I... how could you not know?! You know me! I've mentioned this stuff! I'm fairly certain I've mentioned it.
I missed those posts. Because most of the stuff I've read from you talks about your family and your illnesses and stuff, I knew you were from Trinidad, I didn't know your ancestry.
The Black Caribs of Brazil (on a reservation) and how I feel uncomfortable talking about Carib culture since I don't think blood (genetics) is culture - not when I'd seen how hard those who're trying to maintain a community have to fight to be remembered and losing their elders and the same 'basketweaving and feathers of the past' shite with the occasional beauty pageant...
This? Is brand new information to me. I remember delux_vivens writing something about the Arawaks in Puerto Rico a couple of years ago...and thats how I found out that they hadn't all been killed by Columbus. Because thats what my history book told me. And their issues do not turn up on the news. I mean, you're talking to someone who didn't realise that there were black people in Cuba until I was 11 or 12 because thats when the Sunday Gleaner did a feature on them. Because all the news I'd ever seen featuring Cuban refugees and exiles showed whites. Period. I mean, there's a reason why I stopped studying Caribbean history after I took my GCE's and thats because the story goes like this: There were Amerindians. The Arawaks were peaceful the Caribs were warlike and possibly cannibals. (Or was that just a pirates of the Caribbean thing? Its been a while...) Then Columbus killed them off. Then slavery. Slave revolts. The Maroons. Then Emancipation. Oh and we got independence in the 60s or whatever. That was my history. GCE history was studying slavery indepth. Nothing about the political issues after independence. Nothing about anything else beyond slavery. If you know how much I envied the Europeans because goddammit their history had something else besides goddamn rape and murder and suffering. Maybe if I went to college down there I would have realized that there was much much more to the story. But I couldn't afford it. So.
Then I got older and at some point learned that Caribs were aggressive isolationists and Arawaks were peaceful expansionists and technically the women of both tribes were their own tribe and it all wasn't as simple as primary school.
*blink* WHAT now? Do you have any book recs, if you don't mind? Cause basically if I heard about the Arawaks at all it was in context of archaeology. They had gods called zemis, played some kind of ball game, made turtle soup. And got killed by the Caribs. And then completely slaughtered by the Spaniards. Though maybe they may have intermarried with the Maroons. And these were from books written for the Caribbean-based exam. Which was replacing the GCEs because they wanted to put more emphasis on Caribbean history as opposed to British ideas of Caribbean history, or whatever the excuse was. Maybe its better now?
no subject
I missed those posts. Because most of the stuff I've read from you talks about your family and your illnesses and stuff, I knew you were from Trinidad, I didn't know your ancestry.
The Black Caribs of Brazil (on a reservation) and how I feel uncomfortable talking about Carib culture since I don't think blood (genetics) is culture - not when I'd seen how hard those who're trying to maintain a community have to fight to be remembered and losing their elders and the same 'basketweaving and feathers of the past' shite with the occasional beauty pageant...
This? Is brand new information to me. I remember delux_vivens writing something about the Arawaks in Puerto Rico a couple of years ago...and thats how I found out that they hadn't all been killed by Columbus. Because thats what my history book told me. And their issues do not turn up on the news. I mean, you're talking to someone who didn't realise that there were black people in Cuba until I was 11 or 12 because thats when the Sunday Gleaner did a feature on them. Because all the news I'd ever seen featuring Cuban refugees and exiles showed whites. Period. I mean, there's a reason why I stopped studying Caribbean history after I took my GCE's and thats because the story goes like this: There were Amerindians. The Arawaks were peaceful the Caribs were warlike and possibly cannibals. (Or was that just a pirates of the Caribbean thing? Its been a while...) Then Columbus killed them off. Then slavery. Slave revolts. The Maroons. Then Emancipation. Oh and we got independence in the 60s or whatever. That was my history. GCE history was studying slavery indepth. Nothing about the political issues after independence. Nothing about anything else beyond slavery. If you know how much I envied the Europeans because goddammit their history had something else besides goddamn rape and murder and suffering. Maybe if I went to college down there I would have realized that there was much much more to the story. But I couldn't afford it. So.
Then I got older and at some point learned that Caribs were aggressive isolationists and Arawaks were peaceful expansionists and technically the women of both tribes were their own tribe and it all wasn't as simple as primary school.
*blink* WHAT now? Do you have any book recs, if you don't mind? Cause basically if I heard about the Arawaks at all it was in context of archaeology. They had gods called zemis, played some kind of ball game, made turtle soup. And got killed by the Caribs. And then completely slaughtered by the Spaniards. Though maybe they may have intermarried with the Maroons. And these were from books written for the Caribbean-based exam. Which was replacing the GCEs because they wanted to put more emphasis on Caribbean history as opposed to British ideas of Caribbean history, or whatever the excuse was. Maybe its better now?