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This course was an eye opener in some ways but it did bring up some concerns with me, mainly on how we grew up learning the Eurocentric view points. Caribs were warlike. Arawaks were peaceful and did not eat turtle meat because they thought that it increased stupidity levels. How much of my childhood exams were lies.

It is just straight out mind boggling on how mindless we can be at times if someone doesn't show us the truth.

I understand the divide and conquer strategy, take away all that is dear to them (family, language, religion, etc.) then rebuild them from the ground up with your own selective beliefs "blessed are the poor in spirit for theirs is the kingdom of heaven" (Matthew 5:3) and "blessed are the meek for they shall inherit the earth" (Matthew 5:5) but not "eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand, foot for foot, burn for burn, wound for wound, stripe for stripe"(Exodus 21:24-25)

The sad part is that we are still mindless lambs, years later. We still believe that if we go abroad, we can get a better education. Foreign styles, clothes and shows are better than our own. We learn to write Standard English not Creole.

This course really can make a person wonder about what is the truth and what is opinion.

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Due to the mixture of cultures in the region because of the influx of migrants from slavery, the Caribbean became a very diverse region in terms of religion, languages and cultures. With this diversity, also came a level of tolerance for another's practices and beliefs.

That is to say Christmas is no longer just for the Christians or the Catholics, Divali is not just celebrated by Hindus and Eid doesn't solely belong to the Muslims.

Below is a picture of a group of non Hindu students of varying ethnicities belonging to Holy Faith Convent, Couva in Trinidad, a Catholic institution, on the day of their Divali celebrations.

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Sevilla la Nueva, the first European settlement in Jamaica, is home to the bittersweet story of the beginning of the Caribbean sugar trade

smithsonian.com

Until the discovery of the New World in the late 15th century, Europeans hungered for sugar. So precious was the commodity that a medieval burgher could only afford to consume one teaspoon of the sweet granules per year. And even in Europe's early Renaissance courts, the wealthy and powerful regarded the refined sweetener as a delicious extravagance. When Queen Isabella of Castile sought a Christmas present for her daughters, she chose a small box brimming with sugar.

The commodity's preciousness came, of course, from its relative scarcity during this period. Sugar cane-the sole source of the sweetener-only really flourished in hot, humid regions where temperatures remained above 80 degrees Fahrenheit and where rain fell steadily or farmers had ample irrigation. This ruled out most of Europe. Moreover, sugar-mill owners required huge quantities of wood to fuel the boiling vats for transforming cane into sugar cones. By the early 16th century, sugar masters along the southern Mediterranean, from Italy to Spain, struggled to find enough cheap timber.

So European merchants and bankers were delighted by reports they received from Spanish mariners exploring the Caribbean. Jamaica possessed superb growing conditions for sugar cane, and by 1513, Spanish farmers in the island's earliest European settlement, Sevilla la Nueva, tended fields bristling with the green stalks. But until very recently, historians and archaeologists largely overlooked the story of these early would-be sugar barons. Now a Canadian and Jamaican research team led by Robyn Woodward, an archaeologist at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, has studied Sevilla la Nueva's fledgling sugar industry and excavated its mill. "It's the earliest known sugar mill in the New World," says Woodward.

Woodward first walked the site in 1981 while searching for traces of Christopher Columbus and his fourth expedition: the mariner had spent nearly a year in the immediate region after beaching two of his ships in St. Ann's Bay on Jamaica's north coast. Columbus possessed a detailed knowledge of the eastern Atlantic's Madeira Island sugar industry-he had married the daughter of a wealthy Madeira sugar grower-and he clearly recognized Jamaica's rich potential for growing the crop. Moreover, at least 60,000 indigenous Taino farmers and fishers lived on the island, a potential pool of forced laborers. But Columbus died before he could exploit this knowledge. Instead, it was his son Diego who dispatched some 80 Spanish colonists to the north coast of Jamaica in 1509. There the colonists subjugated the Taino, planted sugar cane and corn, and founded Sevilla la Nueva, the island's first European settlement that, in spite of its relatively brief history, tells a crucial story about the colonization of the Caribbean.

