INDIGENOUS HISTORY AND IDENTITY IN THE CARIBBEAN

The islands of the Caribbean have a special place in global history. While the first people to inhabit the region arrived relatively late near the tail end of the spread of human beings out of Africa and around the world the islands were the site of the earliest permanent European colonisation of the Americas and the initial focus of the great migration across the Atlantic. As a result, almost all of the peoples who lived in the Caribbean retained deep connections with older societies and cultures, the places they had left one or two or many more generations before. Thus, there was a referencing of mainland civilisations in everything from language to material culture and spirituality. Certainly, the islands were sites of creative activity, which contributed substantially to the development of island identities and loyalties, but this creativity has been seen as typically the product of synergies derived from the bringing together of concepts from outside, and blending them in a process of fusion, hybridity, or creolisation. Within this framework, notions of indigeneity have taken on new meanings and the right of individuals to see themselves as indigenous is questioned, in the light of complex understandings of ancestry and identity.