Leland's Garifuna movies Two Parts of the Carib Indian/Garifuna History Part II

Leland’s Two Garifuna  Movies—Two Complementary Parts of Carib Indian/Garifuna History  Part II

By Wendy Griffin  3/27/2015

Filmmaker Andrea Leland, who currently divides her year between the US Virgin Islands in the Caribbean  and the San Francisco Bay Area in California, has done two Garifuna related films. Her first movie “Garifuna Journey” was about the formation of the Garifunas (Previously Black Caribs in English, Caribe Negro or Moreno in Spanish, Garinagu in the Garifuna language) on the Caribbean Island of St.Vincent (Yurumein), their exile to Honduras and spreading out to the rest of Central America. Tens of thousands of Garifunas eventually end up in US big cities like New York City, Los Angeles, Houston, Chicago, and Miami. Since the Caribbean Sea is named for the far ranging Carib Indians who harassed Arawak/Taino Island communities and later Spanish, French and English Island communities alike during the pre-Columbian and colonial periods, perhaps this inspired her to document in film these histories often unknown to Americans.

The fact that most US published textbooks about Latin America and the Caribbean begin with saying all the Indians in the Caribbean Island died out, which made it “necessary” to import African slaves, probably discourages most anthropologists, linguists, archaeologists, and historians for looking for the modern Taino/Arawak, and Carib Indians.  The Carib Indians have legal reserves on Dominica and St. Vincent, and have since 1992 (the year of the “Encounter of Two Worlds” controversy /500 years of Indian, Black and Popular Resistance throughout Latin America and the Caribbean) been organized together with their Central American Garifuna brethren in Belize and also with the Caribs of Trinidad and Tobago and those of Guyana. Yarumein House in New York City facilitates exchanges between New York Garifunas, like Belizean Garifuna singer, musician, filmmaker, and Garifuna language activist James Lovell and those on Yurumein (St. Vincent).

The Prime Minister of St. Vincent who appears in Leland’s Yurumein movie saying ,“Those War Criminals would be killed by an honest War Court”, has been arguing for Great Britain to pay reparations for the attempted genocide of the Caribs and Garifunas, part of a general controversy between Carmicon members and Great Britain being followed by The Miami Herald, the Garifuna activists and their electronic media. The topic of leaving living Caribbean Indians out also came out as part of the meetings leading up to the UN General Assembly on Indigenous Peoples in New York City in September 2014, which was organized by presentations by indigenous representatives of different parts of the World. The Carib Indians presented a formal petition to the UN General Secretary coordinating this assembly that instead of just saying North American and Latin American Indians, to please organize that section of the presentation as North American, Latin American and Caribbean Indians which was accepted according to the official websites about this World Conference on Indigenous Peoples

That World Conference was being held at the end of the Second UN Decade (2004-2014).  In January 2015 the UN Decade of Afro-Descent People began, a UN initiative requested by the Declaration at the end of the First World Summit of Afro-Descent Peoples in La Ceiba, Honduras and coordinated by the Garifuna organization ODECO. This UN Decade has not received the fanfare or funding of the UN Year of the Indigenous People (1993) or the Two Decades of Indigenous Peoples (1994-2014). 

Relationship World Conference on Indigenous Peoples and Funding for Cultural Programs

Although there is a lot of smoke and mirrors about UN Declarations, they do make available some funding, and the World Bank initiative EFA (Education for All) ends in 2015, so part of the purpose of the UN General Assembly on Indigenous Peoples in 2014 was to reflect on what are our funding and policy priorities now that EFA in ending in 2015.

 Through the EFA initiative the World Bank is funding, and organizing other bilateral donors to fund, bilingual intercultural education in a lot of places, including Honduras. This is to comply with ILO Convention 169 on the Human Rights of Indigenous and Tribal People of which about one third of the articles spell out what are guarantees or rights are for Bilingual Intercultural Education. Dominica is the only island in the Caribbean that has ratified ILO Convention 169 for its Karib Indians, while of the countries where Garifunas live,  Honduras has ratified ILO Convention 169.

Contested Indigenous Peoples Status of Garifunas in International Court Cases

Since its ratification by Honduras at ILO convention headquarters in Geneva, Switzerland in 1995, ILO Convention’s rights and funding had been being applied to the Honduran Garifunas. However, in the legal case of Triunfo de la Cruz Garifunas versus Honduras for which oral arguments by Garifunas were heard in the InterAmerican Human Rights Court in Costa Rica in May 2014,the Honduran government  in its written arguments in June 2014 claim the Garifunas are not indigenous and thus do not have rights under the UN Declaration of the Rights of Indigenous Peoples ( Commonly referred to as DRIP) provision for “free and informed consent”, the main legal doctrine the InterAmerican Human Rights Court is considering in this case.

UN Conventions for Indigenous peoples (And Not For Blacks) Another Form of Racism?

My book “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)  shows the Honduran Garifunas should be able to be protected under International Labor Organization (ILO) Convention 169 as either indigenous or tribal people under the ILO 169 Convention, but the legal requirements of DRIP to meet the legal requirement of being indigenous might be different than for ILO 169. 

Inquiring minds, including Mexican and Canadian Indians and Honduran Garifuna Celeo Alvarez Casildo,  the head of ODECO, ONECA/CABO (Organization of Central American blacks), and General Secretary of the First World Summit on Afro-Descent People and myself, raise interesting questions regarding the issue of ongoing racism against both Blacks and Indians in these declarations,  about why only indigenous peoples (as defined by White people informed by educational systems and legal systems that are known to be rife with racism) have rights and Afro-descent groups and mixed race people do not have rights under UN Declarations?  

What is Really happening Today with the World’s Indigenous Peoples?

The reports that led up to the UN General Assembly on Indigenous People were also not encouraging that the UN was doing much of anything to improve the administration of these Declaration of Human Rights, whose violations as included in the official UN reports included from murder, genocide, cultural destruction, displacement, and destruction of their habitats on down.

What are UN Organizations like the World Bank Doing About This?

The response of the World Bank to these criticisms was to recommending lowering social and environmental safeguards on their projects, a topic of hot debate at the March 2015 Society for Applied Anthropology annual conference in Pittsburgh, PA, whose members are more inclined to recommend strengthening the social and environmental safeguards required of World Bank loans and banks in which they hold equity positions in Third World countries like FICOHSA in Honduras. In general, World Bank projects, which are part of the UN system, are considered a major cause of destruction of indigenous people’s habitats and cultures, including looking the other way when these projects cause the actual death of people like Garifunas, Lencas, and Ladino peasants in  Honduras in the Tela, Lower Aguan/Trujillo/Limon area, Patuca III dam, and Rio Blanco, Intibuca conflicts or even causing genocide of whole cultures like the Ache of Paraguay.

What is the Relationship of Caribs in the Caribbean and Garifunas in Leland’s movies?

Andrea Leland’s new movie “Yarumein Homeland” is about two Diaspora groups going home to Saint Vincent or Yurumein for National Hero’s Day- a new Diaspora Carib Indian Dr. Cardin Gill who practices family medicine in Los Angeles and Honduran Garifunas or Black Caribs of the National Garifuna Folklore Ballet. The ancestors of the Central American and US Garifunas were exiled to Honduras in1797 from Yurumein or St.Vincent about 6 months after the 1796 death of Chief Satuye (Major in the French military or Supreme Chief Joseph Chatoyer to the French and the British who vied with each other and the Caribs for control of St. Vincent during the 1700’s) and the Carib Indian and Garifuna defeat in the Second Carib War against the British.

According to spiritual counselor Eckard Tolle in his book “The New Earth”  he says all of us in our lives have that active time when we are going out, but at the end of our lives, there is also a inward movement, a returning home, a gathering in. So Leland’s two Garifuna movies complement each other in the life of this ethnic group—the going out, the gathering in,the first movie the story of those who left and the second movie story of those who stayed.

The Relevance of this Story of Leaving St.Vincent in the Modern Garifuna Culture

The reactment of that arrival of the Garinagu ancestors to Honduras (12 April), to Belize (19 November), and to Guatemala are still known as Yurumein (St. Vincent) in Garifuna and as a result of Garifuna activism are now national holidays in those countries and 12 April also closes the officially decreed Garifuna American Month in New York City. This reenactment also forms part of the Garifuna dugu ancestor ceremony where a male child is dressed as a Wanaragua (The Dance of the Warriors) dancer who accompanies the ceremonial fishermen and the male and female children dressed in red, who arrive in 3 canoes, representing the arrival of the ancestors, the arrival of the blessings of provisions from the sea, and the beginning of the main part of the dugu ceremony which has been described in books like Diaspora Conversions, Garifuna Tomas Alberto Avila’s book Black Carib-Garifuna only available from Amazon.com,  and my book Los Garifunas de Honduras.

The Relationship of the dance of the Warriors (Wanaragua) and the Exile of Garifunas

The reason for the clothes of the Wanaragua dancer is Satuye’s wife Barauda’s suggestion to Satuye that if he does not know what to do about the British maybe he should give her his pants and he could wear her skirt, a scene shown in the Garifuna in Peril movie. Satuye changes the suggestion to  dressing his men in women’s clothes and covering their hair (the colonial British always mention the hair gave the Black Caribs away as different from the Red Caribs, which is reflected in Leland’s Yurumein Homeland movie with Carib boys on St.Vincent showing “I have Carib hair”),and thus thinking to get close to spy on the British who will be unconcerned about a bunch of women dancing nearby. A similar technique had been used by Queen Ya in Ghana about a century earlier against the British reports Ghanan videographer Tete Cobbah. This previous experience in Africa may have informed the Garifuna’s use of the ruse on St. Vincent.

The music and dance steps and the red mask themselves of the Garifuna Dance Wanaragua or Mascaro are from the Mandigo Red Mask Dance, which was a male secret society iniatiation dance, of the old Mali Empire in Africa.  In other parts of the Caribbean,including the Honduran Bay Islands among Black English speakers. this dance is called John Canoe (Yan Canu in Honduran Spanish), reportedly named for a British slaver in Ghana John Canby. The Garifuna version of this dance can be seen in the trailer of the Garifuna in Peril movie at www.garifunainperil.com and a painting of the Yan Canu dance by Garifuna painter Peter Centeno was put on a Honduran postage stamp issued to commemorate the 200^th year anneversay of the arrival of the Garifunas to Honduras in 1997.  See my article on War, Music and Dance in this blog for more ties of Garifuna music and dance to wars on St. Vincent against the French (Gunchai) and the Garifuna national anthem “Yurumain”.  

Chief Joseph Chatoyer or Satuye in St. Vincent and Among Garifunas

Chief Satuye, shown in the film in both Carib Breechcloth and in his French military uniform, is one of the heros remembered in St. Vincent’s National Hero’s Day, now that St. Vincent has recieved its independence from Great Britain after 200 years. Satuye is remembered in the Caribbean with everything from his painting on prepaid phone cards to a plaque where he died on St. Vincent. In Honduras buildings of the Garifunas and the Honduran government are named for him like Satuye Cultural Center where ODECO’s office is and Police Post Satuye outside of La Ceiba. Statues of him grace entrances of Garifuna schools. The Los Angeles, California Garifunas have done two plays about him, one by Belizean Garifuna Bill Flores was included in the 2012 award wining movie “Garifuna in Peril”. The New York City Garifunas have given the name Chief Joseph Satuye to one of their two professional Garifuna dance groups in New York City.

