A Story of British Honduras: A Story of Us

Happy Independence Day—Happy Interdependence Day, Belize

I remember backward,
through names and blood and water,
through stories handed down;
yet every past I touch
is memory arising now.

I stand within this moment,
where British Honduras becomes Belize,
where Stann Creek becomes Dangriga,
and every name I inherited
is living on my tongue now.

I imagine forward,
toward children I may never know,
who shall rename the world again;
yet even their unwritten tomorrow
is imagination flowering now.

A story came down through my family that one of my Garbutt ancestors was at the Battle of St. George’s Caye. I do not know whether that story is literally true. I went looking anyway.

I am not writing a genealogy, and I am certainly not trying to manufacture one. I am telling a story around a campfire, with the documents spread out beside me. Some things I know because I lived them. Some things my family remembers. Some things survive in archives. Some things I infer. And some things, after all this digging, remain beautifully and stubbornly unknown.

I went looking for one ancestor. Instead, I found British Honduras.

Even that name contains a story. The territory formally known as British Honduras became Belize in 1973, eight years before independence. Then, on September 21, 1981, Belize became an independent country and joined the Commonwealth of Nations that same day. So when I invoke British Honduras, I am not wishing colonialism back into existence. Quite the contrary. I am reaching into the name under which so much of the surviving paper trail was written and carrying what I find there into Belize.

There is something wonderfully appropriate about the Commonwealth appearing in this story. The British Empire did not simply wake up one morning and become the modern Commonwealth, and I do not want to polish imperial history into something prettier than it was. The modern Commonwealth emerged gradually from that imperial history as colonies became independent nations and the relationship itself was reimagined. India helped force one of the decisive transformations: after independence, it became a republic yet chose to remain within the association, helping give birth in 1949 to the modern Commonwealth of free and equal states. Nigeria joined after independence. So did Jamaica, Trinidad and Tobago, Guyana and many other former colonies. South Africa withdrew in 1961 amid opposition from other Commonwealth countries to apartheid and returned in 1994 after apartheid ended. Belize entered in 1981 as an independent state. Today the Commonwealth stretches across Africa, Asia, the Caribbean and Americas, Europe and the Pacific, including countries as different as India, Nigeria, South Africa, Canada, Australia, Jamaica, Trinidad and Tobago, Guyana, Belize and the United Kingdom. Some members were never British colonies at all.

I find a strange beauty in that transformation. Empire means possession. Commonwealth, at least in its modern ideal, means association among sovereign states. The history between those two ideas is neither clean nor innocent, but the movement from one toward the other speaks directly to what I mean when I wish Belize not merely a happy Independence Day, but a happy Interdependence Day. Independence does not require isolation. I can cease to belong to you without ceasing to belong with you.

The Garbutt trail took me backward through a Belize I knew and did not know. I found the surname scattered through old records long before anyone in my immediate family whom I remember was born. I found Garbutts associated with cayes, land, southern settlements and the lighthouse service. Then one detail from my own family ceased to float entirely within family memory: a published obituary for one of my relatives records that her father, Clarence Garbutt Sr., worked as a lighthouse keeper at Half Moon Caye. It also records a devastating house fire in which her father and four of her siblings escaped while much of her immediate family was lost.

I already knew that story because my family had carried it. The archive did not create the memory; the archive met it. Archives are not omniscient, and neither are families. Sometimes a document remembers what a family has forgotten. Sometimes a family remembers what no searchable document appears to have preserved. Sometimes they meet one another across the years and say, Yes. Something happened here. And sometimes they disagree.

I began wondering whether every Garbutt in Belize must somehow belong to the same enormous family. I still do not know. A surname is not DNA. A name can travel through fathers, mothers, marriages, enslavement, emancipation, adoption, colonial clerks, misspellings and choices made by people who simply decide what they will be called. The farther backward I looked, the less willing I became to confuse a shared name with shared blood.

Then another ancestral current entered the story. My maternal people are Garinagu. When I was young, the place in Belize that lives in my memory was Stann Creek. Today I say Dangriga. I have also traveled to La Buga—Livingston, Guatemala—where I encountered Garifuna buyei (ceremonial spiritual leaders), whose roles include guiding ancestral ceremonies such as the dügü. Honduras lives in my maternal family memory too. My maternal grandfather came to Belize from Honduras, according to the story passed down to me, and a brother of his remained part of my siblings’ memories.

Suddenly my family tree stopped behaving very much like a tree. It became water.

The Garifuna story had already taught me something about water. Our history reaches backward toward Yurumein, Saint Vincent, where African and Indigenous Caribbean peoples met and where the people who became the modern Garinagu resisted British colonial expansion. In the story as I inherited it, however, the exile was never simply that “the Garifuna were removed.” I remember something more particular: the British divided people whom colonial records themselves categorized differently. They called one population the “Black Caribs,” while distinguishing them from other Indigenous Carib people. After the wars on Saint Vincent, it was principally those whom the British classified as Black Caribs who were rounded up, confined and eventually deported from their homeland.

