“500 years of Columbus a lie,yet we survive!”: Kalinago revivalism,climate resilience,and ecotourism development in the Nature Isle

Abstract

The Commonwealth of Dominica pledged to become the world’s first climate-resilient country after the devastation of Hurricane Maria, with ecotourism being part of that sustainable development strategy. Ecotourism growth on the lush eastern Caribbean island has since surpassed pre-storm levels, even during the COVID-19 pandemic. Crucial to the government’s sustainable resilience strategy has been ethno-cultural tourism of the island’s Kalinago (Indigenous peoples of the Lesser Antilles) community such as handicraft instruction, food preparation, canoe building, Indigenous-led tours, and cultural entertainment centers. This article explores development of a comprehensive ecotourism industry in the Indigenous district of Kalinago Territory as a means toward economic sustainability in the Nature Isle with focus on Kalinago cultural producers and their ongoing contestations of Indigenous absence in the Caribbean through a framework of Indigenous Caribbean revival.

Introduction

Political sovereignty and modernist notions of development have shaped discourses on autonomous routes to economic growth and self-determination for the Caribbean since the independence era (Beckford, 1972; Escobar, 1995; Hintzen, 2005; Lewis, 1954; Rodney, 1972; Sheller, 2003). Dominant development discourse has accompanied philosophical notions of modernity that reinforced western hegemony and adopted prescriptive, universalist approaches relying on colonial relations of power, regulation, and domination (Escobar, 1995; Hintzen, 2005; McMichael, 2012). Development orthodoxy embodied dominant sociocultural attitudes of the modern and economic models that perpetuated global systems of inequality and exclusion (Giddens, 1990; V. A. Nixon, 2015). For the post-independent English-speaking Caribbean, resilience, national sovereignty, and creolized cultural identity are informed by legacies of Indigenous dispossession, African enslavement, foreign imported indentured servitude, and European and North American imperialist exploitation (Kempadoo, 2004; Sheller, 2003). Moreover, long-standing colonial narratives of Indigenous (Amerindian) absence or extinction in the Caribbean shape discourses on national identity and ongoing movements around Indigenous cultural revivalism in the region (Forte, 2005; Hudepohl, 2007; Newton, 2013). While imperial legacies produced an agricultural export imperative on their economies, disrupting historic Indigenous patterns of subsistence, and subordinating Caribbean nations to fluctuating western markets that shape the inequitable landscape of globalized relations they navigate to this day (Kempadoo, 2004; Stancioff, 2018).

Postcolonial scholars of the Caribbean have also critiqued how the exponential growth of tourism in the last 60 years has reproduced a set of economic and political relations that function as a continuum of the colonial era, necessitating a dependence on foreign investment, foreign ownership, extraction, commodification of nature, and imported commodities despite touted as a means toward self-sustainability (Kempadoo, 2004; V. A. Nixon, 2015; Pattullo, 1996; Sheller, 2003; Stancioff, 2018). The sustainability of tourism has been further challenged by the climate crisis, increased natural disasters, and the COVID-19 pandemic (Grove, 2021; Sheller, 2021). Moreover, agriculturally based economies in the Caribbean are already vulnerable to external shocks in the global capitalist system and face obstacles toward sovereign development in the recovery process from these increasingly powerful storms (A. Burke, 2021). Tourism growth projections raise additional concern with the tourism industry’s will to account for the greater pressures it places on diverse socio-ecological systems and marginalized communities in host countries (Azcárate, 2020; A. Burke, 2021). In addition, pre-COVID-19 acceleration of tourism growth was projected to roughly triple the industry’s environmental hazards by 2050 (A. Burke, 2021). These events highlight both the geographic vulnerability of the Caribbean and fiscal implications for the solvency of Small Island Developing States (SIDS) that depend on tourism as a means toward economic development (Grove, 2021).

For the Commonwealth of Dominica, its relatively small size, unique rugged topography, fragile ecology, and isolation from certain global markets posed wider challenges to development and its capacity for economic diversification. One extreme natural disaster can impact the entire landscape and cause a disproportionately high loss of Gross Domestic Product (GDP). In 2017, the category 5 Hurricane Maria affected the island’s economic sectors wiping out a significant portion of the country’s GDP with estimated damages of over USD $1.3 billion, 65 deaths, and hundreds more displaced (World Bank, 2017). Furthermore, economic growth driven by the tourism industry has led to heightened risk of hazardous exposure of Dominica’s coastlines that are susceptible to these stronger weather events. To combat the dire effects of climate catastrophe, in the aftermath of Hurricane Maria, Dominica’s Prime Minister Roosevelt Skerrit pledged the island would become the “first climate resilient country,” creating the National Resilience Development Strategy 2030 and the Climate Resilience Execution Agency to further realize these sustainable trajectories, build back better, and ecotourism’s growth sector has since surpassed pre-storm levels (Commonwealth of Dominica, 2022, para. 1). The Indigenous peoples of the Lesser Antilles known as the Kalinago are integral to how the Dominican government envisions its National Resilience Development Strategy, with ecological and nature-based tourism being one strategy to promote the Indigenous district of Kalinago Territory as a site for the “preservation of culture” and “realization of [Kalinago] self-determination” (The National Resilience Development Strategy, 2019, p. 128).