The Women in Satuye’s Family Also Strongly remembered by Garifunas

 Honduran Garifunas have also given Satuye’s wife’s name Barauda to a dance group. Satuye’s wife Barauda and his daughter Gulisi appear in the movie Garifuna in Peril and the Dangriga, Belize Garifuna Museum is called the Gulisi Garifuna Museum in her honor. She lived to immigrate to Belize in the early 19^th century. All the immigrating Garifunas and the several hundred French speaking Black speaking soldiers from Guadelupe and Martinique who were deported to Honduras with the Garifuna in 1797,  were given Spanish first and last names in Trujillo before 1799, and so we can not find Satuye’s descendants in censuses and church records due to not knowing the Spanish names they were given.

Some of Satuye’s children had also apparently been given French names on St.Vincent, notes Dr. James Sweeney who researched the Second Carib war which led to the Garifuna’s exile. We do not know the correlation of their Garifuna nicknames to those French names either.  Satuye’s son surrender speech which has been published in Spanish by historical geographer Dr. William Davidson in Yaxkin (1985) and in Etnología e Ethnohistoria de Honduras (2009) in articles on the arrival of Garifunas to Honduras (La llegada de los Garifunas) in Honduran government’s Honduran Institute of Anthropology and History (IHAH) publications. The original in English is in Colonial Office, Public Records Office documents in London, England.   

Where do the Names of Carib, Garifuna and ultimately the Caribbean Sea come from?

The film “Yarumein Homecoming” tells the history of the Caribs in their own words. After 18 years of studying Garifuna history in oral history, archaeology, linguistics, and documents, I found no historical errors in the history of the Caribs as recounted in this film, which is unusual as other authors who write about Garifunas and Black English speakers of Honduras will attest I sometimes send voluminous comments about their published materials. My only minor complaint of the film “Yarumein Homecoming” is that Ms. Leland begins her film with the definition of the word Carib or Caribe as Cannibal, without offering other alternative explanations of the word. This seems to be because of not having had access to Spanish language sources about the Garifuna language.

Garinagu, Garifunas’ name for themselves

According to Garifuna historian Prof. Santos Angel Batiz the Garifuna word for their ethnic group Garinagu comes from Kalina, the name of a Carib speaking tribe also in Guyana, and –nagu a corruption of the Spanish word “negro” (Black). This explanation of the meaning of Garinagu actually makes sense in the linguistics of Garifuna where two consonants can not be pronounced together, where whole syllables with the sound of r disappear in the Iriona dialect of Garifuna and o’s like in the place names Limon and Trujillo are often changed to u’s when speaking in Garifuna.  So Garinagu means Black Carib or a Black member of the Kalina Carib speaking Tribe.

Garifuna-Theories of origin of the word

There are several different theories of where the ethnic group name “Garifuna” comes from. According to Honduran Garifuna linguist Salvador Suazo in his book Conversemos en Garifuna which is on the Lea Honduras website,  it may come from kalipona meaning people of the Kalina tribe. Another theory is that it comes from the French Caribphone, which would mean speakers of Carib regardless of their race like Francophone Africa or Anglophone Caribbean. In the Garifuna language, syllables must be open—one consonant sound and one vowel. They can not end in consonants, so to make Caribphone a Garifuna word they needed to add an “a” sound Caribfuna and Garifuna syllables can not end in a consonant, so finally Garífuna.  The changing of k’s to g’s are common in linguistic changes in languages overtime or in different dialects of the same language. According to Santos Angel Batiz, Garifuna is not the singular of Garinagu in Garifuna, as Salvador Suazo claims, but rather like the word Kalipona refers to unmixed Carib Indians, known in British documents as Red or Yellow Caribs, as opposed to mixed race (African blacks and Carib-Arawakindians) Black Caribs.    Profesor Santos Angel Batiz says the Garifuna language also has a word for the unmixed Africans who intermarried with the Arawaks and Caribs.

A New Diaspora Carib coming Home to St. Vincent in “Yurumein Homecoming”

Her 2014 film “Yurumein Homecoming”  follows two quite different international homecomings. One story line follows the Carib Indian Dr. Cadrin Gill who practices family medicine in Los Angeles. He is part of the recent Caribbean Diaspora to the US and to England. New York City is one of most Caribbeanized cities in the US. Dr. Gill is going back to St. Vincent to Yurumein (The Island of the Blessed in Garifuna) where he has not been home for 20 years. To him, the Carib community of Sandy Bay on St. Vincent has changed, but is still familiar and full of familiar faces, familiar stories, familiar music and songs, familiar places.

St. Vincent  is  the place where his parents and grandparents and 500 plus years of Carib ancestors and 3,000 years of Arawak ancestors who intermarried with the Caribs lie buried.  The Arawaks and Caribs are thought to have danced and sang and provided music  for their ancestors even before the coming of Africans, that they over time have mixed with. Flat areas called “canchas” in Spanish, had stone statues around them probably representing the ancestors, and these flat fields with or without palm leaves above to provide shade were thought to be areas where Caribs and Arawaks danced for their ancestors.

The Relationship of Caribs, Arawaks and Tainos and the Modern Garifuna

While the Arawak speakers with whom the Caribs (Kalina in their own language, a tribe of Caribs known to have existed in Guyana) intermarried are usually called by their language name Arawak, they are the same Indians as almost all the other Caribbean Islands between 1,000 BC and the coming of Europeans, who are generally known by their tribal name Tainos. Many people in the Dominican Republic, Cuba, Puerto Rico, smaller islands like St. Lucia claim ancestory back to the original Taino or Arawak speaking natives of those Caribbean Islands.

The Caribs who followed the Arawaks up from the Amazon Basin along the Orinoco River at thought to have been late comers to the lower Windward Islands, but there are still Carib or Karib communities in St. Vincent, on Dominica, and they have recently organized in Trinidad and Tobago where some of the Red Caribs from St. Vincent took refuge after the eruption of the Soufrere volcano on St. Vincent in the early 1800’s devastating the remaining Red Carib reserves which in any case the British were selling in London and eventually dissolved, as shown in Andrea Leland’s movie “Yurumein Homecoming”.

National Garifuna Folklore Ballet of Honduras Also Come Home After 200 Years

The second storyline follows another group of homecomers—Honduran Garifuna members of the National Folkloric Garifuna Ballet, which is an autonomous project of the Honduran government, based in Tegucigalpa which has existed over 40 years under the leadership of choreographer Armando Crisanto Melendez.  Crisanto is from the Honduras Garifuna community of San Juan outside of Tela and he is the author of several books, some still for sale on the Internet like “El Enojo de las Sonajas” (The Anger of the Maracas). He and his daughter Ashanti and one other Honduran Garifuna are interviewed at different points during the movie. Ashanti’s own story and why she does not speak Garifuna, a language in danger of dying out in the next generation, is interesting and was revealed in an El Heraldo article which is on the Internet. 

Examples of Ties Between Dr. Gill of Sandy Bay, St. Vincent and Honduran Garifunas

Gil is still a family name among the Honduran Garifunas like my colleague from the Garifuna Emergency Committee of Honduras (CEGAH) Profa. Carolina David Gil. There is oral history that Sandy Bay on the island of Roatan, Honduras was at one time a Garifuna community and then a mixed Black English speaker and Garifuna community, and is now mixed Hispanics, foreigners mostly from the US, and Black English speakers.   This is the Sandy Bay that was all over  the news a year and a half ago because of the murder of Marjorie Merriweather Post’s great granddaughter and heiress there at her 2 acre spa on the beach, news stories that I felt totally missed the big questions like how do US heiresses come to own 2 acres on a beach in a country which prohibits the sale of land within 40 miles of the Coast in its Constitution, on a coral island with almost no beach, and what had happened to the different waves of original inhabitants of Sandy Bay, Honduras—indigenous, Garifuna, and Black Bay Islanders? 

Leaving Home, Being Behind, Returning Home after Absences Common Garifuna Themes

The experiences of  being left at home while others go away, such as Aurelio Martinez’s Yalifu (The Pelican), the experience of leaving and the processes that caused the Garifuna Diaspora first from St. Vincent like the song “Yurumein” recorded by Aurelio Martinez and available to listen to on the Garifuna Coalition of  New York’s website , or  to the US are common themes in Garifuna popular music in several genres. The hunguhungu song Yarumein (St. Vincent) is considered the national anthem of the Garifunas and is sung at most important occasions from Garifuna Day (12 April in Honduras), Garifuna-American Month in New York City (11 March-12 April), the Patron Saint Fairs including Trujillo’s on the summer solstice/beginning of the Caribbean rainy season and planting season/St. John the Baptists’s Day, and for Christmas/New Years/winter solstice/end of the rainy season/celebration of the rice harvest in Honduras, known as Fedu (Celebration).

Homecoming of a US Garifuna in Los Angeles to her rural community Plaplaya in the Honduran Moskitia, also the home community of Aurelio Martinez and the president of ODECO and ONECA Celeo Alvarez Casildo, and her Garifuna culture is the theme of Ali Allié’s first Garifuna film “El Espiritu de Mi Mama” (The Spirit of My Mother) which includes finding out from a buyei or Garifuna shaman what ancestor ceremony is being called for, doing a bath of the soul ceremony, and preparing for and doing a dugu ancestor ceremony, which are generally not allowed to be filmed, partly  because of the belief that new modern things like cameras are more likely to bring witchcraft and thus a bad end to an ancestor ceremony.

Part of the purpose of the Honduran Garifunas and the Carib Dr. Gill to return home to St. Vincent/Yurumein is  to Honor the Sacrifices of the Ancestors and  to Remember them, to make them happier, and to Restore Relationships that had been broken or strained both between the ancestors and their descendants, and between the different groups of their descendants, so that they will have the blessings of the ancestors as they go forward.  And for this reason, they offer food and music and purification, and learn about what has been happening with each other while they were apart to offer each other their help and support. Many people before an ancestor ceremony report being sad and in down spirits like the Caribs, but with the support and love and music and restoration of being together, their health returns and they are ready to go forward. The Carib offering of music and song and story is on St. Vincent, but the main offering of the Honduran Garifunas is on Balliceaux itself where so many Garifunas died.

Leland's Yurumein Homecoming Highlights Root Causes Garifuna Carib Issues in UN and US Courts Today

Leland’s “Yurumein Homecoming” Highlights Roots of Past Problems of Garifunas, Island Arawaks and Caribs, Which are Still Playing Out in International Courts, UN Forums and US Universities Today-- Part I

By Wendy Griffin  3/27/2015

In the 21st Century, it has become more common for people to be living somewhere different than where they call “home”. Thus the experience of “homecoming”, of going back to that other home far away is also becoming more common. And as attested to by the over 2 million people deported from the US under President Obama’s administration, that homecoming experience, whether it be to crimewracked Honduras or troubled Cambodia, or the slums of Brazil, etc. is often filled with very mixed emotions and experiences, sometimes even life threatening experiences. So Andrea Leland’s 2014 film “Yurumein Homecoming”  provides us with a timely opportunity to reflect on the experiences of going away, coming home, rejoining with those who have been left behind, mourning the losses including of not having known each other and not knowing how the other is doing, and trying to get to closure or peace now, to have a vision of how and where to move on from here and towards what and where.

Some Relations of Leland’s 2014 movie to current situations involving Garifunas and Caribs

Displacement threatens now in 2015 again the two cultures Honduran Garifunas and Caribs shown in the movie. The Honduran Garifunas are threatened by Economic and Development Zones (ZEDE) or Model cities, a new legal regime being planned to be implemented by new Honduran president Juan Orlando Hernandez for almost all the Garifuna communities of Honduras. See www.zede.gob,hn.

