Saint Vincent and the Grenadines' Three Hundred-Year Fight For Sovereignty with Dr. Garrey Dennie

Sacred land, contested memory, and a centuries-long fight for sovereignty, this conversation with Dr. Garrey Dennie traces the deep antiquity of the Kalinago in St. Vincent, their transformation into a maritime powerhouse, and the strategic choices that delayed European domination for generations. Instead of a single “first contact,” we explore two: the catastrophic arrival of Europeans and the liberatory meeting of Kalinago communities with Africans who escaped or were freed from bondage.

Dr. Dennie unpacks genocide as a 300-year process, where pathogens, forced labor, and scorched-earth campaigns worked in tandem to clear land for sugar and slavery. He explains how the union that produced the Garifuna did more than build solidarity; it created a hybrid identity with immunological resilience that helped communities survive. From the First and Second Carib Wars to the brutal detention on Baliceaux and the mass exile of 1797, we follow the pivotal moments that transformed St. Vincent and, paradoxically, shortened its time as a British slave society through relentless resistance.

We also step inside a landmark scholarly effort: the forthcoming multi-volume Native Genocide and African Enslavement in St. Vincent and the Grenadines. He is one of four Vincentian historians co-authoring the series that restores Indigenous and Garifuna perspectives to the center, bridges archaeology and epidemiology with political history, and invites listeners to reconsider where homeland and belonging truly reside. If you’re ready to move beyond textbook myths and confront the intertwined stories of survival, identity, and power, this episode offers a clear, compelling path forward.

Dr. Garrey Dennie is an Associate Professor of History at St. Mary’s College of Maryland and a founder of its Program in African and African Diaspora Studies.  He obtained his first degree at the University of the West Indies, Cave Hill and his Ph. D at The Johns Hopkins University.  Dr. Dennie has also lectured at the University of the West Indies at the Mona campus in Jamaica.  Dr. Dennie has produced and published original scholarship on the politics of death in modern South Africa. And in the greatest privilege of his life, Dr. Dennie served as a speechwriter for Nelson Mandela in the battle to destroy white rule in apartheid South Africa.

Chapters

• 0:00 Welcome & Episode Focus
• 1:19 Guest Intro & Scholar’s Journey
• 8:16 Kalinago Origins And Antiquity
• 13:40 Maritime Culture And Mixed Economy
• 17:53 Pathogens, Genocide, And Staged Invasion
• 22:58 Two First Contacts: Europe And Africa
• 27:09 Liberation And Hybrid Identity
• 31:17 Wars Of Sovereignty In St. Vincent
• 37:05 Exile, Camps, And Accelerated Genocide
• 41:20 Racial Politics And Divide‑And‑Rule

Transcript

SPEAKER_01: 0:00

Welcome to Strictly Facts, a guide to Caribbean history and culture, hosted by me, Alexandra Miller. Strictly Facts teaches the history, politics, and activism of the Caribbean and connects these themes to contemporary music and popular culture. Hello, hello, Mom Waguan. Welcome back to another episode of Strictly Facts, a guide to Caribbean history and culture. I'm Alexandra Miller, and as always, tremendously excited to bring to the fore more stories of Caribbean history and culture that I believe with greater awareness would make us stronger as a people, especially when these topics are supported and you know underscored by new and upcoming research being published. And so that is definitely the case for today's episode. A while back, we discussed the Garfuna, a group of people that are descended from the unity of enslaved Africans and indigenous Kalingos in St. Vincent and the Grenadines, and who were exiled off their lands, as we talked about from the British Empire as a result of the Carib Wars, and they later relocated to places like Belize and Honduras, etc. And I'm sure we'll get more into it today. But our last conversation largely explored the periods after their exile and how this group has maintained their identity through migration, racial politics, and culture. Today, however, we are focusing on the history of St. Vincent's original indigenous population, the Kalingos, and their cultural fight before exile in 1797. And so joining me to share this research is Dr. Gary Denny, Associate Professor of History at St. Mary's College of Maryland. Thank you so much for joining us for this episode, Dr. Denny. Before we kick off and talking about the Klingos, why don't you allow our listeners to know a little bit more about you? Of course, where is near and dear to you in the Caribbean, and what really inspired your research in Black history and Caribbean history and your varied work, as I know, in Black liberation movements?

