Pedagogy of Black Indigeneity: the fight for Garifuna identity in Honduras
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.18764/2675-0805v7e25945Keywords:
Black Indigeneity, Identity, Garifuna, Pedagogy of Black IndignityAbstract
Blackness and indigeneity are two constructed categories that make up or constitute the Garifuna identity. Despite a marked process of racialization, the Garifuna have managed for many decades to build and strengthen their cultural identity based on a constant struggle against policies of extermination
and supremacy. My arguments in this article are based on my experiences during my doctoral research and my grassroots activism with the Honduran Black Fraternal Organization. In this pedagogy of black indigeneity, I demonstrate that separating the categories of blackness and indigeneity in the Garifuna identity is a colonial strategy used by the ‘supremacist elite’ to deny
the ancestral rights of the Garifuna people in Honduras. It focuses on emphasizing the blackness and denying the indigeneity of the Garifuna in order to exclude them from the rights to access, use, and enjoy ancestral lands and territory and other related rights. Garifuna knowledge teaches that Garifuna identity extends beyond the denial or affirmation of any of its constitutive categories, such as being Black or Indigenous. It is about overcoming the dichotomy or colonial dualities imposed by national states founded under the logic of racial reduction of blacks, extermination, and dispossession.
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