Pech Indian Garifuna Plant Related Technologies How they protected the Rainforest and Coastal Environ.

Honduran Pech Indian and Garifuna Plant and other Natural Resource Base Technologies and how They Protected other Aspects of the Rainforest and Coastal Environments

By Wendy Griffin February 2014

In the 20 countries which have ratified ILO Convention 169 on the Human Rights of Indigenous and Tribal Peoples (18 in Latin America, 1 in Caribbean, and 1 in Africa), this ratification means that it is the law that indigenous “technologies” must be taught in bilingual intercultural education programs.  In general, before they can be taught, they need to be identified and documented.

Much of my work has been focussed on two groups whose traditional use of rainforest lands and resources have permitted the rainforest of Northeastern Honduras to exist into the mid-20th century. These groups are the Pech Indians and the Afro-Indigenous Garifunas of Honduras. Much of my work with them is documented in the books Los Pech de Honduras (2009) and Los Garifunas de Honduras (2005).

I put “technologies” in quotations not because I do not believe what they do is not an example of technologies, but rather the word in English is usually associated with machines, and in rainforest peoples, it is more associated with plants. These plants, bushes, and trees include wild plants, cultivated plants, and plants that are left to grow if they volunteer to grow somewhere. While these technologies are plant related, the technologies also ensure that little sediment from erosion enters streams or the ocean in order not to kill the cuyamel fish in fresh waters and shellfish like conchs on the reefs, that both can not live in muddy wáter or an environment choked by sediment. Sediment kills coral reefs themselves, too.

Helping fragile (easily leached of nutrients) rainforest soils recover their nutrients is another aspect of their plant management system.  Ensuring that the rainforest can grow back is another aspect of their land management.  Because they hunt rainforest animals, they are usually noticing what plants and fruits the rainforest like to eat and then leave them or encourage them to grow, so that the rainforest animals will stay in the área.  I personally have been totally unsuccessful in getting the Ladinos who run the national parks in Honduras to reforest fruit trees that the rainforest animals like to eat, and so the rainforest animals have to leave the parks and are shot and killed for their meat.

Plant based technologies include agriculture, food and drink preparation and storing, processing plants and animals to make crafts, firewood, medicinal plants and animals, construction materials processing, and other cultural uses including magic-ceremonial uses, make up, etc.  Agriculture has many sub-processes including soil preparation, planting, weeding, insect, bird, and animal control from eating the growing or harvested plants, and post harvest techniques for food and seed selection, storage and preparation. Some plants, bushes, and trees also require control of flowers and pruning.

The relationship forest-crops-houses between Mesoamerican Indians and their Ladino descendants in Honduras and that of the Garifunas and the Pech are not the same.  For a good description of the Mesoamerican Indian agricultural practices in Honduras seen Honduran folklorist and agronomist Mario Ardón’s “Agricultura Pre-Hispanica” book, available in some US libraries.

Planting is generally not just a matter of sticking seeds in the ground, like when I was a child and was given seeds of petunias to plant in my backyard.  You have to know when to plant, both in terms of when the rains are coming and when they will stop, so that you can harvest.  You have to know where to plant it, how to plant it such as how deep, at what angle, etc., what part of the plant to plant, and in Honduras many plants like yuca (manioc) and plantains are planted according to the phase of the moon. 

Among the Honduran Indians (Pech, Miskitos, Tawahkas) and Garifunas who plant in rainforest areas, most of the plants do not grow from seeds. They might grow from cuttings of the wood, from roots, from parts of a vine, from shoots known as “children” off of the main plant, but seed agriculture is definitely the minority of the types of ways to start agricultural crops in Northeastern Honduras. 

In the past, agronomists made fun of beliefs of planting or cutting wood with the phases of the moon. According to the Pech and the Garifunas, yuca and plantains planted in the wrong phase of the moon are “aguado”, they have too much water in them to have a good taste or consistency. Wood like yagua (royal palm) or the wood for roof beams should be cut in a good moon or else it will get full of termites and not last 2 years. A house built of yagua cut in a good moon will last over 100 years and is also anti-ballistic, it resists bullets, something to consider in the past during Honduras’s many civil wars. It has now been proven that there are insects which are active during certain phases of the moon and not in others which account for the need to cut wood in a “good moon”, according to UNAH ethnobotanist Dr. Paul House. Probably there is a similar issue with planting manioc and plantains by the phases of the moon.

Ladino farmers in Honduras, according to studies by UPN students of the La Ceiba campus, will try to clear 10 acres of land a year.  An individual farmer can only weed 5 acres of land a year by hand in Honduras, so those who manage to clear 10 acres, either get help from children and a wife, and/or also pay their neighbors to help them as agricultural workers “mozos”. Trying herbicides is also another technique to try to overcome this ability to control weeds over as much land as one would like to clear. Slash and burn (quema y roza) is a common technique of clearing land in Honduras among Ladinos that dates to the introduction of corn agriculture in Central America around 1,000 BC,as noted in Brent Metz’s book “The Maya Chorti Area”.

In the past, when the Olancho rainforest still existed around Culmi, a Pech farmer if he wanted to plant, would cut down one tall tree like a mahoghany tree, that grow to about 120 feet.  That would let in sunshine and rain, and the farmer would use this tree as a guide to clear a square the size of the tree, according to Pech farmer Hernan Martinez.  This is an area much smaller than Ladino farmers clear, and is smaller than modern Pech or Garifuna farmers generally plant now. A modern Garifuna farmer tries to plant 2 acres, although they might only plant one as most of the actual farmers are older, noted the UPN students. A modern Pech farmer might have 5 acres planted divided between yearly crops, plantains, and coffee and/or cacao trees, according to my own studies. The latter are planted under rainforest trees among the Pech, like under mahoghany and cedar trees.

I have asked a few Pech farmers who are usually men, as opposed to the Garifuna farmers who are usually women, if they use “quema y roza”, slash and burn techniques to clear the land.  Some told me that they had tried that technique, often on the recommendation of their Ladino neighbors, but that it did not give them good results with the types of soil they have and the crops they plant.  The Pech in particular try to plant twice a year, the first being called “primera” and the second planting called “postera” (the one that comes after). They said if they do slash and burn, the first crop is usually no good. Only the second crop after clearing with slash and burn is adequate. The Pech farmers I talked to planted without burning (sembrar en crudo—literally to plant when it is raw, as opposed to cooked).  I have seen urban Garifunas. who are taking up farming again, do slash and burn, but I do not know if that was what was typical before.

According to the Pech Indians, the Ladino technique of slash and burn, especially of larger areas like 10 acres, burns the roots and the seeds of the surrounding rainforest trees and so the rainforest does not grow back.  According to Dr.Paul House of the UNAH, the burning actually wakes up pine seeds, and helps the pines grow, and the pines themselves make the soil so acidic that most rainforest plants can not grow. If you want to reforest the rainforest after the pines have taken over, as has happened in the Pech area of Dulce Nombre de Culmí, you have to cut down the pines, plant another plant which changes the soil back to less acidic and then the rainforest plants have a chance to grow. That has not happened, and area that was cleared of rainforest in the 1930’s for the Truxillo Railroad 20 and 30 and 40 years later were still not returned to rainforest.

The secondary growth that does come back after using the slash and burn technique of the Ladinos is called in Honduran Spanish “guamil”.  According to plant use studies of Dr. Paul House of the UNAH, the utility of the plants in the “guamil” such as medicinal plants and firewood is very high among the Ladinos, much higher than their perceived utility of uncut rainforest, and often higher than among the cultivated plants themselves.  This is not true of Honduran rainforest Indians like the Pech and the Tawahkas who tend to see the uncut rainforest as extremely useful.  One of Dr. Kendra Mc Sweeney’s studies of the Tawahkas is called, “Our Wealth is in the Forest”. 

While most people see the Garifunas down on the beach and assume they are not affected by the loss of the Central American rainforest, in fact they collected medicinal plants, craft plants, ceremonial plants, and wild food plants in the primary forest. Some Garifuna men also hunted the same rainforest animals as the Pech, Tawahka, Miskitos, and Ladinos. Among the Garifunas knowledge of these kinds of plants and trees tends to be highly specialized such as medicinal plants revealed to shaman or special craft people who sometimes have to do ceremonies to the spirits associated with trees to get the materials they seek.

Honduran rainforest Indians like the Pech and the Garifunas may have more than one plot of land planted. Partly this is to take advantage of different kinds of eco-systems. For example, both the Pech Indians and the Garifunas like to grow rice. Rice likes water. They also like to plant sweet and bitter yucca, which will rot in water.  If bananas and plantains have too much water, they too will rot.  Yuca, bananas, plantains tend to be planted on a slope to allow good drainage, while rice might be planted in lower lands where water might pool.

