COMPARATIVE COLONIALISMS
This chapter compares Carnival and powwow, framing them as responses to colonialism. I trace the history of Carnival in Trinidad from slavery days through emancipation in 1838 and the subsequent colonial administration of a profoundly mixed-race society. I follow pan-Indian culture through the 1880s, when the Dawes Act allocated Indian lands during the final phase of military conflict over the western frontier, and into the twentieth century, with its history of federal attempts to assimilate or eradicate native peoples and culture. The chapter continues a short way into the twentieth century, concluding with a description of Carnival and powwow in their contemporary im/migrant incarnations in Brooklyn and Minneapolis.
Throughout their long histories in this hemisphere, Carnival and powwow have responded to three central themes in Caribbean and Indian social experience: migration, colonial administration, and, in the twentieth century, the astounding reach and celerity of mass culture. These three things are, of course, linked: the forced migration of Africans in the Middle Passage resulted in their invention and remembering of a culture that was subject to vicious repression first by slaveholders, later by the postemancipation hierarchies of Caribbean colonies. American Indians were forced west by pressure from Euroamerican expansion. Removal of eastern nations to Oklahoma, for example, resulted in the formation
Both Helen Safa and Errol Hill suggest that the inability of Africans to return to their actual geographic homelands has a lot to do with the richness of Afro-Creole culture in the New World. Rooted in the concept of culture, rather than any specific place, slaves and their descendants forged a uniquely “indigenous culture,” as Hill phrases it.[2] While the respect given by these Caribbeanists to the power of diasporic memory is appropriate in light of the tremendous syncretic capacity of Afro-Atlantic cultures to remember and reinvent history, the example of Native American experience in the United States provides an illuminating parallel, connecting feats of cultural memory with geographic removal.
Rather than being barred from returning home, American Indians have had the experience of being interned and administered on their own land. They have been removed from or legally deprived of specific places that their nations held sacred; relocated to “Indian territories” on reservations or in Oklahoma; and then administered through the culturally genocidal practices of Indian boarding schools and the prohibition of Indian religions. As both Gloria Anzaldúa and John Martínez Weston point out, native and mestizo peoples often inhabit lands that are historically theirs but have been reshaped by colonial power.[3] Ties to the land are important as practice, much as ties to Africa or to a syncretic Afro-Creole culture are the products of historical struggle. “It is the land,” asserts Gail Guthrie Valaskakis, “real and imagined, lived in heritage and current political process, and expressed in discourse, which constitutes the connection between nature and culture for Indians.”[4] As evidenced by contemporary struggles at Black Mountain, the Paha Sapa (Black Hills), and Mole Lake, to name only a few, simple geographic proximity does not necessarily facilitate access to cultural practices of the land.[5] Patterns of im/migration and administration partially determine the relationship of diasporic peoples to their homes. I will discuss these two strands of Indian and Caribbean history together, and then move on to consider the role of mass culture in what Robert Orsi calls “the inner history” of im/migration.[6]