The mapping of one of these ZEDE, Sico-Paulaya in the Rio Platano Biosphere where Garifunas and Miskito Indians live with US Department of Defense Minerva Funding to the University of Kansas and American Geography Society and Radiance Technologies is assumed to be in anticipation of displacing the Indians and Garifunas, abolishing the Rio Platano Biosphere an Endangered UNESCO World Heritage Site, and “developing” the Honduran Moskitia through US public private ventures as planned in a 2009 US Embassy document made available through Wikileaks. After a published on the Internet complaint of the Garifuna organization OFRANEH that  this project was violating “ free prior informed consent” law of DRIP and AGS and concern that being employed by the project put bilingual UPN students in danger and neither the UPN university, nor the ethnic organizations felt there had been prior informed consent about the US Department of Defense origin of the funding or the US military and its associates whoever they may be by posting the mapping of the area on the Internet complete with drug airports, as the destination for the reporting, an ethics complaint has been under an ethics review headed by Dr. Susan Mac Neil at the University of Kansas since June 2014 for violating the ethics policy of the partner organization American Geography Society.  

On St. Vincent (Yarumein) the island of Balliceaux where the remains of the 3,000 ancestors of the Caribs and Arawaks who perished in the genocide at the end of the Second Carib War in 1797 remain is now up for sale on www.privateislands.com. 

International legal cases related to the ethnohistory shown in Leland’s movie Yarumein Homecoming including genocide charges against Great Britain by St.Vincent, human rights violation cases against Honduran Garifunas by the Honduran government in the InterAmerican Human Rights Court in Costa Rica, and Political Asylym cases in the US and in Spain regarding Honduran Garifunas, Honduran Indians, other Hondurans and their defenders based on legal discrimination and othering policies and looking the other way at human rights abuses of murder on down of the Honduran government, and their US government funders and US military advisors on the ground and from afar, are all whirling around the Garifuna and Carib protagonists of this film.

In the meetings leading up to the UN General Assembly on Indigenous Peoples in New York City in September 2014, the Carib Indians requested that the UN retitle and reorganize the session on North American and Latin American Indians to include “and Caribbean”, and the UN Secretary did rename the session as “North American, Latin American and Caribbean Indians”. Dominica, the neighbor of St. Vincent, which as Karib Reserves for its Karib Indians, is the only country in the Island Caribbean to approve ILO Convention 169 on the Human Rights of Indigenous and Tribal Peoples.   Outside of Latin America only one African country has approved ILO Convention 169, and it is currently embroiled in a known deadly civil war.  This paper tiger element of ILO convention 169 and even UNESCO World Heritage Site Protected Areas has been reported elsewhere in Latin America. Part of the purpose of the UN General Assembly on Indigenous People was to establish priorities after 2015, when the World Bank’s EFA (Education for All) initiative ends, which could affect funding of bilingual intercultural education in many countries including Honduras.

The Garifuna Language, Music, and Dance, shown in both of Andrea Leland’s Garifuna films, is a UNESCO World Heritage Intangible Masterpiece. I have not heard of one cent coming to save this Intangible heritage as a result of this declaration. It is of limited good to have words for 300 neotropical medicinal plants and 30 kinds of tropical fish, living in public housing in New York City or Los Angeles in the US, and being illegal and unable to access US medical care either. Anyone who has been to the Bronx and to Honduran or Belizean Garifuna villages, or seen Ali Alli’s El Espiritu de Mi Mama view of the comparison of life of the urban poor in the US and a Garifuna village, will imagine if there was any choice at all they would not have left their Caribbean villages in Honduras. Leland’s film shows the same was probably the case for St. Vincent, Yurumein, the Home of the Blessed in Garifuna.

According to Trujillo Garifunas, the Nicaraguan Garifuna town of Orinoco was founded immediately after the British brought the Garifunas to Honduras and a group of Garifunas decided to try to paddle by canoe back to Yarumein. They got as far as Orinoco on Pearl Lagoon and said we will never make it back to Yurumein, we will just settle here. That community is now threatened by the proposed Nicaraguan-Chinese canal scheduled to be three times bigger than the the panama Canal and the Free Trade Zone which will be located at either end of the Canal. The Caribs lived on the Orinoco Delta on what is now the Venezuelan-Guyana border before invading the Windward Islands maybe around 1450, and stories collected among Garifunas in Trujillo, Honduras like La comadrona (the Midwife), it appears the Carib men continued to hunt, plant, and trade with the South America mainland after starting families on St. Vincent, perhaps because St. Vincent was too small to support the bigger South American game animals like white collared peccary (quequeo), peccary (jagüilla),  tapir (danto), armadillo (cusucu) that the older Garifuna women, say Oh yes, that is Garifuna food, although near extinction today in Honduras.

 Leland’s “Yarumein Homecoming” -- Typical Counternarratives  presented as Counterarguments in a Real Estate Theft and Murder Cases Requiring Restorative Justice  and Restorative Funding

I noted in my article about the commonalities of Afro-Honduran, Honduran Indian, and US Indian and Blacks narratives on my blog www.healthandhonduranindiansblacks.blogspot.com that they are often like counterarguments in a real estate law case. These include that the person who sold the land did not have legal title, that the person who claimed the land said he had more right because of his moral superiority, that the people who sold the land changed the law to cover up their theft and make it legal often after the theft, that deaths in “wars” and permanent displacement were often only murders and theft and cultural destruction covered up in moral justifications, that how can the Europeans claim to have “discovered” something that was already inhabited and that it was theirs by right of Discovery.   All of these topics in these types of  counternarratives appear in the oral history of the Caribs in Andrea Leland’s film.

Counter Narratives as Arguments for Restorative Justice

In my blog article written in December 2013, I note US Indians use these counternarratives to justify requests of restorative funding now, like bilingual intercultural education, funding to improve or restore their damaged environments, funding for drug and alcohol treatment, funding for job training in the new economy since the possibility of working in the old economy like hunting  and crafts made of plants in an ecosystem where they no longer lived like birch bark canoe makers moved to Oklohoma was destroyed by official US government policies. US courts have also often mandated financial compensation for land loss. The Garifunas and the Caribbean Island Caribs have been fighting these legal and lobbying battles at the highest levels of international justice, in the media, and in the UN General Assembly of Indigenous Peoples in New York City  last year in September 2014. When the questions of Moral Superiority and Funding actually come together, the results are often not pretty.

Silence, Continuing  Racially Motivated False Historical Myths, Being Complicent in Invisibilization of Significant Issues by US Academics, Universities, and Academic Presses

Not only has the US mainstream press often been silent on the issues affecting the Garifunas and Caribs group in the Caribbean, but most US academic textbooks on Latin America and the Caribbean are complacent to say these Indians all died out. Getting funding for projects or land rights for Indians that highly educated US academics, whether careless historians or US university based testers of Honduran Garifuna DNA samples gotten without prior free informed consent which will show the Garifunas are Africans because there are no living unmixed Arawaks andCaribs in the Caribbean because of genocide to compare them to, have said do not exist is quite frankly difficult to do.  

 

Where are the Myths? On Whose Side is the Historical Evidence?

Except for the issue of only defining Carib as Cannibal, explained more below and in other parts of this series, I find after 18 years of researching Garifuna history and its roots, that Leland’s  ethnohistorical film “Yurumein Homecoming” about the Island Caribs is in all other aspects a historically accurate movie. Thus it is one more piece of evidence that much of what a lot of people think they know about the Americas, from the fact that all the Caribbean Indians died out and thus it was “necessary” to import at least 12 million Africans to work as slaves and Christopher Columbus discovering what was already known and owned by the native peoples including the Taino/Arawak and Carib ancestors of the Garifunas, is based on past historical myth making of epic proportions by Europeans, that needs to be urgently and signficantly critically reexamined.

While most US academic book publishers  who publish about the Caribbean, such as those who not long ago published “Cannibal Encounters” about colonial era contacts with Island Caribs, probably pride themselves  on publishing books less fanciful than the Johnny Depp Pirate’s of the Caribbean clips of painted Carib cannibals attacking him and his men shown as part of Leland’s movie “Yurumein Homecoming”, this may not necessarily be the case.

Cannibalism often shows up in archaeological ruins such as charred human bones among refuse piles. St. Vincent is known archaeologically. To my knowledge, no archaeological evidence has yet been found to confirm the fears of Tainos that Caribs ate their captures. “Blood libel” that the other group eats people when it is not true, such as medieval Jews who heard that Catholic Christians ate the body and blood of Christ, and assumed they ate babies, too, is common in many parts of the world.

 One of the most recent examples being Guatemalan Mayas believing gringos are stealing/adopting their babies to eat them or cut them into parts for operations, which resulted in seriously restricting of adoption laws in Guatemala and in Honduras. If Americans consider this preposterous, read the legal analysis of do you own your body parts and blood under US and Canadian law in Dr. Marie Battiste and John Henderson’s book on Protecting Indigenous Cultural Heritage. There have been cannibal groups in the world, the most famous being in the Aztecs, and if we include headhunters, those who stick skulls into the niches of their homes to have the strength of their enemies, we must include the pre-Roman Celtic ancestors of the French, the Spanish, the Danish, the English and the Irish in this list. US scientists trying to patent other country’s people’s blood for its antibodies has been tried.

 Caribbean Indians-The Arawak speaking Tainos and the Caribs did not all Die Out

However,  not only did the Island Arawaks and Tainos,  and the Caribs they intermarried with, not died out (see The Taino Indians online website), they are still speaking Taino (including in Pittsburgh, PA) and Island Arawak, mixed with the Carib language and a few African, French, and Spanish words in the case of the Garifunas. Island Arawak in Garifuna is called Igneri.

Garifunas--Speaking the Languages, Continuing the Religion, the Crafts, the Symbols, the  Foods, the Livelihoods of the Pre-Columbian Caribbean Indians

Their religion also continues in various forms such as the Garifunas are still doing ancestor ceremonies dances that archaeologists who have studied the Caribbean believe the “canchas” or flat fields were used for on pre-columbian St. Vincent surrounded by carvings representing the ancestors, and they are still cutting seashells in the forms of the Arawak forms of certain gods.  They are still calling the ancestors with maracas typical of the Caribbean Indians on the mainland and the islands, and calling the ancestors by indigenous names gubida (cupita badly intentioned or angry spirit in Arawak) and the shaman buyei (poyai shaman in Arawak) by indigenous names, and eating cassava bread (ereba in Garifuna, erepa in Arawak) which dates back 3,000 years among the Caribs and Arawaks as documented by the small white stones used in the grater and clay griddles to cook them on and firedogs under the griddle, still made of clay in modern Garifuna village of  Santa Rosa de Aguan, Honduras.

 The Garifunas  are still making the baskets of belaire or gomerei a vine, seen on the head of the god of Bittle yuca  or manioc at Yale Universities’s Peabody Museum. Bitter yucca still plays a significant role in Garifuna cooking from which at least 12 different things can be made.  The Garifuna men now use metal fish hooks and lead weights and metal hoes and axes to replace the bone fish hooks and stone fishing weights, but they continue fishing in canoes if they have the chance. Stone axeheads and stone hoes from St. Vincent in Yale’s Peabody Museum, which can be seen on online or in Irving Rouse’s The Tainos and in the book In Search of the Arawaks.  Traditional Garifunas in Garifuna and in Spanish are called “Garifunas de hacha y azadon” (Garifunas of axe and hoe), and archaeological collections indicate that they have been Caribs or Arawaks of axe and hoe since before the Spanish or metal was known to them.

