The Caribbean’s indigenous people must be at the heart of the region’s reparations agenda, not an “afterthought”, Taíno Chief Damon Gerard Corrie has told a regional conference.
The chief of the Barbados Chapter of the United Confederation of Taíno People and co-president of the Caribbean Amerindian Development Organisation delivered this message on behalf of Chief Ricardo Bharath Hernandez, chair of the Caribbean Organisation of Indigenous Peoples (COIP).
The call was made at the opening of the third conference on reparations, an international meeting of the Caribbean Community-led drive for reparations for transatlantic slavery and the genocide of the region’s native peoples that followed European colonisation in the 15th and 16th centuries.
The indigenous leader described the struggle for historical restitution as a shared cause for the region’s original inhabitants and descendants of enslaved Africans.
He hailed Pan African Affairs and Heritage Minister Trevor Prescod as a hero of the reparations struggle, alongside renowned historian Professor Sir Hilary Beckles and representatives of the African Union Commission, and urged attendees to recognise the profound significance of ancestral land.
Corrie said: “I begin by inviting us all to acknowledge that the land on which we convene this conference is part of the ancestral heritage of the indigenous peoples of this region. We are the descendants of the survivors of Europe’s genocidal colonisation, and therefore we pay homage to our ancestors who built the first vibrant Caribbean civilisation.”
European conquest brought warfare, forced labour, enslavement, dispossession, disease and the destruction of Indigenous political and social life, causing catastrophic population losses across the Caribbean and Guyana.
Indigenous peoples and their descendants nevertheless survived, but many continue to face marginalisation through insecure land tenure, limited recognition of customary territories, inadequate consultation over extractive projects and unequal access to services. In Guyana, these concerns remain closely tied to mining and control of ancestral lands.
In his critique of European colonisation, Chief Corrie paid tribute to the traditional chiefs, or Kaikhs, who resisted centuries of violence. He urged the international community not to erase the realities of early contact, linking historical atrocities to continuing trauma.
“Many of our peoples were utterly destroyed in genocidal warmongering launched by Christopher Columbus and the European savages who followed him.
“The unimaginable horrors our ancestors suffered throughout the centuries still linger in us. We are their descendants, carrying the unresolved intergenerational trauma. As is also the case with our African brothers and sisters, so it is upon their shoulders that we stand together in unity in demanding reparatory justice, for we are all the lingering evidence of the greatest crime in recorded human history.”
Corrie said the conference’s theme of reparatory justice must be an active “clarion call to action”. While praising CARICOM for providing political and financial support to the CARICOM Reparations Commission (CRC) since its establishment in 2013, he cautioned that national governments should not treat indigenous leaders as window dressing in public relations campaigns.
“By agreeing to provide political oversight and financial support to the CRC, CARICOM placed itself on the right side of history,” he said. “However, reparations must start in the territories of the indigenous survivors. Please do not merely invite us into the process as a public relations afterthought.”
Corrie challenged historical misconceptions about indigenous bondage, noting that Amerindians were not only the first people subjected to chattel slavery in the Western Hemisphere, but were also among the last. He referred to European rubber plantations in South America, where indigenous peoples faced forced labour well into the 20th century.
“Neither shall we forget that not only were Amerindians the first people subjected to chattel plantation slavery by Europeans in the Americas, but unbeknownst to most of us, Amerindians were in fact also the last people to be enslaved in this hemisphere,” he said, citing rubber plantation slavery that persisted in the Amazonian Putumayo province until 1926.
Despite international instruments intended to safeguard native populations, indigenous voices across the region continued to be suppressed, leaving communities marginalised and frequently landless, he said, urging CARICOM member states to enforce International Labour Convention 169 and the 2016 American Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples as minimum standards for governance.
“Survivors of these crimes against humanity remain traumatised, often landless, and are the most marginalised social group within the region,” Corrie said. “We submit that despite international declarations, the indigenous voice remains largely ignored and, more often than we want to believe, aggressively suppressed.”
Looking ahead to the relaunch of CARICOM’s revised ten-point reparations plan, Corrie said an indigenous peoples development programme must be fully integrated into any regional strategy. Such initiatives, he said, were needed to address centuries of neglect and allow native communities to thrive.
He also appealed to regional governments to use education and advocacy to unite the wider public behind the cause of justice: “We call on CARICOM governments, who are charged with the responsibility to initiate reparatory justice programmes, to educate, motivate, and inspire the people of our collective and united Caribbean civilisation.
“We must ensure that present and future generations realise the full benefit from the human efforts being made on their behalf.”
The Taíno, Arawakan-speaking Indigenous peoples, moved into the Caribbean from northern South America more than 2 000 years ago.
By the time of European contact, Taíno communities were prominent across the Greater Antilles, the Bahamas and parts of the northern Lesser Antilles, sustaining settled societies based on cassava cultivation, fishing, trade, craft production and chiefly leadership.
Barbados lay at the eastern edge of this wider Indigenous Caribbean world. Archaeology records successive Amerindian occupations at multiple sites stretching from Chancery Lane, Christ Church, to Heywoods, St Peter, with evidence of Saladoid, Troumassoid and later Suazoid cultures.
But, historians and archaeologists have cautioned against describing Barbados simply as a Taíno island, as the island’s pre-colonial communities had their own changing cultural traditions.
There was no Indigenous population recorded when the English settled Barbados in 1627. (RR)