Both the Pech and the Garifunas also used to plant crops in two places if they spent part of the year away from home, such as hunting among the Garifunas or panning for gold among the Pech. These second locations for crops like the Pech “trabajaderos” along the gold bearing Rio Verde are tending to be lost as the Pech do not have good land titles, and the Ladino farmers fence the land where the Pech used to plant. Garifunas have even reported living on islands like Hog Keys for the good fishing, and also having land on the mainland such as in Sambo Creek to plant. In Trujillo, most of the Garifunas who had houses and crops in Barranco Blanco by the Guaymoreto Lagoon also had houses in Trujillo. Many Pech both had houses in the town of Culmi, and also out in the countryside by their crops. Among the Garifunas, the rural areas are being lost, while among the Pech all of their urban land in Culmi was lost.

If producing for themselves, the Garifunas, the Black Bay Islanders, the Pech and other rainforest Indians do not plant like the monoculture export industries like African Palms, bananas, oranges, etc. They not only plant a large variety of crops, but of each crop type they might plant between 3 and 14 different varieties of that crop like yuca, rice, beans, sweet potatoes, yams, 18 different banana or plantain like plants, 3 varieties of sugar cane, 4 colors of corn, 3-5 kinds of coffee, 3 kinds of chiles, etc. Palm tree crops include coconuts, coyol palms for wine, pejibal palm for its fruit and its wood, cohune palm (corozo) for its nuts and leaves (manaca used for roofs), suita used for roofs, etc.  Many types of fruits are grown, often from trees that volunteer and then are left, like krabow trees (nance).  Other than the petaste, the Honduran name for chayote, actual vegetables are rare, with green leaves more likely to be consumed as tea like avocado leaves, lemon tree leaves, sweet and bitter orange tree leaves, etc. instead of as vegetables. The high level of rains make funguses likely and thus low greens like mustard, lettuce, cabbage tend to get funguses. Forgetting about funguses has been the bane of the existence of the banana plantations in the area and Worldwide.

The idea behind this biodiversity is that if something attacks one variety say of corn or yuca, be it a fungus from too much water or on the other hand dryness from drought, then hopefully the other varieties will make it through. And if all of one crop is lost, like corn, at least there are other crops to eat like plantains and sweet potatoes. And when they had two plots, if one plot suffered from landslides or flooding, perhaps the other one would be OK.  Garifunas also tended to practice having kitchen gardens by the house, because sometimes it rained so much the paths to the fields were flooded and it was important to have firewood, dried fish, and crops near at hand. Abandoning this practice because of bigger houses and more houses in the urban area, means hurricanes or road blockages, when the green banana trucks can not get through, cause crisis in the Garifuna families. 

The goal of North Coast traditional agriculture is to have something harvestable in the field all year long.  This is quite different from corn and bean agriculture with one or two big harvests which you then have to store and eat all year long. Plantain and root crops like yuca and sweet potatoes are planted various times of the year in order to have ones ripening ready to be eaten all through the year. While someone writing about Yams said they were available all year round, this is not true of the yams grown in Honduras where there is just a very short season around Easter when they are harvested.  Many of the crops of Northeastern Honduras like bananas and yucca go bad rather quickly. A Ladina woman in Culmi said, “I would not eat any yuca out of the ground more than 24 hours.”  If Garifunas harvest a root crop, but are not going to eat it right away, they might plant it beside their house and let it grow roots again, just so that it does not go bad after they have harvested it.

Eating fermented foods like yuca breads (sasal among the Pech, cassava bread ereba among the Garifunas) or corn (atol agrio, chicha among the Pech) and yuca drinks (muñía among Pech, hiyú among Garifunas)  and fruit and palm wines (supa, coyol, Pech) is common. The Miskitos used to have foods made of ripe bananas, wrapped in leaves, and buried and left to ferment. It was so humid in Northeastern Honduras that I have seen mold grow on a plastic typewriter case. The rate how fast European style bread will mold in Northeastern Honduras is not even funny, so that sasal will last 10-15 days and cassava bread up to a year is impressive. Flours like banana flour or chata flour for making porridge (Garifunas, Miskitos, Black Bay Islanders) tend to have to be used almost right away.

Planting poisonous plants like bitter yucca (or ackee among Black English speakers) is a way to have a crop that can defend itself against rainforest animals and also thieves of another ethnic group like the Honduran Ladinos. The older Garifuna women farmers would joke “con la yuca amarga misma el ladrón se fregó”  just by eating the bitter yuca itself, the thief did himself damage. The Ladino students in la Ceiba commented on ackee of the Black English speakers, “who knows how many Ladinos have died of being poisoned by the ackee.”

There are special techniques to prepare the ground for planting, like “socolear” with a digging stick and preparing the “guata”, the loose ground where the yuca wood (the stock of the yuca, that unlike a potato does not grow again from the root) can be planted at an angle.  Although bigger yucas might grow as result of planting straight up, you can not get a good angle to pull out a yuca planted straight up and it will break when you try to pull it out of the ground, and you will not be able to get the whole yuca. Another plant planted with the wood is the jicaro or gourd tree. Sweet potatoes are usually grown from “guias” (guides), although some varieties will grow from the root.

Only about 25% of poor Ladinos use plows, introduced by the Spanish. None of the Indian or Afro-indigenous groups do. Studies in the rainforest have shown that yuca production of the roots is worse if plowed or if fertilizer is applied. If herbicide is applied it gets into the root crops and makes them bitter and poisons the consumer. So almost all the common “improvements” recommended for rainforest crops like  plowing, lots of water, monoculture of a new improved type of seed, fertilizer, monoculture of a cash crop, have all been found to not be as effective in maintaining good yields or good food security for the family as traditional practices.

The idea that the traditional practices of the Indians and Blacks are what is holding back the development of Third World countries is definitely not true. Traditional practices of Indians and Blacks are providing most of the food that is eaten in Third World countries, especially Honduras where many of the good lands are taken up for export crops like sugar, African palm, and bananas, often for transnational corporations, and the rest is taken up with cattle, also often for export to the US as frozen, deboned meat, of the type used for hamburgers.

What you plant together might make a difference. Growing “milpa” where the beans that fixed nitrogen and put other nutrients in the soil climbed up the corn, and the pumpkin and squash and large gourds known as “barcos” in Honduras between the rows helped control the weeds and the bugs, is shown to be much healthier for the soil than the Spanish introduced method of planting just corn to get together (un maizal) and all the beans together (un frijolar), according to UNAH ethnobiologist Dr. Paul House.

How you plant, what you plant, when you plant, what you plant it with, all matter, but also where you plant and where you do not plant. Both the Pech Indians and Garifunas report having lands they called “reservas”  (reserved land). Pech “reservas” were usually above their croplands and they did not plant there.

This does not mean, they did not use the land.  This is where they hunted.  This is where they collected some medicinal plants, wild edible plants, construction materials, firewood, and craft plants.  For example, the corn drink “pozol” is supposed to be more delicious if it has “nogal” in it, which grows in the mountains.  When the Pech men went hunting, and they saw a “pimiento gorda” (allspice) bush or a nogal tree, they would collect some and take it home.  Now that most rainforest animals are extinct due to so many Ladinos moving into the area and overhunting them, the Pech still make “pozol”, but without the nogal. They drink allspice tea much less frequently as it is now bought. Pimienta gorda was so associated with the Pech that in their exports of the British called it Pimienta Paya (Pech Indian pepper, like a peppercorn, not hot peppers). Pimienta gorda is also medicinal, especially for stomach ailments. Let your food be medicine was a saying of the Greek doctor Hippocrates, and was firmly practiced by the Honduran Indians and the Garifunas.

According to Garifuna Abraham Norales of the traditional Garifuna community of Bataya, the Garifuna reserved land or “reservas” was located on the land between their uphill cropland, usually called “los yucales” (the place of a lot of yucca), and the houses (el casco urbano). In the reseved land, there were firewood trees and medicinal plants. If people were sick, they might harvest the plants they saw on the way to their fields, on their way home. If they were interested in always having the plant available, they might dig it up and replant it in their fields, such as under the plantains for shade, or by their house, usually full sun.

Garifunas seemed to do this more than the Pech did.  The Garifunas in Trujillo would mention things like, this plant you can just transplant it. This other plant like albahaca de monte (basin in Garifuna) if you transplant it, it will lose all of its seeds and die, but don’t worry as with the next rainy season it will grow again. This plant you can take a cutting. One plant used to treat vajo, the illness caused by the vapors of a dead person, is said to like to grow near concrete. When I went to 50 Garifuna house in Trujillo and Santa Fé with UNAH Biology student Roberto Tinoco, we found the average Garifuna had 10-15 medicinal plants immediately on hand, either as something in their garden, or something they bought dried in the center. The Garifunas were much more likely to have medicinal plants in their yards than flowers.