SPEAKER_00: 2:14

That's a kind of cheeky question in some ways and easier in other ways. As a Caribbean man, um, as a historian, there is a sense in which doing the history of the Caribbean becomes intuitive because we want to understand the world within which we live and the means through which that understanding can allow us to shape how we then navigate, you know, and produce a different kind of um you know experience for our people. Um, so in that sense, the role of the criminal historian is both as a scholar to make sense of the past, but also as an architect of the future, which is to say um how do we use this knowledge in a way to um give our people a platform within which they can construct for themselves a history different from the brutalities that we have experienced. So, in that sense, you know, if you if you do a you know a degree in in history, as I did at K-Vail at the University of the West Indies, there's always a kind of intuitive momentum towards seeking to make sense of the Caribbean. But at the same time, it is also true that in the specific instance of becoming a trained historian, which is different from um that innate desire to know the Caribbean past, a trained historian means that you have to go through the processes of disciplinary training through which we create knowledge and have that knowledge evaluated by our peers and become um you know experts in the field of the production of knowledge. In my instance, I began a PhD program with focusing on the history of South Africa. And so my PhD is in African history, and the specific focus of my study, my dissertation, and my first sets of publications had to do with South Africa. And it is true that the liberation movement in South Africa was an essential part of my experience because in that process, I also became um, you know, uh a speechwriter for Nelson Mandela at the moment that apartheid was fracturing. I was there in the trenches, I like to say these days, taking part in that. Um you know what was a titanic struggle to end white supremacy, in the most brutal form of white supremacy in the world at the time. But the desire to do Caribbean history and to return to Caribbean history, um, I was actually telling my daughter Nika this morning about that history, its trajectory. That what happened is that um in the beginning of the 21st century, St. Vincent and the Guananines elevated Chateer, Joseph Chateier, to the position of our first national hero. So that was a very important uh moment. Okay, now aligned to that fact is that the Gary Funa in Belize saw this as this um pivotal moment as well in their belongingness to St. Vincent. And so you had a Gary Funa, I would say, pilgrimage, a return to St. Vincent, a reclamation of that heritage. And what was surprising to me as a trained historian and also as a Vincentian who did a first degree at the University of the West Indies in the 1980s and who did a PhD at Johns Hopkins, that I was unaware of a central part of the guy Funer's collective memory. That is, for the guy Funa, um St. Vincent was sacred land. Whereas in the context of my broader African diaspora sensibilities, Africa was the sacred land. And so that kind of gap between the broad African diaspora sense of Africa as the homeland and the guy Funa sense of St. Vincent as the homeland, that gap and that fact that that knowledge was absent from me was you know a kind of intellectual shock and a psychological shock. Okay, and and so that became essentially the catalyst for this um new departure point in my own intellectual history to make sense of the Gaifuna, to focus on the Gaifuna, to focus on St. Vincent, and to be engaged in in the research and presenting and writing of Vincentian history. That in a nutshell is how that journey unfolded.

SPEAKER_01: 7:02

And one that I think is especially timely, as I've mentioned, with an upcoming publication of a multi-volume work that you've really been working on with other Vincentian historians with your support of the national government. And this first volume is called Native Genocide and African Enslavement in St. Vincent and the Grenadines. And so just you know, to sort of bring back to your point, right, that you know, this awareness not only needs to be more deeply studied, but one that, you know, we are doing the work within ourselves, um, within our nations and our islands to do. So thank you so much for that. I think just to you know, to really start, I think, is to really understand where the Klingos had descended from when we think of St. Vincent and the Grenadines. Um, they were able to also, you know, prevent widespread European colonization in St. Vincent for quite some time. And so could you sort of situate us historically on their origins and some of that sort of more integral information before we get into um some of the politics of the colonization?