The ancestors in the Garifuna dugu ceremony still rest in hammocks (the English word hammock is from Arawak, the Garifuna word might be from Carib, and were traditionally made of either cotton cloth or from a tree bark string called majao in Spanish, weñu in Garifuna, sani in Miskito, puru in Pech, and the use and the main two style of twisted fibers continue deep into the Amazon Basin notes collections at Chicago’s Field Museum). 

In the Field Museum of Chicago they have a green stone canoe paddle of the type of that Carib kings of the mainland used to show their leadership. It is cut in the shape of the Garifuna paddle, however, the Garifunas of Honduras have substituted mahoghany paddles which appear in the enactments of the “Yarumein” song about St. Vincent, as seen in my book Los Garifunas de Honduras.

 In the dugu ceremony paddles play a number of roles, such as the ceremonial fishermen carrying paddles, leading the way to the ancestor ceremony temple. During the dugu,  traditionally while singing arumajani songs, the songs of old men, one man would lean on a canoe paddle, as if through these ancestral songs always sung in Garifuna, we should be guided as we sail through life and troubles.  The Tulalip Indians of Washington state who were also canoe travelling Indians used canoe paddles as symbols of male authority and leadership in similar ways.

There are Garifuna ancestor songs in a dugu for women abeimajani similar to the men’s songs where everyone is joined by linking little fingers. By being united and together here, we can face what is coming together, is a common symbolism in the names of Garifuna women’s dance clubs like Club or Ensemble Wabaragoun (Let us go forward together) who sing at these ancestor ceremonies. Garifuna dance club Ensemble Wabaragoun was recorded on a CD by Radio France, including these ancestral song, and some libraries like the Schomburg Center of BlackCulture of New York Public Library bought copies.  

The Smithsonian’s Latino Center together with the National Museum of the American Indian is planning a new exhibit on the Indigenous Elements of Caribbean Culture. I was so appalled at their recently conluded Central American Pre-Colubian Exhibit which included not even having the Mayas in the right places on maps where 100 years of the best US universities Tulane, university of Pennsylvania, Harvard had worked with the Mayas, I was terrified what they would do in the Caribbean and donated my books on Garifunas to them so that they could not have an excuse that for the lack of $12 they had not known the Garifunas were the descendants of the Island Caribs and Arawaks and maintain their traditions.    

Myth--If We were Wrong, It does not Matter, as the Issue is insignificant

Leland’s films dispel the notion of some US academics that well, maybe we missed this, as this topic is about a small faraway insignificant group, but it does not matter. The estimated population of Garifunas she gives is 400,000. Tens of thousands lived in the US, usually legally, including in New York City, Los Angeles, Chicago, Miami, New Orleans, Pittsburgh, among other places, even before the current crisis in Honduras. I am sure most US academics can think of prestigious universities with well funded Latin American and Caribbean studies programs in those cities, who are not publishing about the Caribs or Garifunas or Tainos in their midsts. And now the Honduran Garifunas of ODECO have organized a World Summit of Afro-Descent peoples to reach all the 1.8 Billion Afro-Descent people of the World.  Previously the Garifunas were part of the 60 million people represented by the World Council of Indigenous Peoples headquartered in Canada.

I used to wonder what were the issues that made Canadian Indians organize all the Indians of the World to help them get ILO Convention 169 written and approved, and even though Canada did not ratify ILO Convention 169 what has come out over the last 10 years about Canadian Indian boarding Schools into the 1990’sand Healthcare relating to Canadian Indians, make us seriously reflect on who should be watching whom regarding human rights abuses.   Detailed studies of US treatment of US Indians or even the modern issues of US Blacks that led to the “Black Lives Matter” campaign and the comparison of the polite term “Healthcare Disparities” with Honduran Katherine Hall Trujillo’s TED talk about more Black babies dying in US hospitals than all the Wars combined also should raise some doubts about what values are we teaching in the US about the value of human life if that human happens to be poor or not White.  

If Honduran Garifunas feel the need to organize all the Blacks in the World and be part of organizing all the Indigenous people of the world, does it not seem important to find out what is really happening? And if resistance and legal recourse to human rights is not working, why are we surprised to find Hondurans by the thousands at the US Mexican border, and applying for political asylym?

Where are the Real Threats and Are we using Scarce Resources like Money Effectively?

If you are reading books like Confessions of a Bad Teacher about the state of the heavily Hispanic schools in Bronx, New York where the Garifunas end up, why do Americans think the threat to the threat to their personal security and that of their children is somewhere out there, the mythical terrorists, and not from young people in their midst whose aspirations and possibilities we are cutting off at the knees with our laws and policies and funding  priorities and the organized crime leaders here in the US?  Honduran drug trafficker Ramon Matta, prisoner for life in Marion, Illinois would like to know why are no important US drug traffickers caught in the United States and doing time in the US?  I actually think this is a very insightful question. In Spanish the answer is “Tienen cuello”.  

How do we keep US Kids Safe?

What is really going to stop Drugs, US Navy Bases in the Honduran Mosquitia or the Honduran Bay Islands, which are displacing Afro-Honduras like the Garifuna, and DEA involved in killing pregnant Miskito (also an Afro-indigenous group) women and young boys, or investing in drug education prevention programs in Pittsburgh and New York that were cut to pay for the Iraq and Afghanistan war which helped increase heroin imports three and half times? A wise Peruvian economist teaching at the University of Pittsburgh, said we produce many things in Peru, but what the US wants to buy is cocaine, so we sell them cocaine.

If we promote policies in Honduras that cut off the access of Garifunas and Miskitos and Black Bay islanders to hunted meat through national parks, to salt water fish and seafood through marine parks or contamination by agrochemicals or overfishing for export or the tourist trade that we help fund, if we encourage the Honduran government to cut off restrictions for the commercial fleet within 3 miles of the coast (previously either reserved for artisanal fishermen or protected areas for shrimp reproduction), and almost make illegal artisanal fishing, and we encourange industries with multibillion help that pollute the water and kill the fresh water fish, and then we take away the subsistence agricultural lands to give to export industries like African palm, cattle for frozen deboned meat for hamburger, or drug airports (there is a profitable export industry), why are surprised by either high Honduran immigration or by high levels of poor desparate Hondurans selling drugs to get a dollar to buy rice as one Miskito leader said? A 1980’s protest song in the US about Latin America was “Who are the Terrorists? I want to know.”   I don’t see that the answer has changed any.

How could we save money by spending our money on the Real Priorities and Causes?

If we worked on the demand issues, the US would also save money on federal prisons. If we worked so that people in Latin America were not pushed off their lands, often in the name of development which the US supposes will help US companies who want to invest there, a practice which has led to more than 50% of the federal prison population being people who crossed the US border illegally, think of all that money and the money for repatriating 2 million illegal aliens we could save.  

Resistance-500 years, still Resisting and Still Organizing Others to Help in the Resistance

Try to grasp that the people that Christopher Columbus told the King of Spain in his last voyage as he sailed past St.Vincent that the Caribs there are reported so fierce that I recommend that you do not try to conquer them and instead focus on the docile Tainos (with the idea they will do our bidding.)  are still around. And the Kings of Spain never deviated from Columbus’s recommendation and that is why there was French Guyana, British Guyana, Dutch Guyana (now Surinam) and French colonies of Martinique and Guadelupe, and British colonies like St. Vincent and the Grenadines and Trinidad and Tobago, but there were no Spanish colonies in the former Carib Indian areas.

 And these descendants, the  Garifunas have been organizing with worldwide Indian and Black organizations and the Caribbean Caribs since 1992 with access to the Internet and video cameras,and are in English and especially Spanish media hubs like Los Angeles, New York and Miami. This year 2015 might be the beginning of a very interesting UN Decade of the Afro-Descent People.

 

The Controversies Regarding the Reporting of finding the Ciudad blanca and What is Really True? Part I

Part I--Reports of Finding Ciudad Blanca in the Honduran Moskitia Cause Controversy

By Wendy Griffin

Over the last new two weeks, news reports that the Ciudad Blanca, supposedly a lost ruin in the Honduran Moskitia within the Rio Platano Biosphere Reserve, has been found by a team lead by US archaeologist Chris Bird and IHAH archaeologist Oscar Niell have appeared in many places including La Tribuna and La Prensa in Honduran newspapers and the Manchester Guardian and London Telegraph in Europe, National Geographic out of Washington, DC, and as comments of archaeologist’s blogs like Honduran Culture and Politics of Dr.Rosemary Joyce of UC-Berkley and Russel Sheptak. The Wikipedia article in English on the Ciudad Blanca that I helped to update got 29,000 hits over the week the story came out, up from almost none. There is not yet a Ciudad Blanca article in Spanish Wikipedia.

Yahoo! News and even Bloomburg Financial News Service carried stories of the find. This expedition was an on the ground follow up to trying to find the Ciudad Blanca by LIDAR, a type of radar, and the process is being filmed by Steve Elkins with the idea of making a movie about the finding of Ciudad Blanca.

The critiques of the reporting of the find, not the find itself, but how it was reported include several basic criticisms

1) Not cities-maybe true

2) Not Mesoamerican—not true

3) The Ciudad de mono Dios as reported by the explorer Theodore Morde, and the Ciudad blanca as reportedly by the Ladinos, Nahuas, Tawahkas or Miskitos, and Kao kamasa (White house)  of the Pech do not exist, or if they exist are not knowable, and so you can not say if they are found, and that probably what Theodore Morde reported is irrelevant and a hoax.–All also not true.

4) It will cause a problem if an undisturbed sacred site is claimed under the right of Discovery, as not belonging to the people who kept it undisturbed for ceremonial purposes and beliefs, and taken away and dug up,and fenced off.—True

5) There is a claim by the criticizing archaeologists that the Indians who built the fine carved Stone ruins in the Ciudad blanca área of the type reported by the National Geographic team were non-hierarchical and did not have states. – Both not true.

6) This is an astounding new find, that the Ciudad Blanca área was not yet known, and thus the find of the National Geographic team with filmmaker Steve Elkins is so new and astounding that it should reach papers in Europe, the US, and in Honduras. –Not true. Lots is known about the área, and lots has professionally reported,plus the Indians knew where the Ciudad Blanca was, it was not lost.—Somewhat True and Somewhat not True. This issue is caused by the reporters and not by the archaeologist who headed the Project who said, I never said it was the Ciudad blanca or ciudad de Mono Dios. It is a nice find, the issue of reporting on the destruction of the rainforest in the área is quite relevant, some interesting academic reports probably in Spanish in Yaxkin, and in English academic journals that few people read will come out of it, but to sell the idea to newspaper editors, maybe the reporters used as a hook, the White City has been found. I personally am excited to hear what the final reports will be.

However, actually this find and its publicity has the potential of being quite important, because this is extremely good academically and government of Honduras vetted team, so there is no longer any doubt that maybe all those years when Mesoamerican archeologists argued there was nothing looking for in the rainforest of Central America or the rainforest of Peru or Guyana, because there are no civilizations there and so the Indians, such as they might be are, were not worth knowing, maybe they will have to rethink what they think they know, and to what extent that arrogance towards urban hierarchical Indians, who are known to hoard, to have slavery, and kill their neighbors, made them overlook what was good in the rainforest Indians and what it was that they were doing that permitted the continuance of the rainforest.

