Carib

Carib family (by John Gabriel Stedman)

File:Drawing of Caribe Woman.jpg

Drawing of a Carib woman

Carib, Island Carib or Kalinago people, after whom the Caribbean Sea was named, live in the Lesser Antilles islands. They are an Amerindian people whose origins lie in the southern West Indies and the northern coast of South America.

Overview

The Carib people are one of the two main native populations of the carribean islands, the other two being the Tanios, also known as the Arawaks. Both groups are believed to have migrated to the Carribean islands after the initial population of the American continents, and descendants of both groups are believed to have survived for many years in parts of Central and South America. The Caribs were skilled boatbuilders and sailors, and seem to have owed their dominance in the Caribbean basin to their mastery of the arts of war.

History

Although specific time tables are unknown, it is generally believed that the Arawaks were the first group to migrate from the Orinoco river area in South America to the islands of the Caribbean, sometime around 500 B.C.E. The Carib followed soon afterward, invading many areas the inhabited by the Arawaks, killing and subjuctating their predesscors. By 1400 C.E., the Carib controlled most of the West Antilles and areas of the cost of Venezuela. After years of hostility, the two tribes settled into a general peace and cooperation, trading amongst each other and in some areas, such as the island of Domincia, the two cultures blended together.

The Caribs were themselves displaced by the Europeans, and most were eventually killed in battle, assimilated during the colonial period, or retained areas such as in Dominica. However, there are still small populations, specifically in the Carib Territory in north east Dominica.

The Black Caribs (Garifuna) of St. Vincent inherit their ethnicity from a group of black slaves who were marooned in a 1675 shipwreck possibly after seizing power from the crew. In 1795, they were deported to Roatan Island, off Honduras, where their descendants, the Garífuna, still live today. Carib resistance delayed the settlement of Dominica by Europeans, and the Carib communities that remained in St. Vincent and Dominica retained a degree of autonomy well into the 19th century.

The last known speakers of Island Carib died in the 1920s.

The Carib Expulsion was the ethnic cleansing of the Carib population which took place in 1660 on the Caribbean island of Martinique following the 1635 invasion and seizure by the French military that made it part of the French colonial empire.

Using their overwhelming military superiority, the French forces of Pierre Belain d'Esnambuc forced the indigenous Carib peoples to French colonial rule. Through Cardinal Richelieu, France gave the island to the Company of the American Islands (Compagnie des Isles d'Amerique). French Law was imposed on the conquered inhabitants and the Jesuits arrived to convert them to the Roman Catholic Church.

When the Caribs could not be sufficiently induced to supply labour for building and maintaining the sugar and cocoa plantations the Company desired, in 1636 King Louis XIII authorized the abduction of slaves from Africa for transportation to Martinique and other parts of the French West Indies. The Caribs soon revolted against French rule and under Governor Charles Houel sieur de Petit Pré a war was launched against them. Many were slaughtered; those who survived were taken captive in 1660 and expelled from the island, never to return.

Culture

Religion

The Caribs are believed to have been polytheists.

That was not known by Columbus, or any other European. The reason for their invasion was to convert the Caribs, whom they thought were Pagans, to Catholicism. Their Kalingo religion was a simple adaptation of the ancestor worship of the Taino. They believed in an evil spirit called Maybouya who had to be placated in order to avoid harm. The chief function of their shamans, called boyez, was to heal the sick with herbs and to cast spells (piai) which would keep Maybouya at bay. The boyez was very important and underwent special training instead of becoming warriors. As they were held to be the only people who could avert evil, they were treated with great respect. Their ceremonies were accompanied with sacrifices. As with the Arawak, tobacco played a large part in these religious rites.

Patriarchy

Early Carib culture, as seen from a distance, appears especially patriarchal. Women carried out primarily domestic duties and farming, and in the 17th century lived in separate houses (a custom which also suggests South American origin) from men.

However, women were highly revered and held substantial socio-political power. Island Carib society was reputedly more socially egalitarian than Taíno society. Although there were village chiefs and war leaders, there were no large states or multi-tiered aristocracy. The local self-government unit may have been the longhouse dwellings populated by men or women, typically run by one or more chieftains reporting to an island council.

Cannibalism

The English word cannibal originated from the Carib word karibna ('person') – as recorded by Columbus as a name for the Caribs.

Instances of cannibalism are said to have been noted as a feature of war rituals, the limbs of victims may have been taken home as trophies. While the Kalinago would chew and spit out one mouthful of flesh of a very brave warrior, so that his bravery would go to him, there is no evidence that they ate humans to satisfy hunger. The Kalinago also had a tradition of keeping the bones of their ancestors in their houses; initially this had been taken as evidence that they ate human flesh.