SPEAKER_00: 8:07

My preferred word is Kalinagos. Um, that's my preferred word to describe the um the first peoples who arrived in St. Vincent. One of the ways to look at this history, both in the specifics of St. Vincent and um in the broader contours of Caribbean history, is that the occupation of the Caribbean, the transformation of the Caribbean islands into places fit for human habitation, that process would have begun really about 7,000 years ago when we had people leaving South America, basically it's Venezuela, going across to Trinidad, which is the closest point to Venezuela. And then because the Caribbean constitutes an archipelago, having the capacity to hop from an island to another over um thousands of years. One of the um instructive points about that archipelago and the geography of the Caribbean islands is that once you are in one island, okay, you have the capacity to see another island. And because of that geographical feature, it allows for um travel, which would ultimately allow the first peoples to um to colonize the Caribbean, you know, 7,000 years ago, in the instance of the first movement into Trinidad. And in the case of St. Vincent, about 5,000 years ago, that they would have stayed for about 2,000 years in Trinidad before they moved on further into places like Grenada and St. Vincent, and then of course head up the China Islands, you know, to you know, whether it's Jamaica or Puerto Rico or the Bahamas and so on. Some would have migrated as well from Central America. But the first movement began from South America into Trinidad and coming out along the archipelago of islands. So, in the instance of St. Vincent, the people that we would call the Kalinago first arrived about 5,000 years ago. So they were the founders of Vincentian, you know, culture of life, so to speak, a habit of civilization, where human beings enter a land where no one was. Absolutely virgin territory in the truest sense of the word and transformed it into an abode of human habitation, the beginning point 5,000 years ago.

SPEAKER_01: 10:28

I'm fast-forwarding a little bit through time or significantly through time, given that history. But what were some of the you know prevailing customs and you know, sort of cultural identity markers as you're describing for us, that made, you know, the Kalinago central to, you know, building up what we now know as St. Vincent and the Grenadines?

SPEAKER_00: 10:50

They would have left South America at least 3,000 years ago because they were really fundamentally two waves. The first wave was that of um, you know, hunter-gathering, fishing people, and the second wave was um that of agrarian um people. But broadly speaking, when they left South America as agrarian people and they entered the Caribbean, they were transformed into maritime people because the islands um impose a certain kind of um control over your mode of production, or you go about the business of securing yourself and your progeny and so on. So the control of the seas, you know, having access to fish, developing um, you know, fishing techniques and so on, this would be very, very different from the life that they would have experienced in South America. So I think it is crucial to recognize that there was a transformative aspect. But you also had some continuities with South American um ancestral origins, particularly the place of Cassava became a staple crop. And so that remained fundamental as part of how they um they got to transform the central land into a life-giving place for planting food and so on. And so you have a kind of um mixed economy that emerges in St. Vincent and across all the Caribbean Islands with a maritime focus in significant ways missing from the um from the South American experience. If you're looking for a fundamental shift, it is that maritime culture that emerges as part of having to live within these islands.

SPEAKER_01: 12:28

There is that quick story that they give of Columbus coming and you know, decimating the native populations and then enslavement, right? Um, but to really critically understand that indigenous populations lived and you know, inhabited these lands for thousands of years, I think is one that we don't always really hear in a very integral way, as you're you're putting it to us. And so I'm I'm definitely grateful for you sharing that history um and hoping that it underscores or helps to reshape what we know about indigenous communities within the Caribbean that even, you know, as we're talking, still presently exist.

SPEAKER_00: 13:06

I'm glad that you picked it up. The antiquity of human habitation in the Caribbean is something which has not really well been understood or expressed in a manner that um recognizes its its enormous historic significance. As a scholar in African history and elsewhere, that notion that antiquity is in and of itself, one might even say, a virtue of the human presence elsewhere is deeply acknowledged, whether one is looking at um at the emergence of Egyptian civilization or Sumerian civilization and all of these um places that that go back for thousands of years. But within the Caribbean, in Trinidad, in St. Vincent and elsewhere, we have had human um presence there that go back thousands of years before Europeans arrived. And and the the legacies of that um you know, extended presence remain with us, even though, of course, um, you know, the the arrival of Columbus would corrupt the trajectory of the history which had unfolded over thousands of years before those ships came in from Spain.

