(Director) Andrea E. Leland. Yurumein (Homeland). January 2014. 50-minute documentary / DVD format / 4:3 aspect ratio / surround sound.
Resistance, Rupture, and Repair: The Story of the Caribs of St. Vincent in the Caribbean
Yurumein by
Andrea E. Leland effectively begins twice: first it begins in St.
Vincent, and then, as a reflection of the contemporary relocation of the
Garifuna, it begins again in Los Angeles, which probably has the
largest number of Garifuna people outside of Central America and the
Caribbean. The core of the film ostensibly follows the journey of Cadrin
Gill, a Los Angeles family doctor, who self-identifies as Carib and who
was born in Sandy Bay, St. Vincent, one of the residential areas of the
island that contains a sizeable Carib population. Focusing on the
reclamation of pride in Carib identity, and the beginnings of a cultural
resurgence that happens in part as a transnational process of
reconnecting indigenous communities in the Caribbean region (in this
case the relinking of Honduran Garifuna and Vincentian Caribs), this
film serves as an important document of the contemporary presence of
indigeneity in the Caribbean. The film thus helps to fill in the map of
indigenous cultural resurgence in the Caribbean, of indigenous
communities that did not simply vanish due to European colonization, but
that resisted and repaired what they could. In this sense the
documentary helps to further challenge centuries of writings, and even
modern historiography, whose emphases have been Carib decline and
extinction. In addition, as there has been so little produced, whether
in film or in writing, about the Caribs/Gairfuna of St. Vincent, apart
from the occasional thesis or conference paper offered within regional
institutions, this film further serves to fill in the gaps in our
knowledge.
Yurumein represents part of a
growing series of films on indigenous Caribbean topics, but is unique as
one that focuses on St. Vincent. As a contribution to documentaries
about the indigenous Caribbean, this film joins Last of the Karaphuna (Philip Thorneycroft Teuscher, 1983, focusing on the Dominica Carib Reserve); Caribbean Eye: Indigenous Survivors (UNESCO/Banyan, 1991, focusing on contemporary indigenous communities in Guyana, Trinidad, Dominica, and St. Vincent); The Garifuna Journey (also by Andrea Leland, 1998, focusing on Belize); The Quest of the Carib Canoe (Eugene Jarecki, 2000, focusing primarily on Dominica’s Caribs, but also bringing special attention to Trinidad and Guyana); Three Kings of Belize (Katia Paradis, 2007, focusing on Belize, including a focus on a Garifuna musician); and The Amerindians (Tracy Assing, 2010, focusing on Trinidad’s Carib Community).
“That paradigm has changed,” Dr. Gills
says in the film, a change in paradigm that involves increased
recognition of “our history and our heritage.” It is an important point,
as he adds that this has happened “only recently.” Indeed, we are now
in the third decade of a region-wide indigenous resurgence in the
Caribbean, one that arguably began at least on a formal, organizational
level in St. Vincent itself in 1987, with a conference on the indigenous
peoples of the region that would later result in the formation of the
Caribbean Organization of Indigenous Peoples (COIP), whose first
president was the Belizean Garifuna anthropologist Dr. Joseph
Palacio.[1] (Coincidentally, in my own research context in Arima,
Trinidad, 1987 was the first year that Trinidad’s Carib Community
received delegates from seven different Guyanese indigenous tribes.[2])
On a local level in St. Vincent, this
paradigm change has also occurred. “We were brought up as Englishmen, so
we had an English mentality,” Dr. Gill explains, “and consequently
there was not much knowledge about my history…. [I]n my days, it was not
‘fashionable’ to be called ‘Carib.’” Echoing what I found in my
research in Trinidad, the film presents a series of individuals in Sandy
Bay who explain that they did not know of their Carib ancestry until
they reached adulthood, while others did know and could not hide it and
were thus targeted for discrimination in the wider society as
“ignorant,” “backward,” “warlike” and “cannibal” people, leading some to
suppress their own identification as Carib. (Unfortunately, this
juxtaposition of lack of self-awareness as Carib, while the wider
society discriminates against them as Carib, is a paradox left
unexplored in the film.) While there is now a positive acknowledgment of
their ancestral ties (and explaining why this has happened recently
exceeds both the scope of the film and this review), Caribs in this film
also reflect on what they say is their own lack of personal knowledge
of Carib history and language. While they point to a number of surviving
traditions, such as the making of cassava bread (which one woman
claims, without much credibility, to have learned to do all on her own),
it is clear that the identity is also understood in racial terms, with a
not infrequent reference in the film to phenotypical markers,
specifically dealing with one’s face and one’s hair. The kind of
racialization that historically distinguished the Caribs of northern St.
