ARIMA BORN: Land, Labour, Power, and Colonial Mythology in Trinidad

Focusing on the history of the Arima Mission in the Island of Trinidad, ostensibly a mission for Indigenous people, the documentary below features what was learned from the baptismal registers of the Mission of Santa Rosa de Arima—in conjunction with historical texts, government documents, and official memoranda and reports of the time. What we encounter are four main “myths,” or working fictions: 1) the myth that the Mission was for Indians alone; 2) the myth of “Christian protection”; 3) the myth of assimilation; and, 4) the myth of extinction. The film, and the book on which it is based, argues that a proper understanding of the history of the rise and demise of the Mission has to be in relation to the slave plantation economy. Broadly speaking, we are dealing with a story at the intersection of land, labour, and power under conditions of oligarchic domination and the creation of poverty out of plenty.

Research that went into the book, Arima Born, on which the documentary below was based, became part of my “knowledge repatriation” strategy. This was accompanied by a series of events that, for some, would be examples of “public anthropology”.

First, copies of the book were deposited for free in various key access points: in Canada, copies were deposited with Libraries & Archives Canada, along with an e-book; in Trinidad, copies were deposited in the Heritage Collection of the National Library (NALIS), the Arima Public Library, and the West Indian Collection of the Alma Jordan Library of the University of the West Indies.

Second, free copies of the book were delivered to the Santa Rosa First People’s Community, in addition to providing copies to select members of the Arima community more broadly, including the Santa Rosa Roman Catholic Church.

Third, an offer was made to the leadership of the Santa Rosa First People’s Community to republish and print the book locally in Trinidad, under an imprint of its choice, with the majority of revenues going to the SRFPC.

Fourth, public presentations based on the book were made at the community centre of the Santa Rosa First People’s Community on December 10, 2019, and at the Arima Public Library on January 8, 2020. The slides below accompanied those public presentations, and are being made available for download:

ARIMA BORN: Land, Labour, P... by Maximilian Forte on Scribd

Fifth, awareness of the issues presented in the book, and in the public presentations, was heightened by the publication of three separate articles by different authors in the national media in Trinidad & Tobago:

1. “Arima mission a ‘slave colony’,” in Newsday (Oct. 22, 2019), also available here.
2. “First Peoples want HDC house for Carib Queen,” in Newsday (Dec. 12, 2019), also available here.
3. “Counting ‘Indios’,” review by Bridget Brereton in the Daily Express (Jan. 29, 2020), full text available here.

Sixth, the documentary below is the latest form of public presentation of the knowledge gained from this research. The film is available both on YouTube and Vimeo.

“Counting ‘Indios’”: Review by Bridget Brereton

Originally published in the Daily Express, 

by Dr. Bridget Brereton
January 29, 2020

Dr. Bridget Brereton, Trinidad Historian

The history of Trinidad’s First Peoples before the coming of the Europeans has been researched by archaeologists like John Bullbrook, Irving Rouse and (more recently) Arie Boomert. After European contact (from 1498) written records are available to reconstruct what happened to these people, and the Arima based Santa Rosa First Peoples Community (SRFPC) has worked hard over several decades to remind us that their descendants today form an important part of the national population.

Maximilian Forte, a Canadian anthropologist at Concordia University in Montreal, has researched the history of Trinidad’s First Peoples, especially those associated with the Arima Mission, for many years. He published an important book in 2005, with the (typically academic!) title Ruins of Absence, Presence of Caribs: (Post)Colonial Representations of Aboriginality in Trinidad and Tobago, and is a long-standing collaborator with the SRFPC.

Last month, I was lucky to attend the launch of Forte’s new book, Arima Born, held at the SRFPC Centre in Arima. Introducing him, Chief Ricardo Bharath Hernandez described him as a friend and “documentalist” of the SRFPC for over 20 years, a counsellor and teacher “with the characteristics of the eagle”.

