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Arawaks du Clan de l'Aigle

Arawaks du Clan de l'Aigle

Arawaks du Clan de l'Aigle

The Eagle Clan Arawaks and the Caribbean Amerindian Development Organisation (CADO) stand firmly behind the CARICOM Ten Point Plan for Reparatory Justice.

 

The Eagle Clan Arawaks are a Lokono (Arawak) community whose leader, Damon Corrie, co-founded CADO. CADO is an Indigenous-led regional body that brings together the Lokono (Arawak), Taíno and Kalinago nations of the Caribbean and its diaspora. Our peoples are the First Peoples of these islands. We are still here, still living in the Caribbean, and still carrying the cultures our ancestors fought to keep alive.

 

In 2013, the Heads of Government of the Caribbean Community established the CARICOM Reparations Commission to pursue justice for the Indigenous and African-descended peoples of this region. Our ancestors suffered crimes against humanity at the hands of European colonial powers: genocide, the theft of our lands, and centuries of enslavement.

 

As the living Indigenous peoples of the Caribbean, we add our voice to this call. We believe reparatory justice is the path to healing, and to a fairer Caribbean for all of its people.

Arawaks du Clan de l'Aigle

1. A Full Formal Apology. The European governments responsible must offer a sincere, formal apology, not merely statements of regret.

 

2. Repatriation. Descendants of the more than 10 million Africans forcibly brought to the Caribbean must be given the means to return to Africa, should they choose to.

 

3. An Indigenous Peoples Development Programme. Colonisation reduced the Indigenous peoples of the Caribbean from around 3 million to fewer than 30,000. The survivors remain marginalised and landless, and their communities must be restored and developed.

 

4. Cultural Institutions. Museums and research centres across the region must document and preserve the history and experiences of our ancestors and their descendants.

 

5. The Public Health Crisis. African-descended Caribbean people suffer some of the world's highest rates of hypertension and type-2 diabetes, a direct legacy of slavery. Europe must help address it.

 

6. Illiteracy Eradication. Colonial rule left generations without education. Europe must help undo that legacy.

 

7. An African Knowledge Programme. "Bridges of belonging" must be built through cultural, educational and community exchange, reconnecting Caribbean people with Africa.

 

8. Psychological Rehabilitation. Truth-telling and education must begin to heal the deep trauma of centuries in which our ancestors were treated as less than human under the law.

 

9. Technology Transfer. The science and technology that Europe deliberately withheld from the Caribbean must now be shared.

 

10. Debt Cancellation. The international debts of Caribbean nations, which inherited the costs of colonialism, must be cancelled.

 

Source: CARICOM Reparations Commission, caricomreparations.org

Arawaks du Clan de l'Aigle

The history of the Caribbean is not only a story of separate suffering. It is also a story of two peoples who met in bondage, shared what they knew, and survived together.

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What we planted

In 1627, a group of Arawak (Lokono) people from Guiana were brought to Barbados, carrying cassava, maize, sweet potatoes, pineapples, tobacco and sugar cane. The very crop that would come to define the plantation Caribbean arrived in Indigenous hands. Africans arrived carrying their own crops and their own wisdom: okra, yams, black-eyed peas, pigeon peas, guinea corn (sorghum), millet, African rice, watermelon, sesame, tamarind, ackee and the kola nut, while plantain and banana reached these islands by way of Africa. Working side by side, each people taught the other. Neither could have known how to grow the other's crops at first. Through sharing, those crops became ours, so much a part of Caribbean life today that it feels as though they were always here.

 

You can taste that sharing on every Bajan plate. Cou-cou, our national dish, brings together maize from Indigenous hands and okra from African ones, served alongside flying fish from the sea our peoples learned to fish together. Across the region, the story repeats: Indigenous cassava and African yams, cassareep and pigeon peas, side by side on the same table. The rich and diverse food cultures of the Caribbean exist because our ancestors shared.

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Even the language was used to divide us

The colonisers' own writings constantly ranked our peoples against each other, holding one up as "better" or "more skilled" than the other. These comparisons were never fair. Of course a people knew their own native crops best, and of course newcomers had to learn. That is not a measure of worth; it is how every people comes to know a new land. Those words were meant to belittle us and to plant competition between us.

 

And they were written by those who did little or none of the labour themselves. We laboured while they judged, and they reaped the rewards. Both of our peoples were enslaved; they never were. The truth written in our food, our boats and our bloodlines is one of exchange between equals.

