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Maroon Heritage in Dominica - Ep 82
647 Plays10 months ago
On today’s episode, Jessica chats with Jonathan Rodriguez (3rd year PhD student in the Applied Anthropology program at the University of South Florida) about Maroon heritage in Dominica. We talk about how he got interested in archaeology and this topic, as well as how his Army service and Anthropology training influenced his experience with each. We also talk about his upcoming Fulbright research in Dominica, where he will use geospatial methods, archaeology, and oral history to learn more about and amplify the voices of a community that purposefully left little evidence of themselves in the archaeological record. Finally we talk about the networks between Maroon communities and diversity of Maroon community experiences across the Caribbean, as well as Maroon efforts today to be recognized as Indigenous peoples.
Transcripts
- For rough transcripts of this episode go to https://www.archpodnet.com/heritagevoices/82
Links
- Heritage Voices on the APN
- Create Caribbean Research Institute
- Anthropology doctoral candidate selected as USF’s first student veteran recipient of the Fulbright U.S. Student Program
- Lennox Honychurch’s 2017 book In the Forests of Freedom: The Fighting Maroons of Dominica
- Book edited by Polly Pattullo (2015) Your Time Is Done Now: Slavery, Resistance, and Defeat: The Maroon Trials of Dominica (1813-1814)
- YouTube video from Dominica Maroon scholar, Neil Vaz, “DOMINICA TRIP: Discovering Afro-Maroon History via Theater and Hiking”
- Maroon Gathering
- News Article “Maroon gathering in Dominica advances effort for global recognition of maroons as indigenous people”
- Justin Dunnavant’s 2021 article “In the Wake of Maritime Marronage”
- Justin Dunnavant’s 2021 article “Have confidence in the sea: Maritime Maroons and Fugitive Geographies”
- Justin Dunnavant, Steven Wernke, and Lauren Kohut's 2023 article "Counter-Mapping Maroon Cartographies: GIS and Anticolonial Modeling in St. Croix"
ArchPodNet
- APN Website: https://www.archpodnet.com
Affiliates
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Transcript
Introduction to Maroon Heritage Research
00:00:00
Speaker
You're listening to the Archaeology Podcast Network. Welcome to Heritage Voices, episode 82. I'm Jessica Equinto, and I'm your host, and today we are talking about maroon heritage in Dominica. Before we begin, I'd like to honor and acknowledge that the lands I'm recording on today are part of the Nooch, or Ute People's Treaty Lands, the Diné Ta, and the ancestral Puebloan homeland.
00:00:28
Speaker
And today we have Jonathan Rodriguez on the show. Jonathan Rodriguez is a third year PhD student in the applied anthropology program at the University of South Florida. He earned an MA in Latin American and Caribbean history and a BA in history with a minor in anthropology. He was recently awarded a Fulbright US student research grant to Dominica.
00:00:49
Speaker
His dissertation research is a community-based project that examines marinage in Dominica, fugitive geographies, settlement ecologies, and marine heritage. Yes, so welcome to the show, Jonathan. Super excited to have you. Thanks for having me. It's a pleasure to be here. I also want to acknowledge where I'm residing right now. I'm at USF in Tampa, and we reside on the traditional homelands and territories of the Seminole, as well as other historical groups, including the Calusa and Tokabaga.
00:01:19
Speaker
Thanks for having me. Yeah. Okay. So before we do our usual start looking at where you got started, let's, let's define some terms real quick. Cause I'm not sure all of our listeners will know about the maroons and who they were. So if you could just give like a super brief intro into that topic, that would be awesome. Yeah. So Maranaj existed
00:01:47
Speaker
in the Western Hemisphere, anywhere there was really slavery. Marinage is a form of resistance where enslaved
Jonathan's Academic Journey and Influences
00:01:54
Speaker
people would flee from slavery temporarily or for as long as they could. And scholars have usually broken this down into grand marinage, which is fleeing from slavery to set up autonomous sovereign communities or petite marinage, which is temporarily
00:02:16
Speaker
fleeing slavery, sometimes to go see relatives, but they would eventually return back to the plantations or wherever they were being enslaved. Wow. I mean, that seems, that seems very risky. The second one, I mean, most of the time in the case of petite marinade, it was usually because of like excessive labor or like the violence that they were experiencing from
00:02:45
Speaker
their enslavers, and ran marinade sometimes individually or as groups, and especially it would happen a lot during times of war. So these different colonial, imperial wars that happened in the Caribbean, the US, even in South America, maroons were pretty much everywhere, and a real thorn in the side to the plantation slavery system.
