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.