It was the Europeans who called these people the Caribs, for that is what they called themselves. While Christopher Columbus was still on first voyage he picked up the word, or something like it, from the Tainos the Greater Antilles.

The earliest mention of the Caribs is that made by Columbus in journal on 26 November 1492: ‘All the people that he has found up to today, he says, are very frightened of those of can iba or can ima.’ Note that it is mentioned as a place where people live rather than the name of the people themselves. In other statements the Tainos may have been using the term to refer not to a specific ethnic group but to any hostile band who attacked their villages, particularly those who came from the small islands to the east of where they were in Hispaniola. Again on 13 January 1493, the journal notes: ‘The admiral also says that on the islands he passed they were greatly fearful of Carib or on some they call it Caniba, but on Espafiola, Carib.’ This was modified in later Spanish writing to canibal and in other texts to caribi or can be. Once the word hit the printing presses of Europe and became common parlance, the name ‘Carib’, like ‘Indian’ and ‘West Indies’, even if based on a mistake, was to remain for ever more.

One hundred and fifty years later in Dominica, the French priest Fr Raymond Breton who lived among the ‘Caribs’ recorded the people’s own name for themselves as Calliponam in the women’s speech, and Callinago in that of the men. Another ancient Arawakan language term for them was probably kaniripbuna, or kallipina, origin of the term garifuna which is what the ‘Black Caribs’ of Belize call themselves. Because the mainland immigrants who entered the Windward Islands in about 1400 were essentially a male-dominated band, who took brides and fathered a new group within the islands, it would be accurate to use their name in the men’s language: Callinago.

In Fr Breton’s day, the letter ‘k’ did not exist in the French language so the printers of his ‘Carib Dictionary’ used ‘c’ throughout. The word is however better represented phonetically as Kalina go. But things were to get even more confusing. In the twentieth century, anthropologists needed to differentiate between the ‘Caribs’ on the islands and their supposed ancestral people on the mainland. To do so they coined a new term: ‘Island Carib’ when referring to those of the Lesser Antilles and maintained ‘Carib’ when referring to those on mainland South America. To simplify and indeed to try to correct matters, I shall be referring to this distinct group of people, who emerged on the Windward Islands and Guadeloupe, by the name which they called themselves: the Kalinago.

The Kalinago control of the Windward Islands lasted from about 1400 to 1700, with the last of them holding on to Dominica and St Vincent for another twenty or thirty years before finally retreating to the most inacces- sible parts of those islands in the face of English and French colonisation. In St Vincent they mixed with escaped African slaves and held out against the British until 1796, when some 5,0Q0 were deported to the island of Ruatan off Honduras and moved to the area of what today is southern Belize. In Dominica they concentrated themselves on the isolated parts of the north-east coast where they were eventually granted 3,700 acres of land by the British in 1903. They were the last of the Amerindians to enter the region and they were the last to survive.

Our knowledge of the Kalinago is based almost entirely on the written reports of European observers. The Kalinago had arrived in the islands from South America less than a hundred years before the Spanish arrived from across the Atlantic. The first encounter of the two groups was on 4 November 1493 on Guadeloupe, the day after Columbus had sighted Dominica on his second voyage.

Unlike the Tainos, the Kalinago had arrived in the islands recently enough to have retained traditions of their mainland origin. They were accustomed to making trips back and forth between the mainland and the Windward Islands. They explained this to European missionaries and told them that they had conquered an ethnic group named Igneri or Eyeri. Their raids were aimed at bride capture. The capture of women of an enemy group was a feature of raiding and warfare among tribes who were tradi-rionally in conflict with each other. Such inter tribal raiding was common to several South American forest tribes. A well-known example would be the Yanomamo of Amazonia. According to theories of primitive marriage in all races, the earliest form of marriage was bride-capture, when shortage of females obliged early man to seek his mate in war.

By the time Columbus arrived, the Kalinago were raiding Taino villages on Puerto Rico to obtain additional wives. The admiral found over twenty iaino women when he visited Kalinago villages on Guadeloupe during his is voyage, and returned them to their homes on the Greater Antilles. This taking of captives by one Amerindian tribe from another was a method of avoiding inter-marriage among the small communities. The Kalimagos, like other tribes on the mainland, integrated their captives as wives or, in the case of males as poitos (sons-in-law) into their kinship network. Extracts from The Dominica Story