Video
Lost in Paradise- Placing the African Diaspora
Transcript
Karen: Our second presentation is by Joshua Torres at the US Virgin Islands National Park, and he's going to talk about the ways that individuals and social groups transitioned from enslavement to freedom on St. Croix and the Danish West Indies the during the 18th century. I think it's built on ... ongoing research that the park has carried out and begun under, the previous archaeologist whose name is just escaped me, Ken Wilde, I think.
In his research he argues that the emergence of the communities of people at places was - African communities - was intimately linked to the formation of local identities, and the negotiation of social and economic mobility within the context of Danish colonialism, which is sort of surprising, as much as the Africanisms that are often the focal point of diaspora studies. Josh, thanks very much for being with us today.
Josh: Hi, thank you, Karen, and hello!, and thank you to all the listeners who've decided to tune in for our talk today. Just a brief note, I wanted to mention that Ken's actually at the Virgin Islands National Park over in Saint John, and I'm here in Saint Croix so ... Kenny's still over there doing good work, he hasn't retired just yet, so I'm in Saint Croix.
Karen: Okay! My bad! Thank you for correcting me.
Josh: That's okay. I'll forgive you this time, but Kenny might not. Okay anyway, I just wanted to say that I found Susan's talk really fascinating, because I think she's really provided a wonderful example about how the National Park Service can positively engage local communities in the social construction of their history, and assist in their ability to create their own local identities based on the history of the places in which they lived.
In the preface to my talk I just like to say that, the paper that I presented with Doctor David Goldstein, who's our chief of interpretation, was given at this last society for American archaeology talks in Austin, and was part of an invited symposium regarding diaspora studies, so for more information, I would encourage any of our listeners to contact the session organizer, whose name is Clete Rooney, and actually works for the Southeastern Archaeological Center in Tallahassee.
I've modified this talk just a little bit, so that it's a little bit less about diaspora and more about the first point that I discuss, and the one that Susan also discussed about how we can positively influence our local communities using archaeological and historical resources in the park.
The problems, as you guys will see as I give this presentation, is that history in the Virgin Islands often has often been conflated or mythologized due to a lack of information regarding people's past, in particular the lack of a formal archive here in the territory.
At any rate, I'll go ahead and get started here, the African diaspora of the Danish West Indies or what is now the United States Virgin Islands was a direct result of the Transatlantic African slave trade during the 17th and 18th centuries. Slavery in the Danish West Indies spanned over 175 years from the establishment of the first European colonies in the territories, primarily during the 1640's, until emancipation in 1848.
During that period slave traders carried as many as 100,000 Africans to Saint Thomas, Saint Croix, and Saint John. While this is relatively small number in comparison to the total number of Africans ripped from their social, cultural, and physical realities, and transported to the New World, I don't think it's any less important.
Enslaved people were brought to Saint Croix and the Caribbean in general by the Danish as laborers for work in the region’s sugar industry. The majority of these people were brought from Danish outposts on the Gulf and Guinea coasts of West Africa. Like Fort Christiansborg depicted here in the left hand side slide.
I would also like to say that for those of the listeners who are interested, there's really an amazing book that I just got done reading, by Doctor Robert Harms, I'm holding it here in my hand, it's called, The Diligent: A Voyage Through Worlds of The Slave Trade, And it provides a very fascinating story about the Transatlantic slave trade from Europe to the Caribbean Colonies. I encourage for people to look at that, it's very interesting.
The people that were brought to the Caribbean on these European vessels interestingly were from a range of cultural groups, including the Salani, the Mandango, Cango, Amina, Akin, Ibo, and Yoruba, among others. The material institutions of slavery and the Danish colonial experiment here in the Virgin Islands, are readily visible, and provides immense opportunities for understanding the formation of, and for empowering modern African descent communities that live on the Islands today.
At the bottom left here, we see estate Whim plantation from Saint Croix, and at the top right we see Anaburg Plantation on the Virgin Islands National Park, where Ken Wilde works.
