First Peoples: We are Trinis too

Originally published in Newsday
Sunday, October 8, 2017

Narad Mahabir acts as Hyarima in the play Hyarima and the Saints written by Gyasi Garcia of St Francis College during the First Peoples Schools Outreach programme, UWI-ROYTEC North Campus, on September 26. This was one of the events leading up to Friday’s First Peoples holiday.

After years of clamouring for greater national acknowledgement, the First Peoples in TT will be recognised formally on Friday with a one-off public holiday.

And to commemorate the observance, the community has organised a week of activities, under the theme, On Becoming Visible Towards Meaningful Recognition, in an effort to enlighten fellow descendants and others about the history and contribution of the indigenous peoples to the country’s development. 

The activities began on Friday with a lecture on the topic, DNA Testing of the First Peoples of Trinidad and Tobago: Identification of their genealogical ancestry, at the National Academy for the Performing Arts, Port-of-Spain.

Later that day, the group hosted a Waponaka Concert, a rich mix of parang, calypso and other cultural presentations at the Santa Rosa First Peoples Centre, Paul Mitchell Street, Arima.

Today, at 6 pm, the community is expected to host an orientation ceremony for visiting First Peoples delegates at the centre on Paul Mitchell Street. 

Tomorrow, the group is due to host an ancestral journey to Moruga, at which celebrants will perform sacred rites and various musical expressions.

Other events scheduled for the week include a symposium, titled, From Chrysalis to Butterfly: On Becoming Visible Towards Meaningful Recognition, at the University of Trinidad and Tobago’s O’Meara campus; a children’s rally and a ceremonial walk through Arima.

For Chief Ricardo Bharath-Hernandez, president of the Santa Rosa First Peoples, Arima–perhaps the largest and most vocal First Peoples community in the country–the holiday is not intended to encourage relaxation.

Rather, he said, apart from reflecting on the atrocities which were committed against the indigenous peoples, centuries ago, the holiday presented an opportunity to truly celebrate their contribution. 

It gives First Peoples descendants, numbering close to 1,500 in Arima, and others a chance to participate fully in the community’s events.

“Because, in ordinary times, without a holiday, people would usually say they can’t come because they have to work or their children can’t come because they have to go to school. So, my feeling and the community’s feeling was that with a national holiday, nobody cannot use that excuse not to participate.”

Outside of Arima, First Peoples descendants can be found in Lopinot, La Pastora, Maracas/St Joseph, Santa Cruz, Paria, Brasso Seco, Tabaquite, Moruga, Brazil, San Rafael and Talparo.

Bharath-Hernandez, who has said repeatedly they are not just another minority cultural group, insisted they had inherent rights with respect to land titles, which were supported by the United Nations Declaration of Rights of Indigenous Peoples. Some 144 countries, including TT, voted for the Declaration.

Bharath-Hernandez was cautiously optimistic that the group’s lobby for a heritage park–a permanent place to call their own–will become a reality.

Plans for the park began during the former People’s National Movement administration, under late prime minister Patrick Manning. A Cabinet decision was taken to give the First Peoples a five-acre plot of land along Blanchisseuse Road, Arima, which they found to be inadequate. The community later identified a hilly piece of land which had once been occupied by First Peoples centuries ago.

When the People’s Partnership came into office, in May 2010, it rescinded the PNM’s offer of a five-acre plot, and gave the community an additional 20-acres at the same site. The land has since been surveyed, following which an offer of lease was issued to the community from the Commissioner of State Lands on September 9, 2015. Alluding to the movement toward economic diversification in this year’s budget, Bharath-Hernandez said First Peoples in other parts of the region, namely Dominica, Guyana and Suriname, were already firmly entrenched in their islands’ tourism initiatives.

“We are still to reach that point but we see potential in our vision for a permanent space to call our own. We can contribute to the tourism sector".

