Carib
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- This article is about the Island Carib people, who lived on the islands of the Caribbean. For the Carib language-speaking peoples of the South American continent, see Carib languages.
Carib or Island Carib is the collective name of a people given to them who lived in the Lesser Antilles islands, after whom the Caribbean Sea was named. They are an Amerindian people whose origins lie in the southern West Indies and the northern coast of South America.
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. Several words of Carib origin became part of the English language, including hurricane, hammock, barbeque, and iguana.
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[edit] History
These people are believed to have left the Orinoco rainforests of Venezuela in South America to settle in the Caribbean. Over the century leading up to Christopher Columbus's arrival in the Caribbean archipelago in 1492, the Caribs are believed to have displaced the Maipurean-speaking Igneri people from the southern Lesser Antilles. Their legends (as recorded by Fr. Breton in the 17th century) say that they killed (and ate) all the Igneri men (Arawaks) and took their women as wives. Anthropologists are divided as to how true that was, but the fact that the Island Carib women spoke a Maipurean language gives credence to this idea. The islands also raided and traded with the Eastern Taíno of the Virgin Islands and Puerto Rico. The Caribs were the source of the gold which Columbus found in the possession of the Taíno; gold was not smelted by any of the insular Amerindians, but rather was obtained by trade from the mainland. 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.
The Caribs were themselves displaced by the Europeans, and were eventually all but exterminated during the colonial period. However they were able to retain some islands, such as Dominica, Saint Vincent, Saint Lucia, and Trinidad. 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. They were later deported in 1795 to Roatan Island, off Honduras, where their descendants, the Garífuna, still live today. The British saw the less mixed "Yellow Caribs" as less hostile, and allowed them to remain in St. Vincent. 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 number of Caribs in Dominica today is about 3,000; there are several hundred ethnic Caribs in Trinidad.
[edit] Cannibalism and patriarchy
Europeans arriving on the Caribbean Islands in the 15th century remarked on the Caribs' aggressive and warlike ways and apparent taste for combat. Carib culture, looked at from the outside, seems to be heavily patriarchal. Women carried out primarily domestic duties and farming, and in the seventeenth century they lived in separate houses (a custom which also suggests South American origin). However, women were highly revered and held much power. Island Carib society was socially more egalitarian than Taíno society. Although there were village chiefs and war leaders, there were no large states or multi-tiered aristocracy.
Instances of cannibalism were noted as a feature of religious war rituals, and in fact, the English word cannibal originated from the Carib word karibna ('person') – as recorded by Columbus as a name for the Caribs. Claims of cannibalism, however, must be seen in light of the fact that in 1503, Queen Isabella ruled that only people who are better off under slavery (including cannibals) could be legally taken as slaves, which gave Spaniards an incentive to identify various Amerindian groups as cannibals.
[edit] Controversy
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 criticized by the National Garifuna Council for portraying the Carib people as cannibals.
[edit] See also
- Arawak
- Cariban languages
- Maipurean languages
- Arawakan languages
- Taíno
- Garifuna
- Carib Expulsion
- Santa Rosa Carib Community
[edit] References
- Allaire, Louis. 1997. The Caribs of the Lesser Antilles. Pp 180-185 in The Indigenous People of the Caribbean, Samuel M. Wilson (ed.) ISBN 0-8130-1531-6