According to surviving records, the inhabitants of Seville la Nueva did not begin milling sugar until the arrival of their second governor, Francesco de Garay, in 1515. Garay, a former slave trader in the Bahamas, had made his fortune in Caribbean gold fields. He devoted part of this wealth to constructing a mill in Sevilla la Nueva capable of churning out 150 tons of sugar a year for European markets. He was in the process of building a second mill at the time of his departure for Mexico in 1523.

Troweling into the sediments, Woodward's team uncovered the ruins of Garay's large, water-powered sugar mill, complete with a brick-lined tank for holding cane-sugar juice and an ax and a stone block that workers had used for chopping cane. Almost certainly, says Woodward, Garay chose to house all the heavy equipment in simple, open-sided thatched sheds, as opposed to more permanent brick or stone buildings. "This is all very expedient," she says. If Garay had been unable to make a go of it at the site, he could have moved the expensive equipment elsewhere.

Documents strongly suggest that Garay brought 11 enslaved Africans to Seville la Nueva, but excavators found no trace of their existence in the industrial quarter. Instead, Garay relied heavily on coerced Taino laborers. Woodward and her colleagues recovered pieces of Taino stone blades littering the ground near the mill, suggesting that the Taino were cutting and processing the tough cane stalks and doing heavy manual labor. In addition, the Spanish colonists compelled Taino women to prepare traditional indigenous foods, such as cassava bread, on stone griddles.

But while Garay and the colonists worked closely with Taino villagers and dined on native fare, they determinedly kept up Spanish appearances in public. They made a point, for example, of dining from fine imported Majolica bowls-rather than local Taino pottery-in the industrial quarter. "These were Spanish people wanting to show off their Spanishness," explains Woodward.

The excavations also reveal much about the grand ambitions of the early Spanish entrepreneurs. In Sevilla la Nueva's industrial quarter, the archaeologists unearthed a massive sculptor's workshop littered with nearly 1,000 carved limestone blocks of archangels, griffons and demons-the largest collection of Renaissance sculpture ever discovered in the Americas. These were destined for the altar of a magnificent stone abbey the settlers planned to build. Sevilla la Nueva, says David Burley, a historical archaeologist at Simon Fraser University, "is one of the best preserved early Spanish colonial settlements by a long measure."

But the town never lived up to its founders' great expectations. Its colonists failed to reap sufficiently large profits, and most abandoned the site in 1534, settling instead on the island's south coast. Moreover, the sugar industry they founded in Jamaica took a tragic toll on human life. European germs and exploitation virtually extinguished Jamaica's Taino in just one century. Without this large coerced workforce, Jamaica's sugar economy faltered until the British seized the island in 1655 and set up a full-scale plantation system, importing tens of thousands of enslaved Africans. By the end of the 18th century, African-American slaves outnumbered Europeans in Jamaica by a ratio of ten to one.

Despite its short history, says Woodward, the Spanish colony at Sevilla la Nueva tells us much about the birth of the sugar industry in the New World, a global trade that ultimately had an immense long-term impact on the Americas. The growing and milling of sugar cane, she points out, "was the primary reason for bringing ten million Africans to the New World."

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smithsonian.com Until the discovery of the New World in the late 15th century, Europeans hungered for sugar. So precious was the commodity that a medieval burgher could only afford to consume one teaspoon of the sweet granules per year. And even in Europe's early Renaissance courts, the wealthy and powerful regarded the refined sweetener as a delicious extravagance.

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This is not only a regional issue but a global one.

Straying off topic, one can remark on the results of the presidential elections of the United States of America, where a female who spent years in politics from being the First Lady to a Senator then the U.S. Secretary of State lost to a... *I have no words* man.
Please note... she also won the popular vote.

Anyways, our sex is discovered when we are born however, what society does afterwards is link characteristics to what they believe to reflect our sex which they consider gender.

The male gender is seen as the stronger, the hunters, the providers, the more intellectual of the two sexes.
Whereas the female are represented by the caretakers, submissive and the fairer of the two.
The females were the damsels in distress to the male's hero.

