COUNCIL OF NATIVE CARIBBEAN HERITAGE
Cause Area
- Community
- Health & Medicine
- International
- Race & Ethnicity
Location
1901 CAMBRIDGE DRKINSTON, NC 28504 United StatesOrganization Information
Mission Statement
Our mission is to reverse the process of what is known as the "Paper Genocide" which refers to the government sanctioned erasure of a culture. Historically, European powers tried to erase the identity of indigenous populations of the Caribbean, by forced assimilation into the dominant colonial culture. This is a process known as "Acculturation", where the dominant culture erases the subordinate people identity through a process of limiting documentation of a population’s history. The language is lost, religious customs abandoned, and ultimately a cultural identity is erased. An example of this process occurred in Puerto Rico when the Tainos were not allowed to register their race/ethnicity on official census documents. The option only existed for in the Spanish Caribbean as "Blanco, Negro, or Mulatto" (White, Black, or Mixed). We seek to prove that the First Nations of the Caribbean have not become extinct but survived and encourage intertribal exchanges.
Description
We would like to create an Indigenous Archive of the Caribbean, through research of official documents such as birth, marriage and death records of people listed as "Indio, Mestizo, Pardo or TrigueƱo" in Puerto Rico, Cuba, Dominican Republic, and Haiti (and other Caribbean islands that would like to join our project). We have a database that is being generated from records available on Family Search from the Caribbean. Our goal is to demonstrate the continuity of the Native Caribbean populations. We plan on publishing this Archive in June when our website will go live. We need people who can read Spanish, and cursive writing to help transcribe the information needed into a powerpoint slide. We will use these slides as an entry for each person whom we identified as being a member of the Native Caribbean community. Currently records are from the early 20th century (1900's to 1920s), and earlier.