Vincent, especially in the towns of Orange Hill, Oven Land, Sandy Bay,
Point, Owia, and Fancy, from the Garifuna or “Black Carib” of the
southern town of Greggs (which is never mentioned in this film), is not
confronted in this film. Indeed, the seemingly inexplicable adoption of
“Garifuna” for all Carib descendants was one of the surprising
things I learned from this film, and as a local historian explains, this
is “relatively new” (but we are not informed as to why it has
happened).
On an international level, the film
speaks of examples where Caribs today are still stereotyped as “wild
cannibals” in a few yet influential quarters. Here the film showcases
Disney’s Pirates of the Caribbean (2003- ) as one of the latest
examples of this malignant stereotyping. Those presented in this
documentary explicitly comment on their task as one of combating the
influence of Hollywood.
What “loss” means, what constitutes
“knowledge,” and knowledge of loss, are all difficult questions that the
film brushes against on occasion. If the Vincentian Caribs do not know
what “was” their culture, how do they know what was “lost”? Rather than
risk diving into and drowning in an essentialist exercise of
trait-listing, I prefer the formulation of the New Zealand
anthropologist Steven Webster, who argues that “Maori culture is not
something that has been lost, it is the loss; being ‘a Maori’ is
struggling to be a Maori.”[3] There is more to this however, as some
knowledge of what it means to be “Carib,” that is actually in line with
its original political meaning in the first century of European
imperial invasions, is knowledge that persists. As Odette Sutherland, a
Vincentian Carib, says in the film: “They were rebellious people. They
didn’t want to work as slaves. The Caribs always liked to be independent
and work to help themselves and their family,” then adding as she
continues working in her yard, “I am proud to say that I am a Carib.”
Another person declares: “That is our king … the chief of the Caribs …
Joseph Chatoyer. He fight for the Carib country.” Cadrin Gill expands on
this theme of resistance in remarking that during colonial rule in the
Caribbean, “St. Vincent was the mecca of freedom,” where escaped slaves
from nearby territories often sought refuge and were welcomed by the
Caribs. This historical knowledge, of the Caribs as the original
anti-imperialists of the modern world system, is further attested to in a
dramatic fashion, on display for tourists and all visitors, at Fort
Charlotte. There a sign states, “built by the British as the chief
defence against the indigenous people and their allies,” and all of the
cannons are pointing not out to sea, but inland. (It is also possible
that the message of anti-imperialism is simultaneously lost by being
displaced into talk of centuries past, focusing on the British, as Dr.
Gill does not seem conflicted about displaying a portrait of Barack
Obama behind his desk.)
One of the unresolved tensions in this
film is that of claiming lack of knowledge on the one hand, yet
currently producing knowledge of contemporary Caribness that in some
senses accords with the original political content of the
identification. Colin Sam, Gill’s nephew, repeats the complaint of a
lack of cultural knowledge of self. Yet he and his fellow Caribs clearly
know a great deal, but it is not formatted, packaged, and labeled in
the same way that academics produce cultural history in writing. Hence,
rather than a detailed report produced by an archaeologist, in this film
we have: “the Caribs were here ever since.” It is simple, perhaps, but
it is also an understanding that is necessary for any sense of
indigeneity. In addition, among those speaking in the film is Nixon
Lewis, a Carib researcher who spends his spare time doing archival
research during annual trips to London, and when not there, then being
“on the Net all the time.”
Further adding weight to the idea of a
paradigm shift are the words of the prime minister of St. Vincent and
the Grenadines, Ralph Gonsalves, who in speaking of the brutality of
British rule declares: “let us not mince words: genocide by the
British.” What is significant is the occasion on which these words were
spoken: National Hero’s Day—an annual public commemoration of Joseph
Chatoyer, a long sought-after national holiday first demanded by the
Committee for the Development of the Carib Community (CDCC), an
organization not mentioned in this film.[4] Demands for such a
commemoration were rejected by the government for numerous years. In one
scene of the film, we can barely make out a banner in the background on
which these words are painted: “Indigenous People’s Day Rally.”
Indigenous People’s Day is another of those events that
Sherelene Roberts explained the CDCC had long pursued.
Some shortcomings of this film should
also be noted, aside from some of the gaps and silences noted above. We
are told that 2 percent of St. Vincent’s 120,000 people are Caribs, but
the source for this not indicated, nor is the deeply problematic issue
of counting such a contested and suppressed identity considered.
