ABSTRACT
The Caribbean is most often associated with the Middle Passage and slavery. As a result, it has also been associated for a long time with alienation and the loss of memory, with deracination and the memory of loss. This aspect of Caribbean history has been so pregnant that it has tended to occult the indigenous people who had originally conquered the Caribbean, having come from South America in the first place, nearly 6,000 years ago. The destruction of those indigenous societies in the Caribbean certainly was a rapid process once the Europeans had arrived in 1492. Most of the indigenous peoples did not survive the period of conquest, at least in the Greater Antilles.