Bharath-Hernandez said the parcel of land which the community has received for its park, is expected to provide employment in the areas of food processing and sales, handicraft, wildlife farming and eco-tourism.

The facility also will contain a museum, cultural/recreational space and living quarters for the Carib Queen and about a dozen families.

Carib Community want National Holiday.

Carib community want national holiday.
By Camille Clarke
T&T Guardian | Tuesday, October 15, 2013

Amerindians representing different countries during a procession to commemorate
the launch of Amerindian Heritage Week, through the streets of Arima from the Hyarima statue
to the first peoples community centre on Paul Mitchell Street yesterday.
The procession was preceded by a smoke ceremony at the Hyarima statue.
PHOTO: EDISON BOODOOSINGH

Santa Rosa First People’s Community chief Ricardo Bharath Hernandez is calling for a national holiday to commemorate the Caribs, the first people to live in T&T. Hernandez was speaking after the smoke ceremony and street procession in Arima.

"The event today was in recognition of our history and Hyarima’s resistance to the Spanish in October 1637. There is a call for an international holiday on the 14th in recognition of the first people of this land. I know the authorities will have to think for another public holiday long and hard before they consider it,” he said. Hernandez said if the holiday was not possible the authorities could consider a one-day holiday event like the Chinese were granted in 2006, to commemorate 200 years since the arrival of Chinese immigrants.

Speaking about the contingent of Caribs from the Caribbean and South America, he said: “Spiritual leaders from Suriname and the other countries were called in for sanctification and interaction. To guide us in spirituality for this purpose. Some are still practicing the original tradition.” Yesterday, the smoke ceremony began at the statue of Hyarima at Hollis Avenue. Hyarima was said to have been known by the Dutch and Spanish forces who referred to him as “the great Chieftain of the Nepuyo people.”

They filled calabash bowls with bay leaves, incense, shells, cassava wine, hibiscus, poui, lilac and other flowers and offered them up to the great spirit. The women and men wore traditional outfits with crocheted tops and feathers in fire-engine red. They beat drums, blew into a large shell and chanted. Hernandez addressed the crowd that gathered to pay homage to the creator.

“We invoke ourselves and surrender ourselves to him/her recognising that we as humans are weak. He is strong and we ask forgiveness for our weakness,” he said. During the ceremony, first one, then another of the women had a “manifestation.” This manifestation, another one of the women said, was “an ancestor showing they were still around because the body is dead and the spirit is alive.”

Hernandez prayed for the ancestors, peace, a stoppage to all negativity and for the ancestors to keep coming in dreams before the group headed up Woodford Street to the Santa Rosa First People’s Centre at Paul Mitchell Street.

Call for Honour for First Carib Chief Hyarima.

Call for honour for first Carib chief Hyarima.
By Michelle Loubon
Trinidad Express Newspapers | Oct 13, 2013

Dr Satnarine Balkaransingh, chairman for the International First Peoples Conference 2013, has said the first Carib chief who was named Hyarima should be given a posthumous award and the major aspects of the Parliament should be shifted from the Red House at St Vincent Street, Port of Spain.

He made these comments during his presentation “The Wounded Nation of the First Peoples of Kairi - Miscegenation, Race, Politics and Marginalisation”. This was day three of the Santa Rosa First People’s Community of Arima Heritage Week which runs until October 19 at UTT Campus, Arima.

He was among the panellists who spoke on the theme Governance and Politics: Contemporary Perspectives. These included Julie Guyadeen, Dominica’s Chief Garnette, Tommy Isaac, past principal of St Augustine Senior Secondary School, and Andrew Klauty.

On the issue of Parliament’s relocation, Balkaransingh said: “Give consideration to have the National Parliament shifted. We can’t move the bones because you are moving a whole cemetery. But you can move Parliament or the major aspects and leave other aspects and convert it to a natural museum and a national art gallery of international standards. Keep the register of births and deaths. These are alternatives. We are continuing to make decisions in the national interest sitting on a cemetery.”