Between all the Garifunas in Trujillo, between all the medicinal plants that they let grow if they volunteered and those that they planted themselves,  within the urban center there were a lot of medicinal plants which they were using. But there were even more by the Lagoon, up on the mountain, on the beach, or among their crops. People who are using their crops as medicinal plants do not use chemicals like pesticides so that all the parts of the plants, from roots, to bark, to fruit, to leaves can be used medicinally.

In Trujillo, the reserve land which the Garifunas had left “vacant” for the purposes of having firewood, medicinal plants, and also a living barrier to prevent erosion from reaching the beach and the water of the ocean and the streams, has been totally invaded by Honduran Ladinos. Unused land is called “tierra baldio” in Honduras and the Ladinos saw this as unused land, and if they cut down the forest on it, they were the owners of the “improvements” (mejoras).  In Honduras you can sell “mejoras”, independent of the fact of whether you actually have land title to the land.  If Honduras has a trouble with migratory agriculture, that Ladinos clear land, plant one or two years, and then sell it to cattle ranchers, the law of “mejoras”, is a prime reason why.

In order to let the land recover its fertility, the Garifunas would allow land to rest for 15 years. This fallow field system is called “barbecho” in Honduran Spanish. Under Honduran Agrarian Reform Law, if land is not used for 7 years, it has been abandoned and can be titled to someone else. So Garifuna or Pech land that is resting to recover its fertility and their reserve land where they hunted and collected resources is likely to be given to Ladinos under Honduran laws, over and above the problems of corrupt applications of Honduran law.

This has a tendency to make life more expensive as the Garifunas have to buy propane gas to cook and the Pech and Garifunas have to buy meat if they can not hunt for it or if the fish are scarce because of Ladino farming techniques of using agrochemicals and planting crops that tend to leave the land bare at the time of the rains so sedimentation or contamination killed the freshwater fish and some types of seafood. Because of unpaved roads and especially carving out mountains for “development” projects that never materialize, the bay in Trujillo is now sometimes red with clay after a rain for 50 feet out, and the beach which was white in 1996 and had no rocks, is now tan and has a lot of little pebbles or stones. If the Garifunas or the Pech or the Miskito Indians tried to live principally from their crops, they would be seriously malnourished, as they plant many root crops and banana like crops that make you feel full but which without meat or fish, they would be protein, iron,  and vitamin deficient.

The Garifunas also think without the shade cover, which also causes less rain, the creeks are lower and hotter, and this may also have caused the fish to die. Rivers, creeks, and wells have reportedly dried in the Pech area—which in the past reported over 3 or 4 meters of rain a year. Both the Pech and the Garifunas report high levels of malnutrition. Urban Garifunas and Pech also have significant problems of food insecurity. Garifunas in the city have told me we did not eat for 3 or 4 days because we ran out of propane to cook the food, and we did not have money to get more. Nothing that is uncooked qualified in their mind as having had “food” or “a meal”. Urban Garifunas also have a problem of lack of access to fresh water, suitable for bathing in or washing your clothes or flushing the toilet.

The Garifunas and the Pech in addition to leaving area for the rainforest and coastal animals to live, so that they could be hunted, also practiced certain beliefs which helped preserve the animals long enough so that they could reproduce. For example, if the Garifunas see a female crab with its eggs, they let it go so that there will be more crabs.  When they fished, their parents told them, don’t fish near the shore. That is where the fish are small and they need time to grow to full potential and then they will swim out further and you can fish them.  All ethnic groups in Honduras believe in a spirit which protects the fish and which authorizes people to have some. It is necessary to give thanks for the ones you take, and to not take too many or abuse the spirit like putting dynamite in the river (a Ladino technique adopted during the Contra War), because if you do not the spirit will take away the fish from all of us, and you in particular or your family will be punished with illness or even death.  People my age in their 50’s or older still remember these ceremonies to thank for fish being done among Garifunas and the Pech.

Among the Pech and the Tawahkas, the strictures regarding rainforest animals were even stricter. The shaman dreamed how many animals they could take and where they were and what type of animal they could take, and only these. If the spiritual owners of the animals did not give permission to take the animals, then it was better to not hunt, than risk being made ill, being killed, or the animals being taken away by the spiritual owners of the animals. There were taboos and practices related to both rainforest animals and freshwater fish, and giving thanks and not taking too many were also part of this.   The Pech belief in the spiritual owners of trees was also an important part of their belief and fish, animals, trees, illnesses were all causes to have ceremonies, some of which were still practiced into the 1990’s.

Garifunas, Pech and Tawahkas comment a lot on plants that are left to develop because we will need them later.  If a Garifuna man was clearing a field to plant or for cattle, and he saw there was a tree from which “weñu” (majoa  in Spanish) string was made for hammocks, he would leave it.  The Pech left a lot of the hardwoods in their forest, because they said maybe our greatchildren will need them. It takes 300 years to get big trees to the size of making good canoes.

I had suggested to  the Tawahkas that they could take out some of the smaller trees, and leave some of the older ones, a process called thinning in English. The Tawahkas said No, you take the big ones first, so that the small ones have room to grow to reach their full potential.  The small ones need more time to develop. 

The Garifunas in particular are very specific about when you harvest. There is a time when a root crop or a banana like plant is edible, but it is not really ripe. This process to get to its “punto”, when it is really ripe, is called “sazonar”.  The Garifunas complain that you can not leave anything to “sazonar” because thieves will steal the food as soon as it edible, often the whole field to sell it. Ladinos who now grow some of the Garifunas like to buy often do not know when they are really ripe, and bring for example yams into the market because they are really ready. The Garifunas are always excited, oh look, the first yams are here, and they buy them and they get an upset stomach, because until the yams have really finished processing under the ground after the leaves have died, they have some chemical that upsets your stomach. Selling rotten pineapples is the same problem at the other end. I personally am useless as a farmer. I have no more idea how to know when pineapples or watermelons are ripe than the man on the moon.

Devaluation of the lempira has made food more expensive. Increased exports of Honduran food, including fish for cat food, and actually throwing away hundreds of tons of fish as “shrimp bycatch”, because in the Bay Islands they do not consider these fish suitable for serving to foreign tourists or exporting, and many people are hungry.  When the Lempira was two lempiras to one dollar, the Pech sold yuca for 15 centavos a pound, and no one stole yuca.  You could buy fish so that with one lempira you and your family ate for the whole day fish. Now that the Lempira is over 20 Lempiras to one dollar, and fish is over 30 lempiras a pound, and yucca is over L5 a pound, people steal everything. Before the problem of agricultural theft was so minor in Trujillo that you could grow squash and watermelon on the beach. Now thieves will come on to your house plot and steal while you are home or in the backyard, and older Garifuna farmers, usually female, have had their lives threatened by Ladinos stealing from their more distant croplands.

After the food is harvested, the Pech also report special procedures to choose which are the best plants from which to save seeds like squash, corn, rice, beans. Then they dry them, and store them.  The Pech use natural ways to keep bugs out of their crops that are seeds like corn and beans such as ashes and hot chile peppers.  There are chemicals used to control the main bug that gets into beans and corn called “gorgojo” in Spanish, but this “pastilla para frijoles” (pill for beans) tends to make the beans very hard, so that they take forever to cook,which then causes the problem of firewood, and also if they have these pills them, the beans are so hard, they can not be used to plant the next year.  So this chemical imput is considered very bad by the Pech. In order to control humidity so that the beans did not get a fungus and also to help control bugs, the beans and corns were stored on pieces of wood over the roof beams, a system known as tabanco.

The Pech say the smoke “afina”, makes finer the seeds of the corn and beans. USAID and similar development agency houses tend not to have wooden roof beams and so have no where to store corn and beans above the fire. Also development projects have tried introducing “improved” seeds, which the Pech say either do not grow, if they do grow they are weak, if they harvest them they are hard and bitter, and  traditional corn and beans in their different colors cooked differently for different recipes.  The real danger is that the people eat the old seeds after they are given the new seeds, and then they are unable to get the old varieties back. When Doña Juana my Pech friend told her 80 year old mother in law about seeing corn of 4 colors in the San Pedro Museum, her mother in law began crying. We have lost all these things, how can we ever get them back?  My book Los Pech de Honduras every third or fourth plant mentioned says, “And we have lost the seed to grow it” (Perdimos la semilla).

So not only did the Pech know agricultural techniques to ensure that the rainforest could grow back, but they had previously always ensured that they had seeds of every single type of plant that they wanted to grow.  The Garifunas of Trujillo also point out if there is a forest behind our community to put in the Capiro y Calentura National Park or around the Guaymoreto Lagoon which is a Wildlife Preserve since 1992, it is because we took care of it. This seems to be true as over half the Garifuna communities in Honduras are in or next to protected areas, and the same with the Pech Indians.

