Parang music is sung or heard mostly around Christmas time in Trinidad and Tobago. On Columbus’ voyage to the Caribbean one of his goals was to spread God, which in that time was the Catholic religion and with that came the celebration or observance of Christmas the birth of Jesus Christ. Once Catholicism was brought to the Indigenous people, they would have found a way to try to integrate their culture into what was imposed on them by the Europeans. This was where the Parang music came in. 

With the intervention of, Bartolomé de Las Casas, an early Spanish historian and Dominican missionary who was the first to expose the oppression of native peoples by Europeans in the Americas and to call for the abolition of slavery there. Las Casas was ordained a priest in Rome. He returned to the West Indies and in 1513–1514 served as chaplain to the invaders during the conquest of Cuba. After that campaign, he was awarded additional land. Upon listening to a sermon by a Dominican father denouncing the treatment of Indians, Las Casas relinquished his holdings to the governor. He was the only voice they had at that point in time.

Today we have many versions of Parang music that we hear around Christmas time. Parang bands would move from house to house in neighbourhood serenading to family and friends during festive seasons. It would be customary for families to greet the Paranderos with drinks and food, following specific steps or rituals that accompanied the entry to a home, the dedication of songs to a host, the eating and drinking, and the departure. The festive season begin in mid-October and goes approximately to January 6 which is the feast of Epiphany. The resulting atmosphere would be that of happiness, togetherness and the joy of good Christmas lime that continue to the early hours of the morning.

(Rebuscar performing in Lopinot. Photograph by Caldeo Sookram, http://caribbean-beat.com/issue-82/viva-parang#axzz4m9p8hqPs)

Hyarima military prowess, and relentless determination to rid his country of Spanish colonies, made him the obvious choice for warchief or cacique.

He was an able leader and a great warrior, and he soon formed military alliances with “Amerindian” groups in the neighboring islands as well as with Dutch traders in Tobago.

In 1636 and 1637, he joined with Dutch forces based in Tobago to rate Spanish out posts in Trinidad and along Orinoci. On October 14th 1637 the most devastating attack was carried out against St. Joseph the main Spanish settlement on The Island. During the attack, looting occurred and church and town buildings were burnt to the ground, with significant loss of life. The destruction of the town forced the survivors to withdraw temporarily to the main land.

Hyarima was both feared and respected by the Dutch and Spanish forces, who referred to him as ‘the great Chieftain of the Nepuyo people’, and his military activities in the North East of the Island was one reason why the Spanish authorities were never able to effectively establish control of this area. It is often thought that Arima was name after Hyarima, but it is more likely that he took his name from Arima when elected Chieftain, as it was Araucan custom to name their Chief’s and Caciques after the villages and settlements.

Hyarima did not accept his fate but stood up against the Spaniards and Christopher Columbus. When Christopher Columbus arrived, he met the Indigenous People here. He saw an opportunity to live out what was the sole purpose of his voyage, Gold, God and Glory. When he came, he met people with their own culture and their own colonialization. This was however not to the liking of Christopher Columbus and so he saw it fit to take over the land and to take control of the people already inhabiting it. The only was he could have done that was by denouncing the people and their practices and so he raped their women instilled fear in them and called the names like barbaric and cannibals. Hyarima however, saw it fit to stand up for himself and his people in efforts of preserving the way of life of his people and to expelling the Spanish invaders from their ancestral lands. His fierce and profound hatred and distress of the Spanish extended to the Church and its missionaries and he resisted their entry into his lands. Because of the stance, he took some of the Indigenous people survived and today they are able to perform their rituals because some of their practices were passed down through the generations. Today there is a statue in his honor in the village of Santa Rosa.


Amerindian water ceremony held last October at the Arima River off Wilson Street, off the Arima Blanchissuese Road. PHOTO: EDISON BOODOOSINGH, http://www.guardian.co.tt/lifestyle/2016-08-09/finally-some-land

(Australian High Commission Trinidad and Tobago, http://trinidadandtobago.embassy.gov.au/ptsp/events.html)

The women each have up to six school-age children to clothe. They calculate what they will have to save from their family holdings to finance the uniforms and send the children to get the rudimentary education available in the village schools. 