00:03:13
Speaker
Yeah. Okay. Well, just wanted to make sure everyone had that off the top and then, but let's, let's go back to your story. So how did, how did you get interested in this work? So during my master's program, I originally wanted to study like the geopolitics of Cuba, the USSR.
00:03:35
Speaker
in the U.S. during like the Cold War. I was really interested in Cuba at the time. And my adviser, she actually geared, she was a colonial historian of Mexico and she kind of pointed me to some of these anti-slavery and anti-colonial uprisings that were happening in the Caribbean, specifically 19th century Cuba. And that really opened my eyes into
00:04:05
Speaker
different types of anti-slavery resistance. Specifically, there's a rebellion, the 1812 Aponte Rebellion. And I read this great book by Matt Childs that covers that subject as well as Ida Ferrer. They're two very well-known scholars of Cuba. So that kind of interested me into anti-slavery resistance. And then when I got into the PhD program,
00:04:33
Speaker
I initially wanted to study marinage in Haiti or colonial Saint-Domingue. But to do that, I would have had to build rapport, go to the island, like set up all my own project, really. And my advisor, Dr. Diane Wallman, she had an ongoing project in Dominica. So like I entered the program
00:05:00
Speaker
knowing a lot more about the Spanish-speaking Caribbean and didn't know much about the Anglophone Caribbean. And this is just sidebar advice for any listeners out there that are thinking about going to grad school. If there's an opportunity on the table, listen to your advisor and just follow that path.
00:05:25
Speaker
So I listened to her, I started reading more about Dominica and I found out that there was maroons on that island and that none of the maroon settlements had been studied archaeologically. So that's kind of how I got interested in studying Dominica, studying maroon heritage there.
00:05:48
Speaker
It sounds like you had a little bit of an academic journey through different disciplines, which from my perspective is a good thing. But what brought you ultimately to anthropology? I guess even before that, when did you start maybe even before school thinking about this kind of work in general?
00:06:14
Speaker
Right. Yeah, I kind of have an interesting background into getting into this work. But from an early age, I was always kind of interested in history. I was always either reading historical fiction or any kind of.
00:06:29
Speaker
history books, but I was like that kid who was always interested in like World War II history. I read a lot about that and then I traveled a lot as a kid. I'm from New York where I was born and my dad ended up getting MS. So he had to move. We moved the family from New York to Florida. And then eventually my parents split up.
00:06:58
Speaker
My dad remarried a woman in South Dakota and then I moved to South Dakota, which was a huge cultural
Military Experience Shaping Archaeological Skills
00:07:05
Speaker
shock.
00:07:06
Speaker
I went from a school or a town of maybe 300,000 people in Florida to going to a very rural small town in South Dakota with a population of 880, where me, my brother, and my dad were the only Puerto Ricans in sight. So there, I eventually went to a different USF, University of Sioux Falls,
00:07:35
Speaker
And while I was there, I majored in history, but I didn't have the funding to go to school. I was taking out student loans and I ended up joining the military. So I was in the army for six years. And while I was in the army, that's where I really learned that like I was not
00:08:01
Speaker
really familiar anymore with like my Puerto Rican culture because there's a lot of Puerto Ricans in the military. And like I am one of those no Sabo kids. I didn't speak Spanish. So I was kind of detached from my own heritage, even though growing up in New York, it was like every Easter we were going down to Puerto Rico and like really visiting the island, visiting my grandparents. But I hadn't gone since my parents had really split up.
00:08:30
Speaker
And then I did two tours in Afghanistan and on the first deployment, I was part of a counter IED platoon. And my job was, I was trained in tactical site exploitation as well as evidence collection. So basically we would patrol the main highway in Afghanistan and
00:08:58
Speaker
anytime we found an IED or if an IED went off, my job was to basically record the site. Like I had to collect all the materials from the device that was blown up, take photographs, bag and collect the evidence, that sort of thing. I didn't know it was going to have any kind of benefit long-term as far as archeology, but
00:09:25
Speaker
While I was there being around a different culture and, you know, seeing those things, it kind of opened my eyes to being a part of history. And then when I eventually got out of the military, I went to USF and I think I was originally like a business major, but I had to take an ancient history class.