When Dr. William Davidson and his students mapped where were the forests in 1992 in Central America and where were the Indians, he found that where there were forests there were Indians and where there were Indians there were forests, This led to two assumptions—one the Indians depended on the forest and so they remained in areas where there were still forests, and the other is that the Indians took care of the forests, and for this reason there were still forests there in 1992.  In this article, we have seen both the Pech and the Garifunas did know techniques or practiced beliefs that tended to ensure the reproduction of the tropical rainforest, its plants, animals, and fish, and that they did rely on the resources in these forests. In my books “Los Garifunas de Honduras” and “Los Pech de Honduras”, it is possible to know most of the plants and animals that they depended and used and cared for in these environments.

We can also see that Honduran Ladinos used different plants, different agricultural techniques, and many of the “modern” agricultural practices introduced into the region of Northeastern Honduras  made significantly worse the situation of the rainforest, the quantity and quality of water available in surface water and as rain, and worsened the nutritional security of the original inhabitants such as the Garifunas and the Pech Indians. 

So plant technologies included far more than just making foods, or identifying medicinal plants. Agriculture, forest and fresh water management, maintaining the viability of hunting rainforest animals and fishing fresh and salt water fish and seafood were all parts of interrelated systems which the Pech used for 3,000 years to maintain the rainforests of Olancho for 3,000 years, and the Garifunas also had techniques that helped maintain rainforests along the North Coast. Ladinos with their techniques for agriculture, worsened by issues of export agriculture, cattle ranching, and hardwood exports, have managed to destroy in 50 years what the Pech had been taking care of, and have now moved on to Garifuna, Miskito, and Tawahka zones of Honduras.

The fact that I see no indication that the Intercultural Education Program at the UNA in Olancho in Honduras is anything other than a name to teach Honduran Indians and Garifunas “technified” agriculture like the translated from German manuals on how to grow yuca with agrochemicals and tractors, or the FHIA manuals about “improved” plantains that seem to say nothing about taste, cooking ability, drought resistance, ability to grow without fertilizers, or other factors the Honduran Indians consider important, concerns me quite a bit. I can always go back to the US, but I tell the Hondurans if you screw up the Indian’s agriculture and they are the ones providing you with food, you are the ones who are going to suffer. And you won’t even have medicinal plants to help heal you as you keep teaching in elementary school to leave clean without plants everywhere, and the rest you throw agrochemicals on to contaminate them or kill them.

 

How Wendy Griffin Came to Work for over 20 Years with Honduran Garifunas

How Wendy Griffin Came to Work for over 20 Years with Honduran Garifunas

By Wendy Griffin February 2015

I was asked how I  got started being interested in the Garífunas. I thought you all might enjoy knowing the story. I have found it useful to hear about how other non-Black researchers got involved in studying Latin American Blacks. For other anthropologists it might give ideas on how to talk to their students about what it is that anthropologists do and is it of any relevance to anything.

I originally came to Honduras as an English profesor when the UPN was the Escuela Superior de Profesorado. After I worked some with the Pech on bilingual intercultural education I went back to the States and wrote my magnum opus La Historia de los Indigenas de la Zona Nororiental de Honduras Vol. I and II.  It is listed on google books and is in the UPN library in Spanish and vol. 1 is in the IHAH library in English in Teguz.  So I had researched who were the Garífunas, their arrival, their expansión for that book. 

When I came back to Honduras in 1992 and was teaching English at the UNAH I had a Garífuna student from the UNAH, plus I worked with the Miskito and Garífuna students at the UPN who under the suggestion of Dr. Tulio Mariano Gonzalez, then a extensión Dept. profesor of the UPN and under Pepe Lobo Minister of Culture, had formed an organization OAMIGA (Organización de Alumnos Miskitos y Garífunas) at the UPN.  These students helped me fight for bilingual intercultural education in Tegucigalpa and the Miskito students and I eventually published two books of Miskito stories in bilingual form Spanish and Miskito, funded by UNICEF. There are copies in the UPN library.

The Garífunas were asking for bilingual intercultural education at the same time as the Miskitos, and so the new head of bilingual intercultural education was from Trujillo Prof. Fausto Miguel Alvarez. He had previously been Departmental Supervisor of Education in the Honduran Mosquitia and the Bay Islands, so he knew me from the first Bilingual Intercultural Education Seminar in the Mosquitia in September 1992. He helped organize the first bilingual intercultural education seminar in Trujillo with Garifuna professors from around the North Coast and a Garífuna student from the UPN Claudio Mejia helped me give the seminar,which was funded as an extensión Project of the UNAH.

Several interesting things came out of that Spring 1993 seminar. One was a list of 35 Garífuna crafts.  Those who know the North Coast know there were tourists, there were Garífunas, but where were the 35 Garífuna crafts?  Why were the Garífunas saying No hay fuentes de empleo in their communities when they had this tourism business going on in their área and they knew how to make 35 Garífuna crafts? Crafts in neighboring Guatemala was a multimillion dollar business.

Another thing that came out of that seminar was a list of about 35 traditional Garífuna foods they wanted to include in Garífuna bilingual intercultural education.  The conversations to generate that list were in Garífuna, but it was clear  that these were mostly Garífuna men in their 50's   living in Garifuna communities and they could not agree which name went with which Garífuna food.  For my book Los Garifunas de Honduras there is the Garifuna word dugunu just kind of sitting alone by itself. Most of the people I talked to were not sure what food the Garifuna word “dugunu” went to. 

 Again I have been a tourist my whole life.  Why are there no restaurants that sell Garífuna food? Isn't that what tourists do?  They sit in restaurants and try new foods and maybe have a beer or two.  Why wasn't that happening?  Why were the Garífunas losing their language and their ability to even name traditional foods?

Another thing that came out of that seminar was a list of about 20 Garífuna dances.  I have been to Europe. People travel all over Europe to see Folkdance Festivals. The Folkdance Festival in Barcelona is huge. But if they present 12 different dances i would be surprised. In Greece, I have spent many many nights watching Greek Folk Dances. But they present maybe 8 Greek folk dances.  If as I later learned Honduras has 140 known folk dances, why are they not promoted? Why isn't there, for example, a list of when the Patron Saint Fairs are in Honduras?

In this seminar we worked on making cultural booklets.  One group made a booklet on How to Make Tapado.  The first step is to go hunting maybe for a tepescintle.  Seeing the process of how to Make Tapado from their point of view--that you have to have planted the coconut tree at least 5 years a head of time, that you had to have planted the yuca and camote a year ahead of time, then you had to go hunting and salt the meat of the animal and then you are finally ready to get the firewood and start preparing everything to make Tapado. It was an awesome story as was the one Se Murió Tia Frances (Aunt Francis Died) which is about preparing for a Garifuna “velorio” or wake, having the family come from Santa Rosa de Aguan in bus to attend, what goes on at a velorio and then the funeral and burial was a great story and the teachers illustrated it. It is in my bilingual Garifuna story book “Once Upon a time in a Garifuna community”.  These were great materials to teach intercultural education and gave a lot of insight into the culture.

 As I worked with the Garífunas, not only did I realize that they did not promote their culture, but the Garífunas, even worse than the run of the mill Hondurans, suffer from low self esteem.  They have this incredibly rich culture, and yet they are alienated from themselves because they think eso no vale nada (This is not worth anything). I think it actually comes from the schools.

Dr. Tulio Mariano who, whatever else you can say about the man is centered on what it means to be Garífuna and has a daughter named Africa, asked other Garífunas why they married Ladina women, and they told him “Para mejorar la raza” (To improve the race, as you would say if you were breeding cattle).  He would tell them, what is the matter with our raza? 

 I was particularly concerned about the Garífunas because even if they totally did not learn their own culture, rejected the Garífuna language, identified with national culture, they will never be accepted in Honduran society as Ladinos. I hate to be blunt, but you look at a Garifuna and you think, he is not Ladino, por mas querer ser ladino, no pueden (No matter how much they want to be Ladino, they can not be).

 If they do not learn to have a positive self image as a proud Garífuna, there are not other options available to them in Honduras. In the US they try to blend in with US Blacks. To be called a Black American in a Garífuna community is generally not a complement. It is a person alienated from himself and his community.

 I also was interested in helping the Garífuna recover their history.  A key to the origins of African Americans is the culture. Where is abeimajani done in Africa? Where is punta danced in Africa?  Where are atol de guineo (thin banana porridge) or pan de ayote (pumpkin bread) made in Africa? You can not connect the Garífunas to their rich African past about which they know almost nothing because of the biased way we teach about Blacks in schools, if we even mention them or show them in textbooks.  Maybe they had low self esteem because they believed what they were taught in schools that they were descended from savages, which does not happen to be the case. 

 What parts of the Garífuna culture comes from the Arawak and Carib Indians?  Most modern Garífunas identify as Blacks, but in order to qualify for ILO Convention 169 they have to be able to prove that they are also descendants of Carib and Arawak Indians. But we were in danger of losing this information. The Garífunas today do not make half the dishes for which there are words in Garífunas and which people 90 years old remember having eaten or prepared. The Garifuna kids today most can not tell you an uraga (traditional story) or make a craft.

