KacIke.org
Title
Kacike The Journal of Caribbean Amerindian History and Anthropology
Description
The modern world-system emerged with the expansion of Europe into the Caribbean. Similarly, Europe, as an idea and as a project, was constructed and reworked in light of the momentous encounters and relationships that occurred between European metropoles and their social institutions, economies, and agents and their counterparts among Caribbean Amerindian societies. It can be argued that Caribbean Amerindians also played central roles in either making or breaking European efforts at colonization in the Caribbean territories, especially those deemed to be of commercial value for their fertile soils and/or strategically placed in the quest for "El Dorado." Caribbean Amerindians, and especially the Caribs, whose name was once interchangeable with Cannibal and synonymous with anthropophagy, occupied the centre of European imaginations of the radically different Other.
Caribbean Amerindians were present in the range of European attempts at grappling with or constructing difference, whether the conceptions were of irreducible and cruel savages, or heroic warriors and noble inheritors of the soil. Europeans conquered Amerindian societies, worked with Amerindian polities, adopted Amerindian practices, commoditized and globalized the trade in Amerindian products such as cocoa and tobacco, forged new cultural formations with Caribbean Amerindians, married Caribbean Amerindians, settled in their villages, brought them back to Europe, painted Caribbean Amerindians, idealized them, wrote stories about them, and eventually even established institutions and territories designed to protect and preserve the last remaining "pure" Amerindians at the turn of the twentieth century.
Since the end of the 1980s, and especially throughout the 1990s, the public has witnessed a prominent revitalization of both Caribbean Amerindian communities located on reservations in Guyana and Dominica, settlements in Belize and St. Vincent, rural communities in Cuba, or the founding of new cultural organizations identifying with a Caribbean Amerindian heritage such as the Caribs of Trinidad and the various Taïno organizations of Puerto Rico, the Dominican Republic and the United States of America. In some cases, new groups have emerged that explore the Amerindian input and contribution in the makeup of rural communities such as the Guajiros of eastern Cuba or the Cocoa Panyols of northeastern Trinidad. As a result of these revivals, the last decade, since the late 1980s, has witnessed three large regional gatherings of Indigenous groups in Arima, Trinidad, the formation of the Caribbean Organization of Indigenous People, the attraction of serious attention from historians and anthropologists, and even the proud promotional efforts of states in the region where in many cases Amerindians had been conceived by influential nationalist intellectuals as the forebears of the modern nations of the region.
Contact
- Maximilian C. Forte
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- Verdun Quebec
- Canada H3G 1M8
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- +514.8482424