00:09:47
Speaker
And I was just like, this is, I was back in my element. I was like, okay, this is great. But I still hadn't even really heard of archeology up to that point. Like I really didn't. And from that class, I switched my major back to history. And because I had prior courses in history, I was pretty much almost done with my degree, but to get the full benefits of the GI Bill, I had to take.
00:10:16
Speaker
more courses. So I minored in anthropology. And then it was my last semester of my bachelor's degree, I had to take an archaeological field methods class and being outside being part of a team, it kind of was a good thing for me. But I had already been accepted into a grad program for history.
00:10:41
Speaker
So while I was in the grad program, I started working for a local CRM firm here in Tampa called Janus Research. And I was like, Oh, I could
00:10:52
Speaker
work and get paid to do archaeology, like this is great. And while I was in the program, I took electives in Caribbean archaeology and historical archaeology. And once I found out there was a subfield called historical archaeology, I was like, this isn't my niche. This is what I want to do. So long story short, that's basically how I got into this. And then that plus my adviser kind of
00:11:20
Speaker
shifting my focus to anti-slavery resistance in colonial Cuba, that's what kind of brought me into that. But being trained as a historian, I was learning more about how the voices of enslaved people aren't necessarily in the archives. So a way to counter that is through artifacts, is through other methods.
00:11:49
Speaker
So that's what geared me towards, okay, I want to apply to a PhD program in anthropology and focus on historical archaeology.
00:12:00
Speaker
Okay. So obviously I want to come back to all of that, but before we get too far away from it, I'm, I'm curious, you know, thinking about your experience with the army first, like if that affected the way that you think about anthropology in any way. And then also if anthropology affected the way you think about your army experience in any way, I would say both at the time.
00:12:29
Speaker
on my first deployment. I probably was very supportive of what we were doing over there. When I went back in 2014 and I saw that not much had changed, I started having these questions of like, is this good what we're doing over here? And then once I got into reading more, reading was like probably the biggest influence. My brother recommended
00:12:57
Speaker
Howard Zinn's People's History of the United States. And reading through that, then getting into this program and reading more histories about colonialism, imperialism, and slavery, I started to look back on my time in the military and the occupation of Afghanistan as like not a good thing. And I kind of wanted to
00:13:27
Speaker
correct that by doing this type of work and being more of an activist scholar versus just being a scholar not really concerned about what's going on in our current day and age. So yeah, it definitely changed how I viewed the past as well as the present.
00:13:53
Speaker
And I imagine like the reverse is true, like in the sense of, for example, you were talking about kind of mapping a site and
Research Focus on Dominica and Digital Tools
00:14:01
Speaker
getting that experience in your time in the army. And did that affect the way that you do your work at all? Yeah, I mean, that is one of the highlights for my time, that kind of experience. It wasn't all bad learning how to be a mentor.
00:14:23
Speaker
learning how to set goals and achieve them. Like those types of skills I didn't really have early on in my life, even though, you know, I love my parents to death, but my dad was very sick. So I didn't really have that kind of structure growing up. So those types of things did help. And especially the tactical site exploitation, as well as the evidence collection courses I took.
00:14:53
Speaker
helps with having that paying attention to detail that you need when doing archaeology. So yeah, those types of skills were definitely transferable once I got into archaeology. It was more of the theoretical and philosophical things that I had learned through reading that I was not getting in the military. Yeah, right.
00:15:21
Speaker
All right. Well, we're already at our first break point, but when we come back, let's dive back into your graduate school work. So everybody, we will be back here in a moment.
00:15:36
Speaker
Okay. So jumping back in before I briefly detoured us to talk about your, how your military service and anthropology experiences influenced each other. You were starting to talk about what you wanted to look at in grad school. So can you tell us more about that? Yeah. So once I got into the PhD program and I shifted my focus to Dominica, my advisor
00:16:05
Speaker
told me about the Fulbright program. And we were able to go down my first year in the program, I joined her on the project that she has going on with the archaeological survey of Colonial Dominica, where she's one of the PIs along with Dr. Mark Hauser from Northwestern. And they basically were working on a
00:16:30
Speaker
indigenous contact site. So within the Caribbean, there's the Kalanago, which are indigenous to the island of Dominica. And they had found like a trading outpost on the beach. And one of our local collaborators, Dr. Lennox Honeychurch, he's a native to Dominica. And he actually has wrote a couple books on maroons.