Moreover, Roberts reported a figure of 3.1 percent reporting themselves
as Carib during the 1991 Population Census.[5] The film might then lead
some to believe that there has been a decline since then. The film also
reports that there are a total of 400,000 Garifuna in the United States,
Central America, and Caribbean combined, which is a very significant
size (again, a source would have been useful). Aside from these points,
there is no debate in the film about the problems with attempting to
phenotypically define Caribness by the quality of one’s hair, and
whether this could mean an implicit rejection of one’s Africanness. The
film in fact generally ignores the African dimension of Garifuna
identity and history (even when some of the traditions being taught by
Honduran Garifunas to their Vincentian hosts are creole Afro-Caribbean
ones). The fact that a largely African-descended population is the only
population in the region to have kept the Island Carib language alive is
surely one of the most spectacular stories of Caribbean history, and a
key sign of trouble for any attempts to racialize indigeneity or to
distill it out of larger processes of creolization. There is also no
discussion in the film about the relations between Garifuna/Caribs and
the national government. We hear Prime Minister Gonsalves delivering a
stirring speech about British genocide against the Caribs, but then the
film ends by pointing out that the Vincentian island of Balliceaux,
where the Garifuna were imprisoned in 1795 before their exile to
Honduras, rather than being safeguarded as land the Garifuna consider to
be sacred has instead been put up for sale to private buyers. Also in
the context of Balliceaux, the narrative in the film first claims that a
radical cultural eradication occurred, but that then the survivors
carried their culture intact to Honduras. Left like that, the statement
makes no sense, and we should expect that a project that lists dozens of
contributors in its credits would permit the opportunity for some to
review and point out such contradictions that sometimes rendered the
film’s narrative a bit too shaky.
In summary, several aspects of Andrea Leland’s Yurumein
documentary are particularly noteworthy. One is the emphasis of an
acute consciousness by Vincentian Caribs of their “cultural loss” and at
the same time a renewed pride in their Carib ancestry. Another is the
dimension of transnational resurgence, with Garifuna from Central
America (originally from St. Vincent) returning to spearhead a renewal
of Carib pride and to share traditions. A third observation we can make
is about the degree to which this documentary is a nonacademic
production, moreover one that is not mediated or narrated by any
academic expert. A fourth notable aspect is the extent to which the
project involved in making this documentary was locally constituted.
While the film’s gaps and the level of
the narrative are bound to receive mixed reviews from academic
audiences, this documentary could be useful for first- or second-year
students in the North American university/college setting, and for the
general public. With twenty years of immersion in indigenous Caribbean
research, my own special interest has me enthusiastic to see just about any
serious attempt at a documentary on the region’s indigenous peoples,
given the paucity of such materials and my continued inability to
complete my own long overdue video productions. One has to recognize the
considerable effort that went into the making of this documentary,
especially given its broad-based network of local contributors, the
abundance of available narratives, the political implications of those
narratives, the numerous topics deserving special attention, coverage of
key local events, and on top of it all an effort to insert the viewer
into some aspects of the daily lives of today’s Vincentian Caribs. With
so many “moving pieces,” frustration and even failure are more likely
than success. This documentary instead succeeds in encompassing a wide
range of contemporary issues and historical processes, in a visually
engaging manner, and really without trying to tell viewers what to
think. In this last respect, it becomes ideal for the classroom setting
because it leaves gaps to be filled in by a lecturer, and the work of
interpretation open to discussion in the classroom.
I do not think, however, that this
documentary should be viewed alone in the context of a course on the
Caribbean or on indigenous peoples (or both), that is, in the absence of
any other scholarly materials in this topic area. Having said that, it
is at present the best current filmic resource on an indigenous
community in the Caribbean, one that has long been virtually invisible
in the academic literature and documentaries. Others may have done more,
but they are becoming increasingly dated. That this documentary has
already received some excellent reviews, including by specialists in
Garifuna studies, further underscores its virtues.
Notes
[1]. Joseph O. Palacio, “Caribbean Indigenous Peoples’ Journey toward Self-Discovery,” Cultural Survival Quarterly 13, no. 3 (1989): 49-51.
[2]. Maximilian C. Forte, Ruins of Absence, Presence of Caribs: (Post)Colonial Representations of Aboriginality in Trinidad and Tobago (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2005).
[3]. Steven Webster, “Postmodernist Theory and the Sublimation of Maori Culture,” Oceania 63, no. 3 (1993): 222-239.
[4]. Shereline L. Roberts, “The
Integration of the Caribs into the Vincentian Society” (BA thesis,
University of the West Indies, 1996).