What's also really interesting about ... What's really fascinating about all these material we're in, is that they really provide an important resource for us to engage our local communities, and to provide them with opportunities to learn about their history, and the ways in which that we can think and discuss about African diaspora studies, and the processes of social and community development within the colonial or post-colonial narrative.
Here, this is where I get into diaspora studies, talk about them for just a little bit. Here –diaspora - we view as an ongoing process that not only focuses on population movements and creolization or assimilation but also in the ongoing negotiations of communities, as people and place.
My co-author and I's purpose here is to discuss how archaeological research and public outreach can play a critical role in this process. Understand informed grounded histories that are more real, and less mythic character, and offer substance where colonial anecdotes or colloquial anecdotes are often construed as fact. I'll kind of elaborate a little bit on what I mean by that shortly.
Through this, it's possible to put people and place them in history, to demonstrate value for local communities and cultural heritage, and to provide relevant information regarding history, for their own purposes of cultural identity, pride and self determination, and again this points right back to what Susan was kind of advocating for and what they’re doing with the San Antonio Missions.
When we think about diaspora, archaeologists and stories typically focus on one of two domains of inquiry. The first one seeks to highlight continuities from Africa and their presence in New World societies.
An Afrocentric perspective influences archaeological studies where research investigates Africanism or other material traces of African heritage. This material is viewed as evidence of cultural continuity, and perpetuation of social memories, that are employed as mechanisms of resistance and or maintenance of social identity.
In contrast some other scholars emphasized the retention of various cultural traits that become recombined with dominant colonial ideology to create new cultural forms. Criticisms of both of these perspectives, in a nutshell, point out that the use of overarching broad models of social and cultural change, when we think about the specific communities, really doesn't work very well.
The tension really centers on the issues between these broad generalizing processes, and then the transparent weakness that arise when we begin to try and focus on one or the other in local context. Particularly what we see is that there's various historical contingencies leading to the development of communities, and their histories. This is not a homogeneous process; it's multiscalar and nonlinear.
There's a really interesting book again for those of you who might like to read up a little bit more on this, by a gentleman named Edouard Glissant, who's a Martiniquan writer. What's interesting about Glissant is that he brings a perspective that deals with Islands in the context of their colonial associations with their national colonial rulers.
Glissant specifically references all this within the context of Martiniquan Guadeloupe, but I think the important thing to derive from here, is that he discusses that the social construction of communities in these islands and other places, is really contingent on how people view history, and how this blending of different social and cultural values or creolization, if you will, lends itself to different interpretations of history at a local level.
And so, this wonderful picture that I'm presenting to you now, is actually a mural that's up at the Saint Croix Henry E. Rohlsen airport, and I found myself really looking at this, and thinking about how contemporary populations on the island really mythologize their history, and how it's kind of presented to visiting tourists, and romanticized a little bit, if you will.
Specifically, there's an image here where we see a ghost image coming out of an old sugar mill, that's this void left by the movement apparently of a modern African dancer on the right. This is all juxtaposed, if you can see it in the background, against the street scape of modern consumerism.
The history of the African diaspora and slavery here in the islands, it's highly variable, it's highly contentious, and in some cases is misrepresented, and misconstrued to the detriment of modern populations, their understanding of their past. To the point here, among Saint Croix Crucian largely 88% African descendant population of 48,000 people,
there's really a limited group of stakeholders that have a clear understanding of the quality of the factual evidence available about the Danish colonial project and its influence on modern Crucian society.
Again, real quick, there's a book by Jeannette Bastian that talks about some of these issues, because when the United States purchased the Virgin Islands from Denmark in 1917, the archives for the territory were scattered [Owning Memory: How a Caribbean Community Lost Its Archives and Found Its History]. This mystification of history, the decentralization of archives, has really developed a void in modern communities’ understanding a connection with their past.
The challenge here is that, my co-author and I working at National Park Service employees at the Christiansted Historic Site, and living in this community, find ourselves playing an essential role in the development of historic consciousness between park visitors, both local and nonlocal, and among the largely locally developed staff.