00:16:59
Speaker
in Dominica after hurricane Maria, he had found like some surface scatter pottery at this location. So they had been going down there and doing excavation. So I joined them two summers ago. And while I was down there, we were able to make contact with Dr. Schaller is free.
00:17:21
Speaker
And she is the founder and director of Create Caribbean Research Institute, which is a digital humanities research institute that focuses on providing different resources for students and the public on the history of Dominica, as well as training interns on different digital humanities research topics.
00:17:52
Speaker
So the other good thing about Dr. Esprit is she is a descendant of Maroons and her family are proprietors of one of the most well-known Maroon camps, Maroon sites in Dominica, the Chief Jacko Camp. So on my first visit to Dominica, I met with her and her father
00:18:17
Speaker
And we actually got to do a pedestrian survey of the maroon camp, the Chief Jacko camp. So that was super cool. And when I got back from Dominica, I started the Fulbright process to apply to work with Dr. Esprit for my Fulbright.
00:18:40
Speaker
And what were they hoping for out of this Fulbright that you put in for this community? So the first thing was they were really interested in an ecology kind of based research.
00:18:57
Speaker
They kind of wanted to understand why they decided to settle in those areas, different like farming techniques and stuff like that. The region where it's at in Dominica is in the interior. It's located near this village called Bell's. And there's a lot of subsistence farming that goes on in that area. And because of climate change and the natural disasters,
00:19:25
Speaker
on that island like they wanted me to kind of focus my research on those types of questions and another kind of benefit that I could bring to them was I during my master's program I interned at the Institute of Digital Exploration here at USF where we were trained
00:19:51
Speaker
on different digital technologies and tools to create 3D models of cultural heritage objects and do that type of research. So I've been trained in digital photogrammetry, terrestrial laser scanning, GIS, those types of things. So the goal here is for me to work with the interns
00:20:15
Speaker
students and any interested members of the public to train them in digital photogrammetry GIS. I plan
Community-Driven Research Initiatives
00:20:24
Speaker
on getting one of the scholars at USF to possibly fly down and do a laser scanning of the landscape at chief Jack O camp to create a three day model. So all those aspects are the focus of the Fulbright.
00:20:44
Speaker
So can you talk a little bit more about how you'll be applying those technologies? Yeah. So we'll be working with Lennox Honeychurch again. He has a collection of artifacts that we're hoping to do some digital photogrammetry with to create 3D models. We have an oral history aspect of the project where we will be collecting oral histories and traditions from
00:21:13
Speaker
descendants of maroons on the island. So that's the game plan as of right now. Well, man after my own heart, being a cultural anthropologist and all, I love me some good oral histories. Yeah. Well, I was kind of influenced by work done by Richard Price with maroons in Suriname and then also Kenneth Bilby, who did a similar oral history type project with maroons in Jamaica.
00:21:43
Speaker
And the goal is to try and uplift their voices that are silenced in colonial archives, because most of the historical research that has been done on maroons in Dominica, they're using the archives in London, mainly, and some of the archives that are in Dominica to shed light on the maroons, the maroon history. So my goal is to
00:22:14
Speaker
focus on the people and try and get their version of history and kind of center their voices and perspectives.
00:22:25
Speaker
Yeah. And naturally I'm going to nerd out here for a second, but do you have like a, I mean, I don't know if you've talked to the community about this yet or the descendants about this yet, but like what they might want to see done with those oral histories. So it's going to be part of create Caribbean. So I've only talked to Dr. Esprit about this and Shylor actually got
00:22:49
Speaker
funding from Wintergren to do an oral history project. So last time I met with her this past summer, I brought up the idea of like collecting these oral histories and she was like, this is a great idea. Like we want to do something like this. So it's going to be part of that project, their oral history project, but there will probably be a segment that's specific on maroon descendants. That's so cool.