Furthermore, ecotourism has been touted as a more sustainable path toward diversifying Caribbean economies and purports to be complementary to lush ecosystems and socioeconomically beneficial for Indigenous populations disproportionately impacted by major storms and agricultural instabilities. This article explores the contemporary debates around global production of Caribbean and Indigenous cultures through sustainable tourism, along with its representational contestations of Indigenous Caribbean absence through a case study on ecotourism development in the Kalinago Territory. Whether ecotourism in Dominica is a route toward culturally strengthening Indigenous community and sustainability during heightened climate and socio-ecological risks, or reproduces similar patterns of inequality and isolation with representation rooted in the colonial imaginary, this article builds on critical literatures of ecotourism in the global south. Finally, this article considers the economic implications of alternative routes of development for small island states expected to be the earliest and most severely affected by climate change this century (Rhiney, 2015).

Indigenous Caribbean absence and Indigenous revivalism

“500 Years of Columbus a Lie, Yet We Survive!” plastered a mural in Kalinago Territory, marking the quincentenary of Christopher Columbus’s arrival to the island he would name “Dominica,” but known to its Indigenous inhabitants as Waitukubuli or “tall is her body” (Hudepohl, 2008, p. 4). This slogan was a collective affirmation of Kalinago resistance against European invaders and continued survival, challenging predominant narratives of Indigenous annihilation in the Caribbean and “persistent falsehoods” of a globally recognized and lauded historical figure, but less known Kalinago peoples of the Lesser Antilles he would claim to “discover” (Forte, 2005; Hudepohl, 2008, p. 4). Peter Hulme (1992) in Colonial Encounters astutely noted that a tragic consequence of how the “native Caribbean has been locked into an ‘ethnographic present’ of 1492 divorced from five-hundred years of turbulent history” is how the present Indigenous population gets ignored while authoritative narratives on the region presume ignorance such populations exist (p. 214). In his groundbreaking research on the Santa Rosa First Peoples of Trinidad and Tobago, anthropologist Maximillian Forte observed the “postconquest period” treats Caribbean and Amerindianism as a “stark contradiction in terms,” rendering the region’s Indigenous inhabitants to extinction with the importation of enslaved Africans for the purpose of “maximum possible capital accumulation” (Forte, 2005, pp. 24–25).

During multiple fieldwork visits to the Kalinago Territory between January 2022 and April 2023, Gweneth Frederick, manager of the tourism attraction and cultural education center Kalinago Barana Autê (KBA), told me there has been a revival in Kalinago pride the last several years. There has been wider use of the name “Kalinago” instead of “Carib [Indigenous peoples of the Lesser Antilles and of South America]” given its European colonial imposition associating the Kalinago people with savagery and cannibalism, greater youth interest in Indigenous language retention, participation with the Karifuna, a Kalinago cultural dance performance group, enthusiasm for World Indigenous Peoples Day, and a strengthened feeling of Koudmen (Kalinago communal tradition of mutual aid) or collective solidarity through resilience after Hurricane Maria (G. Frederick, personal communication, January 28, 2022). “Our architecture survived Hurricane Maria, and the rest of Dominica should look to Kalinago Territory when rebuilding climate resilient homes,” she proclaimed at a United Nations Development Program Webinar on Kalinago women’s upliftment (United Nations Development Project Dominica Project Office, 2022, 56:35). The KBA manager also shared with me the role Indigenous knowledge of herbs, teas, and natural Shaman baths played in fighting the severity of the COVID-19 disease, alleviating its worst symptoms for the Kalinago (G. Frederick, personal communication, January 28, 2022). This resurgence of Indigenous cultural pride contextualizes the ongoing development of ecotourism in the Kalinago Territory and its economic implications explored below.

