James

Garifuna Dangriga, Belize

The Garinagu are a people of mixed Indigenous-African ancestry who live along the Caribbean coast of Central America, primarily in Honduras, Belize and Guatemala. They originated on the island of Yurumein, what is today St. Vincent and the Grenadines in the eastern Caribbean, as a free society at the crossroads of Arawak, Carib and African cultures. As a free Black society, European slave holders perceived them as a threat and, much like other Indigenous peoples throughout the Americas, they became caught in an impossible position between warring colonial powers. When the British defeated the French for control of the island, they subject the Garinagu to a genocidal exile on Balliceaux, an island too small to support settlement. From there, the Garinagu escaped to the coast of Central America, where they flourished, and later continued onwards to American cities such as Los Angeles and New York, where large segments of the population live today.

Their language, Garifuna, is part of the Arawakan family although it has borrowed words from Carib, French and English. It is a fantastically complex language which represents the last living remnant of the indigenous languages formerly spoken in the Caribbean islands.

James Lovell, of Dangriga, Belize, is a musician and activist who fights for the preservation of his language through performance. His work has taken many forms, including a musical play recounting Garifuna history in which a group of young students became the first St. Vincentians to speak and sing in the Garifuna language since the exile of 1797. More recently, he has collaborated with ELA to document two endangered genres of acapella song, arumahani and abeimahan.