Today we hear no cries, no entreaties for recognition, or against oppression, political or other wide, of the Amerindians, who were the original West Indians, Trinidadians too, and were all but wiped out from the Antilles when the Europeans arrived here to run the Caribbean.

Our Amerindian representatives here, the Caribs and Arawaks, have been so highly diluted as to deny their ethnic recognition; they are weakly concentrated in Arima where every year they proffer some sort of identity via our local Santa Rosa Festival.

Imagine this! They too had progenitors leaving permanent and tangible contributions and, I repeat, rich influences in our West Indian and Trinidad cultures. Yet they ended up in an ethnic niche here less significant than that of the minority Chinese, Syrian and Portuguese.

Take the humble hammock - South Americans' contribution to resting. Take the dirt oven, for bread and cake making - still functioning entities in so many of our remote country areas. Take the many historical artifacts, the "ardonos", proudly displayed in our national and Toco Folk museums.

Come now to their most significant contribution to Trinidad - the workhorse of our neglected fishing industry - the pirogue, which is unique to our island only! In the island of Dominica, back in the early sixties I stumbled on the root, the ancestor of our locally made fishing boats. Attracted to small boats and the adventurous lives of seamen, I lived among the Caribs of Salybia on the Windward coast. This led to much observing and question-asking from the Carib boat builders, leading me to trying my hand at finishing a Carib dugout canoe from the hard, dense and huge trunk of the Gommier tree (Daeryoda hexandra) carving it mostly with the adze. This finished but elementary form of vessel, which used to be adequate for river use around the Amazon where they probably originated, is too narrow for open seas. The Caribs, who colonized the Antilles, I presume, added to that basic form extra sidings in the form of flat boards, called bordage, to increase height and width or beam, for a seaworthy vessel.

In Dominica they went no further than two strips of bordage on each side of their dugouts, thus terminating the evolutionary process. Consequently their modified pirogues, though strong and able to take the Windward jamming, is so seriously limited in beam. Result? a very unstable, capsizing-prone vessel (a nuisance for me), unable to tolerate, even for an instant, anyone standing inside.

Thus it would be really interesting if we could find out who was that "Trini" taking the Carib concept of canoe building three steps further, bringing it to our present-day wooden pirogue that those confounded Venezuelan pirates like to hijack from our Southern fishermen. The modern pirogue with its attractive, complicated looking form is so much more stable, roomier than the Dominican "Gommier" pirogue. So good is its track record that our boat builders here now do it in fiber and Spra glass form.

Up to the late seventies we had many wooden pirogue builders. In the heart of Port-of-Spain there was Taite of Sackville Street; there were also Dehare of Carenage, Preston of interior Diego Martin and others all over the island. Our wooden pirogues used a cedar built dugout serving chiefly as an enlarged keel, not as salient as in a Dominican "Gommier". The first addition of bordage each side was laid as horizontal as possible to give that desirable beam and consequent stability followed by two or more pairs that gradually ended up vertical. Results were also a roomier vessel where a man could stand up and pee in the sea with comfort. Curiously the Dominican pirogue design has taken hold in nearby Martinique and Guadeloupe and English-speaking St Lucia, where those boats too are the workhorses of the "Narin pecheurs". Many of the boats in Martinique and Guadeloupe are acquired from Carib builders.

Having made voyages from Salybia (illegally of course) to Guadeloupe and the Saints, across that deep treacherous and turbulent channels fished around Salybia, and in 1975 having single-handedly built my own Trinidad type pirogue, I thus know a thing or two about those two related pirogues.

Indeed, my schooling in pirogue building started with Dominican Caribs, continued in Trinidad where I used to "macco" boat builders Taite and Dehare as they and their craftsmen made those tricky and complicated bends with thick white pine to accurately fit them to the cedar dugout.

Finally, I say here that if our Government does not give us some sort of "Amerindian Heritage Day", they might well end up with demands for an "Amerindian Departure Day" holiday.

What do you think, Mr. Kamal Persad; am I stirring up the ethnic scene?

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