As I returned to the historical record, I found that my memory was carrying something real. Colonial and later historical sources distinguish between people they called “Black Caribs” and those they called “Yellow Caribs,” although those racial categories belonged to the colonial world that produced them and should not be mistaken for simple descriptions of how the people necessarily understood themselves. Those targeted for deportation were confined on Balliceaux under catastrophic conditions, and the survivors were transported across the Caribbean to Roatán. From there, their descendants spread along the Central American coast and became the people I know as Garinagu.

My mother taught me a distinction that I still carry: Garifuna is the language; Garinagu are the people. In ordinary English, Garifuna is commonly used for both the people and the language, and many of us ourselves say, “I am Garifuna.” I do too. But when I dig beneath the English shorthand and reach toward the language my mother gave me, I encounter Garinagu: us, the people. The distinction feels especially fitting in a story about what names preserve and what they sometimes conceal.

And that language did not merely survive in private. The language, dance and music of the Garifuna were proclaimed by UNESCO in 2001 as a Masterpiece of the Oral and Intangible Heritage of Humanity and, in 2008, inscribed on the Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity, representing Belize, Guatemala, Honduras and Nicaragua. UNESCO recognizes not merely words but an inheritance carried through songs, stories, dances, ceremonies and oral traditions. A people separated by modern borders continued speaking to one another across them.

My encounter with the buyei in La Buga belongs somewhere inside that inheritance too. I grew up knowing what I would call Garifuna spirituality, not simply a separate “Garifuna religion” that could be placed neatly beside Catholicism, Buddhism or some other box on a census form. Outsiders in Belize sometimes called these things obeah, particularly when I was younger. That word never contained the world I knew. Garifuna spirituality could live alongside Catholic saints, Mass and baptism while maintaining an intimate relationship with ancestors, dreams, healing, food, drums, family and ceremony.

I saw that interweaving inside my own family. My aunt Yvonne is a proud Garifuna woman who practiced Nichiren Buddhism in the SGI tradition during her embodied life. Those identities did not require her to amputate her ancestors. I remember her putting out food for our departed family, something I understand through the Garifuna practice of chugú: feeding and honoring the ancestors. A chugú is distinct from the larger dügü. The dügü brings extended family and community together through food, prayer, music, drumming, dancing and ancestral relationship, under the ceremonial guidance of a buyei. A chugú can be smaller and more intimate, centered upon preparing food and setting a place for those who have gone before.

That is why I hesitate to call Garifuna spirituality something one simply “joins.” I inherited it less as a list of propositions I was required to believe than as relationship: family with family, living with dead, present with past. Much of its ceremonial life is specifically ancestral. The ancestors being remembered are not generic spirits interchangeable from one family to another. They are our people. My aunt could chant Nam-myoho-renge-kyo and still set a place for her ancestors. I can recognize Catholicism, Buddhism and Garifuna spirituality moving through one family without needing to force one of them to swallow the others.

And then there is Yurumein.

Yurumein is Saint Vincent, the ancestral homeland remembered by the Garinagu. But in the inheritance that reached me, Yurumein is more than a location on a map. Yurumein is also where the ancestors are. If I translate that into the Catholic vocabulary surrounding much of my family, I might call it heaven. Yet even that word does not quite contain what Yurumein evokes in me. Homeland and afterlife begin touching each other. The place from which my people were exiled becomes also the place of ancestral return.

That lands differently in me now. I can buy an airline ticket and travel to Saint Vincent. I can stand upon the geographical island called Yurumein. But I no longer experience heaven as merely somewhere I might travel after my body dies. For me, Yurumein is also here and now. Heaven is not only postponed. I experience myself already living in the land of the ancestors—not because Colorado has somehow become Saint Vincent, nor because geography has ceased to matter, but because the ancestral world no longer feels elsewhere to me.

Perhaps that is another kind of return.

The people can be carried away from Yurumein, yet Yurumein can travel inside the people. A homeland becomes memory; memory becomes ceremony; ceremony becomes presence. Generations later, I can stand thousands of miles from Saint Vincent, set food before an ancestor, speak a word inherited from my mother, hear a drum, dream of someone long disembodied, or simply become still—and the distance between here and there becomes strangely thin.

My aunt Yvonne is disembodied now, but I still say she is. That grammar reflects how I experience relationship. She belongs to my present, not merely my past. In that sense, what I inherited through Garifuna spirituality and what I now experience inwardly meet one another without needing to become identical. I do not need everyone else to call this heaven. I know what the word points toward for me.

I am already in Yurumein.

In the Garinagu story I inherited, we are warriors. We were not simply a people upon whom history happened. We resisted. We survived defeat. We survived exile. We crossed water and remained ourselves, even as what ourselves meant continued changing.

I remember learning something else when I was younger: that Garifuna women spoke Arawak and Garifuna men spoke Carib. The linguistic history is considerably more complicated than that childhood formulation. Modern Garifuna is classified as an Arawakan language, while its history preserves traces of gendered vocabulary and centuries of contact among Indigenous Caribbean, African and European peoples. I do not need to throw away the memory merely because scholarship gives me a more complicated picture. Instead, I can see the memory for what it was: one small inheritance carrying an echo of a much older linguistic history.

Language remembers. Names remember. Bodies remember. Families remember. None of them remembers perfectly.