Kalinago Territory and eco-cultural production

Principal crops like bananas were a lifeline for the Kalinago throughout the 1980s and 1990s, thrusting their autonomous rural territory of around 3,700 acres and 2,200 people into the globalized economy (Stancioff, 2018). Yet banana cultivation was susceptible to tumultuous trade environments affecting commodity prices on the global market in addition to intensifying weather conditions. Then, the World Trade Organization’s consequential ruling in 1999 struck down the European Union’s preferential status for banana export countries and plunged several banana exporting former British colonies like Dominica, into economic crises immediately halting the livelihoods of Kalinago farmers (Payne, 2008; Stancioff, 2018). Moreover, the devastation from Hurricane Maria less than 20 years later would severely damage the banana industry and tree crops, while the process of banana commercialization notably disrupted the Kalinago people’s traditional agricultural patterns rooted in Koudmen’s communal exchange and cultural social ties. Thus, maintenance of rich sociocultural ecologies of Kalinago residents has been vulnerable to external shocks of the global economy along with climate change, situating the precarity Caribbean islands face when pursuing national development, post-disaster resilience, and sustainability.

In 1994, the North/Northeast Tourism Environmental Development Committee was formed to begin designing a model for community-based tourism and environmental development plans in the north and northeast regions of Dominica (Slinger, 2002). This area covered the Kalinago Territory as it was considered an important geographic location to maximize any supposed benefit from ecotourism due to its naturally mountainous and Indigenous cultural setting, with proximity to the island’s main airport (Slinger, 2002). The year prior to the committee’s founding, Dominica’s government encouraged the Kalinago to form a management plan that would both enhance ecotourism and strengthen natural resource preservation alongside bolstering cultural enrichment. The management plan was said to benefit the Kalinago community by providing research and documentation on cultural resources for the revival of crafts, medicine, and traditional Kalinago performance arts in Dominica’s tourism sector, while promoting environmental education for soil conservation and reforestation initiatives (Slinger, 2002). In the aftermath of Hurricane Maria and ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, the India-United Nations Development Partnership Fund teamed up with the Kalinago Council and Ministry of Tourism in 2021 to promote its 18-month “Strengthening sustainable livelihoods and resilience in the Kalinago Territory” which would build on these prior communitarian-tourism models pursued in the region, including a goal of designing an “Indigenous gender sensitive tourism strategy and Kalinago brand package” (United Nations Development Programme Project Document, 2021, p. 14).

In an interview with the former Destination Marketing Manager of Dominica’s Tourism Authority, Kimberly King, she described the incorporation of Kalinago ethno-cultural tourism as a necessary component of sustainability initiatives for the island and its sociocultural fortitude (personal communication, April 6, 2023). She explained,

“tourism is very interconnected, especially with culture and Dominica prides itself on sustainability.. . . Sustainability means inclusiveness and being focused on your creole and Indigenous culture. The Indigenous people of Dominica, the Kalinago are a rare gem in the Caribbean [as] there are still an Indigenous people with their own community and hamlets . . . that can be accessed by visitors to learn more about their history” (K. King, personal communication, April 6, 2023).

Here, the Destination Marketing Manager alludes to the Kalinago Territory being one of the only politically recognized autonomous Caribbean island settlements of Indigenous peoples, while reinforcing the regional narrative of a wider Indigenous absence and promoting Kalinago assert their unique contribution to the national Dominican creolized identity.

The marketing and politicization of marginalized identities like the Kalinago in service to material and cultural production have informed scholarship on tourist encounters, destination appeal, and its constructions around Indigenous and racialized subjects in regions with long histories of colonial settlement (Alexander, 2005; Hudepohl, 2007; Kempadoo, 2004; McLaren, 1998; V. A. Nixon, 2015; Slinger, 2002). The Caribbean has been fashioned in the western imagination as a site of paradoxical “expressed desires and need for self-control” with a tropical climate and romanticized topography associated with sensual escapism and colonially ascribed hyper-sexuality (Accilien & Anatol, 2021, p. 3; Kempadoo, 2004). These associations inform how postcolonial identities are shaped around cultural expression and commoditization within the tourism industry many Caribbean economies depend upon.

Moreover, literatures on Indigenous cultural production and displays within the tourism industry have ranged from narratives dissecting folkorization, tradition, spectacle, and revitalization, to exploitation, dehumanization, and inauthenticity (Bendix, 1989; Boissevain, 1996; Bruner, 2005; McLaren, 1998; Xie, 2003). Imaginings of the Caribbean as a place of naturalistic sexual desire also shape how African and Indigenous subjectivities may get distorted when tourism stakeholders craft global marketing to entice foreign capital and approximate Caribbean aesthetics to nature. This informs the potential colonial undertones in Dominica’s heavily nature-focused ecotourist destination marketing. The development of an ecotourism image and Kalinago brand also risks perpetuating exoticized notions of primitivity of a region and its peoples (Duffy, 2008). However, scholars of Indigenous ethnic tourism claim that while it has the capacity to “give rise to various processes of exploitation and subordination,” it can also “generate new economic conditions and territorial control that would have been unthinkable without the arrival of tourism” (De la Maza, 2018, p. 97).