It took me almost 20 years to find someone who knew which tree was the tree that weñu (majao in Spanish) the fiber the Garífunas used to make hammocks from came from. I only have a vocabularly of about 150 words in Garífuna, but that is more than 90 percent of the Young people in Trujillo. If we did not collect the information now, we would lose it forever.

 Most Garífunas are pretty indifferent to my books like Los Garífunas de Honduras now. But in 20 years when these things are not in existence I think they will find the book helpful to know where they came from. The legal case of Triunfo de la Cruz vs Honduras is hinging on-- Are the Garífunas indigenous? I have the information to show they are. I also have the historical data how the different Garífuna communities were incorporated into Honduras and what were the treaties involved and how has the US and Honduras violated these treaties.  I have given it to all the leaders of the Garífuna organizations and to organizations that work with Garífuna and Miskitos. There are copies (generally in unopened boxes) in Garífuna schools in Colon. If they do not read them, and do not use them in their legal cases, it is not my fault.      

 I tried getting funding for bilingual intercultural education when just the Pech wanted the program, but it was imposible. People said we can not fund a Project that benefits only 3000 people. But when the Miskitos, the Bay Islanders, the Tawahkas, and finally the Garífunas in 1992 all asked for bilingual intercultural then it was big enough to fund for USAID,UNDP, and the World Bank.

 My Miskito students warned that Hondurans wanted to run bilingual intercultural education by remote control from Teguz and that that would never work. Hay que estar en el lugar de los hechos (You have to be on the ground where things are really happening). Also the World Bank authorized funds for training bilingual intercultural education teachers at the Normal School in Trujillo, and I thought they have no idea what this entails, the local people are going to need help.  I was sick and could not stand the stress of living in Teguz. 

I interviewed Belinda Linton who was running a Spanish language school at the time in Trujillo for an article for Honduras This Week on Spanish language training possibilities in Honduras (as opposed to Guatemala which is famous for that), and the UPN needed an Anthropology Professor for the La Ceiba Distance Education site on the weekends. They had opened the section thinking a Miskito Indian who had just gotten a bachelor's degree in Anthropology in the US would take the class, and he chose not to and went back to the Mosquitia. So I asked Belinda in 1996 if I could teach English in her school during the week and teach Anthropology in La Ceiba on the North Coast on the weekends.

 So then I had up to 70 students with no anthropology textbooks except examples of my own research, but Garífunas, Tolupanes, Black English speakers and Ladinos easily at hand. I had a ball reading my students’ homework. 

I went to  the Mosquitia in 1996 and spent a week writing my book Los Miskitos, trying to take out of the huge book La Historia de los Indigenas de la Zona Nororiental  just the part about the Miskitos, and verify it and add new data based on field research. That book on the Miskitos is about 126 pages long. The head of Miskito bilingual intercultural education hated it. It was too long, we already know our history, and what we really need is a book on the other ethnic groups in the Mosquitia, he said.

 Sincé I was in Trujillo, and I thought this bilingual intercultural teacher training program was going to start (it never did), and they would need textbooks about the ethnic groups to teach the clases, I began with the Garífunas. I thought that if I did the variety of materials needed for bilingual intercultural education--ethnohistory books, medicinal plant books, craft books, dance and religious ceremony books, a book on their human rights under  Honduran law for the Garífunas where I had electricity, running wáter and tiled floors and painted walls, they could serve as a model for bilingual intercultural education materials for the other ethnic groups.

Of course, that did not happen either. If the Garífunas do not read materials about themselves, worse the other ethnic groups reading about them. When the Garífuna food restaurants that I was trying to help, the Garífuna craft shops and Museum I was trying to help, the bilingual intercultural education Project I was trying to help, and my relationship to my Canadian boyfriend all failed and I became too sick to teach even on the weekends, to salvage something out of all those failures and to try to make available the information for future Garífunas who may care more than these ones, or for US and Honduran researchers who may care more than the Garífunas themselves, I worked really hard to get published my research.  

 

When I was in high school 1970-1974 the issue of why we do not teach good things about US  Blacks in US schools was a topic of  discussion because of the Civil Rights movement and there were short ads on TV during Black History Month (February in the US)  about such and such Black inventor invented such and such a thing, so I was familiar with the issue of positive things about Blacks being left out of curriculums and textbooks. 

       

My course in US Native American History at WWU was eye opening on how US Indians are left out of our curriculums and textbooks even worse, even more for the comments of my Makah Indian classmate than the actual course as taught by the professor.   The Schomburg Center for Black Culture has said they were interested in a collection of my materials about Afro-Hondurans, so that will help preserve them and make them available for the Garífunas who live in New York.

 

Honduran Lenca anthropologist Dr. Lazaro Flores at the UPN who I began working with when he coordinated the UPN’s Extension Project with the Pech Indians taught us that if you are going to ask people in the community for information, you have to think what can you give them back to thank them. That is why my book Los Garifunas de Honduras is oriented towards teaching them about their rights under ILO Convention 169, which is also a required topic to be taught in schools under ILO convention 169.  That is not happening, but it is not because they do not have a material at hand to teach them about their rights. It also covers all the other topics that by law under ILO Convention 169 they need to be teaching in the schools of the ethnic groups. I thought to train teachers first we need a material with which to train teachers and that required documenting what was not known about the Garifunas or the Pech or the Miskitos or Black Bay Islanders up until then.

 The Black Bay Islanders of NABIPLA were also at the first Bilingual Intercultural Education Seminar in Trujillo in 1993 which was about the teaching of values.  I said then, “If we do not teach the students the traditional values of their culture, they will adopt the values of the Street, like he who has the most power and most money wins”. They did not listen to me in 1993, they got money from the World Bank to implement bilingual intercultural education, but during 17 years it was not in the classroom and the intercultural part often still is not in the classroom.  The statistics of violence in Honduras today proved me right.

 

Summaries of Wendy Griffin's Manuscripts Related to Honduran Banana Companies in US Libraries

Descriptions of Wendy Griffin’s Unpublished Manuscripts in US Libraries Related to Honduran Banana Companies

(Summaries were  put in the Google Books Pages)

1.  Griffin, Wendy (1992) La Historia de los Indigenas de la Zona Nororiental de Honduras tomo I Prehistoria a 1820

Books.google.com/…/Historia_de_los_indigenas_de_Honduras_nororiental: La Prehistoria

This books begins the history of the Honduran Indians with the arrival of Olmec influence in 1,000 BC, by which time the Rainforest Indians of Honduras like the Pech are believed to have already arrived in Honduras. The book looks at populations of Honduran and other Central Americans Indians in the Classic Period (300-900 AD) and how they had to move in the Postclassic Period due to arrival of slave and land taking Indians from Mexico, most notably the Chorotega and Nahua speakers, known in colonial documents as mexicanos, Pipiles, Nicaraos, Cholulatecas,Tultecas and Acaltecas (now spelt Agalteca in Honduras due to influence of the Nicarao dialect of Nahua). The book also covers the effects of the partial Spanish Conquest of Honduras and how resistance of the Pech, Miskito, Tawahka, Jicaque/Tolupan, Lenca and Nahua Indians in the unconquered parts of Honduras differed from those Indians under Spanish control who were influenced by Spanish Indian slavery, encomiendas, pueblos de indios, repartimiento, Spanish government land titles, missions and missionaries, etc. The book also documents the arrival of different Afro Descent groups such as Spanish speaking slaves,mulattos and pardos, the Black English speakers, Blacks who intermarried with Miskito Indians and at the end Garífunas. Many maps and explains different linguistic, archaeological, ethnographical, colonial terms used for different Honduran Indian and Afrodescent groups. Essential for understanding why the Honduran government did not control the territory where they gave banana company concessions to the Tela Railroad and Truxillo Railroad of United Fruit and to Standard Fruit/Vacarro Brothers (now Dole owned) at the beginning of the 20th century and which groups did live there before the Banana companies. This books is also important to put into context the current problems in the Honduran rainforest in Olancho, Colon and Mosquitia caused by the colonization by Honduras Ladinos as modern descendants of the Mesoamerican Indians as part of an interethnic conflict over land use techniques and definition of culturally important plants and trees that is already 3,000 years old. Also includes information on the independent Miskito kingdom, its kings, its internal administration, and the functions of the Miskito kings. The issue of why the Pech and the Tawahkas who were neighbors of Mesoamerican Indians for 3,000 years yet deliberately chose not to adopt their heirarchical society, their agricultural techniques, or their architecture may be essential for knowing why they were able to live in the Honduran and Nicaraguan rainforest for 3,000 years and not destroy it and in 50 years Mesoamerican based Ladinos have done away with it, as well as for knowing who built the Ciudad blanca or White City in the Honduran rainforest in Pre-Columbian times. This book uses archaeological, linguistic, ethnographic, and historic evidence and starts with an essay on the limitations and benefits of each type of evidence. A good basic overview of this Little known área developed for the Pech Bilingual Intercultural Education program and as a way to make available to Hondurans many bibliographic resources about their country which were either not in their country or not in Spanish or not understandable because Hondurans did not know the meaning of the classifications like Tropical Forest Tribes/Mesoamericans, uto-Aztecans vs Macro-Chibcha, or the connection of historic names like Mexicanos, Mexicano corupto, and Payas with modern names for Honduran Indians like Nahuas and Pech. The errors in the Smithsonian Institute's maps for the Central American Ceramics exhibition which closed 15 February 2015, shows this confusión is not only in Central America. Resources used for the colonial period include not only secondary and primary sources that have been published, but also documents from the General Archives of Central America in Guatemala City and oral history. Trujillo in NE Honduras is the only place in the New World both Christopher Columbus and Hernan Cortes visited.  To here my review on Google books.

