Colonial Encounters in the Southern Lesser Antilles: Indigenous Resistance, Material Transformations, and Diversity in an Ever-Globalizing World

The Lesser Antilles (Figure 16.1) represent one of the major regions in the world in which the lasting effects of the encounters between Europe and indigenous cultures with dramatically different ideological, social, technological, and economic frameworks are still very apparent. The small islands, which are located to the east of the Caribbean Sea, were linked through a vast web of social relationships in which Amerindians, Europeans, and Africans became entangled during the first centuries of European invasion and colonization. The intercultural dynamics which materialized during the early colonial period likely built upon local and regional networks of peoples, goods, and ideas that had developed in the insular Caribbean over the previous 6000 years (Hofman and Bright 2010; Hofman et al. 2011). By ad 1000, different island societies had developed in both the Greater and Lesser Antilles, and by 1492 a web of interlocking networks had spread across the Caribbean Sea, crossing local, regional, and pan-Caribbean boundaries (Hofman and Hoogland 2011). At the time of contact, these networks, which were flexible, robust, inclusive, and outwardlooking systems, echoed the overarching patterns of human migration and mobility, and the intercultural dynamics among the communities of both islands and mainland(s) (Hofman et al. 2014). The Lesser Antilles were the last set of islands in the circum-Caribbean to be officially and permanently settled by Europeans in the course of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Their occupation of these islands was fiercely contested by the Island Carib (Kalinago) and their mixed descendants, the Black Carib (Garifuna).1