Native Diasporas: Indigenous Identities and Settler Colonialism in the Americas

3. Identity Articulated

Chapter 3 Identity Articulated British Settlers, Black Caribs, and the Politics of Indigeneity on St. Vincent, 1763–1797 Brooke N. Newman “The savage, with the name and title, thinks he inherits the qualities, the rights, and the property, of those whom he may pretend to supersede : hence he assimilates himself by name and manners, as it were to make out his identity, and confirm the succession.”1 So wrote Sir William Young, Second Baronet, in An Account of the Black Charaibs in the Island of St. Vincent’s (1795), an edited compilation of the original papers of his late father, also Sir William Young, former chief commissioner for the sale of lands in the Ceded Islands and a major proponent of dispossessing Native peoples in the service of British colonial expansion. Long recognized in Europe as “neutral” territory , until formally allotted to Britain by article 9 of the Treaty of Paris concluding the Seven Years’ War (1756–63) on February 10, 1763, the Ceded Islands, as they became known, of St. Vincent, Grenada, Dominica, and Tobago, offered the Crown and British investors the opportunity to cultivate areas of the Lesser Antilles hitherto only semideveloped by independent French, British, and Dutch colonists. Yet a glitch remained. Although France agreed to deliver the Ceded Islands to Britain in exchange for St. Lucia, and the restoration of Guadeloupe and Martinique, European negotiators had flagrantly disregarded the extant Native inhabitants of the Lesser Antilles, and St. Vincent particularly; “the Charaibes not being mentioned in the 110 newman whole transaction,” one contemporary reported, “as if no such people existed.”2 The significant Carib presence on St. Vincent would not be ignored for long, however. Soon after the ink dried on the Treaty of Paris , British land commissioners, executive officials, and administrators began to create an ethnographic portrait of the island’s Native community . In official correspondence and published accounts they divided and juxtaposed the Vincentian Carib population into, as William Young II later put it, “two nations of people of very different origin and pretensions”: the Yellow or Red Caribs, whom they deemed “the original natives,” and the Black Caribs, “principally the descendants of Runaway negroes from Barbadoes and the other Neighboring Islands .”3 From the beginning, the elder Young and others maintained that the dominant Carib group on the island—the so-called Black Caribs—consisted primarily of fugitive Africans who, desperate to prevent their return to slavery, had gone to great lengths to masquerade as Natives. “Thus these Negroes not only assumed the national appellation of Charaibs,” wrote Young II, “but individually their Indian names; and they adopted many of their customs.” Worse still, the Black Caribs had not simply appropriated the identity of the aboriginal Natives on a superficial level; they ultimately aimed “to destroy the Red Charaibs, and carry off their women, and seemed in full career to the extirpation of the original inhabitants.”4 What does it mean for William Young, senior and junior, and other interested parties to have focused so intensely on the assumed identity of the Black Caribs of St. Vincent, both in their communications with imperial authorities and in retrospective accounts intended for public view? Historians Bernard Marshall, Michael Craton, Paul Thomas, and Robin Fabel argue that British commentators, cognizant that the Black Caribs occupied territory ripe for large-scale agricultural development , accentuated their Africans origins in an attempt to neutralize their ancestral claims to property.5 The British, as Peter Hulme shows, were determined to see the Native peoples occupying the most fertile section of the island as overwhelmingly African, in descent, complexion , facial features, hair texture, and temperament, rather than identity articulated 111 Carib.6 The available evidence confirms this interpretation yet also raises fundamental questions about eighteenth-century understandings of indigeneity, race, and the territorial rights (or lack thereof) of independent mixed communities on newly colonized lands: Could part-black populations claim Native property rights? At what point did biological amalgamation with outsiders compromise a Native group’s indigenous status, generating dilemmas of both sovereignty and identity? “All colonial encounters involved dispossessing people of their land but justifications differed,” Cole Harris observes.7 Casting themselves as harbingers of progress and profit, British land commissioners characterized the appropriation of Vincentian resources, including Native lands, as an inevitable result of imperial conquest. That the hybrid Caribs opposed their dispossession by British colonizers and used legal language to...