Currently we face several challenges that inhibit our ability to do this, and I briefly touched on several of those, and because of some of these disconnects between the local population, and an understanding of their history
we often have, people's concepts of history aren't informed necessarily by fact. In many cases, we come into contact with people who conflate separate events that span, sometimes, a period over 100 years, is a single event taken out of time.
Specifically, I refer to the Saint John's slave rebellions and emancipation in a later labor revolt known as Fire Burn, that occurred in 1878. Really, one of the main challenges that I face, and one thing that I noticed absent when I got on the island a couple of years ago, as the park's cultural resource manager, was a lack of community-based archaeology projects, to provide empirical evidence in a way to engage and empower local populations and their history.
The Christiansted National Historic Site currently forms the cornerstone of the town, and it's a focal point of modern historic, economic, and social activity on the island. Established in 1952, the site protects and preserves the colonial infrastructure of the Danish West Indies, developed for the trade in slaves, Africans, and sugar.
The sites consist of 5 buildings dating to the Danish colonial occupation of the town, with 3 structures. I think I skipped a slide, I'm going to back here.
The site consists of five buildings dating to the Danish colonial occupation of the town, with three structures for Fort Christiansvaern, the steeple building, and the Guinea company warehouse, active during the 18th and early 19th centuries. Again, the town became the capital of Denmark's holdings in the West Indies for over 150 years. In 1917, the island and their inhabitants were transferred to the United States for the low, low price of 25 million dollars.
Traditional interpretation of the ... site is focused on the Danish colonial experience, and more specifically the Danish military occupation of the town. However, this is the primary place where the slave Africans were bought, sold, and disembarked into the broader urban and rural plantation communities of Saint Croix.
We have a real opportunity to use these resources to help engage our local communities, and I'm going to talk about that briefly here for a minute.
One of the most important resources within the park are the invisible, and currently underground remains of the Danish Guinea company warehouse, the structure back here actually used to have walls that extended way out across the street here, and this customs house building was the later edition in 1848.
This building in back here actually extended across the street, all the way up to here, and came back, it was like a big compound.
Following the abolition of slavery, the compound was destroyed, and this customs house was constructed. The compound actually used to have offices for Danish customs officers, but it was also a space where enslaved Africans were bought, sold, and, in later times, closer to emancipation, where the royal slaves owned by the Danish crown actually lived. This is a really interesting, this is really neat.
As you can see here, here's an aerial photo, and again this compound used to extend out across the street, almost over to Fort Christiansvaern here. The roadway wasn't here.
Karen: Josh, do you want to try using the pointer?
Josh: I thought I was!
Karen: Go to the little red ball at the bottom, and depress it, and do a right click, and then move your pointer around, move your mouse around.
Josh: How's that?
Karen: We're still not seeing it… Try and use as much verbal description as you can.
Josh: Right, anyways, so the Guinea company warehouse which is the structure to - kind of in the center of the screen on the left hand side of the street - that structure actually used to extend across the street to the right, and the building in the center of your screen, which is the customs house, wasn't there prior to the 1820s, basically.
Using the 1779 Oxholm map, we generated this outline of what the compound used to look like in 1780, okay? And this is what it used to look like in… this is what it looked like in 1803. As you can see, the slave market was quite large at one time, and in this later 1803 map, we can see the reconstruction of the compound and the location of the royal slave residences.
By the 1820s, the majority of the infrastructure was removed, including the buildings, and the customs house building which is under that blue outline still. There hasn't been any formal archaeological investigations at this portion of the site, but there was a ground penetrating radar study conducted, and the Southeastern Archaeological Center led that project. Two archaeological monitoring projects in 2013, and 2011 were conducted for utility drainage improvement around that.
The customs house and you can see adjacent within the footprint of the original Guinea company warehouse compound. Hundreds of artifacts were collected, and are currently been processed from that monitoring project.
Among these preliminary analyses was identified over 60 pieces of Afro Caribbean and Moravian pottery, which is unique to the Moravian church which is the primary congregation where African enslaves and freed - slave Africans and freed blacks - would go to church.
They were also several clusters of pipe bowls and stem fragments in the vicinity of the known slave residences, both indicate early creolization of Africans in both religious and daily practices. While the estate is preliminary, it specifically places individuals that likely lived in the compound and worked in the community.