Early tourism literatures on cultural production and representation observed “the anthropology and semiotics overemphasize the role of image consumers [the tourist],” while undermining the centrality of how an image is processed by the tourism industry (Bendix, 1989, p. 133). Cultural studies theorists like Stuart Hall (1997) argued how the semiotic approach to representation relied not exclusively on the words and images of objects but also on the objects themselves that “function as signifiers in the production of meaning” (p. 37). Furthermore, discursive debates on authenticity of global and Indigenized cultural production in the tourism industry are shaped around the construction of an invention of tradition (Bendix, 1989; Davidov, 2013; Hobsbawm & Ranger, 2012; Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, 2006). Folklore case studies suggest however that the tourism industry’s imposed invention of an authentic culture has the capacity to become subversively appropriated by cultural artisans and cultural producers to “develop a[n] aesthetic that [is] satisfying” for their own unique cultural identity (Bendix, 1989, p. 133; Hudepohl, 2007).

Prior ethnographic research into the Kalinago Territory by geographer Kathryn Hudepohl (2007) reinforced this understanding as Indigenous craft makers viewed the “consumption of traditional handicrafts by tourists” as a way to “heighte[n] awareness of the ethnic boundary” and the circulated objects added cultural value (p. 209). I spoke with handicraft basket weavers at KBA, formerly named the Model Carib Village, for additional insight. According to a former representative of the Kalinago Council, Janet Williams, baskets for sale added straps that turned into a bag or carrying case and combined their traditional basket weaving materials with added marketability for tourist consumption. She stated, “[Kalinago] add things like straps onto small baskets to make the crafts modern to sell as souvenirs” but that it “still retains its cultural meaning” (J. Williams, personal communication, January 28, 2022). In addition, in constructing a gender-sensitive ecotourism infrastructure, Gweneth Frederick highlighted the historic role Kalinago women played in basket weaving, clay pot molding, and ceremonial bowl design and urged the maintenance of these skills be passed on for future generations while monetizing the industries to economically uplift Kalinago women now (United Nations Development Project Dominica Project Office, 2022, 55:38).

Participating in cassava food preparation at the KBA was also emphasized as a way to enhance an integrated cultural experience with the Kalinago, as it is a staple crop with rich historic tradition. Kalinago Chief Lorenzo Sanford (personal communication, January 30, 2022) described it to me as “the most resilient crop” that is a testament to “Mother nature helping us” if the Kalinago continue to protect their environment. However, one Kalinago resident, Kiwaan Durand (personal communication, March 15, 2023), told me the process of arrowroot cultivation for flour to make porridge carried more cultural significance to him now than cassava. He explained that cassava is more commercialized and mass produced for foreign visitors, with the success of local Kalinago owned and operated eateries like Tilou Kanawa (little canoe) putting a modern spin on traditional cassava bread dishes (K. Durand, personal communication, March 15, 2023). In addition, during the KBA’s construction in the late 1990s, there were some criticisms by community members questioning the authenticity of an attraction like a “Model Carib Village” (Slinger, 2002, p. 103). Geographer Vanessa Slinger-Friedman’s extensive research on Dominica’s ecotourism development found some Kalinago residents believed it to be an “unrealistic portrayal of their culture because it creates a ‘Disney-type’ atmosphere with contrived scenarios,” noting one former Kalinago Chief suggested that “a more accurate impression of the Indigenous people would derive from tourists seeing them live their daily lives” (Slinger, 2002, p. 103). These dynamics convey the invention of tradition that undergirds global and Indigenized cultural production within the tourism industry, albeit potentially financially rewarding for Indigenous communities.

