A/HRC/23/34/Add.2 and hostile with regard to the colonized populations. It is only recently that Vincentians have started to gain access to alternative sources to retrieve their own history. 35. Research indicates that the Callinagos (or Kalinagos), later called the “Caribs” or “Yellow or Red Caribs” by the colonizers, constitute a third wave of Amerindians that settled in Saint Vincent and the Grenadines about AD 1200. They have left an important archaeological heritage by way of petroglyphs that have been found in various parts of the country. The meaning of the petroglyphs is still being researched. 36. Research also indicates that “by the first quarter of the 18th century, there was a relatively large number of persons of African descent, living on the island of Saint Vincent, who were not slaves”.12 These people would have arrived on the islands as a result of various events, including shipwrecks of slaving vessels off the coast of Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, the escape of slaves from Barbados, and possibly the visit by African traders to the West Indies before the Europeans. 37. It was stressed that before colonial conquest, Callinagos and African populations intermingled and married, resulting in a third group, referred to as the Garifuna.13 They were identified as “Black Caribs” by the European settlers and described as indistinguishable from the Callinagos “in terms of dress, diet, language and lifestyle – everything, in fact, except pigmentation and similar racial characteristics.” 14 However, there were also conflicts between the two groups. 38. The Garifuna story is described as unique, and “Garifuna people take pride in their past as a free people living for generations according to their own customs on Saint Vincent. Their language, passed down from the Amerindian side of their heritage, bears living witness to their radically different history”.15 Many of the interlocutors the Special Rapporteur met underlined that resistance by the Garifuna prevented early colonization of the island and delayed the introduction of slavery, which lasted about 50 years and ended between 1834 and 1838. 39. The Garifuna lost the war against the British at the end of the 18th century. Many were killed and the remaining Garifuna population, estimated at between 4,338 and 5,080 men, women and children, was deported in 1796, first to Balliceaux, a small barren island off the coast of Saint Vincent and eight months later, in 1797, they were deported to Roatán, an island off the coast of Honduras. However, only about half of the deportees reached Roatán, as many had either died on Balliceaux, as a result of hunger, thirst and illness, or did not survive the journey. The year 1797 – referred to as the year of banishment – and its dramatic consequences is still present in the memory of the Garifuna people. Those who stayed on Saint Vincent were prohibited from retaining their culture, which was then completely lost.16 40. People identifying as Garifuna in Saint Vincent and the Grenadines today stated that during their youth, references to “Black Caribs” were still very pejorative, and that references to “Garifuna” started being used only in the 1990s. Garifuna identity is being revived, due in particular to the development of contacts with Garifuna populations settled 12 13 14 15 16 Edgar Adams, People on the Move: The Effects of Some Important Historical Events on the People of Saint Vincent and the Grenadines (Kingstown, R&M Adams Book Centre, 2002), p. 6. See also Saint Vincent and the Grenadines Country Poverty Assessment 2007-2008, Final report, vol. I, p. 17. Christopher Taylor, The Black Carib Wars, Freedom, Survival and the Making of the Garifuna (Oxford, Signal Books, 2012), p. 17-18. Ibid. See Adams, People on the move (see footnote 12), p. 58; and Taylor, The Black Carib Wars (see footnote 14), p. 160. 9