Discussing Chief Williams and Intermarriage

For those who might be interested in following or adding to the discussion, we are currently talking about Chief Williams and the Associated Press article in the Indigenous Caribbean Network.

Please see the post and discussion there.

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Africans are not "foreigners" (but racists are racists even if they are Caribs)

For a decade now I have personally known about the racial views of today's Chief of the Dominica Carib Territory, Charles Williams, and was quite willing to keep debates and discussions that we had in private, until I saw the Associated Press possibly tarnishing the image of all Dominica's Caribs among those who might mistakenly think that the Chief speaks for all Caribs.

Chief Williams, who does have Internet access and an email account, is very welcome to post his response on this blog, and I commit myself to publishing it. Again, I wish to reiterate that the views expressed below are entirely my own and do not necessarily reflect the views of my fellow CAC editors.

I believe that the most respectful way to behave, as an anthropologist, is to speak frankly and directly (as I did in person back in 1998), and to even argue with one's hosts and collaborators, rather than write about them behind their backs, which I have not done and am not doing now. I will reiterate what I said in 1998, in what was otherwise a very warm gathering at which Carib senator Kelly Graneau, James Frederick, and Irvince Auguiste (a former chief) were also present.

I do so, quite plainly, to distance myself from views that I think are completely reprehensible: the Caribbean does not need any more racism, and it especially does not need any racism to be reinforced by those who suffered some of its worst effects for the longest.

Africans in the Caribbean, in Dominica, are not "foreigners."

Africans did not choose to be in the Caribbean, they are not tourists, they are not invaders. Africans were stolen from their homes, and would most likely never have chosen to be in the Caribbean, or to remain, were it not for the fact that their homes were destroyed and return proved impossible.

Africans literally spilled their blood on Caribbean soil, labouring, toiling, and fighting for freedom. They have a place in the Caribbean not just because they have been born there for generations, but because they have earned that place like few other people anywhere on Earth can claim.

Africans and Caribs, who merged to form the people we know today as the Garifuna, the last speakers of the Island Carib language (not spoken in Dominica), have long had mutually supportive relationships, have long intermarried, have shared their cultures, have adopted each other's customs and practices, and have fought together for freedom.

One does not turn one's back on such a history in the name of anything--not in the name of a quick buck made by selling baskets to tourists, not in the name of possibly seeking to boot families out of the Carib Territory, and certainly not in the name of "racial purity."

I ask that Chief Williams reflect on the destructive impact of his messages, that he reconsider, and that he publicly apologize for seeking such odious legislation and withdraw his comments.

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Dominica Carib Chief Seeks Legislation Barring Intermarriage

Allow me to post the news article before proceeding to offer a personal comment.

The Associated Press, in rare coverage of a Caribbean indigenous community, published the following news on Friday, May 9, 2008:

Dominica rejects legislating intermarriage to save tribe

Fri May 9, 11:12 PM ET

ROSEAU, Dominica - The leader of the last remaining pre-Columbian tribe in the eastern Caribbean says outlawing marriage to outsiders can save Dominica's dwindling indigenous population, but legislators are balking at deciding who can marry whom.

Chief Charles Williams has proposed a law requiring ethnic Kalinagos to marry only each other for self-preservation. He also requested that foreigners be barred from living on the tribe's 3,800-acre reserve.

"We would like as many Kalinago people to respond and pair off so that we can multiply and protect the race," Williams said during a recent news conference.

An estimated 1,000 Kalinagos of the roughly 4,000 who live on the reserve are considered full-blooded Indians. Carib women who marry non-Indians traditionally leave the reserve, while men who do the same are allowed to stay.

Several legislators said Friday that they refuse to entertain the marriage proposal.

Such a measure would be "legislating who a person can marry, and this cannot be so," Sen. Claduous Stanford told The Associated Press.

Kent Auguiste, a member of the Carib Indian council that oversees the reserve, said the culture should be preserved but not at the expense of personal freedom.

The impoverished Kalinago tribe relies mostly on banana and citrus farming.

Editorial comment:
Chief Williams is pursuing a very questionable goal of racial purification, presumably with the goal of protecting the economic viability of the limited territory that a growing population of Dominica Caribs must share. Chief Williams is himself the product of intermarriage, as is the overwhelming majority of Dominica Caribs, as they have been since at least the early 1600s. Any impediment to intermarriage is not only too much that is too late, it goes against Carib postcolonial traditions, and it reinforces the idea held by some Dominicans that the Caribs are incurable racists. Indigeneity, construed as located in the blood and visible on the face, is a notion pushed by some Caribists in Dominica not only to the detriment of peaceful relations within their own community, but to the detriment of regional indigenous solidarity networks and to building alliances with Garifuna communities. It is also bad politics: a small community does not need big enemies, and such a move would hardly have won Chief Williams much in the way of sympathy from overseas. Speaking only for myself, I find Chief Williams' message to be a deplorable one, and I totally repudiate it.
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"Developing" the Carib People of Dominica?

As readers will have seen in the previous post at http://cacreview.blogspot.com/2006/04/carib-cultural-village-opens-in.html, the Government of Dominica seems to have developed an instrumentalist and top-down view of the "role" to be performed by the indigenous population of Dominica. Added to the Government's recent overthrow of the elected Carib Chief, this seems to be more than just distant conjecture.

It seems clearer now that the Government desires to not only politically control the Carib population--a Government embarrassed internationally by Chief Williams' campaign to denounce the entry of Disney onto Carib soil in a venture that would feature Caribs, once again, in a colonial light as mindless cannibals--but the Government also clearly wishes to use the Caribs as an economic tool. The Caribs seem to be slotted as mere window dressing in a professed strategy of developmentalist diversification, thus reduced to playthings for foreign tourists, and reduced to "resources" in the calculations of economists.

This is not an unusual strategy for any government that has inherited and upheld the colonial heritage at the basis of the putatively independent state. "Recognition" and "celebration" of the Carib presence, by a variety of contemporary Caribbean states, are tactics revealed in the light of day as instruments of control and containment. While on the one hand they are useful for countering outmoded assertions of extinction, on the other hand they are equally useful for ensuring the centrality of the state as a legitimate arbiter of authorized identifications.

Unfortunately, if established and recognizable historical patterns are anything to go by, one will find a few indigenous collaborators who are willing to suck up to those in power and who hunger after the tourist dollar. What is lost in the process is consciousness of how the "development" process often is a mere gloss for older campaigns once referred to by terms such as "civilization" and "assimilation." Obedience to both capital and the state may appear to be a tactic of survival, at least in the short-term; in the long-term, it is nothing but negotiated surrender. One is reminded here of Peter Tosh's famous line, "peace is the diploma you get in the cemetery."