Further literatures deconstructing the colonial imaginary within the tourism industry situate the role of narrative, tourists, cultural producers, local populations, and governmental actors in the marketing and shaping of culture as a global product for international consumption (Bruner, 2005; McLaren, 1998; Nelson, 2005). Anthropologist Edward M. Bruner noted in his ethnographic study on cultural tourism of the Indigenous Maasai and Samburu communities of East Africa that the dichotomy of experience theater and tourist realism acts as an “imagined space” by which tourists interact in the environments of host countries (Bruner, 2005, p. 49). He observed that performance-based experiential tourist attractions function on a set of implicit binaries that reinforce difference and otherization between touristic spectators and local populations. The set of binaries reproduced in these encounters get constructed around civilized, wild, European, African, settler, Native, green lawn, brown earth, fertile, arid, and how the dichotomous narratives advanced by the tourism industry become authoritative and risk-overpowering Indigenous voices (Bruner, 2005). Bruner argues the narrative perpetuated by agents of power aim to invent, construct, and mold culture, its history, traditions, and heritages, decentering grassroots experience and perspectives. In the enforcement of “authoritative narrative,” via global tourist marketing of Indigenous culture on brochures and literatures, Bruner argues authoritative voices establish fixed cultural meanings (Bruner, 2005, p. 169). Moreover, Bruner draws on Mikhail Bakhtin’s philosophy on the dialogic to promote a narration of shared meaning and emphasizes the significance of who is telling the stories about marginalized cultures (Bakhtin, 1981). Narratives on the Global South and Indigenous peoples should not be viewed in a historical vacuum or “monologic static entity,” but in an interactive framework that is transformative and rejects monolithic othering (Bruner, 2005, p. 170).

Bruner’s analysis of divergent cultural meanings conveyed through tourist destination marketing is also explored in Velvet Nelson’s semiotic study on destination marketing of ecotourism in Grenada, examining how diverse components of an image are crafted to communicate certain messages and exclude others through the use of natural landscape and heritage (Nelson, 2005). These images evoke “connotative meanings” that can be both explicitly identified but also carry implicit or unconscious assumptions (Nelson, 2005, p. 135). Therefore, understanding the varied lens of connotative meanings becomes a necessary component of critically interpreting visual objects and images produced by tourism stakeholders. While control of visual objects and images was stressed by Janet Williams as key to affirming the Kalinago’s cultural autonomy, noting “Discover Dominica [Tourism Authority] needs Kalinago approval” for images circulated of the territory so the Kalinago people are not “only used as a marketing tool to attract visitors” but also have a say in what is being marketed and reproduced (personal communication, January 28, 2022).

Navigating Caribbean Indigeneity and Blackness

Situating Dominica’s Kalinago people within historic African and Indigenous relations in the Caribbean also shed light on how the postcolonial nation-state facilitates notions of national identity, belonging, race, culture, and ethnicity. The ways Indigeneity and Blackness have been understood by Indigenous peoples within these geographic boundaries additionally provide background into how notions of Indigenous revival are being negotiated and understood within the global tourism culture economy.

Geographically, St. Vincent and the Grenadines had the largest amount of Carib and Kalinago peoples in the Lesser Antilles and like the island of Dominica, its rugged terrain proved a formidable force against sustained European encroachment (Avila, 2009). The Caribs of St. Vincent would assist fellow Kalinago throughout the chain of the Lesser Antilles to resist both French and British colonization. St. Vincent and Dominica were unique in that they both had sizable Indigenous populations and fought off European empires, navigating neutrality for their islands in the 18th century while sometimes sheltering enslaved Africans fleeing from neighboring plantocracies in Barbados or St. Lucia who hoped to live freely and take advantage the islands’ thickly wooded mountains (Avila, 2009).

While the influx of runaway enslaved Africans came to the Carib Republic of St. Vincent as a source of refuge, Kalinago males had sometimes brought Africans back to their French, British, or Spanish slavers, yet out of increasing strategic alliance, more Africans were welcomed into the fabric of Indigenous communities and territory as single nations (Avila, 2009). However, this partnership did not always last. Due to the inequitable gendered composition of the islands, other Indigenous groups such as Arawak (Indigenous peoples of the Greater Antilles and of South America) women who were taken as captive by Kalinago males during warfare were overrepresented in Carib society, while runaway Africans were disproportionately male, leading to interracial unions to the ire of some Kalinago males. The result of these unions would birth Black Caribs, and European powers would exploit ethnic tensions to divide Indigenous land and pit Afro-Indigenous descendants against their non-mixed Amerindian counterparts.

