Place of Beginnings
The Worldviews of the Amerindians of Cairi and of Medieval Europe
by John Stollmeyer
Warao Cosmology, Mythic Eco
In my researches I have come across some interesting correspondences relating to Trinidad and its perceived importance to different peoples.
In the Karinya language the word Arima means, “place of beginnings.”
The name for Naparima Hill comes from Nabarima, which means, “Father of the waves” to the Warao who inhabit the Orinoco Delta. It is the abode of the spirit of Haburi, their ancestral hero, the original canoe and paddle maker. Perceived as a petrified tree, it holds up the northern limit of their universe.
“PLACE OF BEGINNINGS: THE WORLDVIEWS OF THE AMERINDIANS OF CAIRI AND OF MEDIEVAL EUROPE” by John Stollmeyer
In my researches I have come across some interesting correspondences relating to Trinidad and its perceived importance to different peoples.
In the Karinya language the word Arima means, “place of beginnings.”
The name for Naparima Hill comes from Nabarima, which means, “Father of the waves” to the Warao who inhabit the Orinoco Delta. It is the abode of the spirit of Haburi, their ancestral hero, the original canoe and paddle maker. Perceived as a petrified tree, it holds up the northern limit of their universe.
Columbus’s Worldview (detail)
When Columbus sailed into the Gulf of Paria in early August he had to make sense of two anomalies. His navigational readings had been picking up the earth’s equatorial bulge and it being the rainy season in the Andes the Orinoco was in spate. He was faced with this powerful current running from west to east and although he had been in the clear blue salt of the Gulf Stream all along, now when he dipped his bucket he came up with sweet water. Captivated by the friendly natives, the exuberant vegetation, the benign climate and the extraordinary landscape he called the area, “Tierra de Gracia” (Graceland). Bible scholars of his day said that the Garden of Eden was in a far eastern land where a mighty river came down from the hills of paradise. From all this he imagined that the earth was shaped, “like a woman’s breast” on which rested the “Terrestrial Paradise” putting the data together, Columbus believed he had sailed up onto Mother Earth’s nipple. Later he wrote,
“God made me the messenger of the new heaven and the new earth of which he spoke in the Apocalypse of St. John (Rev. 21:1) after having spoken of it through the mouth of Isaiah; and he showed me where to find it.”
To the Sufis coming from the same tradition Trinidad is the place where “heaven touches earth.”
For over 20 years, I have cultivated an interest in tribal culture, lifestyle and spirituality. I have been involved with the Santa Rosa Carib community here in Trinidad since 1982. As an artist, I was concerned about the use of toxic materials and researched the technologies (from techni, the Greek word for art, literally: “logic of art”) that preceded the commercialization of petroleum. While living in
Ontario, Canada, I continued to investigate the egalitarian and sustainable nature of indigenous societies as they existed in North America.
Most recently my focus has been on recognizing the significant differences between tribal spirituality, what has been called Animism, and the dominant religions of our day. In my growing awareness as a practicing Animist, the universe is a Great Mystery, experienced as intelligent, creative and constantly changing; and each one of us is completely and inextricably, lovingly connected to every other part of it. For humans born into consensus reality based communal societies whose languages lack the verb “to be,” using instead, “to belong”, I imagine this state of reverence for our surroundings feels natural. The neighborhood is a friendly place. When individuals of “civilized” societies experience this first person universal, the transformation has been termed enlightenment. The word alignment seems to me more accurate. Enlightenment is a condition of one’s alignment with All Our Relations: with human community; with rooted beings, winged beings, water beings and four legged beings; with the elements: earth, air, fire and water; and with the celestial entities, the sun, moon and stars. In other words, the world is a sacred place and we belong in it.
If it appears that I am idealizing tribal peoples and that “as we know” there are all kinds of things wrong with every tribal way of life. Then yes, if what one means by “wrong” is something one does not like, there are aspects in every one of those cultures that “civilized” humans might find distasteful, immoral or repugnant. The fact remains that whenever tribal peoples have been encountered in their traditional habitats, they show no signs of discontent, they do not complain of being miserable or ill-treated, they are not seething with rage and are not perpetually struggling with depression, anxiety, and alienation.
In contrast, we can see how religion (from the Latin ligare literally, “to tie or bind again”) became the appropriate word to describe those teachings that arose to explain and justify the inherent injustices of our 10,000 year old class and caste societies. These social organizations which exemplify a response to the over-population caused by the huge food surpluses generated by “catastrophic” aggreculture (sic) engender a loss of that sense of connection to each other and to the natural world. Days and places are set aside as sacred and species are valued only according to their usefulness to “man” who, despite being conceived as a different order of being from the community of life, is fatally flawed and in need of salvation or nirvana. Whether or not we articulate it, our modus operandi reflects the attitude that the world was made for man, and man was destined to conquer and rule it.
“Place of Beginnings, The World Views of the Amerindians of Cairi and of Medieval Europe,” was mounted as a companion to “The New Old World: Antilles-Living Beyond the Myth,” featuring the photographs of Marisol Villanueva from Puerto Rico. Villanueva documented the continuance and revitalization of indigenous cultures in the Caribbean Antilles: in Trinidad, the Dominican Republic, Puerto Rico, Cuba and Dominica. In Trinidad, she took up a residency at CCA7, and photographed the Santa Rosa Carib Community, focusing on the processing of bitter cassava into farine and cassava bread. A collection of the images was first shown at the Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian in New York. When it came to Trinidad, it was the first time that the work was shown in a territory of an indigenous community that was documented in the project.
Support from Jane Gregory-Rubin, Director of InterAmericas/Society of Arts and Letters of the Americas for Villanueva’s tour, was extended to my work. Jane met Ricardo Bharath-Hernandez, Chief of the Santa Rosa Carib Community, in New York. I met her in Arima with Ricardo when the Villanueva exhibition was being planned. At that meeting, Jane indicated her interest in h
aving a companion show based on indigenous mapping of the region in the period of Columbus’s explorations.
The exhibition which I curated ran from August to November 2003 consisted of three new installations: “Columbus’s World View”, “Warao Cosmology, Mythic Ecology” and “Cairi (Island)” as well as earlier works: “Re-orienting to an Earth Centered Philosophy” (1999) and “Turtle Island Mandala” (2001). Also included were: (1) artifacts from the collection of The Archaeology Centre, Department of History at The University of the West Indies, St. Augustine and of the Santa Rosa Carib Community of Arima, (2) The Seville Diptych (1992) by Tina Spiro and (3) Amerindian Communal Shelter constructed during a children’s summer camp.
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