If the United States finds as the Honduran women and children came across the border, or as the Department of Defense is planning to Map the Honduran Mosquitia that Honduras is the “unknown” country as Tanya Kerrsen calls it in “Power Grab” about the Lower Aguan Valley, they only have their own funding priorities of not funding positions and research in Lower Central America to blame. That lower Central America also means, where US banana companies United Fruit and Standard Fruit are, might be related to why all eyes were rewarded to look elsewhere.   

7.  We do not know the name of the culture who were the creators of the civilization that existed in the Ciudad Blanca área? Probably false. While many people do not agree with me, I believe from the place names, from the crafts, from the God’s names, from clothes shown, from what is known of the ceremonies and their beliefs and their legends, which are reflected in their sculptures I would say that we can say they are Nahua speakers, probably some combination of Nicaroas who immigrated from Teotihuacan (Tula or Tulan) to Cholula (place of the refugees) and then to Soconosco, in the Tehuatepec isthmus area in Mexeco and then to Central America, and Toltecs or in Nahuatlized Spanish Tultecas (people from Tula, the place of tule, some of whom lived in Culhuacan before immigrating) or Agaltecas (people from the place of tule, carrizo or junco) and Pipiles (pipilli the leaders). My theory that the builders of the Ciudad Blanca were Nahuas has been on the Internet site www.roatannet.com/ciudadblanca which is related to the video Search for Ciudad Blanca available in Parts I-IV in English, and  Search for Ciudad Blanca Spanish versión all in one part by Hondurasociety on youtube. That roatannet.com site is down right now, possibly because the interest in the topic was so great over the last two weeks that it gave problems to the website. 

 I believe I now know which of all the ruins in the Mosquitia is the Pech Kao Kamasa (White House) where the Pech hero Patakako died, and the only place names in the área are in Pech and in Nahua, and the place names in Nahua would have special meaning particularly for the Nicarao speakers of Nahua, based on a visión of their wisemen when they left Tehuantepec near Soconosco, Mexico. It is noticeable in the Aztec tribute lists for Xoconosco that many things they required the Xoconosco people to pay tribute in--Green Stone beads, petates of cacao beans, Green feathers, gold, were produced in the rainforest of NE Honduras and were not available locally to them.

I still stand by my theory of Nahua speakers having been the builders of Kao Kamasa, which I first put forth in the book Dioses, héroes y Hombres en el Universo Mitico Pech in 1991, La Historia de los Indigenas de la Zona Nororiental de Honduras prehistoria a 1800 vol. 1, from 1992 which can be seen on google books, which was also presented at the IHAH Seminar in honor of the 500th Anneversary of the Discovery of America in 1992, The History of the Indians of NE Honduras Prehistory to 1800 Vol 1, from 1994, also on google books which is not the same as the Spanish version, the Miskiwat story books with the story of Rah and Miskut published in 1996  and I presented my work to the Latin American Indian Literature Association in 1996, Honduras this Week articles, and Los Pech de Honduras from 2009, and my work Guia de Artesanías Pech (Guide to Pech Crafts), of which there are copies in the San Pedro Sula Museum,the Vine Deloria Jr. Library of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian, at the Burke Museum of the University of Washington together with the crafts which the San Pedro Sula Museum also have and among the Pech,  in my blog articles in Spanish and in English on www.healthandhonduranindiansblacks.blogspot.com and

www.crisisderechoshumanoshonduras2015.blogspot.com  and in the Ciudad Blanca article in English in Wikipedia. I have done a material on all the crafts of Honduras, including with David Flores and Cesar Indiano, Hecho a Mano: Una Panarama de la Artesanía Hondureña, including the Nahua Indians of Honduras and all the folkdances of Honduras La Evolución Historica de la Danza Folklorica Hondureña including all the known ceremonies with dances or music. Within the Ciudad Blanca área, there are numerous other ruins that are not the Pech Kao Kamasá, but they relate to Ladino and Aztec stories related to Quetzalcóatl, and Nahuas of Olancho Honduras claim the Ciudad Blanca as an important site in their cultural past. So some of the comments in this three part article will be to explain how we know which cities might be of importance to these other groups who identify with the general myth of the Ciudad Blanca. One story of the City is that it had a lot of White faced monkeys, as noted in the video Search for Ciudad Blanca on YouTube, and the current National Geographic expedition were impressed how many monkeys there were at their site and how unafraid they were.

 Dr. Chris Begley, one of the co-signers of the critique, has his own theory that the Pech built the Ciudad Blanca, but I have no idea what he bases on his reasoning on. Mine in found in the resources above. In my works I also explain what happened to the Nahua Indians that I believe built numerous ruins in Olancho, in the Mosquitia, in Colon, and also in NW and Western Honduras. These states and cities were probably not only of Nahua speakers, but as the leaders they determined things like location of the city, orientation of the city, materials used to build the city, the motifs in the art work, the gods that would be worships, the ceremonies that would be done and when, types of designs and materials and other preferences of luxury goods, names of cities and surrounding countryside, while although there are workers of other ethnic groups, their input into these types of decisions are minimal. The same could be said of United Fruit Company housing in Honduras, and of the Mormon Temple and the Episcopal Churches, and to some extent the organization of Moravian Miskito villages, where the workers are local and not of the same ethnic group or necessarily same race or religión as the people who own and control the work. 

The Nahua Indians   were not the only Mesoamerican Indians in Honduras, but substantial work in recent years has been done on Lenca and on Chorotega languages, so that we can rule them out. Also work has been on the archaeology in the Lenca, Nahua, and Chorotega (Mangue speakers) in Southern Honduras, so that we can say probably the displacement of Mayas of the Classical Maya State based at Copan Ruinas, Honduras from the indefensable valleys to the mountains, was probably first caused by the migration of Chorotegas through the Maya Chorti lands of El Salvador before they arrived to settle on the Gulf of Fonseca such as at Nacaome.  There is some awesome and very interesting ethnohistorical work going on in El Salvador, a lot of it on Wikipedia, and the website about the history of El Salvadoran Indians like the Mayas and the Lencas on the inclusivebusiness website blows away a lot of traditional theories of archaeologists who study Mesoamerican Indians like Olmecs,Mayas, and Lencas in Central America and Mexico. It is evident that the person whose website this is speaks really good Maya Chorti. 

Human Sacrifice Part of the Ciudad Blanca Story Report Pech and Theodore Morde

The Chorotegas like the Nahuas took slaves and sacrificed people to their gods. Some Nahua Indians of the Pipiles may have settled in El Salvador prior to the end of the Classic Period so that the combination caused the depopulation of the Valleys in the Maya and Lenca áreas, not only in Honduras, but also in Guatemala.  Most Chorotegas who settled in the Gulf of Fonseca área were later displaced by Nahua speaking Nicaraos. The Chorotegas moved into Nicaragua in the Rivas región, and again lost the área beside Lake Nicaragua to Nicaroas.  Chorotega sites in the Gulf of Fonseca can be distinguished archaeologically from Nahuas, and the Chorotega (the name means people from Cholula) Mangue language gives words and place names that are very distinctive from Nahua.   The Oto.Mangue speakers of Central Mexico greatly predated the arrival of Nahuas there, and were among the Indians to domesticate corn. Besides Chorotega, another Oto-Mangue language is Masahuat and it is not currently known if the places in Honduras and in El Salvador were called Masahuat because they were Oto-Mangue speakers or if the name of the communities comes from macehuales (common people, vassals) in Nahua. The people who have been working on the Wikipedia Mexico Project deserve a lot of credit for my understanding of what was going on in Mexico relative to immigrant groups leaving Mexico and ending up in Guatemala, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Costa Rica and Honduras.

Did this National Geographic Team Find Cities in NE Honduras?

.—1) it was initially  reported as  they found two cities, but according to Honduran archaeologist Ricardo Agurcia an archaeological site must show that it had a population of over 10,000 people, so maybe it would be more technically correct to say they found two settlements with a significant number of Stone crafts and carvings. The animals shown included a vulture, and a were-jaguar.  The latter is interesting as shamans (nahuas) changing into their protective animal spirit (nagual) and particularly changing into jaguars is a Mesoamerican motif and belief since the time of the Olmecs. Significant urban settlements with White Stone cobbled streets, terraced architure, earthwork city walls, temples and plaza are known for the White City área in the Rio Platano Biosphere in the Honduran Mosquitia. Whether this find is one of them, hard to tell from the reporting that has been released so far. Below it is explained about the types of sites generally found--forts in the mountains with walls around the city, the most likely type of archaeological site findable by radar or satellite technologies, residential type sites of Mesoamerican Indians who probably lived in champas (Eastern Honduras Nahua Word at time of Conquest Champagua and still today) or palapas (Western Honduras Word at the time of Conquest as in the place name Petoapalapa, a pueblo de indios now just called Petoa) which have thatched roofs, but no walls to let in the breeze.

When the Spanish conquered Nicaragua, this is the type of houses the Nicaroa Nahua speaking Indians lived in. Nahua speaker thatched houses differed from Pech houses in that Nahua speaker houses often had stucco floors. These have been noted in what were formerly Lenca áreas (the Lencas did not do that in the Classic period) and in the Trujillo área, the Garífunas still sometimes run into stuccoed floors from the Post Classic when they go to build their homes. Because the Word Palapa is found in the Founding of San Pedro sula document by Pedro Alvarado in 1536 giving Petoa Palapa as an encomienda, the Wikipedia article in Spanish saying that Palapas represent philippino influence in Mexican architecture is probably not true. Palapas in Mexico are reportedly especially common in Western Mexico, and maybe an important key to finding out what language Petoa, Tocoa, Omoa, Yojoa, etc. are in Northern Honduras.

Pech generally built houses of very perishable materials, including unrolled bamboo (tarro) such as in the San Pedro Sula Museum, or of cane with a thatched roof, and still in the 1950's were building houses without walls. The Pech Word kao (house) refers to houses without walls (champas in Honduran Spanish, palapas in Mexico), and with walls, but can be modified like kao chajú (a tapir house) of perishable materials or kao pechakwa (other people's type houses) with clay walls and a thatch roof. Both the Nicarao and the Pech were reported as living with extended families in larger houses.  If your regular house, or your house in the fields has no walls, if your village is under attack, you either run away and hide in the forest or in caves like the Pech, or you take refuge in a mountain fort like the Nahuas, Lencas, and Chortis of the Post Classic period. It would be shocking if there was a society that could get a walled fort built and large temples built without a centralized government structure, as some archaeologists have theorized about the Ciudad Blanca. However, that thought seems to be caused by confusión on their part. For example if some of the archaeological sites of NE Honduras have carved Stone ceremonial benches which show female shaman (which I have not seen), they would be Mesoamerican, as Pech ceremonial benches are low, of the Wood of the capulín tree, and the Watá, the spiritual and political leader of the Pech, would sit on this bench during a ceremony, and it was made particularly for that ceremony. Some of the large carved corn grinding stones in NE Honduras, which are in Trujillo Museums,and are similar to the ones in the San Pedro Sula Museum, and are in the video Search for Ciudad blanca on YouTube, may have served a similar purpose for the Mesoamericans of NE and NW Honduras.

So fort sites of Mesoamericans with temples and plazas and sometimes ballcourts, residential sites of Mesoamericans with temples and plazas, cave burials of Mesoamericans who also used the caves for other ceremonies, are known for the Postclassic period in NE Honduras and hunting/fishing/temporary housing type sites for the Pech and other Tropical forest type tribes are known for the Classic Period in NE Honduras. The Caves in the área of these Classic period Tropical Forest tribes sites do not seem to have been used either ceremonially nor for primary or secondary burials in the Classic period in NE Honduras. This would follow colonial period burial practices of these tropical forest tribes Indians, who buried under the ground, with open thatched structures over them and grave goods,mostly foods like pineapples and iguanas, left there in the open.  

