Ancestry Dept: From whence came the Caribbean?

[Capn Jimbo]

Long before Caribbean rum...


Were the Carib Indians, after whom the Caribbean takes its name. The Caribbean includes all of the bordering islands (to the north and east) as well as the Central and South American countries who as a group, outline and define what we now call the Caribbean. There is little disagreement on just which countries are indeed "Caribbean", except for the amazing tete a tete I once had with the Bassitor of Rum: check out this link for enterainment value:

http://rumproject.com/caribbean.html

It seems obvious that the "Caribbean" was named after its earlier inhabitants, the somtimes cannibalistic "Carib" Indians, and the countries to which they migrated. But the question is:


So where did the Caribs come from?

Until now, nobody really knew, but with the help of a miniscule grant a team of researchers used DNA testing to find out this: the Carib descendants on Trinidad have evidence of origination from both Africa and - to a larger degree - from the American Indian DNA. Now that is something! So far the study remains young (first 25 samples) but the local community is excited and most of these people - about 600 - are due to be tested for further information.

"The history books have always indicated that the first inhabitants of the Caribbean were the Arawaks and Caribs. But what those books have not indicated is that the indigenous people may have had strong ancestral links to Africa and to Native American Indians.

Recent work by the North American-based National Geographic Genographic Project on the Carib community in Trinidad, utilising Deoxyribo Nucleic Acid (DNA), has confirmed that members of the community in Arima have very strong ancestral links to Africa and to Native American Indians."

(Source: Caribbean 360)

The original ancestor: Chief Rumming Bear. a distant relative of our Bear Brothers (with appropriate apologies to Tento and his Cano Sabe, Lance - The Lone Caner)...

[JaRiMi]

Honestly speaking, and having lived in Trinidad, this interpretation that Caribs had anything to do with Africa is as misleading as when students of UWI decided to state that rum was distilled in Barbados long before whisky or brandy was distilled in Europe.

(The good students forgot in their nationalistic fenzy that distillation was brough to the Caribbean by Europeans - who had been distilling in Europe for hundreds of years. All they did was to look at what year different distilleries received their official licenses, and whisky distilleries got their typically in 18th century only. It does not mean that thats when whisky distilling began).

The Carib/Arawak remnants in Trinidad are no longer "pure" (hmm, a word that seems to pop up now only too often) South American indians. After centuries of oppression and colonialism, as well as facing the black power years of 1970s, most of the people with any trace of native American actually moved out of Trinidad - or were killed in the last 400 years.

The remaining "Caribs" are a mixture of Yankee, Spanish, Portugese, French, African, East Indian and native American. Any Trini know that. The guys in Santa Rosa are about as pure native American as is the name of their leader - Ricardo Bharath-Hernandez. That is Trinidad today. These people have not been sheltered from mixing, they lived right among all the other inhabitants that have come to live in Trinidad over the last 400 years.

My daughter has Trini native American ancestry. She is even distantly related to the late Calypsonian Raphael de Leon through her mothers/grandmothers/great grandmothers' family ties. Many people mixed with native American finally departed from T&T to go to Canada, Panama, Belize and USA during the 70's black power days as I said. A lot of violence against them was what prompted the move.

In any case, my daughter has reportedly Spanish, Portugese, Native American Indian, African, Chinese, German, Finnish, Swedish and Russian roots. it don't mean that all these people use to visit Trinidad for the Carnival in the days past

The Trini government has always used the fact that there are no pure Amerindians alive as an excuse of not giving the indigenous people any landrights. One reason being, that the lands might include some of the oil-rich territories of South Trinidad

First Africans who came to Trinidad did not come there by choice. They came and were brought there by the white man, and that was less than 400 years ago. So if anyone thinks there was any ties of Africa with Trinidad before that, they are sorely mistaken.

Actually, Caribs were just one of the many tribes that lived in the island region that we now know as the Caribbean...But they are the best known, because they fought against the Europeans hardest. It is estimated that the real, unmixed Caribs of 400 - 1000 years ago originally came from South American continent, and pushed Taino, Arawak etc out of land area they previously lived in.