Eighteenth-century Saint-Domingue still bore material traces of its exterminated indigenous inhabitants

Evidence

The colony was in fact full of haunting reminders of its vanished inhabitants. In Limonade one encountered “with each step, debris of the utensils of the indigenous people who lived here,” and in Quartier-Morin, “everywhere you find their bones, their simple but ingenious utensils, their hideous but sometimes very artistically made fetishes.” On one sugar plantation, each hole dug for the cane turned up “some new vestiges of the existence of this race now erased from the list of humans.” … Near the town of Les Cayes was a peninsula where it was easy to find “fetishes” left behind by its former inhabitants, as well as small caves they had carved into the rock, and small figurines made of conch shells. “The regret of the philosopher is awakened,” wrote Moreau, “when he thinks about the fact that from a people so numerous, there is not one left to enlighten us about its history.” — Dubois, Laurent, Avengers of the New World_ The Story of…, 63

Categorization

• SEED: The image of Taino artifacts surfacing in every cane hole, and a carved indigenous stone repurposed as a holy-water font, could seed an essay on colonial erasure as a substrate of plantation agriculture.