Both the Pech and the Tawahkas try to avoid caves and the highest points of mountains as they say evil spirits live there. In fact, that is where the Nahuas would do ceremonias, and in Pech stories these other Indians are often identified as evil spirits allied with the spirits of storms, which would match the Mesoamerican rain spirits identified later in this article. In Catecamas Olancho a colonial pueblo de indios which used to have Nahua cofradías and the main Nahua Federation villages are outside of it , the patrón saint fair for which there used to be a guancasco is Nuestro Señor de las Aguas on 2 December at the end of hurricane season in the Carribbean, even though the convent there was to Saint Francis of Asisi. Does the Catholic Church even have a saint called Our Lord of the Waters?

Do the Sites Reported by National Geographic and the others in the Ciudad Blanca área qualify as Mesoamerican?

2) Some archaeologists who have written whole books about Mesoamerica complained that they thought the peoples in the Ciudad Blanca area were not Mesoamerican. That particular criticism seems unfounded. One of the most controversial things in Mesoamerican studies, according to Dr.Robert Carmack, author of the Legacy of Mesoamerica, is the definition of Mesoamerica.

Various criteria are used including monumental temples with plazas, urban center, intensive agricultural techniques (in NE Honduras this is shown by terraced agriculture like at Tulito on the Rio Paulaya and at Las Crucitas on the River Aner near the River Wampu), speaking Mesoamerican languages including Nahua, participating in the Mesoamerican dominated long distance trade routes, and participating in religions that share common characteristics, including human sacrifice, corn and rain and agricultural gods and their related ceremonies organized by a calendar, and having hierarchical societies.

As we will see NE Honduran city-states organized into provinces meet all of these criteria, including the principal language noted for naming archaeological ruins in the área and some geological features like rivers and mountains and mountain passes are in Nahua.  I have only found 3 Pech names for anything still used in geography in NE Honduras, as the tendency seems to have been to translate Pech names to Spanish like river "asowa" in Pech to Ojo de Agua which would be wa "ojo" and aso "agua" or wáter. The Pech área has a river called Ojo de Agua River and Ojo de Agua is a common place name in NE Honduras.

Mesoamerican Language Used in the Ciudad blanca Area--principally Nahua

The Pech seemed to have had the tendency to name rivers by their color which would also tell you what they are good for fishing for, so names like Rio Tinto (a dark colored river), Rio Negro (black or dark colored river) Agua Blanca (White Water), Aso Sewa (Yellow wáter river), Agua Zarka (Green colored wáter river)  are examples of the many types of names in the Pech área. Thus it is unusual that there would still be a Pech name for the área where the Kao Kamasa is believed to be. The sheer number of Nahua place names in NE Honduras is astounding. This área has only slowly been coming under the control of the Honduran government over the 20th century.  I am not sure the Word "control" even now reflects the reality of the Honduran government to much of the Mosquitia and Eastern Olancho like where the Tawahkas live.  In the área where I believe the Pech Kao Kamasa to be only Nahua and Pech langauges are used  in the surrounding place names.

The Builders of the Ruins in the Ciudad blanca área participated in Mesoamerican Religious System

The new National Geographical group reported finding Stone carvings with the motif of Were-jaguars. Were-jaguars are thought to be associated with Mesoamerican rain dieties, which fits in well with the names of Nahua dieties known in Honduras, Guatemala, and Nicaragua, such Esquipul the black panther at night who devours human hearts from whose name Esquipulas, Guatemala seems to come from, and there is a pool there used in the rain ceremonies of the Mayas.  Pech stores are full of celestial black tigers who menace the Pech, including one in the área of Boqueron or Olancho Viejo, which they think was the cause of the destruction of the Spanish town of San Jorge de Olancho. Temples with priests burning incense by day to idols were reported by the Spanish of Olancho El Viejo. The Pech do not make idols of their gods, do not burn incense, do not make temples that are different from houses, and do all of their ceremonies at night when the spirits the hidden ones come out, so nothing about the Indians of Olancho El Viejo, or the Mesoamerican type ruins of the Ciudad blanca área match the Pech culture, and it totally matches what we know about Nahua speakers. One of the things the black panther in the sky did was take out of the heart of the Pech hero Patako while he was in heaven checking if there was another Patakako (Our person who does in Pech).

Nahua Rain god Images in Ciudad blanca área and NW Honduras place names--Tláloc or Quia

Another diety associated with were-jaguars is the rain god called Tlaloc by the Aztecs, but Quia among Central American Nahua speakers, such as Quiatlan the place of the rain god Quia, now Quimistan, Santa Barbara, where there was a cave with hundreds of copper bells used for music in the human sacrifice ceremonies besides pools of wáter. These bells are also found in the Sandy Bay Museum at St. Anthony’s Key Resort on Roatan, in the Honduran Bay Islands. These bells seem to have made in NW Honduras, but the copper may have come from the Bay Islands and from Manto, Olancho.  Examples of the Quimistan bells were recently on exhibit in the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Exhibit on Central America.

Besides Stone carvings of Were-Jaguars (which may show nahuas or priests changing into their nagual or protective animal spirit called nagual in Honduran Spanish a Jaguar), other proof of the belief of Northeastern Honduran Indians belief in these rain dieties are the  Tlaloc cups in a style of pottery known as Tohil Plumbate (Plombiza Tojil in Spanish) for its glaze have been reported near San Esteban, Olancho (formerly called Tonjagua) and in ruins in the Ciudad Blanca or White City visited by Ted Maschal in the municipio of Culmi, Olancho. The current National Geographic team did not report finding Tohil Plumbate or Tlaloc cups, and in fact mentioned no interesting pottery.

Were Jaguars indicate a belief in nahuas and naguals among the Indians of the Ciudad Blanca

The belief in nahuas or witches (brujo) who could change into their naguals or protective spirits is extremely widespread in Honduras,including the Lenca área, the South, the Center,and NW Honduras. The animals can include owls (lechuzas), dogs or coyotes (also the origin of the bad cadejo and the good cadejo), jaguars or panthers, and pigs. In Honduras 30 years ago, children commonly were thought to have a nagual. The relationship of the words nagual and nahua are in Mesoamerican cultures since Olmec times (1,000 BC)  according to Historical linguist Dr.  Lyle Campbell. Among the Maya Chorti they call Catholic saints “nagualitos”, little protective spirits in Spanish, so even though the Maya Chorti Word Tzikin used for the ceremony for the ancestors on the day of the Dead entered Pech as sikinko, the house of the saint, the Maya Chorti do not use tzikin to refer to saints or idols, and the Indians of the Agalta valley in 1808 did use tzikin to mean an idol with a native paper face.   The ending -ko in sikinko (church in Pech) may come from Nahua -co place, rather than -kao house in Pech, and trilingual Spanish-Nahua speakers-Pech speakers may have introduced Christianity to the Pech in the missions of Olancho. The Nicaroa god Esquipul was associated with the constellation ursa major (Big Bear in Spanish, I think the Big Dipper in English) and that is why he is often mentioned as the celestial night tiger or panther in Pech stories. According to Dr. William Davidson's new book on the Black Christ of Esquipulas, the -as was added by the Spanish to make Esquipulas easier to pronounce. The identification of the people who controlled Esquipulas as Toltecs at the time of Conquest comes from the oficial Esquipulas Guatemala website, and I believe they are quoting Conquistador Pedro Alvarado's soldiers who said the Pipiles in the área were brethern of the Toltecs. Pedro Alvarado published a book of his conquest of Eastern Guatemala, prior to attempting to conquer Western Honduras.

How to Recognize Toltecs in Archaeological Sites and These are Present in NE Honduras Archaeology

There was also a Tohil Plumbate Tlaloc pot in the Copan Ruinas Museum on Central Park in Copan Ruinas, Honduras the last time I visited there. Tohil Plumbate is associated with the arrival of Toltecs in Central America, and Wikipedia in Spanish has a good article and photo. The Tohil Plumbate figures that were included in the recently finished Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian, also included the Old Fire God, who is also the God of the Center.  The colonial name of Copan was Copante, which in Nahua means bridge, and is still used in Honduran Spanish to mean a piece of Wood that you put across a stream to cross it safely. The original Mayan name was probably Zotz, the bat. I believe the new Postclassic site found in the El Bosque section of Copan Ruinas, may indicate the arrival of the Toltecs from Mexico who founded Payaqui (among Nahuas) first as a confederation with the Maya Chorti. Green obsidean from a mine controlled by the Toltecs in Hidalgo, Mexico, blackbosidean from Salvadoran sites,but not Guatemalan sites of obsidean, and Fine Orange Ware,and cream and buff pottery mark this site, the site of a Toltec pochteca merchant in El Salvador, an archaeological site called El Coyote in Santa Barbara, and Chichen Itza.

 The Spanish reported repeatedly about the macanas or mahoghany sword clubs with black obsidean teeth in their fights with Honduran Indians particularly in Olancho. There is a whole container of the black obsidian teeth for macanas in the Trujillo Rufino Galan Museum. There is also an obsidean core for making obsidean knives. The Nahuas of Central America tried to get a monopoly on the distribution of obsidean, including controlling mines in El Salvador. There are uncertainities if they got the control of the La Esperanza Intibucá obsidean mine away from the Lencas. Naco (place of the son of the sisimite) Santa Barbara was a major place for obsidean tool and weapon production having many more pieces of obsidean than any where around. Trujillo was seriously at the end of this distribution system. The Pech Indians used wooden arrowheads tipped with poisin for arrows, and seemed to have always used Wood as the Pech Word for arrowhead arrosa means pine arro, head sa, or an arrowhead of fine ocote pine.  Basalt arrow heads which would have needed poisin like from poisonous frogs or toads to be effective are also found around Trujillo, Honduras.  The Lencas like Chief lempira are also reported to have used poisoned arrows. The palm to make bows and the Wood of arrows pejival palm,generally known by the Miskito name supa in Honduras, is cultivated, not wild, but was used by all Honduran Indians who made bows and arrows. The Nahua derived verb Macanear (to hit hard repeatedly) and the noun Macanazo (now a beating, literally a wound caused by a macana) and mancaneado (something that is difficult and tiring to do--Este es macaenado) are still in use in Honduran Spanish.

Thunder/Lightening, Fire, Rain Gods, and Tree cotton, native to Central America, and Firestones

According to several Honduran Indian groups including the Pech, the Lencas, and the Maya Chorti, the thunder god sent down a lightening bolt and caught the forest on fire,and the people kept the fire, and after that they could eat cooked meat, that before they could only eat it rare. So the thunder and lightening and rain gods, and the fire gods are usually considered the same gods in Honduras.  These included Tlaloc or Quia for whom Quiatlan, now Quimistan, Santa Barbara, and Nahuehue, the son of the sisimite and a woman, for whom Naco, Santa Barbara was probably named, among the Nahua speakers. Managua is the main indigenous language name for rain spirits that has been found among the Lencas, who often use Spanish glosses for concepts like gods in the sky (angelitos), gods in the earth (diablos, vírgenes), in the wáter (sirena), and ancestors (animas).