Unlike in Mark Anderson’s text Black and Indigenous (2009), on how Afro-Indigenous Garifuna peoples in Central America affirm their identity, Avila’s volume of earlier anthropological works from the mid to late 20th century on Caribbean Afro-Indigeneity, positions the distinctions between Blackness and Indigeneity as largely rooted in inter-ethnic Amerindian conflict, rather than a byproduct of an overarching European colonial regime that sought to define Indigeneity in racial and phenotypic terms for the subjugation of both groups. The lingering impact of phenotype-defining Indigeneity was observed by Kathryn Hudepohl in her interviews with former Kalinago Chief Hilary Frederick about the likelihood of Kalinago in Dominica working with Garifuna communities present in St. Vincent for Indigenous linguistic and religious cultural exchange (Hudepohl, 2008). The Chief was “noncommittal” indicating “purer traditional forms would come from South America,” observing how Garifuna “look more African in their features” (Hudepohl, 2008, p. 4). However, Janet Williams told me, “some Kalinago have much darker skin than [her] with very coily hair, but they still represent and fight for the Kalinago people” (personal communication, January 30, 2022). In addition, cultural exchanges and transnational alliances among Kalinago and other Indigenous peoples of the Caribbean have been strengthened, like with the Santa Rosa First Peoples of Trinidad and Tobago and Kalina (Indigenous peoples of the northern coastal region of South America) of Venezuela (Hudepohl, 2008; L. Sanford, personal communication, January 30, 2022). As Forte observed when describing Caribbean regional Indigenous revivalism, “globalization processes have provided some of the raw materials, conditioning processes, and impetus for developing Indigeneity in the Caribbean” and forming a “virtual-meta indigeneity” (Forte, 2005, p. 220) whereby there is “spread of motifs, practices, products, and ideologies” shared across multiple geographic spaces and communities (Hudepohl, 2008, p. 10).

The Garifuna peoples also offer important insight into the relationality between Blackness and Indigeneity that complicate binary constructions of how those terms come to signify concrete racialization. Anderson’s evoking of Blackness as taking on symbolic meanings associated with Indigeneity such as tradition, rootedness in territory, rurality, and relationship to nature unpack the complexity of Afro-Indigeneity in the Americas and are relevant in conceptualizing Dominica’s Kalinago people within a majority African-descendant country (Anderson, 2009). Dominican historian Lennox Honeychurch attributed the popularization of Afro-Dominican musical expression zouk (popular dance musical style known for fast tempo originating in the French Antilles in 1980s) with the Rastafarian movement decades earlier that advocated for a lifestyle associated with the symbolic meanings Anderson ascribes to Indigeneity such as a special relationship to nature, territoriality, and traditionalism (Honeychurch, 2017). However, Native studies scholars also problematize the characterization of Indigeneity as rootedness, suggesting it confines Indigenous peoples to static configurations of time and space (De la Maza, 2018; Diaz, 2015).

Furthermore, the framework of tidalectics championed by Barbadian poet Kamau Brathwaite disrupts the binary dialectic of Blackness and Indigeneity in the Caribbean that separate cultural symbolisms such as the ocean from the land (King, 2019). Such a binary has metaphorically positioned Blackness as oppositional to Indigeneity and emerging Black and Native scholarship seek to problematize that framing (Anderson, 2009; King, 2019). The shoal then works as a theoretical intervention alongside tidalectics to reorient Black Diaspora Studies to envision Indigeneity as also connected to water and oceanic. The shoal as a metaphor reinforces tidalectics within Middle Passage epistemologies, disrupting the oceanic coherence of Blackness and putting it in conversation with the lived experiences of Indigenous peoples of the Americas.

Scholars of Caribbean Indigeneity have also challenged components of decolonial thought on the Anglophone Caribbean that have argued African diasporic people have reindigenized the land through processes of creolization (Jackson, 2012; Newton, 2013). This gives context to the shortcomings around legislation like Guyana’s 2006 Amerindian Act as extensions of colonial era thinking and policies (Newton, 2013). The notion of reindigenizing the land has also shaped how the dominant society seeks to negotiate Caribbean Indigeneity on their own terms. Hudepohl recalled, “the status of the Kalinago as a viable Indigenous group has been challenged periodically by the state in part because Afro-Dominicans or creoles . . . would like to farm or otherwise develop parts of the Carib Territory” (Hudepohl, 2008, p. 3). This has led to land disputes between Afro-Dominican and Kalinago farmers who preserve their territory through communal land ownership. This is an example of how the Dominican state has attempted to renegotiate Indigeneity, highlighting the social context by which the Kalinago navigate their own identity “within the larger nation-state” and signifying the significance of affirming their heritage through means like ethnic eco-cultural tourism (Hudepohl, 2007, 2008, p. 3).

Environmental vulnerability and sustainable tourism

Due to the increasing effects of climate change and heightened environmental vulnerability of the region, Caribbean islands are often placed at the center of the natural disaster paradigm and ground-zero for global climate crises (Rhiney, 2015; Sheller, 2020). While climate change impacts all countries, SIDS in the Caribbean are expected to be the earliest and most severely affected by climate change this century (Becken & Hay, 2007; Rhiney, 2015; Sheller, 2021). This is further complicated by the region’s over-reliance on traditionally unsustainable industries like tourism with the additional precarity brought by the COVID-19 pandemic (Sheller, 2021; Wolf et al., 2021). Caribbeanist sociologist Mimi Sheller observed this stark reality, noting that tourism was “one of the first sectors of the global economy . . . severely disrupted by the coronavirus pandemic” with the Caribbean suffering a 66% decline in tourism arrivals for the year 2020 from 2019 (Sheller, 2021, p. 1).

