VIRTUAL Barcelona

Abstract

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While archives are typically viewed as the primary and essential source of information for researchers interested in cultural heritage, archives often contribute to a process of official erasure. In Decolonizing Methodologies, Linda Tuhiwai Smith quoted Audre Lorde’s insight that “the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house.” Indigenous activists seeking official recognition and land claims—while depending upon colonial archives to do so—must fight against the narratives of Indigenous history therein represented. The colonial archive is an instrument of domination, a product of colonial bureaucracies, the written word, and colonial surveillance—instantiating dominance, overwhelming the researcher with minutiae, and perfectly silent about what it obscures. As the British empire hinged upon a certain theory of dominion, counternarratives rarely peek through the interstices of colonial reports. Such is the case in Belize, formerly British Honduras. This paper concerns the selective creation of the colonial archive by Governor John Burdon and his team, and their compilation of a massive, three-volume index (Archives of British Honduras) that is typically used as the finding aid for researchers, even though it represents only a portion of the documents. The index’s introduction asserts that the British entered a terra nullius and that the Indigenous people living there were descendants of immigrants who arrived after the British had wrested the lands from the Spanish. However, in the archival interstices, there are glimpses of Indigenous settlement in northern Belize just prior to and in the early years of the British colony. Evidence suggests that certain documents relevant to Indigenous land claims were deliberately destroyed or buried by colonial representatives. Such documentary evidence, in combination with archaeological data, could be used as the basis for official Indigenous recognition and land claims in northern Belize.