In addition to this data - and I'm going to start to wrap it up here - n addition to this data ... Let's see, it just skipped one. Okay. In addition to this data, we've been working with the local historian named Doctor George Tyson, to develop social biographies of the slave population under the ownership of the crown and housed within the Guinea company warehouse compound.
These people were employed in the town as skilled craftsman. The royal slave database highlights the residences individuals in the compound, between 1736 and 1848. The database consists of 11,152 entries transcribed from over 150 different documents found in Saint Croix, the United States, and the Danish National Archives, primarily, census records, and court proceedings.
Based on this database we've been able to reconstruct the biographies of over 30 individuals, and document some of their histories from enslavement to freedom. Critically, we are able to trace these individuals and their descendants’ movements into the towns and the modern Christiansted community to Free Gut, Water Gut, and Gallows Bay.
Looking at this image you can see towards the top center part portion of the graphic, there's a large open space, that's the historic site, and then these lines are drawn out to the surrounding communities that are immediately adjacent to the site. What's really interesting is when we begin to look at this database, and trace the genealogy of some of the people that lived and worked in this space, we can actually trace their descendants directly out into the local communities.
The upcoming years of 2016 and 2017 mark important dates for us here in Christiansted at the national historic site, being the 100th anniversary of the Park Service and the transfer of the Danish West Indies to the United States.
We're currently planning a community-based excavation project within the bounds of the park near the current customs house, and within the bounds of the old Guinea Company warehouse royal slave residences to try and directly involve the community and get them participate in their shared history.
Through this we hope to provide new educational opportunities for our community, and link the archaeological record with historic documents directly, and it really doesn't get much better than that. Importantly, I think we really want to convey to our local community, and to visitors that come to the island, the idea that Christiansted, despite the Danish architectural style, it's really an African town,
not only because Africans and people of African descent utilized their skill and hard work to construct it, but because they dwelled here and created families, and through this interaction and dwelling through time, created culture and community traditions that formed the core of what it means to be a local Crucian, both past and present.
From this perspective, the idea of Diafra and moving populations is also the story of community construction that goes beyond the study of population movements and creolization but rather it's an ongoing process, and a negotiation of descent communities, and the stories of their past, present, and future that we've yet to uncover.
Thank you, I think I went a little bit over my time. If you would like to contact me, here's my contact info, and thank you so much for inviting me, Karen, and to the other speakers for presenting.
Karen: Joshua, thank you very much, do you have time for a few questions, or comments?
Josh: I do.
Karen: Are there any questions for Joshua? Any comments?
Brad: Very, very nice job, Joshua, this is Doug Wilson. Really enjoyed that presentation. I look forward to hearing about your public archaeology digs.
Josh: Hey, thank you very much, Doug. I appreciate it, and if this is of interest to you, we'll be hopefully presenting the results of our work over the coming months, but always and, anybody, always please feel free to contact me, if you'd like to discuss some of the stuff further. It's really, really interesting.
Karen: This is really interesting that we have two presentations today about Park Service projects that are empowering local communities, by helping them to claim their heritage. I really appreciate your coming and giving these talks today. I think there’s something so unexpected about the Danish presence in the West Indies.
I first learned about this when I was working with Ken Wilde to post some of the research that he's been working on, and this is a very nice addition to the corpus of archaeology that's coming out of the West Indies.
Josh: Thank you, Karen, and I hope so. Before I came here to the park, the park didn't have a formal cultural resource program manager. When I was hired for this position two years ago, I just realized there's really a lot of work to do, and our chief of interpretation has also been faced with a variety of challenges to help educate our local communities and increase their knowledge about the value of their cultural heritage, and
how they can use that, not only help to facilitate their basic understanding of the past, but also help reinforce their sense of cultural identity, as we move forward into this next century, so very exciting.
Karen: Well, I look forward to hearing more about it, about your research.
Josh: Thank you!
Description
Joshua Torres, 10/9/2014, ArcheoThursday
Duration
30 minutes, 44 seconds
Credit
NPS
Date Created
10/09/2014
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