In a fascinating presentation, Forte explained that his new book was based on the baptism registers of the Arima (Roman Catholic) Mission Church, covering the period 1820 to 1916, plus various other documents of the same period. In Trinidad, as in many other places, surviving church registers (baptisms, marriages, burials) are a key source for historians, especially when we remember that government or “civil” registration of births, marriages and deaths typically began only in the 1800s (1847 in Trinidad).

Forte said that his research for Arima Born has led him to expose what he called four “myths” about the Arima Mission, which was the main Catholic-run centre for surviving First Peoples (whom Spanish priests called “Indios” or Indians) in Trinidad from 1786. (Overall, 630 “Indios” appear in the Mission’s baptism registers.)

First, Arima’s population in the early 1800s was predominantly African not “Indian”: most baptisms recorded in the Mission registers for the 1820s were of enslaved (African) children. Arima was a small settlement surrounded by plantations, many owned by French Creole families, and worked by enslaved Africans, who outnumbered the First Peoples (“Indios”) in the “Indian Mission”.

Second, what Forte called the “myth of Christian protection”: in fact, the Church could and did sell or grant the lands of the Mission (in theory vested in the resident “Indios”) to others for plantation development, such as the Farfan family. And the Mission ran its own rum shop and allowed the “Indios” to run up debts to the shop, a way of controlling their labour and maybe forcing them to sell their lands.

Third, the myth of “assimilation”, the idea that the First Peoples of the Mission adopted Christianity and its associated lifestyles with little resistance. In fact, many fled from the Mission; disobeyed church teachings; buried their dead in the hills not in the Mission cemetery; and rejected Christian marriage (53 per cent of the baptisms of “Indio” children were “illegitimate” between 1820 and 1852).

Finally, the myth of “extinction”, the “vanishing Indian”: the “Indios” didn’t vanish, of course, but the Mission was disbanded when slavery ended in the 1830s. Now, their labour was no longer needed and their lands in Arima were wanted for plantation development. And so they were no longer counted; in the baptism registers, they were no longer identified as “Indios” from the 1840s, but given a new ethnic identity, such as “mestizo”.

Sadly, Arima Born was not available for purchase at the launch, but Forte’s new book—from his presentation clearly a major contribution—can be ordered online from Alert Press.

Trinidad's Indigenous Peoples, Reparations, and the History of the Arima Mission

On Tuesday, December 10, 2019, I delivered a presentation based on Arima Born at the Santa Rosa First People's Community Centre in Arima (Trinidad). In January (2020), on this site readers will be able to access a PDF with all of the slides used, plus there will be an accompanying video lecture. The event on Tuesday was covered by the local media--please see the article that follows.

Maximilian Forte at the podium.

Republished from Newsday, December 12, 2019

Originally published as:

First Peoples want HDC house for Carib Queen

by Tyrell Gittens

FIRST Peoples chief Ricardo Bharath-Hernandez is calling on the government to provide a house for Carib Queen Nona Aqua.

Bharath-Hernandez made the call on Tuesday while speaking at the launch of the book Arima Born by Maximilian Forte, at the Santa Rosa First Peoples Community Centre. 

“We have asked, recently, for a house for our Carib Queen to be made available”.

He said the recently built Carina Housing Development was one site where a unit could be made available, not only because of the location, but also because of its historical significance of the land.

“A house ought to be made available in one of these housing developments, preferably Carina Gardens on the By-Pass Road. 

“When you look at the (historical) maps you see the King of the Caribs, and all his descendants, occupying that land and they lost it whatever way,” said Bharath-Hernandez.

He said given the rate at which housing developments are being built, and houses distributed, he is puzzled as to why a house cannot be provided.

“In this development and this distribution of houses, one cannot be made available for our Carib Queen?

“And when you consider all the contributions that the early ancestors have made, to the (country's) development, tell me why it cannot be done. Why? Can anyone answer me that?” 

Forte’s book explores the birth and baptismal records of indigenous people in Arima in the 1800s. The records were maintained by Arima’s RC church during the church’s Arima Mission. 