Major tourism shareholders have had a varied history in addressing the role tourism plays in worsening climate change and the inevitable financial burdens it has posed for their business model (Becken & Hay, 2007). Tourism contributes to the massive buildup of greenhouse gasses causing increasingly high temperatures, coastal erosion, coral bleaching, elevated sea levels, oceanic acidity, noise pollution, air pollution, and higher levels of energy consumption (Becken & Hay, 2007; Slinger, 2002). The maintenance of popular attractions shaped by consumer attitudes and the environmental attributes they seek out also influence how the tourism industry attempts to balance this resource-dependence business model with environmental sustainability under heightened risks of climate change (Becken & Hay, 2007; Bramwell & Lane, 1993; Zolfani et al., 2015). Environmental regulations have also been adopted to protect certain environmental assets as well as implementing land-use laws to safeguard vulnerable landscapes, mitigate damages, and encourage the development of sustainable ecological processes (Zolfani et al., 2015, p. 16).

Marxist geographers have warned that under the neoliberal economic paradigm of disaster capitalism, however, sustainable ecological processes adopted by the tourism industry to address climate change such as green eco-friendly development schemes often end up reducing landscapes to commodities to be sold, politicized, and corrupted into green gentrification zones (Fletcher, 2011; Gould & Lewis, 2018; Khan, 2010). During green gentrification, post-disaster Caribbean islands are regarded as “blighted urban neighborhood[s] in need of renewal” (Gould & Lewis, 2018, p. 151). The expansion of ecotourism in the last several decades has also been theorized by critical tourism geographers as an integral part in the expansion of capitalism that seeks to overcome “inherent contradictions” that threaten the ultimate survival of the global capitalist system through “spatial, temporal, and environmental ‘fixes’” (Fletcher, 2011, p. 444).

Moreover, tourism scholars have grappled with varying understandings of what makes tourism sustainable since the concept first emerged in the early 1990s (Bramwell & Lane, 1993; Yoopetch & Nimsai, 2019). In the years following the introduction of sustainable tourism, critical tourism literatures casted doubt on the industry’s sustainability as a viable alternative to the exploitative economic, environmental, and degrading elements that plagued traditional tourism sectors (Amsler, 2009; Azcárate, 2020; Butcher, 2007; Dodds & Butler, 2019; Duffy, 2004, 2008; Fletcher, 2011; C. M. Hall, 2009). Furthermore, sustainable tourism development grew out of the convergence between sustainable tourism and sustainable development goals (Clarke, 1997; Zolfani et al., 2015). Sustainable tourism development was defined as an “economic, social, and environmental tourism . . . that aims at the continuous improvement of tourists’ experience,” while improving quality of life for local communities by “optimizing local economic benefits, protecting the natural and built environment” to reach sustainable development goals (Zolfani et al., 2015, p. 2). Although the emergence of sustainable tourism has been the source of numerous debate and critique for its nebulous framing (Amsler, 2009; Clarke, 1997), tourism researchers have stressed the urgency in sustainable tourism development under increasingly vulnerable environmental conditions a growing number of tourism destinations experience from air pollution, unmanageable waste, to an inequitable water supply (Yoopetch & Nimsai, 2019).

In her ethnographic work on ecotourist operations in Belize, Rosaleen Duffy situated ecotourism within its political context to critique how the nature component of ecotourism ironically inhibits the goals of environmental sustainability (Duffy, 2004, 2008). Ecotourism is defined as a “sustainable form of natural resource-based tourism that focuses primarily on learning about nature . . . managed to be low-impact, non-consumptive, and locally oriented” (Fennell, 1999, p. 43). For critical tourism scholars, the sustainability of ecotourism is dependent on the neoliberal market-based incentives around a type of green capitalism (Butcher, 2007; Duffy, 2004; Fletcher, 2011; Gould & Lewis, 2018; R. Nixon, 2011). Duffy (2004) argued this economic model inhibited the scale of radical sustainable development by centering profit over conservation efforts. Similar to the critiques of sustainable tourism, ecotourism “fits neatly with dominant development theories based on neoliberal economics” and the politics of big business, NGOs, and outside interests (p. 126). When engaging the intentions and attitudes of ecotourists in Belize, Duffy discovered how consumer power shaped the individual expectations of ecotourism, which often had little to do with their interactions with the host environment. Thus, sustainable tourism was largely focused on meeting tourist expectations and undermined local conservation efforts (Duffy, 2004; Zolfani et al., 2015). Duffy (2004) also explored how Indigenous communities utilized ecotourism for local development but were still confined by a “bigger political and economic system that directly frustrates genuine development” to meet the needs of global free-market interest groups (p. 154).