00:23:18
Speaker
Yeah, it's the part that I look forward to the most, honestly, is just going out there and talking with the community. That's been heavily focused in our curriculum here at USF, is doing community-based research. And even though for your proposal, you have to come up with research questions and that sort of thing,
00:23:42
Speaker
really over the 10 months that I'll be down there in Dominique, I'm hoping to get more community involvement in the research design and planning and gear my research questions to what the community wants to know. Yeah, I love a good iterative approach. Throwing in my jargon word of the day. Yeah, that's awesome. So, okay, thinking about
00:24:12
Speaker
The work that you've already done, that you were already part of there on the site, you know, you mentioned like doing some ground survey there. What did you learn from the work that you've done so far and how are you, how is that like making you think differently about the work that you're going to be doing? So the reason why
00:24:35
Speaker
I'm very interested in the Chief Jaco Camp is we kind of know that this was the location of it based on there are extant stepping stones leading to the camp that were chiseled into the rock of the cliffside. And they're incredible. Originally, they were about three feet high.
00:24:58
Speaker
And to climb them, it would I. Right now, they've been kind of modified to where they're easier to walk up, not super easy, but easier. It's over a hundred steps that you have to take to go up. But it was part of their defensive measures. So originally when they were three feet tall, it would cause any kind of British
Technological Approaches in Studying Maroon Camps
00:25:24
Speaker
military offensive or troops
00:25:27
Speaker
they would have to sling their weapon on their back and really climb these these stones. And towards the end, there's actually like a funneling in a trench wall, sort of. And the Maroons would post centuries up at the top to watch any kind of approach. And while I was there. Shylar's father, Martin, was our guide.
00:25:53
Speaker
And he's actually a hunter that hunts in this central forest reserve where it's located. So he's super knowledgeable about the ecology, the landscape. So he was giving us details about like which plants would be used to create settlements like that, thatched roofs, different types of trees that were used for canoe building.
00:26:17
Speaker
which the maroons were known to travel from Dominica to Martinique and Guadalupe, which are nearby French islands.
00:26:27
Speaker
The one good thing about going there the first time was opening my eye to the knowledge of some of the locals that know the terrain. They know the different species of plants, that sort of thing. When I went there, I brought my GPS and I recorded points of interest and the location of the camp. And then the second time I was there,
00:26:54
Speaker
People kept telling me about Lake Kachibona, which is northeast of a coastal town called Cali Hope. And that's the location where they think another maroon chief, Farcel, his camp was supposedly located. So I went and did that hike with the same methods. This time I brought a drone to try and create a 3D model of the landscape.
00:27:22
Speaker
And that hike was brutal. It was it was super you have to like there there's rope on the trail to actually like climb up. So doing archaeology up there would be extremely challenging. So that's why I've kind of just focused on doing it at the chief Jacko camp because it was actually one of the easier hikes I've done in Dominica.
00:27:46
Speaker
But basically with the GPS data, I came back home and decided to do spatial analysis on GIS, which included doing visibility analysis and least cost path analysis. So in short, what that means is I wanted to see how much of the landscape was visible from the locations of these camps and how many camps were
00:28:15
Speaker
intervisible, like they could see each other. And then since I knew the cheap Jaco camps location, I created least cost path is basically the route that could possibly be taken from one point to another point, and you can create barriers or costs. So the costs for this analysis was the elevation of the landscape using a digital elevation model.
00:28:42
Speaker
as well as rivers. There's over 365 river networks in Dominica. So the cost to cross a river as well as crossing elevated areas. So that was part of my initial preliminary research to get a better idea of some of the settlement patterns and
00:29:05
Speaker
My goal is over the 10 months of going there, I've talked to Shylar and she said one of the things they would do growing up is visit these different marine camps. She mentioned over 20 that they would just go and part of a tradition that they did. So my aim is to visit as many as possible to get GPS data and then do a GIS based study.
00:29:32
Speaker
that focuses on settlement location choice, which is grounded in settlement ecology theory, and understanding the different environmental and socio-cultural variables that went into their decision-making process. That was a lot.
00:29:49
Speaker
I know that is a lot, but it's super interesting and like, ah, super cool. But yeah, like I always think the least cost, wait, least cost path, right? Analysis is always kind of interesting. I think just cause like from an ethnographic side,
00:30:05
Speaker
People don't obviously always make decisions. I mean, Americans tend to make decisions based on what's easiest. But thinking of indigenous pilgrimage trails or things like that, that sometimes the hardness is the point that you have to earn it. And then thinking about what you're talking about, maybe the least cost would be bad in a different way. If we're talking about people that are escaping slavery, obviously,
00:30:35
Speaker
In a lot of ways, maybe you'd want it to be a hard path. If, if you're worried about, you know, people coming after you or your community or things like that has, have you looked at that at all? Like, have you looked at, I mean, it sounds like from what you're saying, like that the elevation was like a purposeful choice. So like, I don't know. I'm just curious about what you're, you're thinking or finding so far with that, like least cost. Yeah. So like one thing about Dominica is the topography is very mountainous.