SPEAKER_01: 14:13

On that point, because I think it it definitely gets to obviously what is key in this upcoming volume that you're a part of is this factor of genocide and what happens several thousand years later when these native indigenous communities do come in contact with European settlers. Um, and so could you sort of walk us through what that first contact looked like, as well as, you know, as a result of that first contact with Europeans, what the first contact with enslaved Africans also looked like for these indigenous communities, and what were sort of the consequences as a result?

SPEAKER_00: 14:49

Wonderful. You did two things there, which is often missed. Usually, when people speak of first contact, um, they think of it in the context of Europeans and indigenous peoples in America. But in fact, as you recognize, there's actually two first contacts. There's one involving Europeans and indigenous peoples, but there's also another equally important involving indigenous peoples and Africans. And in St. Vincent in particular, that double kind of phenomena is of central importance in trying to um, you know, make sense of the Vincenzian historical experience. But as to the issue of genocide in particular, there are two other elements which need to be noted. The European arrival in the Caribbean is genocidal in and of itself. And that is because the assurance which the oceans provided, the Atlantic Ocean provided an assurance of protection from um the pathogenic danger that you know Europeans represented. Okay, so absent, you know, Columbus crossing um the ocean, then Europeans pathogens remain in Europe. Okay, Columbus arrives, and those pathogens that come with Columbus, they are automatically a tremendous threat to indigenous peoples. If we want um a modern-day analogy, all we have to do is to look at the COVID experience. That um a new pathogen emerges, and a new pathogen emerges, and it's a threat to global health because we do not have an immunological um you know memory of this disease. And hence, you know, lots of us become deeply susceptible, and um, some of us died, millions died as a consequence of this exposure to a pathogen human beings had never been exposed to before. We have to multiply that, you know, you know, 10,000 times to understand the impact of Columbus's arrival here in America's. Okay, it became essentially mass murder. You know, it's genocidal, millions were dying. So even without intentionality, and we're gonna have to uh impose intentionality into that framework, but even without intentionality, the very arrival of Europeans here was a pathogenic um you know nightmare for the indigenous peoples. But the intentionality also existed, which is to say that Columbus set out to enslave and to rape and pillage and to do all these awful things. And from the moment, you know, there's this deliberate effort to enslave, to pillage, to rape, and all of these things, that too enhances or intensifies the pathogenic um genocidal consequence of Columbus and company arrival here. And that would continue for several hundred years, it didn't simply stop, okay. And that is particularly important in the context of St. Vincent and the Grenadines because the Caribbean Sea is one of the um largest seas in the world. It's nearly a thousand miles between a place like St. Vincent and Puerto Rico. Columbus arrived in the Northern Caribbean first, and so the effort to seize control of Caribbean Islands began in the Northern Caribbean first. And indigenous peoples from St. Vincent, Dominica, and elsewhere actually traveled that distance in the 1500s to engage in the battle to stop that aggression launched by Europeans against their indigenous brothers and sisters in the north, and in so doing, it also delayed the penetration of European presence in the southern Caribbean. So, what that meant is that the the genocide proceeded in stages geographically and chronologically, the northern Caribbean first, and we're looking at the 1500s and the 1600s, but it's moving southward to enter the Southern Caribbean, and they're being fought every step of the way by indigenous peoples, and so that ultimately, okay, by the time the British arrive in St. Vincent and defeat the Garifuna in battle in 1797, that is the final battle of a 300-year struggle to prevent European penetration and you know to withstand the threat of genocide. So the genocidal onslaught is a 300-year onslaught, and it is episodic in terms of which specific island or group of islands have to confront this reality. And so St. Vincent becomes the last battleground because the seas are provided, in part, a defense a thousand miles away, but also the heroic resistance on the part of indigenous peoples, first the Kalinago, and then that um the Gaipuna will become the union of Kalinago and African peoples. Um that guaranteed that genocide would sweep across the Caribbean um more slowly than it otherwise might have done. But it makes sense to see the genocidal um process as a 300-year process.

SPEAKER_01: 20:04

At the end there, you touched on the union of the Kalinago and enslaved Africans in terms of what then becomes the Garafuna. So, do you also want to share um what this first contact between the Kalinago and the Africans during this time was like?