Forte, a lecturer in anthropology and Caribbean history at Concordia University, in an hour-long presentation on Tuesday detailed the hardships of Arima’s indigenous population during the church’s mission. During that time, they were stripped of their lands and made to provide free labour for plantation owners. 

The way the First Peoples were treated, said Bharath-Hernandez, suggests why a house for the Carib Queen is the least that can be provided to descendants of the group. 

He said the book also informs on the need to renew wider discussions of reparations for descendants of indigenous communities. He called on Forte to use his knowledge to help advocate, on behalf of the communities, to Caricom's reparation committee. 

Noting that Caribbean governments are responsible for discussions on reparations he said that responsibility was not solely theirs but one they inherited. 

“We heard it here today (in the book), and this is the kind of information that informs reparation.

Acknowledging a verbal apology had been made by representatives of the Santa Rosa RC Church to the indigenous community Bharath-Hernandez said, “We do not really want an apology with words coming from the mouth. That apology must come with some depth, some meaning.

“We feel that the church, at the level of collective churches in TT, can come together and, in some way, do something towards the development of the First Peoples”.

The Santa Rosa First Peoples Community is now turning its attention towards building a heritage park. Bharath-Hernandez, holding up an artist's rendering of what the park will look like, said, “We, the descendants of the original peoples, of the mission of Arima, are striving to establish our heritage village.

“If we can accomplish the first phase (of building) – there are many phases – then I think we would be well on our way to doing many things”.

 Dr. Brinsley Samaroo shares a comment during the discussion following the presentation.

Arima mission a ‘slave colony’

Author explores records of First Peoples

First Peoples visits San Fernando last week. - Marvin Hamilton

By TRACY ASSING

Originally published in NEWSDAY, October 22, 2019.

In December, Maximilian C Forte returns with an exciting new text which deals specifically with the history of Trinidad’s indigenous population, titled Arima Born.

Forte has continued his research in the Carib/First Peoples' Community, which began in 1995, and has already contributed to the documentation of TT history with Ruins of Absence, Presence of Caribs, which was published in 2005. Forte’s other work on the Amerindians of Trinidad is titled Indigenous Resurgence in the Contemporary Caribbean: Amerindian Survival and Revival.

The new, self-published text (Forte’s Alert Press) is invaluable to any Caribbean history collection. Forte has based this new work on his study of the baptismal registers of the RC church in Arima for 1820-1916.

He is the first to admit that his work is incomplete, as huge chunks of the records were missing, illegible, and systems of record-keeping were flawed. He has included re-productions of the records he studied, bringing the page count to just over 300.

In the preface of the book he reveals that the registers he had the opportunity to examine were sent to the archives of the Archbishop’s residence and are now difficult to access.

Forte is a professor of anthropology in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at Concordia University, Montreal, Canada. He first learned of the Carib Community in the early 90s through a newspaper article. He committed to sharing the results of his research with members of the Santa Rosa Carib/First Peoples Community, some of whom believe the very proof of their indignity lies in these records, but Forte says: “Identity is ultimately an idea.”

At Concordia University he teaches courses on indigenous resurgence, media and visual anthropology, political anthropology, Caribbean history and political economy, among other subjects.

He makes the point that the registers are “not only material evidence concerning the history of the Amerindians in the Arima Mission, they are also a detailed repository of data on African slaves in Arima and environs.”

This is so, he notes, “in a period when reparations are being studied and proposed at the highest political levels across the Caribbean.”

In Arima Born, readers learn that Arima was never actually a mission just for Amerindians. In fact, Forte describes it as a “slave colony.” Even though missions were initially conceived to “pacify” the Amerindian population, toward the end of the 1700s the Amerindians were, as ever, “caught between shifts of value.” The mission to “pacify” and Christianise failed. Then Don Miguel Sorzano, a Spanish slave owner who was the first corregidor, established the mission in 1784. There were other slave owners in Arima and at that time, the mission’s indigenous inhabitants included tribes forcibly displaced from their lands in Tacarigua, Caura and Arouca.

