COUNCIL OF NATIVE CARIBBEAN HERITAGE

Mission Statement

Our mission is to reverse the process of what is known as the "Paper Genocide" which refers to the government sanctioned erasure of a culture. Historically, European powers tried to erase the identity of indigenous populations of the Caribbean, by forced assimilation into the dominant colonial culture. This is a process known as "Acculturation", where the dominant culture erases the subordinate people identity through a process of limiting documentation of a population’s history. The language is lost, religious customs abandoned, and ultimately a cultural identity is erased. An example of this process occurred in Puerto Rico when the Tainos were not allowed to register their race/ethnicity on official census documents. The option only existed for in the Spanish Caribbean as "Blanco, Negro, or Mulatto" (White, Black, or Mixed). We seek to prove that the First Nations of the Caribbean have not become extinct but survived and encourage intertribal exchanges.