SPEAKER_00: 20:20

Excellent, because it's the gateway for the early question on first contact, recognizing that there are two first contacts. The first when the European is genocidal, the second one the Africans is not, and that is interesting. Okay, it's interesting in this regard. We have evidence of the Carinago people engaging these battles with the um Spaniards and others in the 1500s. We also have evidence that in some cases where Africans had been um enslaved by the Spaniards, that they were, for me, um, liberated by Kalinago people and taken to places like St. Vincent and Dominican elsewhere. So the first contact within the Caribbean between the Kalinago people and Africans was an act of liberation, of freeing them from Spanish monacles where they were under the control of Spanish slaveholders. And so, as a social and political act, that is that is what we see. Um, what is also true, however, is that it also meant that the processes of the exchange of genes between Africans and indigenous peoples and equipment would have begun in the 1500s. So new hybridized populations um would come into existence um slowly at first, and it would accelerate over time. What is crucial here is this the threat which Europeans pathogens presented to indigenous peoples, that threat was far less CVM in the instance of Africans. And the reason for this is that Africa, Europe, and Asia constituted a single epidemiological zone because it's it's contiguous turkey. So over millennia, um, you know, people and pathogens would have moved back and forth, producing then similarities in the immune capabilities of Africans, Asians, and Europeans. And so what that meant is once you begin to have um Africans producing children with indigenous peoples, you had the transfer of African immunological capabilities to indigenous peoples. Okay, and and so the consequence of that is that it will begin to offer protection for indigenous peoples who would anarchise in in the Northern Caribbean, but in the in the Southern Caribbean, as this kind of contact multiplied and in St. Vincent would ultimately produce a dominant hybridized population of Africans and indigenous peoples, they would, in effect, immunologically protected against the further um you know in roads of European diseases. So, in that sense, I like to think of it as um, you know, the Kalinago people first liberated Africans from European enslavement in the 1500s and so on. And then Africans um, you know, gift to the Kalinago, so to speak, was a genetic um legacy which would um prevent them from being completely wiped off the map by producing a new hybridized population with an immune system much more capable of resisting European pathogens.

SPEAKER_01: 23:50

And this is what we now name as the Garafuna people. So thank you so much for I think, you know, not only presenting that history, but I think framing it in a way as that liberation and the gifting back, I think is one that we don't typically, you know, hear, not only here, but you know, really understanding ways that these distinct communities built bridges amongst themselves, particularly in St. Vincent and the Grenadines. Um, I think this point in the sort of lineage of what we're talking about also brings us to the Carib Wars, the first and the second Carib War, which is obviously a rather complicated history of you know, decades of fighting um on behalf of, you know, these indigenous and African um and mixed communities really wanting to maintain their freedom and ownership of their land before you know this 1797 point. And so um, could you sort of walk us through not only the wars briefly, but also I think it is a rather complicated history. You know, they are also exiled before even before exile, they're put in concentration camps and various islands and all of these things. Um, and so how does this sort of impact um your study on this mass genocide within St. Vincent?