Amerindian artefacts and bones were discovered recently at the Red House during renovations.

Parliament is currently located at Tower D of the International Waterfront Centre, Wrightson Road, Port of Spain due to ongoing renovations at the Red House which traditionally has been the seat of Parliament.

Moving to Chief Hyarima, Balkaransingh added: “ Recognise Hyarima as T&T first national hero for his courage and action in fighting foreign aggression and provide the highest award (Order of the Republic of Trinidad and Tobago) posthumously.”

“Hyarima was the first person in 1637 with his warriors and with the help of the Dutch who sacked St Joseph and burned it to the ground actually chasing the Spaniards out of Trinidad. Nobody thinks about the people fighting and therefore Hyarima must be considered the first national hero.” Chief Hyarima’s statue is at Arima.

Asked for an update on the Conference, Ricardo Bharath, Chief of the Santa Rosa First Peoples Community, said: “President Anthony Carmona is expected to attend celebrations today. Nine people will be awarded and I will be making the call for three major things. The first is a call for a public holiday on October 14. I will speak about the other two today.”

The conference continues today. Below is the schedule
Today is First Peoples Heritage Day:
Dedicated to the Great Spirit Tamushi
6:30 a.m. to 8:15 a.m.
Smoke ceremony
Procession from Smoke Ceremony to the Carib Centre
Venue: Streets of Arima
3 p.m. to 5 p.m.

Contesting Trinidad's Past: The Indigenous Peoples

A much appreciated revisiting of the dominant, almost doctrinal assertions made about the history of Trinidad and Tobago--with some attention paid to the ways historiographers diminished and extinguished the Indigenous presence (see from page 178 to 180, "The Politics of Indigeneity", from which the extract below was copied):

The Politics of Indigeneity 

In virtually all accounts of Trinidad & Tobago’s history, it is taken for granted that the nation has no indigenous population, that the aborigines – whether they were “Caribs” or “Arawaks,” both or neither – had disappeared by the nineteenth century and played no role in the islands’ modern development. The literature of the nineteenth and the twentieth century pronounced the absence of the indigenes. Using the powerful tropes of extinction and amalgamation, writers of all persuasions saw the full-blooded Amerindian as entirely lacking in the nation’s pluralist society and aboriginal culture as lost forever. As the anthropologist Maximilian Forte neatly puts it, the view was that “the only real Carib is a pure Carib, and the only pure Carib is a dead Carib” (Forte 2005: 2 , see also -32). The nation was seen as one of those states which were colonial creations, lacking any pre-European past, “modern” from the beginning of their colonial experience, and therefore lacking a primordial past on which to draw for images and symbols of nationalism. In this Trinidad & Tobago was different from Guyana and Suriname on the continental mainland, which both have significant Amerindian populations which have retained much of their cultures and languages (Eriksen 992: 42-44). 

Since the early 1 990s, mainly through the efforts of an organization based in Arima (an old town in northeastern Trinidad where surviving indigenes were concentrated in the late 1700s), the Santa Rosa Carib Community (SRCC), Trinidad & Tobago society has come to recognize the Amerindian/Carib as a valid symbol in nation-building and national identity politics. The result has been, in Forte’s words (2005: 33), “increased recognition of the Carib in narratives of national history.” To acknowledge the Amerindian presence helped to create “a sense of local primordiality and of territorial continuity with antiquity.” The wider society has rediscovered its Carib heritage, and has accepted the “First People” (an internationally used term increasingly deployed by the SRCC) as the nation’s territorial precursors and symbolic ancestors, even if not the biological ancestors of most modern Trinidadians. This is a development which, by restoring the indigenes to the national history, has given antiquity and chronological depth to the concept of the nation, symbolized by the now popular trope of the First People/Trinidadians. The Carib can also be seen as the first to struggle against colonialism. The shadowy figure of “Hyarima,” perhaps a Carib chief who fought the Spaniards in the mid-seventeenth century, can be enshrined as a hero of resistance; a statue of him has been erected in Arima which bears a plaque calling him the first national hero of Trinidad. The tragic episode in 1699, when a group of Amerindians in the Spanish Capuchin Mission at Arena (now San Rafael) murdered the priests and then the governor and his suite, only to be hunted down and killed, or captured, tortured, and executed, can be reinterpreted as an epic of resistance to colonial rule and forced conversion, rather than the horrific murder of noble Catholic martyrs. A recent editorial in one of the nation’s leading newspapers describes the site of this event as “the forest in Arena where 300 years ago, the First People of Trinidad made their last great stand against domination and injustice.” The commemoration of 1992 (the quincentenary of Columbus’s arrival in the Americas) and 1998 (he sighted Trinidad and Tobago in 1498) also helped to fix the Amerindian/Carib as a central figure in the foundation of the national society.