According to Forte: “Between field work, public works and armed security one cannot interpret the founding of the Mission as anything less than a form of state patronage in the service of landed capital and the existing oligarchy.” Amerindians even built homes for the disbanded 3rd West India Regiment.

Even when the British came, the Amerindians were only valued as long as their labour was valued. British authorities “imported” Amerindian/mestizo labourers from Venezuela, and they got to work shoulder to shoulder with the Amerindians of Trinidad: “Amerindian labour was utilised to create value in land, by clearing it for cultivation. Once that land was cleared, its value would have increased while the labour that produced that value would then become disposable.”

When the priests in the mission kept careful accounting through racial/ethnic registry, it was because real legal obligations and rights were attached to members of different groups. Forte concludes: “The Amerindians of Arima went extinct but in a political-economic sense only, rather in than either ethnic/cultural or biological terms.”

Arima Born shares more information about the socio-political structures which orchestrated this “paper genocide.” Two priests of interest who appear in Forte’s text are Fr Pedro Josef Reyes Bravo (1786-1818), who gave testimony in the trial of Luisa Calderon, and Msgr Charles de Martini (1895-1916), whose family came to own substantial cocoa estates during his tenure.

Forte also reveals that the position of Carib Queen did not exist before the 1800s and the first queen may even have come from Venezuela. In exploring the roots of the Santa Rosa Festival, which is essentially why a queen was appointed, he examines the similarities between the Santa Rosa Festival and the Cross Wake (Veloria de la Cruz). He also offers more information about the existence of Amerindians outside the missions, those who choose to live in the forests of the Northern Range. Add this to the fact that we have no way of knowing how many baptised children were not included in the register and how many were not baptised, or the numbers contained in the records which have been lost.

What becomes clear is that the assertion that Amerindians “died out” or “lost their heritage through miscegenation” is a myth. And, Forte wrote: “Far from offering the Amerindians ‘protection,’ the mission was an engine of their socio-economic demise."

CLICK HERE TO ORDER A COPY OF ARIMA BORN

Colonial Myth-Making and the Mission of Santa Rosa de Arima, Trinidad

Was the Arima Mission an “Indian Mission”? For what purposes, and in whose interests, was the Arima Mission established? How many Indigenous people lived in the Arima Mission, and in Trinidad as a whole? Who counted them? How were they counted, and why? Why did Arima come to be seen as a centre of Indigenous culture in Trinidad? Exactly how did the Amerindians “vanish” from the Mission? What “secrets” are revealed by the Baptismal Registers about the nature and impact of the Christian “civilizing mission”?

When under Spanish colonial rule the authorities approved the Catholic Church’s plans for building mission towns in Trinidad, it was as part of dual commercial and counterinsurgency strategy. Mission towns were established in the early to mid-1700s, in an effort to “pacify” the Amerindian population, and to incorporate Amerindians into profitable, market-oriented activities. Missions were multi-pronged: they combined religious, political, economic, and military objectives. While cocoa production increased under the direction of missionaries, and would eventually become a lucrative commodity destined for export, the missions had limited or mixed results on the other fronts. The missions were subject to attacks from Amerindians outside of the missions, and were subject to internal resistance, outright rebellions, and flight of the Indigenous population.

Myths

Among the many things that we learned from studying the primary sources and the baptismal records of the Arima Mission are that certain myths (working fictions) have been in operation and, like all good myths, they are contradicted by documentary evidence. The primary myths include the following:

1. The myth of the Mission as a form of racial segregation and exclusion;
2. The myth of protection of the Amerindians by the authorities;
3. The myth of the vanishing Amerindians; and,
4. The myth of successful assimilation and Christian indoctrination.

Let's start by looking at myth #3, one of the most popular, influential, and enduring because it has been institutionalized.

