between that NDN tumblr confession and that totally awful map, there’s been a lot of dialogue on the erasure of currently living Caribbean NDNs, so I thought it’d be a good time to re-post this:

One of the tenets of the modern historiography of Trinidad is that its former aboriginal inhabitants were practically extinct by the middle of the nineteenth century and that even prior to that Trinidad was virtually a deserted island. As a consequence, Trinidad’s modern cultural development could then be cast as suffering from a dearth of indigeneity. I argue that what is essentially a terra nullius principle is the constructed result of racialized assumptions and naming practices embedded in colonial policy and historical literature of the late 1700s to early 1800s. The enforced silences on Amerindians of many historical sources that now form part of the canon of Trinidadian historiography present a problem of absence, contradicted by ethnographic realities of indigenous presence. Amerindians were increasingly racialized and labeled in a manner that would permit writers to eventually erase them from the historical register. Depictions of the irredeemable savage, romantic primitivist nostalgia, and what I call ‘pathetic primitivism’ mark the writings of the period in question. In the latter case, Amerindians were defined as dwindling in numbers (according to notions of racial purity), and were depicted as child-like, untrue to their heritage, ignorant of their culture, spiritually broken, and lifeless in character. The political economy of this region of the Atlantic world is critical for understanding the interests at work behind the production of these various narratives and images of the Amerindians in Trinidad, ranging from European colonial questions of “Who are the Indians?” to “Where are the Indians?”