The Caribbean is named after the Kalinago, whose cannibal reputation lacks hard evidence
Columbus recorded the name Caribe, and the whole sea came to bear it. Spanish accounts cast the Kalinago as raiders who roasted human flesh, but no hard evidence backs that up. What is documented is their resistance: in the Lesser Antilles they held off Spain, France and England for generations.
The Kalinago, long called Island Caribs, lived across the Windward Islands, Dominica and the southern Leewards, including Guadeloupe. Their own names are Karifuna in the singular and Kalinago in the plural, and Dominica officially dropped Carib for Kalinago in 2015. Spanish officials used Carib for Indigenous groups they saw as hostile and Arawak for those they considered friendly, which coloured the record from the start.
The old origin story, told by early missionaries, had warlike invaders from South America conquering the islands from the Igneri. Newer work challenges it. The Kalinago language seems not to have been Cariban at all but closer to that of their Taino neighbours, and ancient DNA points to shared roots with other Antillean peoples. In Grenada, the French in 1649 distinguished two groups, Caraibes and Galibis, which archaeologists link to a local pottery tradition and to Cayo pottery with mainland ties. The Kalinago identity may therefore have been a fusion or alliance rather than the product of an invasion.
After Spain crushed Taino and Kalinago resistance in the Greater Antilles by the mid-16th century, the smaller islands proved a different matter. Lacking gold and costly to attack, they stayed independent. In the 17th century Kalinago raided English and French plantations and played the European powers off against each other, and the line between their islands and the Taino lands became known as the poison arrow curtain. A 1660 treaty confined them to Dominica and Saint Vincent, though England soon ignored it.
On Saint Vincent, Kalinago intermarried with free West Africans, forming the people Britain called Black Caribs, the Garifuna, who were deported to Honduras in 1797. The 1812 eruption of La Soufriere then devastated the remaining community. In Dominica, rugged terrain helped preserve independence, and in 1903 Britain granted a 3,700-acre territory on the east coast. Around 3,400 Kalinago lived there as of 2008, electing their own chief.
Source: Kalinago