The Mayas seemed to associate getting the gift of being able to make fire when they wished with also knowing about cotton, and this may be related to the technique reported by the Maya Chorti, the Pech, and the Lencas of rubbing two stones together over a piece of cotton, and then it caught fire from the spark, and then they added ocote resinous pine which here in the US we also call fatback pine. Interestingly this is not the technique for making fire for the New Fire Ceremony of the Indians of Quetzaltepeque, Chiquimula who use a fire drill, a technique common in US and Canada Indians. This knowledge of how to make fire at will seems to come to the Honduran Mayas and Lencas about the same time as cotton, pottery, how to make pottery waterproof by treating it with bitter atol made of corn, and set fire to substantial áreas for corn, which maybe due to Olmec influence seen in the Stone carvings in the area. 

Relationship Celestial Rain gods and Goddesses who care for wáter, fish, Aquatic animals  

Most Honduran Indians see a relationship between earthly wáter and its spirits like Texiguat or Siguaté ( the lady of the pool of wáter in Nahua, probably the origin of the sirena in Honduran Spanish, place names in Atlantida, El Paraiso, and Olancho) who is probably equivalent to the Goddess of Terrestial Waters (and its fish) in Teotihuacan and the Lady of the Jade Skirt among the Aztecs. The large Green female Stone statues in the  Trujillo area (maybe at the Poza de la Sirena in the municipio of Santa Fe), in the Bay Islands and in Olancho, possibly at the archaeological site La Llorona, were probably this goddess. She is thought to be either the sister or the wife of Tlaloc the rain god.

Green Goddess Figure  who brings rain and abundant fish identified archaeologically in NE Honduras

This goddess is also shown as a small half axe of Green Stone with a female top that can be worn as a necklace. There are examples in the Trujillo Museums including the one at the Fort. This same type of female half axe figure in known for the Nicarao sites of Nicaragua and Costa Rica.The source of the Green Stone is thought to be at the archaeological site of Tulito (little Tulan, the place of a lot of Tule, the name the Toltecs (people from Tulan  who called  Teotihuacan, Cholula )city of the Refugees in Nahua,given because they had to abandon Teotihuacan due to attacks), Chichen Izta in Mexico). Small Green Stone axe heads were also used, and were known to the Pech and Ladinos as thunder stones.  These have been found buried at entrances of caves near Nahua speakers like Gualaco, Olancho above the Agalta Valley, also now part of the Nahua Federation in Honduras. Examples of these Green Stone axe heads can be seen in the San Pedro Sula Museum in Honduras.

Importance of Caves for Ceremonies and Burials among the Nahuas of NE Honduras, Avoided by Tropical Rainforest Indians

 The use of caves is thought by the Nahua speakers themselves as one of the predominant features that typifies the ethnic group, noted the SEDINAFROH website. Similar uses of caves have been reported in the Choluteca, Francisco Morazon, Colon near Trujillo, Santa Barbara, and Copan Depts. as well in Honduras. An interesting cave was found at Las Crucitas site in the Ciudad Blanca área of Olancho. In the Culmi, Olancho área in the Ciudad blanca zone, Ladinos have taken Green Stone necklaces out of the cave burials in the area and tried to sell them to researchers in the área. A small offeratory in a cave at Jamasquire, now one of the towns in the Nahua Federation outside of Catacamas Olancho, was reported by archaeologist Doris Zemurray Stone and was confiscated by the Honduran government, which still upsets the Jamasquire Indians. An example of modern Green Stone work from the Trujillo área was donated to the Burke Museum of the University of Washington, and can be seen on their website and on Wikimedia Commons.

Source of Green Stone for the Green Female Water and Fish Goddess and tie-in to Tula

Tulito, the source of the Green Stone, is on the Rio Paulaya (River of Blood in Miskito) on the edge of the Ciudad Blanca área and shows that it grew to be a prosperous city with plazas and temples and terraced agricultura, probably as a result of its Green Stone exports. It was described principally by the Sir Walter Raleigh expedition of British archaeologists looking for Ciudad Blanca.  Tulian (place of a lot of tule) is also a related Tula place name in NW Honduras. Since acalt in the Náhuatl dialect or agatl in the Nicarao Nahua dialect, can mean tule, junco, or carrizo, the agalteca, Agalta names are also related to the concept of Tulan, the place of a lot of tule. Tula was also used to mean capital city,  where people are so close together they are like tules in the wáter, noted linguist Jeff Pynes.

Sea Foam and Wave Incised Punctate Decoration on Orange Ware and tie in to Cholula and Teotihuacan, and the Goddess of Celestial Waters

The Paulaya River is also where there were round clay pots in the wáter as reported by Doris Zemurray Stone with photos that show the waves and seafoam (s's and dots) motif similar to the motif on Classic Era (300-900 AD) Fine Orange Pottery of Cholula and Teotihuacan in Mexico. These are probably offerings to the spirit of the wáter, the sirena in Spanish, and possibly related to the Goddess of Terrestial Waters and taker care of fish shown in a cave under one of the pyramids in the Center of the Classic period ruin Teotihuacan.

Ties of Nahuas of NE Honduras to Nicaroas in Nicaragua and Costa Rica who migrated from Mexico

Rosemary Joyce argued that since the archaeology of the Ciudad Blanca área in some ways ressembled that of Nicaragua and Costa Rica the culture that created them could not be Mesoamerican. That is not true. It is known that both the Chorotegas (name means people from Cholula) and Nicaraos (named by the Spanish for the chief Nicarao, but they call themselves Nahoa) of the Pacific Coast of Nicaragua and the Guanacaste región of Costa Rica were both immigrant groups right from Cholula and previously from the Valley of Mexico, both within Mesoamerica.

Slave societies known to have existed in NE Honduras

It is also known the Indians of the Ciudad Blanca and other Mesoamerican type groups of NE Honduras were slave societies from whom the Spanish reported getting slaves from them. The slave trade of selling Costa Rican Indians as slaves continued into the 1840’s when Indian slavery finally ended in the Mosquitia, because the British finally stopped buying them, having ended slavery in 1839 in its Empire. So we should not be surprised to see some Costa Rican type crafts in NE Honduran sites, and the Green Stone and gold of the Costa Rican postclassic sites probably came from NE Honduras.

Trade Routes Changed in Post Classic Honduras to Canoe Routes

Part of the definition of Mesoamérica is to participate in the long distance trade routes controlled by Mesoamericans. These trade routes switched to using primarily canoes in the postclassic period, and one reason Copan was less populated in the post classic is that it became a backwater, which it still is,  with the major trade going on near the Coast.

Fine Orange and Incised Punctate Potteries in Ciudad blanca área both related to Cholula and Teotihuacan Fine Orange and a coarser ware in Cholula

My belief is that both Sula Fine Orange which replaces Lenca polychromed ceramics in the Sula valley in the Post Classic, and  also fine Orange ware is made in El Salvador and incisived punctate ware made in NE Honduras and in Nicaragua, are all local productions trying to imitate Fine Orange ware and its coaser versión made in Cholula and used in Teotihuacan in the Classic Period, but it seems to disappear in Mexico by the end of the Classic period and reappear in Central America.

When the Lencas of La Campa make pottery, the women make the pots,but the men decorate it.Maybe in this Nahua speaking immigrant group the people who knew how to make Fine orange pasted ceramics ended in some locations, while those who knew how to put the incised punctate decorations ended up in other places.

Renaming places in NE and NW Honduras after places left behind in Mexico by Toltecs and Nicaraos

Place names associated with the Nicarao and Cholulateca migrations like Culhuacan (originally a Toltec neighborhood in the Valley of Mexico founded after they left Teotihuacan) and Cholula are in the Ulua Valley in the list of encomiendas given by Pedro Alvarado in 1536. Place names associated with the Culhua were also reported by Alberto membreño in the Department of Lempira, in Western Honduras. There is a whole book on the Perseverancia de náhuatl en una zona supuestamente lenca (The Continuance of Nahuatl in a supposedly Lenca área, about the issue of places and chief names and vocabulary words and legal documents in Nahua in Lempira.

Clothes shown in NE Ceramics match Toltec styles, not Aztec styles

Fine paste orange ceramics were reported in the Ciudad blanca área by explorer Ted Danger who made the Search for Ciudad Blanca video with Discovery Channal cameraman Tony Barrado. A small amount of polychromed ceramics are known for NE Honduras including in the Trujillo Rufino Galan Museum where you can see clearly the dress of a chief with a kidney shield, and no tilma, and Bay Islands polychrome, in which you can see a stylized warrior-king, was reported by William Duncan Strong in NE Honduras on the mainland as well.  These postclassic NE Honduras polychromes are a completely different style than the extremely widespread Ulua Polychromes of the Classic period of the Honduran Lencas, which in the Sula Valley disappear in the Postclassic, but which seem to continue at Postclassic sites further inland like Tenampua, a fort site above the Comayagua Valley, protecting the entrance/exit of the valley between Comayagua and Tegucigalpa.

Walled Forts in the mountains  necessary for the Nahuas due to their practices of stealing women, children, and ambushing hunters of other ethnic groups

If the Nahua Indians had a culture where they were stealing people's wives, and capturing people,maybe particularly children and warrior aged men, to sacrifice to their gods or to sell as slaves, one would expect the other Indians to get angry at them and try to attack them. This appears to have been a concern as Honduras, El Salvador, and Guatemala see Indians up in the mountains in the Postclassic, including Indians like Maya Chortis and Lencas who were known to have been in the valleys in the Classic period. There are a number of walled cities or forts known for the Post Classic period including possible Papayeca in the Aguan Valley, excavated professionally by Dr. Paul Healey, Tenampua above the Comayagua Valley, Paso de Conquista near La Brea, Ocotepeque which was the Maya Chorti hero Copan Galel's first fort where he fought against the Spanish, and then he went to a second fort also part of the área he was responsable in Citalá, El Salvador.  The Lenca chief Lempira fought in a fort above Erandique, Lempira. He reportedly had so much stored there that he could have fought another 6 months against the Spanish if not for treachery. One does not just suddenly have a fort with huge earthernwork walls to protect you from the Spanish. The Postclassic in Honduras, El Salvador, Guatemala, and Nicaragua seemed to be a time of wars. Cerro Palenque at Santiago Pimienta in Cortes Department where the Chief Cicumba fought against the Spanish also seems to be one of these forts.

The Pech say in their myths that they had to hunt in groups and in the mountains, not in the valleys, because if they went to the valleys, the hunters were captured, sacrificied to the Gods, and eaten. When a Pech woman was kidnapped by the giant Takaskro (the Pech name for the sisimite) her husband's brother was counselled by bats in the cacao grove to not try to attack him within his Stone suit (inside his Stone fort), but to wait until he came out and then attack him, which he did and he got the wife of his brother back.  The sisimite besides being a mythical creature of half man-half monkey to was hairy and lived in the forest like a Sasquatch or BigFoot, Xiximite was also the name of two Pre-Columbian Salvadoran kings of the Señorío of Cuscatlán, a Pipil Nahua speaker Kingdom in the PostClassic in El Salvador, which supposedly Ce Acatl Topiltzin Quetzalcóatl also founded, which eventually displaced most of the Maya Chorti from Western El Salvador, limiting their Access to fish and salt and corn products..