When researching tourism as a development tool in four uniquely different sites in the Mexican state of Yucatan, Matilde Córdoba Azcárate’s ethnographies build on Duffy’s critical ecotourim scholarship of Belize and offer a wide range of case studies on the varying shortcomings of both large-scale mass tourism and ecotourism (Azcárate, 2020). Each site had its own tourism development. The first site studied was the heavily touristed beach resort–laden Cancun, the next was an ecotourism fishing town in Celestun, an Indigenous luxury tourist attraction in Temozon Sur, and finally, hospitality tourism in an inland community in Tekit (Azcárate, 2020). She used a sociohistorical lens to examine tourism development in each area to gain a deeper understanding of the developmental trajectory from mass based in the 1970s to more ecological and heritage based tourisms of the late 1990s. The forceful state-led ecotourism construction of Celestun into a “world biodiversity niche” and “pristine natural oasis” amassed a dramatic fourfold increase in tourist arrivals in less than 20 years and imposed dire ecological and sociocultural disturbances on the town’s local residents (Azcárate, 2020, p. 70). Azcárate (2020) reflected how the nature-based branding of pink flamingos glossed over the violent chaos, growing military presence, labor struggles, and overregulation of its environment, as “global leisure consumption” was prioritized at the spatial expense of Celestun’s local communities (p. 71). Azcárate’s (2020) ethnographies uncovered that however heterogenous tourism operations were constructed, they ultimately functioned across scales as “market-driven, engineered projects for profit” that reinforced notions of the Yucatan as a destination of exotic paradise to “escape to,” (p. 28) affirming Duffy’s (2004) critique that all facets of tourism are susceptible to the exoticization of the host community.

The four tourism sites in Yucatan supported prior critical tourism scholarship that tourism development has worked to negatively impact host environments by generating “predatory regional geography[ies]” that placed vulnerable communities in an “uneven set of labor mobilities” that “exhaust[ed] landscapes, resources, and bodies” (Azcárate, 2020, p. 29). Furthermore, Azcárate argued that under the increased risks posed by climate change, advancing sustainable tourism while fueling the consumptive capitalist drive of its industry’s operations were contradictory agendas. These case studies highlight the significance of a tourism infrastructure working in tandem with host countries’ natural environment with the full participation and agreement of Indigenous governing bodies to oversee its development as outlined in the United Nations’ Strengthening Sustainable Livelihoods and Resilience in the Kalinago Territory with backing by the Kalinago Council.

Conclusion

This article seeks to situate the Commonwealth of Dominica’s growing comprehensive ecotourism industry in the Kalinago Territory within the body of critical sustainable tourism literature under an analytic framing of Indigenous Caribbean absence to explore how global tourism production of racialized cultures interact with sustainable economic trajectories in regions with heightened climate vulnerability. Community-based ecotourism is said to involve a certain structuring of development that is locally controlled, with the goal of an “equitable flow of benefits to all affected by the industry” (Jayawardena, 2005, p. 302). The community functions as a readily integrative conduit through which sustainable tourism can be achieved fostering greater community participation in decision-making and development overall (Jayawardena, 2005). Yet critical tourism scholars aim to complicate normative logics around sustainability, arguing the ambiguity over what constitutes sustainability limits understanding in how existing modes of production and consumption can be altered without “upsetting the legitimacy of the broad status quo” of global capitalism, hierarchy, inequality, and exploitation (Amsler, 2009, p. 123).

Predictably, obstacles to touristic communitarianism remain, as governments and external agencies have often set the parameters around developmentalism without much regard for the effects on local communities. However, Dominica’s insistence on crafting a viable climate resilience profile seek to challenge how sustainable tourism projects have been pursued in the past to present the benefits and procedures that inform community controlled and ecologically conscious routes to ecotourism development. The Kalinago cultural producers of Dominica pursue ecotourism to affirm their Indigenous expression and sustainable livelihoods while emphasizing the uniqueness of their environmental practices and combatting Caribbean Indigenous erasure. Moreover, critical postcolonial literatures on Caribbean tourism reconstruct narrow frameworks of sustainability that reduce the capacity for an agentive reimagining of Caribbean futurity, Indigeneity, and economic development of its diverse and fragile landscapes during heightened climate impacts.