Carib

The term Carib has traditionally described the indigenous people of the Lesser Antilles, those tribes inhabiting the Orinoco and Amazon River valleys in South America, and a language family.

The most accurate term to describe the people who inhabited the Lesser Antilles is Island Carib. The inhabitants of the Orinoco and Amazon River valleys should be referred to by their individual, tribal names, and Cariban is the proper name for the language family of these people.

Early colonizers constantly referred to the Island Carib as fierce and aggressive warriors because they resisted European expansion into the islands so fervently. Europeans contrasted the Island Carib with the Taino by portraying the Taino as pacific. The assumed warlike nature of the Island Carib so captured the imagination of Europeans that they named the Caribbean Sea after these people. Additionally, the term cannibal is derived from the name Carib, even though evidence of this practice among the Island Carib is scanty at best.

Scholars debate the origins and actual identity of the Island Carib. Some believe they were simply another branch of the Taino, and others argue that these people were recent arrivals from mainland South America related to the Cariban-speaking people of the Orinoco and Amazon River basins. Most likely, the Island Carib represented a merger of Taino who occupied most of the West Indies with the late arriving Cariban speakers. Island Carib oral traditions maintained that they had recently arrived in the Lesser Antilles just before the arrival of Christopher Columbus in 1492 and married the wives of the men they had defeated and killed. The fact that Island Carib females and children spoke Taino (an ArawAkan language) and adult males spoke a Cariban pidgin gives credence to their oral traditions. The Island Carib perpetuated this situation by having the females and children live in residences separate from the adult males. The men obtained wives through raids on the Taino and practiced polygyny. In general, women were subservient to men and had to use the Carib pidgin language when addressing them. The Island Carib’s close alliance with the Cariban-speaking Galibi on the islands of Grenada and Tobago and other Cariban speakers on the South American mainland also testifies to their probable late arrival in the islands of the West Indies.

The Island Carib subsisted by farming primarily manioc and sweet potatoes and supplementing these horticultural products with fish, shellfish, turtles, agouti, rice rats, and iguanas. The Island Carib also grew cotton, and they made beer that they consumed on social and ceremonial occasions. This last practice was not evident among the Taino. Island Carib villages consisted of circular huts for the women and children built around a rectangular men’s structure. They maintained an egalitarian society that exhibited hierarchy only during warfare, when certain war leaders assumed command of expeditions based on their demonstrated abilities. The Island Carib practiced a shamanistic religion that did not have the organization or multiplicity of gods like that of the Taino.

The material culture of the Island Carib more closely resembled that of the Cariban South American tribes than that of the Taino, especially their ceramics. They made substantial canoes on which their livelihood in warfare and trade depended. In addition to basic ceramics, their home furnishings consisted of stools, baskets, and cotton hammocks. They usually wore only decorative garments, including crescent-shaped gold or copper pieces and green stone pendants, although on special occasions they also wore clothing woven from parrot feathers. In warfare they used a substantial longbow with poisoned arrows, war clubs, blowguns, and noxious gases made from the smoke of hot chili peppers.

In resisting European expansion into the West Indies, Island Carib raided plantations and often escaped with African slaves (see slavery). Usually they adopted these captives into their society. Additionally, runaway slaves and African survivors of shipwrecks frequently fled to Island Carib-controlled areas. After two centuries of this syncretic process, a new ethnic identity emerged on some islands. Europeans called these new people “Black Carib” and feared them even more than the traditional Island Carib. Most of the substantial Island Carib populations that existed during the early years of European colonization of the Lesser Antilles disappeared as a result of the epidemic diseases introduced when Europeans arrived, slave raiding done primarily by the Spanish, and constant warfare with European colonists.

Further reading: Nancy L. Gonzalez, Sojourners of the Caribbean: Ethnogenesis and Ethnohistory of the Garifuna (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1988); Peter Hulme and Neil Lancelot Whitehead, eds, Wild Majesty: Encounters with Caribs from Columbus to the Present Day: An

Anthology (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992); Irving Rouse, The Tainos: Rise and Decline of the People Who Greeted Columbus (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1992); Samuel M. Wilson, ed., The Indigenous People of the Caribbean (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1997).

—Dixie Ray Haggard