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What we knew of the sea

Both of our peoples came from long seafaring traditions. Indigenous Caribbean people built dugout canoes that carried them from island to island, and many Africans came from coastal and river nations with canoe traditions of their own. On these islands, those traditions met. An account of Barbados from 1804 records enslaved Africans fishing for flying fish at night in the same way as the Kalinago, and anthropologist Jerome Handler, who spent decades researching Barbados, concluded that Indigenous people likely shared many other fishing and sea-gathering skills. Historians Nuala Zahedieh and Kevin Dawson have shown how central the canoe was to survival in the colonial Caribbean, and how Africans' own boat-building skill carried many of them to freedom.

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Freedom across the water

By the 1660s, St. Vincent, a Kalinago stronghold about 100 miles west of Barbados, had become a refuge for Africans escaping slavery. They crossed the open sea in boats, many of them fishermen and boatmen who knew the water well, and the Kalinago took them in. By 1676, some 600 Africans who had escaped from Barbados and other islands were living free on St. Vincent.

 

Over generations, the two peoples became one: the Garifuna (Garinagu), who carry both bloodlines to this day. The Garifuna are living proof of what our peoples can achieve together. Through love, and a unity forged in shared struggle, they held two cultures at once, kept both alive, and made each stronger through the other.

 

This is our shared inheritance. Our ancestors shared crops, boats, knowledge of the sea, and the will to be free. That same unity is needed now.

 

Sources: Jerome S. Handler, "The Amerindian Slave Population of Barbados" (1969), "Aspects of Amerindian Ethnography in 17th Century Barbados" (1970) and "Escaping Slavery in a Caribbean Plantation Society: Marronage in Barbados" (1997); Nuala Zahedieh, "Canoes in the Early English Caribbean," Past & Present; Kevin Dawson, "A Sea of Caribbean Islands: Maritime Maroons in the Greater Caribbean," Slavery & Abolition (2021).

Arawaks du Clan de l'Aigle

When emancipation came between 1834 and 1838, our ancestors asked for one thing above all: land. Land to farm, land to build homes on, land on which to be truly free.

 

That land was never given. The planters kept it, and were paid compensation for the "loss" of the people they had enslaved, while the formerly enslaved received nothing. For generations after emancipation, people across the Caribbean petitioned, protested and rose up for access to land and a fair living. In Barbados, the planters held on to almost all of it, leaving the descendants of the enslaved to rent small house spots and labour on the same estates.

 

The Indigenous peoples of the Caribbean lost their lands even earlier, and many of our communities are still landless, or still fighting for recognition of their land, today.

Arawaks du Clan de l'Aigle

Reparations are not about money in hand. They are about repairing our nations and giving our people the foundation they were denied. Reparations will look like:

 

  • Better-equipped national facilities: hospitals, schools, clinics and public services that truly serve our people.

  • Access to land: for farming, for food security, and for homes.

  • Affordable housing, so families can own their homes and build lasting security for the generations to come.

  • Development that serves the people, especially the Black and Brown citizens whose ancestors built this region's wealth and never shared in it.

  • A more equitable standard of living, closing the gap between the descendants of the enslaved and colonised and the descendants and beneficiaries of the plantocracy.

  • Recognition, land and development for the Indigenous peoples of the Caribbean, as set out in Point 3 of the CARICOM plan.

Arawaks du Clan de l'Aigle

Myth: "Black people will get cash payments."​

Fact: Jewish survivors of the Nazi genocide rightly received cash reparations from Germany for the 12 years of persecution they suffered. Yet the descendants of enslaved Africans have never received a single cent, not one square millimetre of land, nor any other form of reparation. This is despite more than 400 years of the transatlantic trade in enslaved Africans and the slavery it fed. It began in the 1440s, when Portuguese ships first carried captives away from the African coast, and it did not end until 1888, when Brazil became the last nation in the Americas to abolish slavery. Across those four centuries, Portugal, Spain, Britain, France, the Netherlands and Denmark carried the greatest share, but they were far from alone. Sweden ran slaving forts on the Gold Coast and later a slave port on St. Barthélemy. Norway, then joined to Denmark, shipped captives and shared in Denmark's Caribbean colonies. Brandenburg-Prussia (today's Germany) built its own slaving forts in West Africa and shipped captives to the Caribbean. The Duchy of Courland (today's Latvia) held a slaving post on the Gambia River and a colony on Tobago. Genoese and other Italian bankers financed Spain's slave contracts, while merchants and banks in Switzerland, Hamburg and other German ports invested in slaving voyages. Scotland, too, was a partner in the trade both before and after its union with England. Nearly all of Europe shared in the profits. More than 12 million Africans were forced onto ships, and nearly 2 million of them died at sea before they ever reached these shores.