A central government programme was set up to provide free school uniforms to the country’s poorest children. None of the women in Annai have heard about it.

In Guyana, 88% of Amerindian households live below the poverty line; entire regions of the interior qualify for poverty relief. Yet most of the money voted for the free uniforms scheme was unspent in the first year. The next year the vote was repeated, and again could not be spent. Practical systems for disbursing the aid simply did not exist. The Ministry of Finance tried to transfer the funds directly to the Ministry of Amerindian Affairs, but bureaucracy was still a problem.

Amerindian parents face extraordinary hardships as they try to provide their children with the necessities of a new world for which their traditional skills do not equip them. They fervently believe in formal education, even though it has enabled few of them to grasp the advantages of “modern” life as a community, Amerindians still rank low in the national society.

More separate Guyana’s “Amerindian” population than space and time from the Western-oriented “coast landers” and from any putative pan Caribbean link. It is the only significant one in the Caribbean — close to 50,000, compared with 6,000 in Dominica, 3,000 in St Vincent and a few hundred in Trinidad and Tobago. Amerindians are the fourth largest ethnic group in Guyana (after the Indians, Africans and “Mixed”); in many interior regions they are a majority. Except on the coast, most Amerindians still speak their own languages and enjoy some measure of self-rule in their remote villages.

While most Guyanese live huddled close together on the swampy coastal plain, looking northwards to the United States and Europe, Amerindians are diffused over a vast landscape with little in common with the Caribbean apart from the sun. They look instead to South America. All the nine surviving tribes have cross-border relatives in Venezuela (Arawak, Carib and Warau, Akawaio and Arekuna), Brazil (Makushi, Wapishana, Waiwai and Patamona) and Suriname (Arawak and Carib). (Janette Forte, Caribbean Beat Issue 27)

Links with the continent are taking more permanent shape a road to Brazil’s Roraima State and a ferry link with Suriname. At the same time, resource-hungry investors are anxious for a piece of the action in Guyana’s hinterland; and elections in which regional voting may prove decisive are around the corner. The interior and its peoples are moving into prominence.

The attention is as calculated now as it was when Dutch ships first weighed anchor off these muddy shores nearly 400 years ago.

The Dutch who settled on “the Wild Coast” traded peacefully with the native populations they found there. They treated Amerindians as business partners, suppliers of goods (including local slaves) and services (such as recapturing runaway African slaves). Immunity from slavery was granted to some of the Amerindian nations, and there were annual “presents” for favoured tribal groups.

A century later, however, the balance of power had shifted and the original “lords of the soil” were no longer partners and allies. Now, they were subjects, with no recognised rights to their customary lands, not even the right to elect leaders of whom the colonisers disapproved.

The British inherited and maintained many elements of Dutch administration, including land law, and modified them as colonial needs changed. The end of slavery changed their policing role, and “Pax Britannica” proclaimed the protection of minorities. The labour needs of the all-powerful sugar industry meant deliberate discouragement of new settlement in the hinterland, and the need to settle borders with Venezuela and Brazil focused more attention on the peoples who occupied the borderlands.

However, the Amerindians were never a priority. All territory, apart from that held by European settlers, was designated as Crown Land. Indigenous land was parceled out as Mining Districts and State Forests, within which Amerindians had special rights as long as they remained Amerindian — in other words “traditional” or “other”.

In 1966, guaranteed Amerindian land rights were made a condition of independence by the departing British almost an afterthought, and largely because of intense lobbying by the visionary Amerindian MP Stephen Campbell. Today, most Amerindian villages hold communal title to some of their customary lands; yet post-colonial governments have retained the colonial laws that vested control over sub-surface minerals in the State largely intact.

Daily life for the Arawak, Warau and Carib peoples of the remoter, less fertile sections of the Guyana coastal plain is often thought to differ little from that of the rest of the Guyanese people, who were mostly imported for the colonial sugar industry. Nevertheless, visit any of the 100-odd native villages and you will catch a glimpse of a world far removed, though conscripted now by a cash economy into an alien value system.

 After the outsiders leave, the problem of school uniforms remains. Photograph by René Van Dongen.