SPEAKER_00: 25:09

One of the benefits of recognizing genocide as a 300-year process is that um it also allows you to indicate moments in time when you have um an acceleration of the genocidal assault against the Caribbean indigenous peoples. You know, um when you model genocide um in the kind of um, you know, the Germans killed Israelis between 1939 and 1945, and after that, the genocide is over. And so you you have their beginning point and end point, it's such a six-year process and so on. That is not what took place in the Caribbean. Okay, what we have is a 300-year salt, and within that time frame across these different islands, there are moments when the genocide is accelerated based on the specific context or circumstances of time. Okay, so when you're looking at St. Vincent, which had become um, you know, uh a refuge ultimately in that um continuing battle between Europeans and indigenous peoples, okay, and become one of the last, and ultimately the final ground upon which these battles would be fought. A pivotal moment arrives in um in 1763, um, because what that um that has to do with the British and the French, particularly deciding among themselves that the French, who had passed 100 years, sought to obtain um indigenous acceptance to enter St. Vincent and set up their um sugar factories or different types of um you know agricultural um enterprises in St. Vincent and make their own claims that St. Vincent belonged to them and so on. By 1763, they they come to an understanding with the with the British by treaty that um the French would give up any pretense and any legal claim within European courts, let's call it that a European international law, you know, to um to St. Vincent as a French colonial possession, and that this would now be a land owned by the British. Except there's a problem. The problem is that the guy Funna Ayn St. Vincent, and there's probably about 10,000 of them, and their claims to sovereignty over St. Vincent, that claim actually would have um been established several hundred years before Columbus and company got to the Caribbean in the first place. So, from the perspective of the Kalinago and then their Gaifuna descendants, because we have to see it as lineage from the Kalinago to the Gaifuna, they are the biological descendants of the Kalinago. Um, St. Vincent is theirs. Okay, and so what that meant is that they understood that this was a trap, the British presence was a trap to their sovereignty. So these kind wars, as um, you know, some historians would call them, um, we refer to them as the wars of sovereignty, because that is precisely what the um, you know, guy fooner um they're fighting to preserve. These are existential struggles, as we should see. So there's a simplicity there if we recognize that the British are making a claim to the ownership of St. Vincent, because they want to now do to St. Vincent what they have done to Barbados and St. Lucia and Jamaica and all of these other places, transform St. Vincent into a slave society, make St. Vincent part of this um, you know, sugar revolution, sugar and slaves. Now, one has to understand that St. Vincent um in the 1700s had become a society with slaves. That is to say, the British and the French had already enslaved Africans in St. Vincent. But simultaneously, the Garifuna were also exercising sovereignty over St. Vincent, and the Garifuna were not slaves. And so you have dual sovereignty claims being made, competing sovereignty claims, those of the indigenous peoples, you know, whose presence go back to 5,000 years, whose biological um you know antecedents go back to 5,000 years. And then you have the British arriving and saying, okay, we and the French have come to an agreement that um this is now exclusively ours. And so the guy Funa um cannot be allowed to maintain the rulership of St. Vincent, their claims over land, and so on. And the only way you could do that is by war. That's the only way. And war is in and of itself not even sufficient. You have to continue the process of genocide, you have to remove them from the land, you have to banish them from St. Vincent forever. Because only in that sense would it be possible for this larger British project of transforming St. Vincent into a slave society for British exploitation safely take place. And so it is in that context that you have an accelerated genocide that takes place in St. Vincent in those wars of sovereignty between 1763 and 1797. So that is essentially a 30-year process. And within that period, the British are saying, you know, from time to time, we see this in many of the official documents, that what they need to do is to remove the guy Funa from St. Vincent completely, to deny their patrimony in St. Vincent, to deny their indigenity to St. Vincent, and hence legitimize in their mind and whatever moral codes that they claim for themselves, that what they were doing was perfectly legal, perfectly moral, and so on. But within the context of the Guy Funa's history of Vincentian habitation, this was a war for sovereignty, a war for their existence. And in 1797, when the war broke out, the final um phase of that war broke out in 1795, and um is completed most of it around 1797, which then says the British would exercise maximum force, naval power, um, land power, um, overwhelming um combat power would be brought to the battlefield to ultimately overcome the indigenous resistance in St. Vincent's sculpture policies, where you you kill men, women and children, you starve them to death. You will do all of these things only so that you could have access to the land. And then you ultimately have the round it up and depositing the defeated Gaifuna in Bali Soul, where they took something over 4,000 plus and half died from lack of water, lack of food. So it was again, this is what I mean when I speak of the accelerated genocide, these different phases of how genocide proceeded within the Caribbean, and ultimately that banishment from St. Vincent into um Central America. So the wars of sovereignty and the genocide that unfolded, or the accelerated genocide that unfolded within those years, were part of the matrix of understandings that the British constructed as to how to transform St. Vincent into a slave society, it would not be possible to do so without first removing the Gaifuna. So, what this means is that the history of African enslavement in St. Vincent after um you know 1797 or its transformation into slave society was inextricably linked to the history of the wars between the Gaifuna and the British. And the consequence of that is that St. Vincent became the very last place in the world, in the British world, to be a slave society, hence, would spend the shortest amount of time in the Caribbean, in the British Caribbean as a slave society. So, once more, that is the gift that the indigenous peoples would give to um African peoples in the Caribbean, that they shortened the time of slavery, they shortened the transformation of St. Vincent, they delayed the transformation of St. Vincent into slave society, where every single element of that society was governed by the exploitation of African labor for the purposes of profit.

