In April 2022, I joined a group of Maroon descendants and allies at the United Nations headquarters in New York, where the 21st Session of the Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues (UNPFII) was being held.
As a shell blows to settle the meeting, I look around the General Assembly room and catch the eye of Trinidadian activist Akilah Jaramogi. It is largely due to her constant encouragement that we are there at all.
It’s a journey that began for him as a teenager – running from home and into the hills, answering the call of Rastafari, and eventually becoming the Paramount Chief of the Merikin Maroons of Trinidad. Their ancestors in the United States had escaped slavery by fighting for the British in the 1812-14 war, for which they received land grants in Trinidad – and their freedom.
There are other Maroon communities throughout the Caribbean – in Barbados, Belize, Dominica, Guadeloupe, Jamaica, Martinique, St. Vincent, Suriname, Trinidad & Tobago – and further afield in Sierra Leone and the Gullah/Geechee Nation (USA).
All, at one time or another, were involved in armed conflicts, calculated uprisings, or heavy bloodshed in opposition to slavery. Some – such as in Jamaica and Suriname – eventually received land rights through treaties signed with colonial authorities (some of which fell into gray areas after independence).
But Marronage is more than a rejection or escape from oppression – it’s about deliberately creating something to direct to. And this goes beyond concrete land rights.
In the Americas, the accepted meaning of indigenous refers to the Taino, Kalinago, Warao, and the peoples that our history books wrongly teach us have been erased. But if erasure is the war of the colonized, Marronage is the weapon.
What this “indigenous” identifier offers is recognition and respect for spiritual and agricultural practices; the right to education on the history and culture of these groups; the right to learn languages lost due to colonial erasure; and reparations in the fullest sense – repairing 500 years of violent loss through true justice and equality.
The 2014 Maroon Women’s Chamber was founded by Akilah Jaramogi, Gaman Gloria “Mama G” Simms and Fidelia Grand-Galon Cooperation.
What followed in 2018 was a flurry of meetings, visits and conversations with elders – from Jamaica to the Gullah Islands, Switzerland to Suriname. In 2019, the three women made their first visit to UNPFII to begin pushing for the Chestnuts in the Americas to be recognized as tribal/indigenous peoples as legally defined by the UN.
Not everyone is happy with this.
orAs the UN meetings progress, we encounter both interest and suspicion among the delegates. It is suggested that we may rightfully belong to the Permanent Forum on People of African Descent, scheduled to have its first meeting in December 2022.
Our legal representative Andy Reid reminds us that we are not there to seek recognition, but simply to assert who we are. In a meeting with Francisco Cali Tzay, the UN Special Rapporteur on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, he asks: “How do you define yourself?” Self-identification is what matters most.
Can groups of people of African descent self-identify as indigenous?
There is legal precedent for this in two decisions of the Inter-American Court of Human Rights, both involving Maroon communities in Suriname. In 2007, the court found that the Saramaka were a “tribal people” with a collective human right to communal title, use and protection of their traditional territory and natural resources. He cited the 2005 case that recognized the cultural and spiritual rights of the N’djuka Maroons in response to a massacre in the village of Moiwana.
Both decisions recognized that Maroon peoples have a spiritual relationship and ancestral connection to the lands they occupy – and that their roots in the indigenous peoples of Africa were the source of their “distinctive” social, cultural and economic character. They proved that the Maroon peoples of the Americas have preserved and evolved their African indigeneity into the peoples they are today.
To understand what it means to be a Maroon is to look long and deep into Caribbean history. It is to think of the first sight of the first boat of conquistadors that reached the Caribbean. One can only imagine what words the Taino and Kalinago people had to create in their own languages to help understand these new visitors who quickly turned into enemies.
It is to understand the complexities of these relationships and how they are further complicated by colorism, religious assimilation, centuries of violence, the rage of a people tapped and interrupted, and the grief of not knowing when the work of repair will be completed. bottom.
It is to imagine your ancestor trying to understand the end of a slave ship. It’s to feel the midday sun and realize the danger in plotting your escape—or worse, plotting to overthrow your captors.
It is to think about the complexity of survival.
orAt the UN, part of the unpleasant work we identify during our side meetings is dealing with all the instances where we have not acted as each other’s allies. Mama G went on record this year apologizing for the role some maroons played in the brutal suppression of numerous uprisings by enslaved peoples, including the famous Takyi Rebellion in Jamaica in the 1760s – which also catalyzed the introduction of the first Caribbean laws against Obeah.
One of our contingent, Garifuna Ambassador Cynthia Ellis, addresses the Forum with a plea for unity, for our islands to be borderless. Boundless in the face of oppression is what it means to be Garifuna. A united force of people coming together: Africans rescued from a shipwrecked slave ship by the Kalinago people of St. Vincent, and through generations of complications creating a new nation to wage war against British slavery.
This is part of my story. My Garifuna great grandfather Papa Gimpie was born after Emancipation in the Mesopotamia Valley in St. Vincent. It is what draws me to this UN meeting and this movement to restore lost links, not only with one island, but with the entire region.
It is his name that I call the day we visit the monument to the victims of the Atlantic slave trade on the premises of the UN headquarters. There are tears on our cold faces as Kenrich Cairo of the Okanisi people of Suriname sings for the lost. With us, pouring libations to the ancestors, is Mireille Fanon Mendes-France – human rights lawyer and daughter of the late Martinican psychiatrist and philosopher Frantz Fanon.
We leave the UN to go on another trip, to another meeting. We share food, coffee and stories. We share solutions for healing, organizing and recovering when harmed by a community member.
History also requires us to look to the future. For the certain uncertainty of climate change; disappearing islands; forced separation from the original homeland; the urgency of preserving different cultures; and what role – if any – do maroons and indigenous peoples play in collectively challenging the social and environmental wounds of imperialism.
This journey—like many stories involving Caribbean people—is long, complicated, and full of twists and turns, with multiple points of starting, stopping, coming back on itself, and walking fearlessly.
And what does a United Maroon Indigenous Peoples mean for the Caribbean? This answer cannot be found in the United Nations.
