The news of the ad­vances of the in­dige­nous com­mu­ni­ty of Trinidad and To­ba­go, re­lat­ed to de­vel­op­ment of the 25-acre par­cel of land at Ari­ma grant­ed by the Gov­ern­ment, is quite en­cour­ag­ing.

As re­port­ed in this news­pa­per, wa­ter and elec­tric­i­ty, two ne­ces­si­ties to spur de­vel­op­ment, hu­man and phys­i­cal, are now firm­ly es­tab­lished at the site.

Ac­cord­ing to Chief of the First Peo­ples, Ri­car­do Her­nan­dez, they are seek­ing to have Wi-Fi in­ter­net con­nec­tion and oth­er ameni­ties to move the liv­ing project for­ward.

Amerindi­an peo­ples, left be­hind af­ter hun­dreds of years of mass bru­tal­i­sa­tion, ne­glect and de­nial of their cen­tral place in this Caribbean so­ci­ety, are very much en­ti­tled to such fa­cil­i­ties.

The fact is that while larg­er groups of cit­i­zens with more com­pelling voic­es and a lis­ten­ing ear in the right places have been able to per­suade suc­ceed­ing gov­ern­ments to al­lo­cate re­sources and priv­i­leges to their cause, it has tak­en 40 years of plead­ing be­fore the Amerindi­an peo­ples could have been heard and their very le­git­i­mate re­quests met.

It must be the hope and ex­pec­ta­tion that it will not take an­oth­er cou­ple gen­er­a­tions for the First Peo­ples site at Ari­ma to be con­vert­ed in­to some­thing that the great spir­its of their fore­fa­thers will be sat­is­fied with. The na­tion­al com­mu­ni­ty must recog­nise the life and death strug­gles fought by the war­rior chief Hyari­ma against the Span­ish in­vaders to pre­serve the lives and cul­ture of his peo­ple.

Among the am­bi­tions of Chief Her­nan­dez and the re­main­ing Amerindi­ans, sad­ly re­duced to a few hun­dred in num­bers but strong in moral au­thor­i­ty to be here in this time and space, is to recre­ate a vil­lage in the like­ness of those which were de­vel­oped by their fore­fa­thers. The ex­pec­ta­tion must be that such an achieve­ment will have a pos­i­tive im­pact on the na­tion­al psy­che of all the peo­ples of Trinidad and To­ba­go.

A suc­cess­ful and thriv­ing vil­lage com­mu­ni­ty of the na­tive peo­ples of the re­gion will in­form of the be­gin­nings of Caribbean civil­i­sa­tion and those who mapped out our vil­lages and towns. We on­ly have to take no­tice of the Amerindi­an names of towns, vil­lages, streets and mon­u­ments to un­der­stand how cen­tral the First Peo­ples were and con­tin­ue to be.

The for­ma­tion of such a vi­brant and rel­e­vant vil­lage in Ari­ma—an Amerindi­an word mean­ing “wa­ter”—will al­so al­low for the con­tin­ued and en­hanced link­ages amongst oth­er com­mu­ni­ties in Do­mini­ca, St Vin­cent and the Grenadines, in Puer­to Ri­co, the Do­mini­can Re­pub­lic and in Be­lize in Cen­tral Amer­i­ca and in­dige­nous peo­ples of North and South Amer­i­ca.

The re­al­i­ty is that while oth­er eth­nic and cul­tur­al groups across the re­gion have re­ceived the recog­ni­tion for con­tribut­ing to Caribbean civil­i­sa­tion, there is a sure deficit in knowl­edge re­gard­ing the var­i­ous tribes of Amerindi­an peo­ples and their long his­to­ry of be­ing here.

One ma­jor in­ten­tion of Chief Her­nan­dez is to es­tab­lish a self-sus­tain­ing vil­lage in which agri­cul­ture, which was at the base of the Amerindi­an civil­i­sa­tion, will flour­ish and that the present gen­er­a­tion will recre­ate around the orig­i­nal arts and crafts of their an­ces­tors. An alive and func­tion­ing Amerindi­an vil­lage will ex­tend the cul­tur­al and so­cial bound­aries of Trinidad and To­ba­go; so we can be­come a whole peo­ple.