Family Continuity between Yurumein (St Vincent) and Belize, Central America

Abstract

IntroductionIn April 1997, on the occasion of the two-hundredth anniversary of the forced exile of Garifuna people from St Vincent to Honduras, Central America, I initiated a study to trace family linkages between the Garifuna in Belize and those in St Vincent. In the first publication resulting from this study,1 the focus was on finetuning techniques and methods of oral history, a topic receiving limited attention at that time in our regional institutions of higher learning.In this essay I look at the people-to-people linkages through the axis of cultural identity and indigeneity, and in so doing introduce two themes that undergird my enquiry - the power of the collective memory to recall extreme hardship, and the power of the human soul to extend through metaphysical space and time in joining with the spirits of the dead. Because of the significance of the narrative format in relaying the accounts of our protagonist Gulisi, the daughter of Paramount Chief Joseph Chatoyer, there is a brief overview of the narrative as a tool of research. There follows some detail of Gulisi's recall of her experiences in St Vincent as well as in Honduras, and eventually in Belize. There is also a genealogical reconstruction of Gulisi's descendants over five to six generations in Belize.Finally, I allude to the impact of this study on a re-evaluation of Gulisi from being almost totally forgotten in Belize to becoming an icon whose name has been placed on a museum and a primary school, and to her spirit becom- ing so revived that it has been making visitations in ancestral ceremonies within recent years.The backdrop for continuityThis essay traces continuity within an extended family spanning over two hundred years and stretching a little over 1,700 miles or 2,800 kilometres across the sea from the eastern Caribbean island of St Vincent to the western Caribbean mainland territory of Belize. Figure 1 traces the journey that the British imposed on the Garifuna exiles from St Vincent to Roatan, Honduras in 1797. While there are no disputes about the dates of departure and arrival, there are minor discrepancies between two authors on the numbers of those ending up in the prison at Balliceaux prior to the embarkation: Christopher Taylor records a total of 4,776 while Nancie Gonzalez notes 4,19 5.2 The difference could result from errors in calculation or inscription during intake at Balliceaux, which took place from 21 July 1796 to 2 February 1797, and the assigning of categories to various groups of the prisoners, among whom were Yellow Caribs and slaves who were owned by the Garifuna.The concepts of cultural identity and indigeneity provide the axis within which the continuity takes place. Since the last two decades of the twentieth century, cultural identity and indigeneity have received much attention within the social sciences.3 The introverted concern within the Caribbean region about its own cultural identity has diminished appreciation for its indigenous peoples. A region confined from its earliest colonial settlement within steep interracial stratification, the Caribbean defines its cultural identity within the bipolarity of pedigree and creolisation. Pedigree stands for the degrees of political entitlement that one receives through biological inheritance^ while creolisation reflects the constant overlap of cultural and biological traits that dominates all parts of the region. 5 Within such fixed and opposing categorisations, in step the Garifuna, an interracial indigenous nation, who uphold hybridity while defying conventional self-categorisation by race and are found not only within pockets in the insular Caribbean but also on the Caribbean rim land of Central America. The Garifuna widen the cultural purview of the Caribbean by forcing a review of widely accepted concepts of race and ethnicity, and of the regional scope of Caribbeanness, while simultaneously renewing an understanding of indigeneity in a region where it had been presumed to have died. …