00:31:05
Speaker
So the mostly in the interior of the island, it's very rugged, very mountainous. And most of the plantations during the British colonial period from 1763 to 1834, they were along the coast, the coastal zones. And when I did this initial analysis, I even made a caveat like these are
00:31:32
Speaker
imagined routes, you know, we don't have other barriers such as vegetation, colonial settlements, military defenses, those types of things that have also been avoided. So, you know, it's that that initial GIS study doesn't account for those things.
00:31:55
Speaker
But since then, I've found ways of creating new GIS data. That's another issue with trying to do this without being in Dominica, is there's no GIS repository that has the types of data that I need to do that study. But since then, I've been able to, for instance,
00:32:24
Speaker
Map from a survey done by John Byers in 1776 that I was able to geo reference and I was able to add colonial roads, different military defenses.
00:32:38
Speaker
for the British colonial military. So I've added those to my GIS data to rerun the same type of analysis to get better results. So I haven't redone a lease cost path with those, but I have started to do preliminary research to find out, for instance, I redid a viewshed
00:33:02
Speaker
where I still had the visibility of the maroon camps and then I had visibility from the British colonial outposts, which are all along the coastline. And the field of view for the maroon camps is much larger than the field of view for the British colonial outposts. So in my sense, I read that as then strategically
00:33:31
Speaker
positioning themselves, the maroons in locations where they have eyes on possible movements by the British military as a defensive measure. So yeah, I'm still adding more data to the GIS analysis, but I'm looking at different, like I said, different environmental and socio-cultural variables to kind of point to
00:33:59
Speaker
their decision making on where to settle. And even the maroon
Future Research Directions and Maritime Networks
00:34:04
Speaker
camp, so I have two where I know there was maroon sites there, the chief farcel camp and the chief jacko camp, but the other eight that I have
00:34:16
Speaker
That was all based off of place names that are mentioned in Lenox Huntage Church's book. The Fighting Maroons of Dominica, it was published in 2017. He has a map on there as well as kind of throughout the text details of where the locations of camps were. So like the spatial accuracy of where these camps are located haven't been ground truth through archaeology per se, but
00:34:45
Speaker
the place names still exist. So I was able to create points for seven other maroon camps based off of place names and creating a point in that location. Yeah. It seems like you could spend a lifetime on this alone. There's so much good stuff to explore, but we are sadly at our second break point. So we will be back here in a second.
00:35:13
Speaker
Okay, so we're back from our break and I know you were talking about some of the different GIS analysis and we were just talking during the break and it sounds like for anyone that's interested in learning more, because like we talked about, there's a lot more that could be said on this topic that it sounds like you're going to have an article coming out next year. Can you tell me a little bit more about what's going to be in there?
00:35:38
Speaker
Yeah, so we have a special issue coming out with American Antiquity and that will be from that preliminary research of the visibility and accessibility analysis I did with GIS. And in the article, I talk about the visibility from the camps and as well as line of sight between camps.
00:36:05
Speaker
and then the possible routes between each camp that they would have taken.
00:36:10
Speaker
Cool. All right. Well, I'm excited to read it when it comes out and I'm going to shift topic slightly, but kind of stay on the same topic for a little bit longer. This is something that you mentioned already a little bit. And then you and I talked about even a little bit more before we started. And I really, I'm really curious. I'd really love to hear more about the maritime maroons. So can you tell us what you mean by that? And yeah, more about what that means.
00:36:40
Speaker
Yeah, so even prior to the British colonizing Dominica in 1763, after the Seven Years War, Dominica was kind of a refuge for indigenous peoples fleeing Spanish colonization in the greater Antilles.
00:37:02
Speaker
And they would travel by canoe to Dominica. And then later on after British colonization, there was still these maritime networks between the different Caribbean islands and Dominica. So I was first put onto this reading the work done by Dr. Justin Dunavant. And he had an article where he did geospatial analysis from St. Croix.