The more I dug, the less Belize looked to me like a collection of tidy ethnic boxes. Belize contains Creole, Garinagu, Maya, Mestizo and many other communities, themselves shaped by different histories of indigeneity, colonization, slavery, resistance, refuge and migration. Maya peoples did not disappear into some archaeological past; they remain living peoples of Belize. Mestizo migration into Belize was profoundly shaped by nineteenth-century upheaval in Yucatán. Garinagu established communities along the southern coast. Creole Belize emerged through the brutal colonial encounter between Europeans and enslaved Africans and their descendants.

I do not experience that as a melting pot. I do not need everybody melted. I like the pieces. I like hearing one language from one doorway and another from the next. I like a surname that sounds English sitting beside one that sounds Spanish while neither tells me everything about the human being carrying it. I can carry African, Indigenous American and European ancestry without needing to divide myself into mathematically convenient fractions. The Garinagu themselves refuse such neatness: African and Indigenous Caribbean histories met, changed, survived and produced something that cannot be reduced to one without losing the other.

My own family keeps making the point for me. One branch is Belizean Creole, carrying African, Maya, Spanish and English ancestry in the family story. Another is Garinagu, with remembered roots reaching through Belize toward Honduras. Then Belizeans leave Belize. Caribbean people meet other Caribbean people thousands of miles from the Caribbean. Children are born carrying countries their parents did not share. People marry. People divorce. People remarry. Surnames arrive and disappear. Languages survive in fragments. Families scatter across Central America, the Caribbean, the United States and Europe.

I am writing these words in Colorado Springs. There is Belize in that sentence too.

So on Belize Independence Day, I find myself thinking about interdependence. Independence matters. Belize became independent from the United Kingdom on September 21, 1981. That is political history, not metaphor, and I celebrate it. But on that same day Belize entered a voluntary association containing the very country from which it had just become independent. There is no contradiction in that for me. If anything, it sharpens the distinction between independence and isolation.

No country creates itself alone. No culture creates itself alone. No language creates itself alone. No family creates itself alone. Even resistance requires relationship. Even migration requires somewhere departed and somewhere approached. Even the word diaspora makes no sense without relationship.

Perhaps independence and interdependence are not enemies. Perhaps independence means I can stand as myself without requiring you to disappear. Perhaps interdependence means I can recognize that whatever I call myself was never created by myself alone.

Belize feels almost impossibly suited to teaching me this. The country is geographically small enough that I can imagine the journeys between its communities, yet historically immense enough that following almost any one of those roads eventually carries me beyond its borders. Mexico appears. Guatemala appears. Honduras appears. Saint Vincent appears. Africa appears. Europe appears. The Caribbean opens around everything.

And I appear within that movement too. I have crossed some of those waters myself. I have stood in La Buga. I have lived outside Belize. I have traveled farther still, carrying these names and memories with me into places my ancestors could not have imagined. I have sat beneath another ancient sky near Sacsayhuamán in Peru and found myself among ancestors who were not biologically mine, yet whose humanity required no introduction. The farther I travel, the stranger the word foreign becomes. Not meaningless. Just relative.

British is mine. African is mine. Indigenous America is mine. The Caribbean is mine. Europe is mine. Belize is mine. And by birth, the United States of America is mine. But I do not mean mine as possession. I do not mean the mine of conquest, ownership, slavery or a flag hammered into somebody else’s earth. I mean mine as kinship. Mine as inheritance. Mine as relationship. Mine because I cannot tell the story of myself without eventually encountering all of them.

I do not have to pretend every culture is the same. I do not have to erase colonization, slavery, conquest, exile or war to announce some sugary version of universal brotherhood. Quite the opposite. I can honor difference precisely because unity does not require sameness. The Maya are Maya. The Garinagu are Garinagu. Creole is Creole. Belize is Belize. Yurumein is Yurumein. La Buga is La Buga. And I am I.

Difference remains. The nonduality I existentially know does not require me to bleach the colors out of the painting.

So I return to the ancestor I went looking for. Was one of my Garbutt ancestors at the Battle of St. George’s Caye?

I don’t know.

I love that I can say that now.

I went looking for one person and found hundreds of years of movement instead. I found colonial records and family memories, lighthouse keepers and cayes, Stann Creek and Dangriga, Yurumein and Roatán, Honduras and La Buga. I found Africa, Europe and Indigenous America refusing to remain neatly separate once human beings actually began living, loving, fighting, surviving and having children together.

I went looking for genealogy. I found relationship.

And somewhere in all this digging, an old sentence from my father returned to me.

Blood is thicker than water.

Perhaps it is. But I have spent all this time looking backward through blood, only to find water everywhere.

People crossed it willingly. People were driven across it. People fought upon it. People made homes beside it. Names crossed it and changed. Languages crossed it and changed. Families crossed it and changed.

And beneath all the names I went looking for—the ones I found, the ones I inherited, and the ones history swallowed—the blood remained red.

Our skin does not share one color. Our languages do not share one tongue. Our ancestors did not share one history. We need not erase any of those differences to recognize what is beneath them.

Blood is thicker than water.

And all of us bleed red.