SPEAKER_01: 33:45

Bridging off that point, and you know, how you outlined that there are these three claims that are being made to the land itself. Um, when we get to that point of 1797, and you know, these populations are being exiled, put in concentration camps, etc., uh, there is a moment of um kind of racial politics at play when it's those who are, you know, more African presenting in a sense, um, being definitively cast out. Whereas if you potentially had more, you know, indigenous traits, to an extent, some of those peoples were more allowed to remain on the island. And so, could you sort of note for us how this creates a sort of relationship between this 300 years of genocide, of slavery, and the the relationship between the two when we think about some of these racial politics happening?

SPEAKER_00: 34:41

Well, um, excellent question. One of the things we have to always remind ourselves is that the Europeans at the time, and this is inclusive of the British, their knowledge of biology was fundamentally limited. Genetics as a science didn't exist. And so their capacity to distinguish between the Gaifuna and the Kalinago, they would call the Gaifuna the Black Caribs, they would call the Kalinago the Yellow Caribs, they would maintain those frames of distinction throughout their aggression against the indigenous um peoples in St. Vincent. Okay, so what they meant when they said Black Caribs is that these were the union of African peoples and indigenous peoples who had produced um a sense of themselves as a specific identity and um created the political community, um, exercised claims of sovereignty and the capacity to resist penetration by Europeans against St. Vincent. When they spoke and wrote of the Yellow Caribs, okay, what they said is that these are the indigenous peoples who were there before Africans um entered, and that they constituted a separate political and economic and cultural entity and so on. Now we have to be careful of those distinctions, okay, on two grounds. Because again, you know, Mendelian genetics, which the British would never have understood at the time, you know, biological um, you know, advancement doesn't exist, okay, would have meant, as I indicated, from first contact between Africans and indigenous peoples in the 1500s, that exchange of genes had already begun to take place. And so by this, by the 1700s, that exchange of genes would have been 200 years plus old. And the notion that you could somehow, by a person's features, know who's pure Kalinago, that notion is nonsensical. There is no such thing as a pure Kalinago in the 1700s, not in an island as small as St. Vincent, where over generations, you know, men and women are you know producing children, you know, as men and women do. But the where one lives and one's physical features um could allow these physical characteristics, you know, that's how racism works. The use of physical characteristics, you know, to denote a specific group and then add all kinds of um you know characteristics to that group in all kinds of ways. So the same process is at work, and in this instance, it is to distinguish what they see as the genuine threat to British um you know dominance of St. Vincent, the Kalinago people slash Black Arabs from those whom they deem to be not as threatening the Kalinago people slash the uh the Yellow Caribs. So Gaifuna slash Black Caribs, Kalinago slash um Yellow Caribs. But these same Kalinago, who they now call in the tame people, were the ones who were leading the fight in the 1500s and the 1600s. So all of a sudden they become tame. Okay, it makes no sense. The Gaifuna spoke the same language, the culture was identical, their fate was identical. So for the Kalinago, this was their brothers, sisters, cousins, ancestors, they had become a unified people. But political communities um you know can be maintained or created through divide and rule strategies and so on. And the smaller group of people who may have identified themselves as the so-called um, you know, yellow crimes in the British terminology, um, they saw as this lesser threat, and hence they deemed those peoples to be um capable of remaining, but they were smaller numbers. The vast majority of the people vanished from St. Vincent. And so there's a kind of um self-rationalizing that takes place. We will keep a smaller numbers and say that they're the yellow Caribs, and we'll send away the vast number of people and call them the Black Caribs. But of course, these dreams of the Garavuna and the Kalinago are all now intermixed in a way that is has become indistinguishable. So we should see these as social and political um you know strategies on the part of the British to divide and rule indigenous peoples of St. Vincent and justify the mass expulsion of the vast majority of Indigenous peoples on the basis that they were not indigenous.