Extinction via Miscegenation

Extinction via miscegenation was the dominant and thus standard mode of rhetorically displacing Arima’s Amerindians (see Forte, 2013). This idea, that Amerindians became “extinct” by virtue of forming unions with members of other racial/ethnic groups, amounted to the most common and thus most taken for granted “explanation” that was widely reproduced in the literature on Trinidad in the 19^th and even the 20^th centuries. Writers of local histories, memoirs, and travel books reflected what was ultimately state policy: the Mission was only for those persons who were “pure” Indians. Any mixed offspring would lose the right (and the obligation) to reside in the Mission. This policy was succinctly explained by the corregidor of the Mission, Martin Sorzano, in testimony before the Burnley Commission on July 16, 1841. In response to the commissioner’s question, “To what, then, do you ascribe the gradual and rapid diminution in their number?” Sorzano replied:

“Chiefly to the gradual mixture of the races. As pure Indians they were compelled to remain at the mission, and conform to the regulations; but the children born of Spanish and Creole fathers could not be so classed, and would not submit to the restraint of remaining there”. (Burnley, 1842, p. 109)

As a fundamentally racial narrative, the idea of extinction via miscegenation found favour with colonial élites who has busied themselves with formulating and then disseminating—even legislating—the racial ordering of the working class in Trinidad, especially as material questions of rights to property and free labour were determined by such an ordering. Governor Woodford instructed Captain William Wright, on the latter taking charge of the Mission, to do as follows with the Indian residents: “You will then proceed to make a return of them by families, shewing their lineage or descent as well as their trades, and if intermixed with other than Indian blood” (quoted in Fraser, 1971[1896], p. 104). Dating from the earliest years of British colonization in Trinidad, an English writer described Mission Indians in one of the earliest recorded instances of the racial extinctionist theme: 

“Some of the Peons are Indians of South America,—others are the mongrel offspring of the white Spaniard and Indian, the Indian and Negro, or the progeny of any of them, united in such varieties of shade, as almost to have effaced the traits of the aboriginees [sic]. But there are many of the true Indians to be seen, at the different Indian villages, or missions”. (Letter to the Duke of Portland, 1807, p. 60)

One of the first and most prominent local history volumes was that authored by E.L. Joseph in 1838, which is a valuable source of insights into élite thinking of the time, and a source of tremendous misinformation as well. In one notable passage on this topic of race and indigenous identity, Joseph wrote the following:

“This indolent harmless race is here fast merging on extinction – from no fault of the local government, nor from any disease: the births amongst the Indian women exceed the deaths in the usual ratio; the fact is, that the Indian men, since they are obliged to live in society, choose mates of other races, and the women do the same (Mr. Coleridge was misinformed when he stated that the Indians will not intermarry with other races), hence out of every seven children born of an Indian mother during the last 30 years, there are scarcely two of pure blood, as I have been informed; this will of course decrease their population; for those of the mixed race, whether they be Samboes (between Negroes and Indians), or Mustees (between Europeans and Indians), or the countless castes that the admixture between the African, European, and Indian tribes produce, they are not the real aboriginal race, and leave the inactive community of Indians as soon as they reach the age of discretion”. (1970[1838], pp. 102–103)

As if to concretely prove Joseph’s adherence to plainly racial paradigms, he cited in one passage the argument that the Amerindian cranium “is uniformly superior to the cranium of a negro, whose powers of mind are as much inferior to those of the Indian, as those of the latter to the powers of the European” (1970[1838], p. 121).

Extinction via miscegenation as a narrative was as enduring as it was influential. The “approximate extinction” of the Amerindians, through the process of inter-marriage, was a concept used by De Verteuil (1858, p. 172). One travel writer asserted, presumably on the basis of what he was told by his hosts, that by 1797, “probably many of them [Indians] had been absorbed by intermarriage with the invaders. At present, there is hardly an Indian of certainly pure blood in the island, and that only in the northern mountains” (Kingsley, 1877, p. 74). Several decades after Joseph, Fr. Cothonay wrote, “The inhabitants of this earthly paradise are not in effect Indians….they are descendants of the Spaniards, more or less mixed with the Indians [Amerindians] and the blacks” (1893, pp. 241–242).

