Decolonising stories of the indigenous Caribbean

Could you introduce yourself and your work? 

My name is Akley Olton, I’m a Vincentian visual artist, filmmaker, cultural worker. I’ve made the focus of my work over the past few years, decolonising our stories, or decolonising stories of indigenous Caribbean, stories of celebrating the new emerging identities that is Caribbean. And that’s what I’ve been sort of like researching, including interviewing lots of people and reading about the past to make these documentaries, sharing and telling people about how things went and why, why we inherit some of the traits that we have today and connect it to the past. This led to my community nominating me to be on the local reparations committee, which enabled me more to take responsibility and charge of like the conversation  for the past 15 some years I’ve just been documenting things in St Vincent when it comes to conversations about indigenous history, reparations, slavery. I have a sort of like archive of footage that I’ve been filming.  

What does reparations mean in the context of the histories and communities of St Vincent and the Grenadines? 

When it comes to St. Vincent reparations, it’s very, very interesting because as a case study, St. Vincent is not just only reparations for the transatlantic slave trade, but on the ground in St. Vincent and the Grenadines on the island of Baliceaux. There are bones that have recently been revealed because of climate change, and those are bones of indigenous people who were sort of exiled from mainland St. Vincent. In terms of the conversation of reparations, point number two is about confronting the indigenous genocide in St. Vincent, supported by the story of the Kalinago people and the Garifuna. It’s a very powerful place for this conversation, representing hundreds of thousands of descendants of Garifuna who live in Latin America, who point to St. Vincent as their mecca. The International Garifuna Conference, which happens in March, brings together indigenous people from across the Caribbean and researchers from Europe and North America to discuss preserving heritage in the Caribbean. They share groundbreaking information about the memory of the indigenous people and how they survived, with living descendants of the indigenous Kalinago in St. Vincent and Dominica. The Tainos in BVI are revealing themselves, and the Garifuna have been trying to return to St. Vincent for the past 220 years. The Garifuna conference has been championing these discussions for about 12 years, where the topic of reparation has also come up a few times. 

We don’t really think about what it means to move forward as a young nation in this world, and I even see us as the newest people on the planet right now. This country is about to be 46 years old, and we get to forge our identity now. I believe we should demand justice for what happened to our foreparents and grandparents on the island, which in some cases is a graveyard where indigenous bones have revealed themselves on the surface. We need to confront what it means to live in a graveyard for centuries and how to put those spirits to rest. With climate change affecting the evidence linking us to our past, we must have resources to protect those things, possibly by building shrines or exhuming bones. St. Vincent and the Grenadines was the cornerstone of indigenous resistance to colonialism and one of the last places to be colonised. Unfortunately, the Vincentian populace hasn’t fully tapped into the essence of this conversation, as colonialism still has a strong hold on the minds in St. Vincent. 

What are you looking forward to in the ongoing movement for reparations in the Caribbean? 

I see the necessity for more resources to help us to be even more connected. For example, one of the dreams that Mia Mottley expressed in her presentation was the banana farmer from Vincy who will drive his bus down to the wharf, get on a boat and drive off in Bim and just keep selling bananas. This makes me feel like some kind of healing is happening, healing of our economies and market spaces. For too long, we have depended on the North-South arrangement for our raw materials and intellectual capacity. We have had the opportunity to maximise our neighbours and family islands, with glimpses like the University of the West Indies maximising education potential through investment. This university is now accredited among some of the greatest in the world, showing that with investment, we can unite our economies and work cohesively as a region. We can revolutionise their education system. We can revolutionise how they feed themselves, medicine, even energy. In St. Vincent and the Grenadines, we have a volcano that erupts pretty much every 40 years. It erupted in 2021, and we are investigating geothermal energy. Basically, we have a green nuclear power plant that could power the whole region. The voice of the Caribbean is so critical because we are the people who survived. We are the people who survived the casualties of war and exploitation. Here is a people who have paid the price and who also know the value and importance of maintaining peace. So we get to become the voice that becomes the living examples of why peace is important. Because of the trauma. There’s so much advocacy we could put forward to make the world a better place if we’re just enabled. Because first we want to heal from this as family who are interested in moving forward together. The Caribbean is a place where you have to take care of the land you live on. Now we have to take care of the world we live in.