Why People who Use Radar Technologies are more Likely to Detect Fort Sites in the Mountains

Most of the fairly well known archaeological sites in the Ciudad blanca área of Honduras are in the valleys.    However, forts are more likely have things sticking out of the ground that can be seen by technology like Lidar or the satellite radar coordinates used by the people who made Search for Ciudad Blanca video on Youtube.  In this video, it is clear they at river level, but the archaeological site is up in the mountains, and from where they were, there was no entrance way.  At the Papayeca site, above the Aguan Valley there only about 2 entrances to the city and there were walls (murallas, muros) all around the city and there were ditches (zanjas) or natural gullies around them.  That may be what the National Geographic team found and to say it is hard going to get there is an understatement. There are temples and plazas inside these post classic forts in NE Honduras and some have had ballcourts in Honduras, all outside the Maya area. Agalteca, Comayagua may one of these types of forts with ballcourts. In Europe and in the US, where there were forts or walled cities, people often lived and work outside of them, and then took refuge in them in times of attack. In Honduran colonial Spanish these places were called "plazas fuertes" (fortified plazas) or "peñol" the latter of which were always on a mountain. Palenque, as in the name Cerro palenque, the archaeological site in Cortes which Rosemary Joyce is famous for working at, also meaning fort in Spanish. 

Why  Post Classic North Coast Applique Ceramics of NE Honduras belong to the Mesoamericans and not the Pech Indians

The principal type of ceramics found between La Ceiba and the Ciudad blanca área called North Coast Appliqué is principally used to make incense burners with three hollow feet and lug handles. An example of the feet of the incense burners is seen in the Search for Ciudad blanca video on Youtube. The Trujillo Museum used to devote about one-fourth of its floor space to North Coast applique pieces. They are unlikely to be indicative of the Pech as the Pech do not burn incense in their ceremonies. This same s’s and dots,which I have been told is waves and seafoam is found on clay pots left in the Paulaya River, probably as an offering to the sirena for fish and rain. The Pech made their offerings to the sirena in biodegradable guacals and guacalitos from tree gourds.  North Coast Appliqué was also found near the La Entrada, Copan archaeological park at La Jigua, Copan (which had been a pueblo de indios in colonial times)  and used to shown in the Museum there. Because many Post-Classic potteries are monochrome orange to red colors, archaeologists had been disregarding them as uninteresting or unimportant. There has been an issue in Honduras about archaeologists either not knowing which ceramics indicated the postclassic, or considering monochrome ceramics unimportant, even though as in the case of El Bosque site in Copan Ruinas and La Jigua, Copan site, the monochrome ceramics turn out to be imported long distances to the area, and thus probably elite ceramics.

Where were the long distance trade routes that connected NE Honduran Indians, including those of the Ciudad blanca área, to Mesoamerican dominated trade routes from Costa Rica and Panama through Mexico City to the US Southwest?

The long distance Indian trade routes from Trujillo went down the Paulaya, across to the Patuca,to the Guallambre, and from there they could reach the Indians of Central Nicaragua (documented by Jaime Incer in the book by Gotz von Houwald mayagna), the Choluteca and Gulf of Fonseca área,the Tegucigalpa área, El Paraíso Dept.and into the Nahua and Mangue speaking parts of Nicaragua. This trade route is still attested by place names like the river between Honduras and Nicaragua is the Pochteca River (the Pochteca were the long distance merchant class of the Toltecs and the Aztecs), Azacualpa, the place of the temple of the patrón god of the Pochtecain Nahua, according to the late Dr.Hugo Nutini, and located in almost every department of Honduras, and Calpules and -calpa, from calpulli and the place of the calpulli, the basic administrative, landholding organization of Nahua speakers.

The long distance trade route also went down the Atlantic Coast past the Desaguero on the Rio San Juan in Nicaragua, along the Costa rican coast,and ending in Veragua, in Panamá. The Indians of Veracruz Mexico showed a map to Cortes of this trade route and where the rests(posadas) and fairs (ferias) for trading were. Honduran Indians continued to trade in regional fairs with the most important at Esquipulas in Guatemala and at San Miguel in El Salvador. The trade in obsidean continued until at least the early 1800’s, in feathers at least into the 1940’s, and in live tropical birds and medicinal plants continues until today.

Bringing ítems from far away for status purposes is known to have happened in pre-Columbian times in Honduras and in Mexico. Many products produced in NE Honduras such as whole live jaguars and jaguar skins and jaguar claws, live tropical birds like Green parrots and macaws and their feathers, liquidámbar, rubber, gold, copper, cacao, conch shells cut into wind jewels for the worship of Quetzalcóatl and the god of the Wind, are known to have arrived in the Aztec capital of Tenochitlan, where Mexico City is now.  The NW Honduran made copper bells, known as war bells and used in human sacrifice ceremonias in Mexico and El Salvador, were found in the trade route going into the US Southwest such as to Naco Arizona.  

Nahua Corn Gods, Moon goddesses, and Female Water Spirits continue in legends, in place names, and in archaeology in NE Honduras 

 Honduran place names and legends in NE Honduras, including in the Ciudad Blanca región, also point to participation in Mesoamerican religious beliefs, chiefly with Nahua names still. In Honduras and in El Salvador, the mother of the Young corn god Xipe, now called el cipotillo or duende in Central American legends, had this child as a result of an illicit affair with the morning star (Quetzalcoatl) was punished and turned into  a wáter spirit known as the Sucia (the dirty one), or Siguanaba (the female spirit) or are sometimes combined with the myth of La Llorona (the female who cries). There are legends of these in Wikipedia in Spanish such as linked to Mitología Pipil  and in Wikipedia in English (sihuanaba). La llorona is a large archaeological ruin within the Ciudad blanca área, and may be where the Green feminine Stone life statue was.  Clay life size statues of Xipe Totec have been reported for the Agalta Valley, and looters in the Ciudad blanca área thought one had been found there, too.   An example of this type of statue is in the Banco Atlántida next to the Honduras Maya in Tegucigalpa.

Among the Maya Chorti, the spirits in the wáter are the sirpe, and their job is to go to the sky at the beginning of the rainy season to bring the clouds for the rain. As a spirit that goes between the earth and the sky, they are often traslated as angelitos by the Lencas and the Chortis. The actual 4 rain gods are given Saint’s names by the Maya Chorti and are also called los 4 hombres trabajando (the 4working men) among Chortis and Lencas.  

Quetzalcóatl as an important rain god, and corn god in the Ciudad blanca and NE Honduras

Quetzalcóatl carved in Stone and as metate heads are found throughout the NE Honduras región including the Trujillo área, such as are in the Trujillo Museum, and in the Search for Ciudad blanca video on YouTube, you can see examples from that área in situ and in Museums.  Quetzalcóatl was associated with the god of the wind, who was also the god of hurricanes in Central America. The name Papayeca, the chief city of an Alliance of two states Papayeca and Champagua,  the place of the chief priest Papa of Quetzalcóatl in his form of god of the wind in the Aguan Valley área south of Trujillo, shows the importance of this god.  Yeca might be related to the Pech belief that the wife of Takaskro the sisimite who captured Pech women named Jicara and Cacao, was called Yekayeka.

One story of how the Nahuas got corn collected among Nahuas in Mexico is that the son of the Sisimite and a human woman Nahuehue became the captain of the 4 thunderbolt/rain gods, the god of the center, and when the ants showed that corn was under the mountain of substanance, the thunderbolt gods hit the mountain with lightening, and the people were able to get the corn. Nahuehue, being tired after helping to break open the mountain, rested and was disgusted when he woke up and found the people had left none for him and refused to teach the people how to grow the corn. Finally, however, he taught them how to grow milpas. In other versions, it is Quetzalcóatl who teaches them how to grow milpas. The Word milpa (growing together corn, beans, and squash) was used in Honduras in pre-columbian times in NE Honduras as the town in Olancho Valley south of Catacamas and north of Juticalpa now called Santa maria del Real was originally called Escamilpa.
So he is important for controlling the wind and rain related to the growing of corn. Too much rain, especially the problems of hurricanes, makes corn and especially bean cultivation very problematic in NE Honduras.

So there is every evidence that the Ciudad Blanca área Indians spoke a Mesoamerican language, believed in Mesoamerican gods, practiced Mesoamerican type ceremonies, built Mesoamerican type architecture, made Mesoamerican type crafts and clothes, probably grew Mesoamerican type crops, participated in long distance trade routes dominated by Mesoamericans, and had typical Mesoamerican type problems with their neighbors that required the building of forts, had typical Mesoamerican type weapons, and what is left of the language and what is known about them from their neighbors points to Nahua speaking Indians.

What would a Pech or Tol speaker Archaeological Site Look Like?

The team of archaeologists who made up the Sir Walter Raleigh Expedition to look for the Ciudad Blanca on the Rio Paulaya reported two types of archaeological sites. There may also be a third type, a few bones, a few shells, post holes, that are very hard to find archaeologically a thousand years later. Those will be the Pech sites based on what we know of their architecture, their hunting, their crafts, their fishing. A similar problema exists finding archaeological sites of Tol speakers in Yoro and Atlantida, who reportedly moved even more often than the Pech. there may be no specific Tol pottery, because it takes 15 days to dry a pot to fire it. It might have been easier to trade meat with sedentary groups for pots, which is what they did on Montaña de Flor in the 1940’s. 

The Problems with the General Words for Unconquered Indians--Payas and Jicaques

 Although the Tols have words in their language for canoe and bow and arrow, but even in the 1940’s did not make them,  and there are colonial era reports of Jicaques in canoes with bows and arrows, maybe those canoe going Jicaques (unconquered Indians) were not the same ethnic group and may not have spoken the same language as Tol. Not only are there Nahua place names in Yoro and especially Atlantida, but in the Tolupan religious hierarchy collected by Dr. Anne Chapman at the last Tol speaking community Montaña de la Flor at least 3 of the top 4 gods their names are in Nahua like Teot and Toman. Nahua influences have been noted in words related to crafts among the Pech and the Tawahka Indians of Honduras and stories seem to have the characters, but their names are changed according to the language like the Sisimite.

Both Paya and Jicaque seemed to have been used by the Spanish as general terms for unconquered Indians. The use of Paya dates literally to the arrival of Christopher Columbus when the Mayan chief  Yumbe (One path in Mayan) told Columbus that the Indians to the West of Trujillo were Mayas (and that is why they are still called that today, even though we know they speak at least 26 different languages) and those to the East were either Payas or Tayas, the manuscript copy is not clear. Taya as in Tayaco, a common place name in Olancho and Colon, including there is a rive Tayaco, may have been the Nahua speaker name for the Pech Indians, and so while the Nahuas of the Agalta valley still spoke Nahua, all Pech villages were called Tayaco (place of Tayas). Most things the Pech would say about themselves like My name is would start with Tasma, I and emphasis, so the people who started their sentences like that, the nahuas may have called Tayas.  On the map of Central American provinces at the time of Conquest in Central America in the Wikipedia Historia del El Salvador article, you can see an área for Tayacones. (People who live in places called Tayaco). When the Nahua speakers no longer spoke Nahua, they switched to calling Pech villages El Payal and Tawahka villages El Sumal, and Garífuna (Black Caribs) villages El Caribal.

The Word Paya I believe refers to people who lived in Payaquí (among nahoas according to colonial translations, among Yaquis according to linguist Dr. Judith Maxwell) and included both Mesoamericans like Lencas, Nahuas, Maya Chortis, and non-Mesoamericans like the Pech Indians. Both Nahua meaning Witch or Priest, and Pipil meaning leader, member of the ruling class, are not necessarily the name the ethnic group had for its self or its language. Pech for example just means "People" and the world is divided into "Pech" and "Pechakwa" (other people). Now when speaking Spanish they call their language Pech, but in Pech there is no other Word for their language except "our tongue".  The case of the Pech Indians does not seem particularly unique as far as I can tell among other indigenous groups that still speak their language.