Telling Treasure Tales: Commemoration and Consciousness in Dominica

This article examines popular narratives of buried treasure collected in the Commonwealth of Dominica between August 1996 and May 2000. I will analyze these narratives in terms of what they might signify for their tellers, as members of Dominican society and possibly as the descendants of the Kalinago warriors who reclaimed treasures from Spanish ships passing near the island. A unifying theme of this article is that, whatever the “truth” of these stories, they function to create a sense of continuity through time, and create or reinscribe specific social and historical relations. They enable participants in the narrative to insert themselves and their ancestors into a popular version of Dominican history, one that extends to the precolonial era and focuses on Carib resistance to Spanish domination.