Missionaries such as Pere Jean Baptiste Labat and Cesar de Rochefort described the Kalinago practice of preserving the bones of their ancestors in their houses in the belief that the ancestral spirits would look after the bones and protect their descendants. Today a similar practice to this is still practiced in tribes of the Amazon.

Even after Columbus was presented with evidence that the cannibalism of the indigenous people was a myth, the myth was perpetuated because in 1503, Queen Isabella ruled that only people who were better off under slavery (including cannibals) could legally be taken as slaves, this provided Spaniards an incentive and legalistic pretext for identifying various Amerindian groups as cannibals in order to enslave them and take their lands away from them.

To this day the Kalinago people fight against what they regard as a misconception about their ancestors. The film Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest was recently criticised by the National Garifuna Council for portraying the Carib people as cannibals.

Language

The Cariban languages are an indigenous language family of South America. Carib languages are widespread across northern South America, from the mouth of the Amazon River to the Colombian Andes and from Maracaibo (Venezuela) to Central Brazil. Cariban languages are relatively close to each other; in some cases, it is difficult to decide whether different groups speak different languages or dialects of the same language. Because of this, the exact number of Cariban languages is not known with certainty (current estimates range from 25 to 40, with 20 to 30 still spoken). The Cariban family is well known in the linguistic world due to Hixkaryana, a language with Object-Verb-Subject sentences, previously thought not to exist in human language.

Some years prior to the arrival of the first Spanish explorers, Carib-speaking peoples had invaded and occupied the Lesser Antilles, killing, displacing or forcibly assimilating the Arawakan peoples who inhabited the islands. They never reached the Greater Antilles or the Bahamas. Curiously, the Carib language quickly died out while the Arawakan language was maintained over the generations. This was the result of the invading Carib men usually killing the local men of the islands they conquered and taking Arawak wives who then passed on their own language to the children. For a time, Arawak was spoken primarily or exclusively by women and children, while adult men spoke Carib. Eventually, as the first generation of Carib-Arawak children reached adulthood, the more familiar Arawak became the only language used in the small island societies. This language was called Island Carib, even though it is not part of the Carib linguistic family. It is now extinct, but was spoken on the Lesser Antilles until the 1920's (primarily in Dominica, Saint Vincent, and Trinidad).

The largest Carib languages today are Carib proper, or Galibi, with 10,000 speakers, and Macushi language, with perhaps 24,000 speakers. The Hixkaryana language is famous in linguistic typology for its unusual word orders.

Although Garífuna, spoken in Honduras, Guatemala, and Belize, is known as "Black Carib," it is actually an Arawakan language with Carib influence: At one time men used Carib lexical vocabulary, and women Arawak vocabulary, though both on an Arawak grammatical base, but this distinction has dwindled to only a handful of words.

Although the men spoke either a Carib language or a pidgin, the Caribs' raids resulted in so many female Arawak captives that it was not uncommon for the women to speak Kalhíphona, a Maipurean language (Arawakan). In the southern Caribbean they co-existed with a related Cariban-speaking group, the Galibi, who lived in separate villages in Grenada and Tobago and are believed to have been mainland Caribs.

Contemporary Life

Because of Dominica's rugged area, Caribs were able to hide from European forces. Today, on the island's east coast, there is a 3,700 acre territory granted by the Crown in 1903. There were only 3000 Caribs remaining after many years of brutal treatment by the Spanish, French and British colonists. They elect their own chief. In July of 2003, Caribs observed 100 Years of Territory. In July 2004, Charles Williams was elected as Carib Chief.

There are several hundred ethnic Caribs in Trinidad, as well as a Carib population in St.Vincent-the size of which is not known. Some ethnic Carib communities remain on the South American mainland, in countries such as Venezuela, Colombia, Brazil, French Guiana, Guyana and Suriname. The sizes of these communities differ.

References

ISBN links support NWE through referral fees

• Allaire, Louis (1997). "The Caribs of the Lesser Antilles." In Samuel M. Wilson, The Indigenous People of the Caribbean, pp. 180–185. Gainesville, Florida: University of Florida. ISBN 0813015316
• Steele, Beverley A. (2003). "Grenada, A history of its people." Macmillan Education, pp11-47
• Honeychurch, Lennox, The Dominica Story, MacMillan Education 1995.
• Davis, D and Goodwin R.C. "Island Carib Origins: Evidence and non-evidence" American Antiquity vol.55 no.1(1990).
• Eaden, John, "The Memoirs of Père Labat," 1693-1705, Frank Cass 1970.
• Ethnologue report on Carib [1]

External links

• Etnolinguistica.Org: online resources on native South American languages
• Ethnologue report for Carib languages
• http://www.cariblanguage.org/galibi.html
• Rosetta Project entry

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