This book on the ethnohistory of the Pech (Paya), Tawahka (Sumu), Tolupan/Jicaque, Miskito, and Nahua (Pipil, Nicarao, Mexicano, Cholulateca) Indians of Honduras beginning in1,000 BC to the end of the colonial period  also includes the Colonial era Spanish speaking Blacks and the English speaking Blacks .  The book was written in 1992 in support of the Pech bilingual-intercultural education project.  It combines the major archaeological, lingüístic, históric and ethnographic sources of information, and so is a place to begin to connect the modern Honduran Indians and Blacks  to anthropological, ethnographic, linguistic,  historic, and geographic classifications and contexts.  Many maps showing different periods are included. In addition to published sources of information, both primary sources from the colonial era, secondary sources, and Honduran sources of Indian oral history and ethnography,  documents from the General Archives of Central America in Guatemala City were also consulted.

A lot of information on Western and Central Honduras  from 1,000 BC to the Spanish conquest which was occupied by Mesoamerican groups including Lencas, Nahuas, and  Mayas is included. Vol. I emphasizes the conflict between the Pech and other Central American Indians when the Nahuas and Chorotegas arrived in Central America from Mexico and more conflicts with the coming of the Spanish.  Almost all Indians of Northeastern Honduras  remained free during the entire colonial period so strategies of resistance are noted, and where the frontier was between the Spanish and the Free Indians is documented at different periods in the colonial period. Information on the Miskito Kings and their Kingdom is included as is ethnographic data noted in colonial era documents.

 The situation of the free Indians like the Miskitos, the Tawahkas, the Tol and Jicaques, some of the Nahuas, the Rah, and the Pech is contrasted with Indians under Spanish control such as through encomiendas, pueblos de indios, or missionary controlled towns and the different resistance strategies of both are noted.  Why the Honduran North Coast and the Bay Islands were mostly deserted by the time the Honduran Garifunas arrived in1797 and later the English speaking Blacks who are the ancestors of today’s Bay Islanders  is included.

This book is important to understand why the Honduran government did not control the áreas where the US owned Banana Companies like United Fruit’s Tela Railroad and Truxillo Railroad and the Standard Fruit Company/Vacarro Brothers wanted to establish themselves, and why the Honduran government was anxious to gain control of the areas by adding communication infrastructure such as Railroads, Telegraph, Radio, Ports, and Customs Houses, in areas of the Honduran North Coast that they did not control and had no presence after becoming independent in 1821 and which was still the case at the beginning of the 20th century when Banana Company presence increased. None of the current books on Honduran Banana Companies takes into account that almost all the land given to US owned Railroad Companies for Bananas was NOT controlled by the Honduran government at the time it was given and that the Railroads were a strategy to gain political control and economic resources in an área where 400 years of Spanish Conquest had not yet managed to penétrate.

This book also puts into historic perspective the colonization front of Honduran Ladinos in entering the Honduran rainforest which has accelerated since the 1960’s, but is part of an interethnic conflict between Mesoamerican and Tropical Rainforest type Indians over land use and resources that is at least 3,000 years old in North Eastern Honduras with evidence of Olmec influence and trade in both Olancho and Colon Departments. While US archaeologists ooh and aah over Mesoamericans, the Pech and Tawahka Indians were their neighbors for 3,000 years and chose not to copy their style of hierarchical societies and practices of land use and understanding why and how the Pech and other Tropical Forest groups maintained the rainforest and did not copy these other Indians whose practices have destroyed the Olancho rainforest in 50 years is probably a critical point to understanding tropical ecological systems, a how they were maintained for many millenium by their inhabitants and current conflicts in Honduras today.

This unpublished manuscript is the basis of historical information in published books like the 1991 “Dioses, héroes, Hombres en El Universo Mitico Pech” by Honduran anthropologist of the UPN Dr. Lazaro Flores and Wendy Griffin, the 2009 book “Los Pech de Honduras: Una Etnia que Aun Vive” by Wendy Griffin and Pech informants Hernan Martinez Escobar and Juana Carolina Hernandez Torres and also figure in her published books on Afro-Hondurans like “Los Garifunas de Honduras” (2005) and Griffin,Wendy (2004) The History and Culture of the Bay Islanders and North Coast English speakers”  available on the Internet at .s114101627.onlinehome.us/files/Isleno.pdf  Many Honduras This Week articles included information from this unpublished manuscript. There are copies of this manuscript in the library of the Universidad Pedagogica Nacional (UPN), the Honduran Institute of Anthropology and History (IHAH), in Pech schools in Moradel and El Carbon, and Miskito and Garifuna high schools in Brus Laguna and Santa Fe in Honduras and in the University of Pittsburgh library and the Vine Deloria Jr. Library of the National Museum of the American Indian, Smithsonian, Washington, DC.  

2. Griffin, Wendy (1994) The History of the Indians of Northeastern Honduras: Prehistory to 1820: Contact, change, and resistance Across the Mesoamerican-Tropical Forest Tribe Cultural Fronteir www.books.google.com/.../The_History_of _Indians_of_Northeaste.html?id.

Similar to above, but it is better documented and also includes at the end looking at how to see the presence of the Honduran government in the áreas where the Indians of NorthEast Honduras and the presence of these agencies at different points in the 19th and 20th centuries, in a shift from what had been closed corporate communities to societies inmeshed in the national structures and surrounded by the national and increasingly globalized culture. Also includes the shift in local control from the Indians to municipalities run by Ladinos, a process now also affecting strongly the Garifunas of Honduras.  It looks at religión maintenance and language maintenance as the Honduran government and the Ladinos of the center move into the Indian and Free Blacks controlled áreas.  Documents better Indian forms of resistance in both Mesoamerican Indian towns under Spanish control and that of the free Indians.

3.  Griffin, Wendy (1992) La Historia de los Indigenas de la Zona Nororiental de Honduras: 1800 a 1992 Tomo II

books.google.com/books/…/La_historia_de_los_indigenas_de_la_zona.htm

This book begins with a summary of why the Honduran government did not control NE Honduras in 1800 with a map showing where the free Indians and the Honduran government each controled.There is also a section on efforts of the colonial Spanish government 1795-1820 to try to gain control including the reconquest of Trujillo abadoned in1645 and missionaries trying to christianize Indians in NE Honduras. The rest of the book is divided into the 19th and 20th centuries and follows five main themes. What did the Honduran government do to try to gain political control and uncontested title to NE Honduras which meant extinguishing in turn the rights of the Miskito King, the rights of the British,overcome interrnal civil wars, and the rights of the Nicaraguan goverment, a process only completed in 1960. There are a whole series of international treaties and treaties with the Miskito King or his representative which brought this about which make the Honduran Indians, Garífunas and Bay Islanders have Treaty rights which is uncommon in Central America. The second theme is economic activities in the área,usually driven by foreign concessions or buyers, and how did the Pech, the Tawahkas, the Miskitos, the Jicaques, the Nahuas, the mulattos, the Garífunas and Black English speakers fit into this and how did it affect their cultures. Also noted is the expansión of Catholic and Protestan tchurches into the área. The ethnic composition of NE Honduras changed drastically especially after the Wars of Olancho ending in 1865 with Ladinos exiled to the North Coast and the coming of the Truxillo Railroad,beginning in 1914 which displaced at least 6 Pech villages, and the railroad of Standard Fruit. Extensive information on the Truxillo Railroad and how their bananas, free rights to all hardwoods and all hydrocarbons along their route caused issues of land loss, destruction of the NE Honduras rainforest which did not return, and changed the ethnic composition of the área where interethnic relations remain conflictive. Besides Honduran ethnic groups, the arrival of new European and Black immigrants are noted, and laws and policies to encourage or discourage their migration and investing in Honduras are noted. 