 

Not one island in the Caribbean was spared. Every nation we know today was a slave colony, and many passed from one European hand to another:

 

  • Barbados, Antigua and Barbuda, St. Kitts and Nevis, Montserrat, Anguilla, the British Virgin Islands, the Bahamas, the Cayman Islands, the Turks and Caicos, Bermuda, Jamaica and Belize: Britain (Jamaica was first taken by Spain, and St. Kitts was shared with France in its early years).

  • Trinidad: Spain, then Britain. Tobago: Courland (today's Latvia), the Netherlands, France and Britain in turn.

  • Guyana: the Netherlands, then Britain. Suriname: England, then the Netherlands.

  • Dominica, St. Lucia, St. Vincent and the Grenadines, and Grenada: France and Britain, with St. Lucia alone changing hands fourteen times.

  • Haiti: Spain, then France. The Dominican Republic: Spain, with France for a time. Cuba and Puerto Rico: Spain.

  • Martinique, Guadeloupe and French Guiana: France. St. Barthélemy: France, then Sweden, then France again. St. Martin: divided between France and the Netherlands to this day.

  • Curaçao, Aruba, Bonaire, Sint Eustatius and Saba: the Netherlands, with Curaçao and Sint Eustatius serving as major slave depots for the whole region.

  • St. Thomas, St. John and St. Croix (today's US Virgin Islands): Denmark–Norway, with St. Croix earlier held by France and the Knights of Malta (today's Malta), and part of St. Thomas leased to Brandenburg-Prussia (today's Germany) as a slaving base.

 

Instead, in 1833, the British Government paid £20 million in compensation to the slave owners: the very people who had enslaved and exploited Africans. The enslaved themselves received nothing. It is hard to find a more glaring double standard in all of recorded history.

 

Reparations will not mean individual cash payments. They will mean that the heirs and successor states of the greatest criminal enterprise in history use a significant share of that ill-gotten wealth to ensure that every African and Indigenous descendant of Europe's crimes can enjoy basic, modern standards of living: electricity, piped water, flushing toilets and indoor showers in every home, and land of their own on which that home can stand, among other things.

 

These are things the descendants of the slave owners enjoy and take for granted. Why, then, should it offend anyone that the descendants of those whose exploitation built that wealth should also enjoy the minimum standards of a dignified life in the 21st century?

 

If you truly stand for justice and equality for all of humanity, learn this history. You will find yourself supporting the reparations movement, not opposing it.

Arawaks du Clan de l'Aigle

To every Indigenous Caribbean and African Caribbean descendant:

 

We are bound together by blood, by history, and by the soil beneath our feet. Our ancestors met on these islands under the whip and in the forests. They shared what they knew so that others could live. They planted the same crops, built the same boats, read the same tides, and escaped across the same seas.

 

This fight was not one we chose. We inherited it, in our very DNA, from ancestors who never received justice. They asked for land and were refused. They rose up and were punished. They were never repaid. They did not give up, and neither will we. We seek reparations not for ourselves alone, but on behalf of our ancestors, and for the children who will come after us.

 

Some will point to the painful chapters of our past, to the times our peoples were turned against one another. We do not hide from that history. We name it for what it was: divide and rule. The colonisers paid, pressured and forced our peoples apart, because our unity was the greatest threat to their power. "Every man for himself" is exactly the story colonialism planted to divide us, and in some places it took root. But today, with the history and the evidence before us, we refuse to carry that division any longer.

 

Let us unite for the greater good of the long-wronged people of the Caribbean, who built and sustained this region and inherited its struggle through blood, sweat and pain. Nothing the Caribbean is today was built without us, yet our peoples have barely tasted its benefits. We must stand once more as the spine of the Caribbean, and claim the inheritance and equity our ancestors were robbed of.

 

Now is the time for the tides to turn. We are stronger together than apart. They are one; together, we are many.

 

Two voices against one.

 

Their struggle continues through us.

 

- The Eagle Clan Arawaks & the Caribbean Amerindian Development Organisation (CADO) Lokono · Taíno · Kalinago

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