00:37:31
Speaker
in the Virgin Islands and their possible routes of travel landing in Puerto Rico. And in one of the articles that he published, he did mention people from St. Croix going to Dominica, which sparked my curiosity. And then reading more into the work of Dr. Honeychurch as well as Dr. Neil Vaz, they mentioned Maritime Maroon Networks
00:38:01
Speaker
in Dominica and how the maroons would travel to the nearby French islands of Martinique and Guadalupe. So then I became kind of interested in connecting the land with the sea. And then from my experiences with our guides that had taken us to the two different maroon camps, Chief Farcel and Chief Jaco, we noticed that there was a lot of
00:38:31
Speaker
these, they're, they're called go be air, their type of tree, where they would create canoes out of these trees. And at both camps, there were these massive trees that can be used to create canoes. And there, there was other resources that they could use these trees for, for example, incense,
00:38:56
Speaker
as fuel for fires. So I kind of wanted to connect and it might be out of the scope of my dissertation research, but for future research, trying to do a similar study that Justin Dunavant did to try and map out these maritime maroon networks from Dominica to other islands or from other islands to Dominica.
00:39:22
Speaker
Yeah. And okay. So we're talking about future work now. So do you have a vision? I mean, like I said, there's already a lot that you could do with, with what you're working on, but do you have a vision for, you know, other future research that you'd like to do? So I'm hoping after I finished my work in Dominica to try and
00:39:47
Speaker
recreate a similar study in Puerto Rico where my family from and the archaeology of marinade in Puerto Rico is not at the same level as either pre-Columbian archaeology or you know the contact period. So I'm hoping that once I finish my dissertation I can then
00:40:17
Speaker
kind of use those same skills to study marinade in Puerto Rico. So just in what you've seen so far, obviously you haven't gotten to do the work in Puerto Rico yet, but have you seen major differences between Dominica and Puerto Rico? Yeah. I mean, I haven't noticed many
00:40:38
Speaker
differences because I haven't really researched enough. But one of the things that Justin Dunavant did was he went to Puerto Rico to the municipality of Luisa, which has a very high Afro descendant population. And the the actual town was created by, you know, formerly enslaved people that had escaped slavery.
00:41:05
Speaker
So, you know, there is evidence there. It's just there hasn't been as much archaeological research done on the topic.
00:41:16
Speaker
which just blows my mind because it's a super interesting topic. Like I just, I don't, I don't understand how, um, cause I thank you in, I think it was in the Fulbright article that you sent me, which we'll put in the show notes as well, that you, this will be the first, what was that first archeology? No, I guess.
00:41:39
Speaker
Yeah, I'm trying to remember exactly what it was. This is I'm doing a terrible job. Yeah, no, no, you're right. Like it will be the first archaeological investigation. And some of that has to do with the Maroons tried their hardest to remain hidden. And like they the kind of.
00:42:01
Speaker
nickname for maroon archaeology is like the archaeology of absence, because there's not that many material cultural remains at some of these sites. But I think
00:42:17
Speaker
having a multifaceted kind of research design where we're including oral histories, we're including the archaeology at Chief Jack O site, we're also doing spatial analysis of the settlement patterns, I think you can at least have the groundwork there to further investigate some of these sites. And some are more hard to reach. Like I said, the Chief Jack, the Chief Jack O site is a lot easier to get to versus the
00:42:47
Speaker
chief farcel site. So that's
Recognition and Awareness of Maroon Heritage
00:42:50
Speaker
another aspect of it. But it's not that it can't be done, like the work of
00:42:55
Speaker
Dr. Cheryl White, her dissertation research was in Suriname studying maroons and she was out there camping for like a week and her maroon guides, they were like hunting for their food. It's an incredible story. It can be done. It's more of just like, are you willing to go to the next level to get it done?
00:43:19
Speaker
Yeah, and so I'm curious with you working on this topic, which is like you said, it's a less explored topic in a lot of ways, especially in archaeology. What is something or a couple of things that you really wish people knew about this topic?
00:43:38
Speaker
I think first is that there were maroons not only in Dominica, but throughout the Western Hemisphere, wherever slavery existed. It's just some of the bigger maroon settlements in Brazil and Jamaica and Cuba and Suriname, they've kind of gotten the most focus. So there are other
00:44:04
Speaker
instances of marinade, especially in the Eastern Caribbean that have now begun. People are starting to talk about and study. And it's not like people obviously on the island we're talking about. It's more of like, I guess, U.S. scholars are just in academia starting to research. Yeah, it's it's a very understudied topic in archaeology.