However, much is missed if we take sources at face value. On the one hand we are told that the Arima Mission was something of an exclusive racial zone designed to preserve Indian purity: thus Harricharan (1983, p. 22) asserts that priests “prohibited ‘mission’ Indians from contact with ‘bush’ Indians, Negro slaves, mestizos or other Spaniards and kept them confined to the missions”; Noel argued that one of the successes of the Capuchins “seems to have been the partial preservation of the Indigenous race as agricultural workers under the external guise of living a Catholic life” (1972, p. 18). How contact with other groups could have been prevented, when these other groups also formed the population of the Mission, would be something that strains credulity. Indeed, what if the opposite were true? What if, in a colony ordered by a racial hierarchy, the Mission Indians had been deliberately made to cohabit with members of other ethnic groups, knowing that the result would be miscegenation, and thus eventual removal from the Mission?

Ethnic Substitution

With the displacement of Indigenous residents of the Mission, which accompanied the rise of the cocoa industry, a new wave of migrants from Venezuela entered the area and furnished the workforce for the expanded industry. To get a sense of the magnitude of the immigration, Brereton (1979, p. 12) indicated that Trinidad’s population increased from 84,438 in 1861 to 200,028 in 1891. Some of the major cocoa estates in the Arima Ward Union included the Santa Rosa estate owned by C.G. Scheult; Buena Vista, owned by Jules Cipriani; and El Retiro, held by the De Martini family (Collens, 1896). Given that many of the migrants were of a similar cultural, religious, and ethnic background as the former Indian and Mestizo residents of the Mission, what transpired was a process of ethnic substitution and what then appeared to be a revitalization or resurgence of a number of key traditions and ritual practices, when viewed from a certain angle (Brereton, 1979, pp. 131–132, 152; Moodie-Kublalsingh, 1994, pp. 2–3, 4, 33, 41). In some areas, there was a fusion of the two groups, that is, the Indians already present in Trinidad and the Venezuelan migrants. The baptismal registers reflect all of these developments and transformations, except for the process of fusion.

---

See the book, ARIMA BORN

The Real History of the Mission of Santa Rosa de Arima: From ARIMA BORN

The real history of the Arima Mission in Trinidad is one of exploitation, and even abuse. The Arima Mission is revealed to have been primarily a slave colony, dominated by the presence of Black slaves. The mission itself was under the authority of Don Manuel Sorzano, a prominent official in the outgoing Spanish regime, a major estate owner in Arima, and an owner of slaves. Rather than just an Amerindian history, the baptismal registers reveal a masked and obscured African history of Arima. The baptismal registers, coupled with other documentary sources, also reveal a history of Amerindian resistance to assimilation promoted by the “civilizing mission” of Christianization. Assimilation was largely a failure—a fact that was embarrassing to colonial élites—and rather than confront their failures they airbrushed Amerindians out of history altogether. We also witness how colonial authorities, priests included, went about the business of deliberately under-counting the Amerindian population, when it became convenient. The fabricated “vanishing” of Amerindians also reveals a complex political economy of land, labour, and power.

Amerindians were valued while their labour had value, and their labour had value only for as long as they cultivated cassava to feed slaves, cleared lands for cultivation, built roads to speed the products of estates to market, and staffed the armed militia used to put down slave revolts. When the cocoa-producing lands occupied by the Mission’s Amerindians soared in value, and when slaves were emancipated, plus an influx of new labourers from abroad came in, the value of Amerindian labour plunged. It is no accident that the Arima Mission was dissolved a few short years after slaves were fully emancipated at the end of apprenticeship in 1838. Amerindian labour, and Amerindians as such, became disposable.

By a change in labelling practices, they were made to disappear from the baptismal registers. Rather than help perpetuate a community of Amerindians, the mission promoted its breakdown. This book tells that story for the first time.

See the book, ARIMA BORN