The process of how new industries moving into the Indian and Garifuna áreas at the beginning offered Jobs, but later these Jobs disappeared either because the Company left, the ethnic composition of workers was changed in favor of Ladinos, or the Jobs were mechanized and so local people were not needed or internationally some chemical product was found to replace a locally produced natural product like dyes, chicle, rubber, etc. and so how it came to be that the ethnic groups of Honduras have few job opportunities in their áreas is revealed.  Hondurans tend to think that these ethnic groups never contributed anything to local economy, but in fact they were the motor of these export industries until the 1950’s, since cacao was the first export product of Honduras in 1,000 BC to the Olmec región of Mexico. The types of things these ethnic groups  produced for the international market tended to take advantage of rainforest resources without wiping them out, which led to an internal ethnic group ethics to maintain the rainforest rather than to cut it down for the selling of the hardwoods.

While this book has a map of where the Truxillo Railroad had reached by 1933 when Jesus Aquilar Paz completed his first map, it does not include the spur of the Truxillo Railroad going along the Western bank (margen izquierda) of the Aguan River that went from Corocito to Sonaguera which was built and the story of Sonaguera when the Truxillo Railroad and the Standard Fruit’s railroad wanted to go through is beautifully documented in John Solouri’s 2009 book “Banana Cultures”.  The mulattos of Sonaguera warned don’t give away the land and displace the cattle industry that has been our “patrimonio” the way we made money from time inmemorial. These companies could come in and then be gone.

The municipal government of Sonaguera did not listen to them and zoned all of Sonaguera agricultural so that the cattle would not bother the banana trees, thereby destroying the livelihood that had been Sonaguera’s reason for existence since at least 1550 by which time the native Indians had already been sold overseas as slaves. The mulatto cattle ranchers of Sonaguera who probably had no legal land title to their grazing lands were right. Within a decade the Truxillo Railroad had both come and gone, but the resources were not returned to their original owners who anyway no longer had cattle to put on the land.  Sonaguera is now full of Agrarian Reform cooperatives which do monoculture with oranges and when it is a bad year and people do not want to buy the oranges they rot and the people have nothing to eat, because they did not plant part of their beautiful flat lands in beans and rice for having listened to the siren’s song of advisors who recommend using land to produce things of higher value for people who have money to pay more, instead of what will feed your family and your neighbors.

4.  Griffin, Wendy y Tomasa Clara Garcia Chimilio (2012) Yaya: La Vida de una Curandera Garifuna. (Yaya: The Life of a Garifuna Healer) There is an English versión and a Spanish versión,but only the Spanish versión is in the University of Pittsburgh library. 

Tomasa Clara García Chimilio was 91 years old at the time I interviewed her for this book, and so she grew up at the time of the Truxillo Railroad in Trujillo itself.  Her father at first worked bringing contraband goods and some people from Belize by three sail canoe for the foreign merchants who sold in Trujillo for the local population and to the workers of the Truxillo Railroad. Then he switched to working on call for the Truxillo Railroad as one of the dock workers for Puerto Castilla, a common job for Garifuna men in Trujillo at the time. Clara’s mother had a farm and sold produce from her farm and breads in Puerto Castilla to the Truxillo Railroad’s workers there, and sometimes Clara went with her to sell.  She herself was a midwife and healer and her stories and those of other older Trujillo Garifunas are full of interethnic stories of healing, birth attending, and of witchcraft.  Her life which included working as domestic help for other people in banana towns like La Ceiba and Olanchito for a number of years is fairly typical of other people’s remembrances of Garifuna life at the time of Truxillo Railroad in Trujillo itself. I am working on improving this manuscript for publication.

In the versión at the University of Pittsburgh there are modern photos of Doña Clara a buyei, including in her guli or sanctuary where she communicates with the ancestor spirits who help her by David Flores Valladares and there are 4 photos of the series of photos by Cajun engineer Antime Landry from 1928-1930 of the Truxillo Railroad era in the área of Trujillo and Puerto Castilla, used with permission.  Hopefully I will get the stories related to Growing Up in the Shadows of Honduran Banana Companies: An Oral History Project in Honor of the 100th Anneversary of the Truxillo Railroad written and published, a Project for which I have permission to use the photos of Antime Landry from his inheritors, his children and grandchildren.

Honduran Banana Companies as Reflected in the Published Works of Wendy Griffin

Honduran Banana Companies as Reflected in the Published Works of Wendy Griffin

By Wendy Griffin February 2015

1. Griffin, Wendy, Juana Carolina Hernández Torres y Hernán Martínez Escobar (2009) Los Pech de Honduras: Una etnia que aun Vive  Tegucigalpa:  Instituto Hondureño de Antropología e Historia.

This book includes the stories of the Pech of Olancho walking to Trujillo to sell pigs in Trujillo for the Truxillo Railroad workers, the Pech as workers for the Truxillo Railroad, the effects of the Truxillo Railroad as it entered the Pech áreas of Rio Sico and Paulaya including displacing Pech villages without payment, cutting mahoghany and even abandoning it, and the rainforest not growing back after the Truxillo Railroad left. It also mentions the logging by Samuel Zemurray’s other Company the Nicaragua Louisana Lumber Company in the Honduran Mosquitia, and the fact that the Truxillo Railroad’s concession included the rights to cut Wood,  and also rights to hydrocarbons like coal, gas, naptha, petroleum that might be under their lands or within 50 miles of their right away for free. This is mentioned in the context of other hydrocarbon concessions given in the 1920’s and 1930’s  in the área.

The book includes the Honduran rubber industry and how rubber was extracted and processed in order to be sold. It mentions that some of the buyers included people associated with the United Fruit Company such as Mr. Darling, the builder of United Fruit’s Great White Fleet who had a rubber concession on the Caratasca Lagoon. Each ship required 22 tons of rubber. During the Second World War the United States was concerned that the Japanese controlled most of the sources for domesticated rubber which were in Southeast Asia, and United Fruit’s President Samuel Zemurray personally assumed responsibility to ensure that from Central American sources the US would have enough rubber to build the ships and make tires and hoses for truck and airplanes for the war effort. The Honduran rubber industry mostly died after the Second World War. Also included is the Honduran chicle industry, which provided chicle to Wrigley’s to make chewing gum which had a Factory at Waspan on the Rio Coco on what is now the border between Honduras and Nicaragua. Wrigley’s provided chewing gum to the US troops during the Second World War. Both natural rubber and chicle have been largely replaced by products derived from petroleum.

The book also mentions the founding of the Pech village of Silin outside of Trujillo as a Ladino cattle rancher from Olancho brought Pech workers to work on his ranch in the 1930’s when the Truxillo Railroad was still active and had two fincas in the Silin área of Trujillo. The  Truxillo Railroad had a person who slaughtered beef in the Trujillo neighborhood of Jerico and then it was sold to the Truxillo Railroad workers, so cattle ranching expanded around Trujillo as a result of the Truxillo Railroad and the German owned Mas Nada which raised cattle for the shoe Factory that opened in Trujillo to make shoes from the slaughtered cattle to sell to the workers of the Truxillo Railroad. Mas Nada, located where the Garifuna neighborhood of San Martin is now, and the Shoe Factory both left in the 1930’s as the Truxillo Railroad began to shut down.

One third of the Pech population was lost in the 1918-1920 Spanish flu epidemic during the time of the Truxillo Railroad, including the parents of the woman considered the founder of Silin. It is called Spanish flu as it followed the trade routes of ships, so the frequent ship transportation to the North Coast as a result of the Truxillo Railroad was a contributing factor to the high losses of population reported among the Pech and the Tawahka Rainforest Indians for the 1918-1920 period.   This book is in US universities and is note don WorldCat.  Some copies are still for sale through the major distributors of Central American books in the US such as www.libreroonline.com and Literatura de Vientos Tropicales.

2. Griffin, Wendy & Comite de Emergencia Garifuna de Honduras (CEGAH), “Los Garifunas de Honduras:  Cultura, Lucha y Derechos bajo el Convenio 169 de la OIT”  (The Garifunas of Honduras: Culture, Struggle, and Rights under ILO Convention 169” in Spanish ) Central Impresora San Pedro Sula, 2005.

This book includes some of the land problems caused by the Truxillo Railroad, the Tela Railroad, and Standard Fruit/Vacarros Brothers in Garifuna communities. It includes the work of the Garifunas with the banana companies, and as the Truxillo Railroad closed, how the Garifuna men switched to working as merchant marines for the banana Company ships and how they served on the Great White Fleet as these ships provided logistics support for the US war effort in World War II. Also includes the affects of other businesses of the Honduran Banana companies like logging and making vegetable shortening from coconuts, cohune palm (corozo), and African Palm oil.  The Honduran government had  land to give to Ladino peasants in the Lower Aguan  (see Wikipedia article Bajo Aguan Conflict and Food First’s book Power Grab for overview of modern conflicts there) as part of the Agrarian Reform in the 1970’s as it was Truxillo Railroad land that was set aside for Colonization as the Truxillo Railroad began to withdraw. The book documents the relationship of bringing Ladinos to the North Coast first for the Truxillo Railroad and later for the Agrarian Reform and then displacing them as a result of the Counter Agrarian Reform in the 1990’s which Standard Fruit of Dole had a role in is related to current Garifuna land troubles. How mahoghany was actually cut with the bull gangs and principally Garifuna workers before the railroad was put in is also documented.