00:44:33
Speaker
especially in the Eastern Caribbean. And I'm hoping with my research that we can center the perspectives of Maroons and Maroon descendants and then begin to do more comparative analysis of Maroons in Dominica and Lesser Antilles with some of the more well-known sites throughout the Americas.
00:44:59
Speaker
And other than I suppose it getting studied more, is there anything else? And, and like you said, including more of the voices of the descendants, is there anything else that you'd like to see change like within this type of work? So I think one way this could really benefit maroon descendants
00:45:23
Speaker
in Dominica as well as the Americas is they've been trying to get legally recognized by the UN as indigenous to the land and to get the rights for their lands. There's a movement, the Maroon Heritage Movement, and I can give you a link to an article about it, but they've been
00:45:50
Speaker
collectively organizing maroon descendants throughout the Americas to get this recognition from the UN. And I'm hoping that my research could be useful in that aspect. Hmm. Hmm. So, like, I'm just curious if, you know, in fighting to be considered indigenous, whether there's been any friction at all with, like, other indigenous communities in this effort? I don't know, per se. I know that there are
00:46:20
Speaker
I guess, political tensions between the colonnago and African descended population in Dominica. Another thing I'm kind of hoping the archaeological investigation of Chief Jaco Camp can shed light on is possible networks and connections between the enslaved population
00:46:46
Speaker
as well as the indigenous Kalanago on the island during that time period. Yeah, that'd be super interesting. Because in Lennox's work, he talks about there being that connection and collaboration between the indigenous Kalanago and the first enslaved Africans to flee to Dominica, but then it kind of dissipates once we get to the British colonial period. So
00:47:14
Speaker
I'm hoping that my research can kind of shed light on that and then we can kind of come together towards this indigenous sovereignty issue. Yeah, yeah, interesting.
00:47:27
Speaker
And I will say, I said it was the maroon heritage movement. It's the maroon gathering movement. Okay. Yeah. Okay. Well, we are, we're at the end of our time. Any last thoughts that you want to share with everyone? I'm just super thankful to, you know, be here and have this conversation with you and, you know, hopefully
00:47:52
Speaker
This can bring some more awareness to Maroons and Dominica in their heritage and history. And yeah.
00:48:00
Speaker
Yeah. Well, and I'm super excited for your Fulbright. I'm excited to hear how it goes. And, you know, maybe someday you and your partners in the maroon community and the descendants, I should say, in Dominica, you know, could, could come on again and we can talk about what you found and what they already know and what you're learning and could be, could be a really interesting future episode. So putting that bug in your ear.
00:48:26
Speaker
Yeah, that would be great. Yeah, so thank you again for taking so much time and yeah, really interested to hear more in the future. Thanks for having me.
00:48:40
Speaker
Thanks for listening to the Heritage Voices podcast. You can find show notes at www.archaeologypodcastnetwork.com slash Heritage Voices. Please subscribe to the show on iTunes, Stitcher, or the Google Play Music Store. Also, please share with your friends or write us a review. Sharing and reviewing helps more people find the show and gets the perspectives of Heritage Voices amazing guests out there into the world.
00:49:03
Speaker
No, we just need more of that in anthropology and land management. If you have any more questions, comments, or show suggestions, please reach out to me at Jessica at livingheritageanthropology.org. If you'd like to volunteer to be on the show as a guest or even a co-host, reach out to me as well, Jessica at livingheritageanthropology.org. You can also follow more of what I'm doing on Facebook at livingheritageanthropology and the nonprofit Living Heritage Research Council or on Twitter at livingheritagea.
00:49:29
Speaker
As always, huge thank you to Liable Enqua and Jason Nez for their collaboration on our incredible logo.
00:49:46
Speaker
This episode was produced by Chris Webster from his RV traveling the United States, Tristan Boyle in Scotland, DigTech LLC, Cultural Media, and the Archaeology Podcast Network, and was edited by Rachel Rodin. This has been a presentation of the Archaeology Podcast Network. Visit us on the web for show notes and other podcasts at www.archapodnet.com. Contact us at chrisatarchaeologypodcastnetwork.com.