This thought has run rampant for centuries. In the Caribbean, even prior to Columbus' arrival, gender roles were well defined. The males were the hunters and gathers of the tribe along with being the major source of protection. Their female counter parts cooked the meals, looked after the children and sick and generally never really left the village.

During slavery, on plantations like the Sevilla la Nueva in Jamaica, the European males were the top of the food chain. They did as they pleased and whoever went against their word was punished. Their equally fair skinned wives, not much was known about their role on the estate, though through most documented cases viewed them as the type that sat back and let the men do all the work, while they relax in the comforts of their own homes.
This was a different case from the enslaved, they were judged from the moment they set foot on these shores. The males that looked fit and muscular were the normally the first to be sold off as it seemed that they could handle the long process of sugar production. Females, for them, beauty was a curse and some were bought as breeders, if nothing else.

**Please refer to Food for Thought link**

Enough about the past, the present is not much better. Females are still deemed as inferior, though progress has been made since those times.

People were surprised that both awardees of the President's medal in Trinidad and Tobago, this year, were both female. They, Raquel LeBlanc and Priya Maharaj, both attended two female denominational secondary schools. I was pleasantly shocked and pleased by this news, along with the majority national scholarships being granted to females along with four of the top five schools that were awarded with the most scholarships happened to be all female institutions.

After talking about this great news with some male acquaintances, a good portion remarked not on the girls' excellence but the boys' performances. In my mind, I'm in just complete shock... I knew for an almost 99% certainty, if I told them that the recipients were males, they would not have reacted or said anything, much less mention the girl's who wrote along side them. Is this the society we live in, where I need to fight tooth and nail to prove my worth? Where, even if I graduate with First Class Honours, it does not matter as it is a male certification in this man's world. It just means that I think like a man.

Where do I fit into this world? How far can I go before I reach my glass ceiling? That is up for us to decide. To see if we have to drive to beat the status quo, like these lovely and intelligent ladies... to create a society where there are equals not inferiors

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Our past unites.

There is never an end, only the start of new chapters and stories and when our lives are over sequels and continuations from those we have touched physically and emotionally.

We may not look the same, or have similar speech patterns, much less all speak the same language but..
We are one and the same, there are no differences between us on the inside. We all bleed, cry and hurt. We all laugh, smile and work.

No matter where life takes us,
Or however far may we roam.
Our island blood connects us,
To the place we call our own.
While most see coloured skin,
We all beat red.
We all come from one home,
Our One Unified Caribbean.

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America has just separated themselves from Britain... What is the most important piece of literature did they create as proof of their newly claimed freedom?

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America has just separated themselves from Britain... What is the most important piece of literature did they create as proof of their newly claimed freedom?

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The Declaration of Independence

That's apparently wrong, it's their dictionary. So if they want to spell realise with a 'z' ... It's now grammatically correct (at least, according to their standards)

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You can anyone this question and get varied responses. How does one define themselves? A trait, a family name, a title, a position in authority, your background.... your history.

History is made daily, through words and deeds. How can you expect to understand your present situation if you don't acknowledge the past...

What is my past? Can I trust what others tell me my past is... or what I discern it to be? Do I trust my family members or the historians?

History is written through the eyes of the victors, never the fallen. So everything learnt is to be taken with a grain of salt as there is always more than one side to  a tale...

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I survived Caribbean Studies for CAPE.... this should be a piece of cake

* One Introductory Lecture later *

Well, my last year was a lie... along with anything previous to that
But, the course sounds more fun than I first thought

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Interestingly enough, over half of this year's national scholarships went to the girls.... and reading the comments below, Bernadette Annemaire Ricahrds (from her facebook account) commented on a probable link between female's success with violence towards them.

Oh, congrats ladies !

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Two girls have won this year's President's Medal.Raquel LeBlanc of St Joseph's Convent, Port-of-Spain and Priya Maharaj of Lakshmi Girls Hindu School were on Thursday ann