SPEAKER_01: 39:20

I think this is a tremendous conversation as you've walked us through, um, just because it challenges some of these more simplistic notions, right? Of genocide, of indigenous histories, of sovereignty and claims to these lands. And so while I usually um in these episodes ask for several, you know, recommendations of texts that are, you know, bring together this history. I think this volume that you and your colleagues are working on, or these set of volumes that are coming out, um, will be tremendous in helping us more deeply understand the roots of these histories, um particularly for St. Vincent and the Grenadines. And so with that, um I just want to ask you from a author and historian perspective, you've been working on this, these volumes, the first of which is debuting shortly. Um, what has it been like to not only work on history of St. Vincent as a Vincenzient, work on it alongside other ventrient historians and your colleagues, um, and do so in ways that are supported by the government? Um, what has this collective process been like? And how do you hope that these volumes really transform the understandings for venture at home and abroad?

SPEAKER_00: 40:39

Um, that's a wonderful question indeed. Um, my my colleagues are top class, um, Dr. Asian Fraser, who actually um, you know, could reclaim, if he so wishes, to be my intellectual father, because he taught me in high school and introduced me to the um to the more rigorous way to think of history, to be working alongside um, you know, Dr. Fraser, um, who was my teacher, is an honor uh in and of itself. Um, I'm also working alongside Dr. Clee Scott, um, whose um encyclopedic knowledge and um research capabilities, uh, you know, and the history of St. Vincent is clearly um unrivaled. And he teaches at the University of West Indies, Kevil. And Dr. Thomas, um, you know, who is also um he's been working in this field um at least since the 1970s. So he has like a 50-year um, you know, kind of um, you know, anchor within the um research and writing of the intention historical um experience. So against these men who have um spent decades of their lives um you know developing this corpus of knowledge of St. Vincent, um, I am humbled by the opportunity to work with them and show that work, you know, offer some, I would say, you know, my own kind of insights as to how we can think of this material. So it has been an exceedingly productive relationship in terms of having to work alongside these fellow authors. And um what it has also meant, however, as Vincentians, and in part you you've got the answer that you have an interpretive posture, uh you know, um sense as to how we view the Vincentian experience in a way that um you uh unlike to find elsewhere or expressed in the same fashion. So this is what is so crucial about um doing the Vincentian historical experience. Because in history, we want to, um in terms of the Caribbean, see where St. Vincent fits into the broader um contours of Caribbean history. Yet simultaneously, we want to understand the specific um, you know, elements of St. Vincent, which give this um this history, you know, a particularity that um that we see now place else, because that is part of the the the um the whole project of you know of understanding how history unfolds. You know, some things may ultimately be quite different. So we want to have a you know to see where St. Vincent fits into that large larger tapestry of the Caribbean experience and so on. And we're eternally grateful to the government of St. Vincent and the Grenadines for conceptualizing the idea that the history of St. Vincent ought to be um written and to choose to fund it as they are doing. So in all of these different ways, I am really um you know very, very happy to be working at this time in this field with um with federal intentional historians.

SPEAKER_01: 43:45

Well, I am certainly looking forward to these series of texts, I think, you know, again, to really transform um that pre-colonial history, especially, I think is one that is particularly interesting to me, just as, you know, for us to understand that that our our stories did not start with Columbus, right? As they're often simplified. And so for us to have a deeper understanding of that pre-colonial history and as well the connections that result from, you know, these first contacts, especially between enslaved Africans and indigenous communities. And so with that, I will bring us to a close. I hope our listeners who are tuned in are as excited for these volumes as I am. I will be sure to link, you know, this first volume and the subsequent ones for our listeners online on our website, um, as well as across social media. So definitely be sure to keep an eye out for Native Genocide and African enslavement in St. Vincent and the Grenadines, published soon by Dr. Denny and his colleagues, as he mentioned. I'm certainly looking forward to it. Um, and I hope all of our listeners are as well. And so, with that, thank you, Dr. Denny, for sharing so much of your wisdom and experience with us. Um, and congrats, of course, again on this you know major accomplishment for this first set in the volumes.

SPEAKER_00: 45:07

Thank you so much.

SPEAKER_01: 45:09

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