Lost

I’ve always been fascinated by that phrase ‘lost at sea,’ the opening line on so many memorial stones in old seafaring communities. Lost is just a synonym for died, but evokes so much more. It doesn’t say you’ve been crushed, burned, shot, drowned, or had a heart attack. Any of those things may have happened. But what matters is that you disappeared, all traces erased.

In a world of hard drives, online histories, YouTube re-runs and surgical inventions to cheat ageing, the very concept of disappearing seems incredible, the stuff of science (or children’s) fiction.

Yet here in the jungle-covered island of Dominica a great disappearance, a mass vanishing act, is taking place under our very eyes.

When Christopher Columbus stumbled across the Caribbean half a millennium ago, Dominica and the other coral-bound islands were inhabited not by Indians or Japanese, as he and other Europeans insisted. The people living here were largely Kalinagos and Arawaks, seafaring relatives of the tribes living along the rivers of the South American mainland.

Columbus and those in his wake set about saving these “Indian” souls and, in a historical blink of the eye, wiped them out. Steel, bullets, enslavement, and diseases like smallpox felled otherwise hardy people; the tender mercies of civilization and education ground down the survivors.

Almost no Kalinagos (whom the colonizers called Caribs) or Arawaks remain in the Caribbean today. Their genes, mixed with others, persist in many individuals. Their Latin American branch still thrives. But as Caribbean peoples, the natives whose forefathers conquered these rough waters in open boats and witnessed that first arrival of Columbus’ caravels have gone. Obliterated. Lost at sea.

The final community of Kalinagos, some 3,000 people, clings on in Dominica -- crumpled, waterfall-fed, jungle-tangled Dominica, where we secured “Moon River” to a mooring on the tiny shallow shelf between the coast and plunging, volcanic sea.

Chief of a lost people

The road to the Carib Territory writhes across the island’s steep hills, passing village upon village of the descendants of African slaves who by accident of history have come to inherit and rule the Caribbean. The startling sight of people with Asian, indeed sometimes almost Japanese, features is the first clue that you have arrived in the reserve – and the fact there are so few of them an immediate indication of the tragedy that has taken place.

Meeting us in a quiet (rather too quiet) office, Chief Garnett Joseph was unable to hide his foreboding.

The Kalinago language has effectively died out, the reserve’s 3,782 acres are too small to be anything more than a territorial afterthought, and with intermarriage and cultural assimilation apparently unstoppable, the core of Kalinagoness has faded to deathly grey.

“We’ve got to reserve some trends,” the chief said. “Otherwise, we’re going to be swept away in a tide of nothingness.”

The meaning of what it is to be a Kalinago was never terribly clear to their European enslavers or, sometimes, their dominating Afro-Caribbean neighbors.

They left no buildings of note, wrote no books, and traditionally wore few clothes. The appalled white man felt little compunction in treating the inhabitants of his newly collected islands as at best a commodity. He renamed them Caribs, from which the word cannibal derives, and when the Kalinagos resisted, as they sometimes fiercely did, their extermination seemed no more immoral than the blasting of natural obstacles impeding new settlements.

Kalinago richness was beyond the understanding of the conquerors. For Kalinagos, their great universities were the tropical forests, where every leaf, branch and root was a book, a story, a solution. Their churches were the trees, stones and waves. Their souls struggled and soared just as any white or African soul, yet they struggled and soared in tobacco-wreathed shamanic rituals that no foreigner – too busy creating his “new” world – had time to comprehend.

A little of the old wisdom survives in Alina, an alert and bright-eyed 73-year-old Kalinago woman we met. She lives with her aged husband in a compound that featured a tiny two-room house and a hut with a kitchen, yet where the garden is the real focus. Here, high on a hill over the churning ocean, Alina grows coconut, taro, dashin, yam, mango, passion fruit, cocoa, coffee, calabash, banana, sugar cane…

All the produce of your supermarket fruit aisle grows within hand's reach around Alina, yet even greater rewards are found in the discreet roots, leaves and weeds of herbal medicine. The vinegary smell from a pot on the fire when we arrived was the result of boiling ginger, carpenter grass, bay leaf, yams and other ingredients from the jungle: a potion to cure stomachache afflicting Alina’s sister.

Alina's husband makes medicine

A cure, but not for their real problems

Knowledge of the forest’s secrets is the lore that has bound Kalinagos for centuries. Chief Joseph suggested that such knowledge could be the foundation for his people’s rebirth in the modern world, turning the reserve into a “center for health and wellbeing.” He wants the Kalinago basket weaving business – their main source of tourist dollars – to produce “not just souvenirs but to develop things that have practical use in the home.”

In other words, Chief Joseph wants the Kalinagos to matter to the outside world.

The problem is that the outside world has already drowned out his cry.

Kimberly Daroux, 23, is one of the Kalinago youths staying behind in the territory to help her old folk, rather than emigrating. But the battle is already lost, she said.

“Young people are not really interested in the traditional things, traditional crafts. They want fast things,” she said, holding her Afro-Carib toddler daughter on her knee. “The Carib chiefs didn’t want the races mixing, but our population is very small so I don’t think that’s possible. You’d have incest.”

“The only thing that keeps us Kalinago is our grandparents’ generation,” she said.

Children of the earth, air and sea, Kalinago elders like Alina are remarkably spry. Her mother lived to 104.

But the terrible sickness of history is claiming the last of them now. And there’s no medicine man to call for that.

The Kalinagos' future -- but there aren't many