“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.

Book Review: The Indigenous Peoples of Trinidad and Tobago from the First Settlers until Today, by Arie Boomert

Arie Boomert

The Indigenous Peoples of Trinidad and Tobago from the First Settlers until Today.

Leiden, Netherlands: Sidestone Press, 2016. xv + 197. (Paper US$ 45.00)

[This is a pre-publication draft. The published version is in the New West Indian Guide (NWIG), Vol. 92, Issue 3-4, December, 2018, https://doi.org/10.1163/22134360-09203027]

Trinidad and Tobago are the oldest settled islands of the Caribbean archipelago, and as Arie Boomert demonstrates, Trinidad’s geography is not only still marked by hundreds of Amerindian toponyms (unlike any other Caribbean island), but the Indigenous Peoples’ cultural heritage was implanted in the rural and domestic traditions of a peasantry that fused Amerindians, Africans, and Spanish people and lives on to this day. Arie Boomert’s synthesis of archaeological, ethnohistoric, and ethnographic research on the Indigenous Peoples of Trinidad and Tobago is more than just a capstone to his many years of research in this field. It is also more than a book written for the general public (students, history teachers, and adult citizens of the twin-island republic). It is the only existing, up-to-date text on this long-neglected subject that is both comprehensive and yet highly informative on very specific points. Both specialists in the subject, and those with a general interest in the cultural history of the Caribbean, or even the history of the Spanish Caribbean alone, will find great value in this work which should form a part of every serious library collection on the Caribbean.

The structure of the volume is chronologically sound, divided into eight distinct time periods covering roughly ten thousand years, without any one period occupying more space than the others. As an archaeologist himself, Boomert was well equipped to provide the layperson with a good overview of archaeological research conducted in Trinidad, dating back to the 1800s, with roughly 300 sites studied. The strength of the volume lies in its archaeological and ethnohistoric dimensions, with roughly the past century and the present confined to the final chapter. In that sense, the volume tends to reinforce the established tendency to speak of Trinidad indigeneity in the past tense. Yet Boomert’s book also shows how indigeneity in Trinidad is constantly returning from the margins, and is partly due to the island’s close proximity to neighbouring Indigenous populations on the mainland, whose presence figures prominently throughout the book.

Many will appreciate the thick detail in this book, systematically organized as it is. Boomert draws from a wide variety of sources, including his own archaeological work, the offerings of diverse museum collections across Europe, and insights from very rare texts. There is a minimum of speculation in this book, and a maximum emphasis on information. It is also very well illustrated throughout, with attractive photographs, diagrams, and maps. Tobago is not an afterthought either: a significant amount of information about Tobago is presented throughout, with a dense chapter devoted to the Indigenous People of Tobago which in itself is a significant contribution to knowledge. Just to give the reader a sense of the coverage contained in this book, it typically focuses on trade, subsistence, material culture (pottery especially, and weaponry), ritual (burial), warfare, social structure, the division of labour, house construction, political organization, chiefs (many are named) and shamans, and an expertly synthesized and engaging presentation of colonial ethnohistory. The description of the emergence of a rural peasantry, with syncretic religious, ecological and domestic agricultural traditions founded on Indigenous knowledge and practices, is impressive. The book thus also covers issues pertaining to ecology, folklore, health and healing, and food production. Politically, Boomert also devotes considerable attention to slavery (which first emerged in the Caribbean with the Spanish enslavement of Indigenous Peoples); resistance, in the form of revolts; and, collaboration between Indigenous communities and foreign invaders. Boomert’s overview of the Catholic missions among Trinidad’s Amerindians is comprehensive, and not confined to Arima alone, one of the longest standing and more recent missions that is the current home of the revitalized Santa Rosa First Peoples’ Community.

Among the very few shortcomings of the book, there was insufficient effort made to transform archaeologists’ writing into material genuinely intended for a broad public (few would call a bowl a “serving vessel”), and some of the names of vegetables and ground provisions do not appear to be Trinidadian but are imported by the author from elsewhere (such as “coontie [zamia]”). There was actually very little on the figure of the Nepuyo warrior, Hyarima, a treasured part of Arima’s history, with only a few lines offering no new information, yet a subsection of a chapter was seemingly devoted to him. Most importantly, however, is the consistent lack of citations in the text, thus not allowing readers to track down the original sources of information. Instead, Boomert opts for a select bibliography, organized into not very helpful sections. One could also quibble about other specific historical and interpretive points, but none of this is meant to detract from the fact that this book stands as a highly detailed, comprehensive synthesis, that will likely stand unrivalled for many years as a central, go-to resource on the Indigenous Peoples of Trinidad and Tobago.

Maximilian C. Forte

Department of Sociology & Anthropology, Concordia University