The SRCC has pursued the “invention of tradition” with considerable success since about 1990. “Traditional” festivals and practices connected to them, shamanistic ceremonies developed from several different sources – what Forte calls “global neo-shamanic transfers” – crafts, building techniques, healing practices, and food culture have all been revived, invented, and marketed as authentic Amerindian/Carib folkways. Moreover, the SRCC leaders have successfully forged international linkages with indigenous peoples in the Caribbean and South America (especially Guyana), in Canada and the United States, and globally, to strengthen the legitimacy of their identity as recognized aboriginal people. The use of “First Peoples/Nations” is a hallmark of this globalizing process, similar in many respects to the globalization of various “Diasporas” in recent years. The SRCC has also shrewdly developed strong links with the political elite, enjoying an especially close affiliation with the PNM, which is in power at the time of writing, but also with the two other parties which governed between 1986- 1999 and 1 995-2000 . Partly for this reason, partly because the individuals who self-identify as Amerindian/Carib are very few numerically, partly precisely because of their status as indigenes, the people who were always here, the SRCC’s activities and claims have not been seen as a threat either to the nationalist narrative, or to the ethnic projects whether Afrocentric or Indocentric. Certainly, however, they have succeeded in rewriting the Amerindian peoples into the national narrative of Trinidad (Tobago is only marginally part of their discourse). This success is reflected in a local newspaper editorial which recently declared “it’s never too late to pay tribute to the First Peoples of the nation. They were the ones who had to bear the brunt of the initial bruising encounter with an invading culture and the peoples decimated in the largest number and perhaps most brutal manner by the ‘discoverers’” (Forte 2005: 8 -97, 99-2 3, 224).

Oct. 14, 2007: Amerindian Heritage Day in Trinidad & Tobago

Many thanks to Cristo Adonis of the Santa Rosa Carib Community of Arima, Trinidad, for earlier this month sending the following program of activities for October 14, which is an annual day of recognition for Trinidad's indigenous cultural heritage.

PROGRAMME OF ACTIVITIES
Daily five minutes educational spots on radio: topics should include historical facts about the Amerindian community in Arima; place names; Hyarima; foods; medicinal herbs; customs; arts; crafts; etc.

Sunday October 14th
Opening Ceremony
Carib Centre in Arima
6:00 p.m.

Monday 15th October
Gathering at Hyarima Statue Indigenous ceremony followed by Procession through the streets of Arima to Lord Harris Square for all day Indigenous activities
7:00 a.m.

Tuesday 16th October
VILLAGE SETTING
CULTURAL PERFORMANCES
6:00 p.m.

Wednesday 17th October
Lectures on Local Community
Indigenous World View
Groups would appear in Tobago

Thursday 18th October
CULTURAL EVENT
San Fernando Hill
10:00 a.m.-5:00 p.m.

Friday 19th October
Workshop on Indigenous Spirituality & Languages
C.O.I.P. meeting (Caribbean Organization of Indigenous Peoples)
Carib Centre

Saturday 20th October
Visiting groups depart

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