The book also includes a Garifuna eyewitness versión of the expulsión of the Black English speakers who had been employees of the Truxillo Railroad in the 1930’s and for which the Honduran government required in the 1934 law prohibitting the entrance of Blacks to Honduras even as tourists that the United Fruit Company to send three ships and forceably repatriate them, which they did.

Another version of this mass deportation of Honduran Black English speakers who were employees of the Truxillo Railroad is in Glenn Chamber’s book on Race, Nation and Anglo-Antillans in Honduras.  That book does not include that it was in the Truxillo Railroad’s original 1914 concession that the Truxillo Railroad was prohibitted from bringing in Black, Chinese, East Indian, Syrian, and Malayan workers. While they complied with the other races, by 1914 there were already complaints that United Fruit was bringing in Black workers and that they should repatriate them.

Reports of Honduran revolutions during the Truxillo Railroad period reaching Trujillo itself and the actual entrance to the American zone of Puerto Castilla is also included in Wendy Griffin’s book, with descriptions of different types of Garifuna houses used to take refuge in because they were bullet proof. Anti-black riots in Trujillo reported in other sources like Elizeth Payne’s article on Trujillo merchants and the Black English speaker book “Black Chest” were not mentioned by the Garifunas, but it may be that the two month strike,the race riots,and then the entrance of Gregorio Ferrera’s troops into Trujillo and Puerto Castilla coming from Western Honduras in the 1930’s by way of Tocoa and the Aguan Valley plantations all blended into the memories of “revolution”.  The idea that there were no strikes in US owned Honduran banana companies prior to 1954 just because unions were illegal, with at least 15 strikes noted in the documents sent back by British and American diplomats on the North Coast, does not hold water.

There are photos of an old Standard Fruit train engine, currently in a park in La Ceiba, and also parts of a railroad car of the Truxillo Railroad which were left abandoned on the beach in Trujillo in the neighborhood of Barrio Rio Negro. The latter and the old Truxillo Railroad engine that still stuck out of the wáter in the Trujillo Bay in the 1990’s are no longer there. There is also a photo of a banana tree growing in a Garifuna garden. There are also photos of Garifuna women farmers holding some of the products that they raise with the caption that Garifuna women sold food crops and breads to the workers of the Truxillo Railroad.

Another source of information about Garifunas as workers for the US banana companies and as merchant marines on the Banana companies’ ships is in Wendy Griffin’s  article “Garifuna Immigrants Invisible” available for free as a pdf file in the about and Garifunas section on the website of the Garifuna in Peril movie www.garifunainperil.com

3. Wendy Griffin’s articles published in Honduras This Week related to the Honduran Banana Companies

Wendy Griffin did a number of articles related to the land problems caused by the leaving of the Truxillo Railroad for Honduras This Week. She also did one article specifically about the Truxillo Railroad and the photo collection of Antime Landry from 1928-1930 that will be included with the book versión of the Oral history Project in commemoration of the 100th Anneversary of the Truxillo Railroad. She also did a two series article on Black Women’s work during the Banana Boom and a two series article on the long history of Black English speaking churches on the North Coast of Honduras and in the Bay Islands. Those on the North Coast were all started by the Banana Companies and most had bilingual schools associated with them, which in most cases precede the opening of Honduran government Spanish language schools in those towns. 

Although others have argued that these schools were opened for the children of the White workers of the Banana Companies, in most cases until at least the 1950’s, the White children were taught separately in the American zones like Mazapan in La Ceiba or where Villas Telamar is now in Tela, and the bilingual schools were attended primarily by the children of the Banana Companies’ Black workers, including both Black English speakers and some Garifunas. Many children of White workers also studied in the US in either boarding schools or with family members. The articles on the Black English speaking churches also note that in Banana towns like La Ceiba, the Episcopal Church did services in the American compounds like Mazapan separately for White workers and their families  until 1954, and then said, we only have one church where we do services. Come to the church services together with the Black workers or don’t attend church. In the US Martin Luther King described 11 am on Sunday morning the most segregated hour in America, because mostly Blacks and Whites did not go to the same Protestant churches in the US. This issue also affected Honduran churches, and when the Honduran Episcopal churches passed to being a Missionary church of Episcopal churches in Florida in1954, the pressure in the US to force churches to be more open also affected the Honduran Episcopal churches in Banana Company towns. The Episcopal Church and its bilingual school in Puerto Castilla closed after the Truxillo Railroad left.

4. Griffin,Wendy (2004) The History and Culture of the Bay Islanders and North Coast English speakers (These are Black or Afro-antillian English speakers) This is the whole book available for free on the Internet . Developed at request of IHAH librarian due to student requests.

.s114101627.onlinehome.us/files/Isleno.pdf

Everything about North Coast English speakers in this book is related to life and culture in Honduran banana towns. Much of the information about the Bay Islanders was also provided by people whose parents had worked for the Banana Companies on the North Coast, especially Prof. Arnold Auld whose father had been a Jamaican school teacher in the bilingual school at Puerto Castilla for the workers of the Truxillo Railroad Company employees. He married a Black English speaker from the Bay Islands and the family relocated to Roatan as feelings and laws grew against Black English  speakers in the Trujillo área. The Bay Islands is where the Honduran banana trade started, and at the beginning bananas were just a part of a general fruit trade from the Bay Islands in which coconuts actually dominated.  During the Banana boom period, the Bay Islands provided agricultural products for sale to Banana Company workers and to Standard Fruit’s La Blanquita Company with ships between La Ceiba and the Bay Islands being frequent.   Bay Islanders like the Pech and Miskito Indians often relocated for a time to work with the Banana companies on the North Coast. Black English speaking women provided both profesional labor like school teachers and nurses and domestic help like cooks and nannies in Banana Company towns.

The stories of Black English speakers going to Belize in skiffs and dories seemed to buy seem to indicate that the Black English speakers, like the Garifunas, Miskitos, and the mulattos of the Honduran North Coast were all involved with the Honduran government called contraband or smuggling which continued unabated at least through the massacre of most of the Garifuna men of San Juan near Tela in 1937 by the Ladino army detachment based in El Progreso, Yoro, for helping to smuggle arms brought from Guatemala to support General Umaña in his revolt against the Carias government. The Garifunas of San Juan were also accused of bringing General Umaña himself ashore almost in the direct shadow of the Tela Railroad’s cattle ranch at Puerto Arturo and their headquarters in Tela 4 km away.  Virgilio Castillo’s book about the Massacre at San Juan is in US libraries.   Examples of the arms that were left in the caves at Puerto Arturo are in the Rufino Galan Museum in Trujillo.

5. Griffin, Wendy (2012) "Garífuna Immigrants Invisible" Available as a pdf for free on the Garífuna in Peril website. www.garifunainperil.com

This article tells the role of Garífunas in the US banana companies in Honduras and as sailors on ships of the US banana companies and how this led to many Garífuna families being able to legal immigrate to the US.  This article also tells the leading role of the Garífunas in international, regional, and local struggles for Blacks and Indians.  The article documents that the experience of many Garífunas in unions within Fruit Companies, including the Pomona Citrus packing plant in Belize, and later in unions for Honduran government workers like teacher's unions and medical worker unions, led to the Garífunas being part of political parties and government structures that changed their countries. In Belize these changes extending  voting rights to reach universal suffrage and receiving Independence from Great Britain.

T. V. Ramos who is famous for his inspiration of the Garífunas in Belize was actually born in Honduras where his father worked for a banana company in NW Honduras at the time of Marcus Garvey's UNIA organization's misión to Honduras between Puerto Cortes and La Ceiba which tried to reach Garífunas as well as Black English speakers.  According to Honduran historian Jorge Amaya Banegas, T.V. Ramos mentions being motivated by Marcus Garvey's dreams which his father had heard and also many Garífuna sailors heard about. See for example Sabas Whittaker's book Africans in the Americas.

When Honduras made laws that foreign Blacks could not immigrate or even come to Honduras as tourists between 1934 and 1949, this affected not only Black English speakers, but also Garífunas living in other Central American countries.  The assumption that all the people who held British Passports in Honduran statistics were West Indian English speakers does not take into account the movements of Belizean Garífunas during the Banana Boom period. Not only did Belizean Garífunas go to Honduras, but Honduran Garífunas including Yaya's natural father from Roatan and Herman Alvarez's uncle in San Juan, went to Belize and stayed.