ANTI-RACISM LAB

Essequibo Border Dispute and Indigenous Erasure

By Romain Khan

It is not uncommon to find prefatory material on “Guyana” that references its Indigenous Warau meaning, “the land of [many] waters” (Reyner & Hope, 1967) for its multitude of natural waterways and vulnerability to extreme flooding (Vaughn, 2022). What is less reported, though equally factual, is that Guyana, as an independent state, or colony of British Guiana, has always been fractiously circumscribed, subject to territorial claims from every neighbouring country (Menezes, 2010; Bulkan, 2021). From Suriname in the east, to Brazil in the south, and repeatedly Venezuela in the west, Guyana has been bombarded by geopolitical challenges to its national sovereignty, the aftermath of conflicting European imperial enterprises and interests in South America, and specifically British colonial occupation and survey expeditions to delineate the colony of British Guiana (Menezes, 2010). Add to this geopolitical disquiet, the country’s existential battle against the rising Atlantic Ocean in the north (incidentally where both Suriname and Venezuela have advanced further territorial claims), and what emerges is the image of a nation whose sovereignty and “transition from borderland to ‘bordered land’” (Hoonhout, 2020, p.20) appears irresolute.

Venezuela’s recent threat of annexation of the Essequibo region, roughly three-quarters of postcolonial Guyana and zone of that country’s newly discovered offshore oil deposits (Jeong & Brown, 2023), reinforces this historical restiveness. And while there is a certain allure to zealous nationalism, such sentiments can work to occlude the deeper “imperial formations” or those “relations of force” (Stoler, 2016) that underpin and animate this conflict, and which, if acknowledged, may in fact reveal an awkward congruence between these two nation-states. Though brazen displays of power such as a feared militarized invasion by Venezuela, or Guyana’s reported interest in establishing U.S. military bases (“U.S. Defense officials,” 2023) are actions intrinsic to Empire, these are not the articulations of power in question. Instead, those accretions of colonial power are so banal that they “fade out of focus” (Stoler, 2016, p.343) in popular settler discourses about this dispute. There in opacity, these imperial logics continue to facilitate the usurpation of Indigenous lands and sovereignty and bind Venezuela’s and Guyana’s respective sovereignties to similar processes of “elimination of the native” (Wolfe, 2006). So, to elucidate this “terror of the mundane” (Hartman, 1997, p.4) requires critically approaching the dispute through the lens of “Indigenousness” as an identity shaped and lived within the context of internal colonization (Alfred, 2014). Doing so cuts through the settler cacophony on territorial sovereignty over the Essequibo and reveals that the border is in fact dual with its spatialization of race and territorialization of space (Jackson, 2006). And that while state territoriality demarcates the internal versus external, an equally abiding “interior frontier” exists which dispenses with that dichotomy in preference for the critical analysis of colonial ruin-making (Stoler, 2022).

Currently, many non-Indigenous, nationalist discourses about the territorial conflict are preoccupied with arguing the (in)validity of the 1899 Arbitral Award that granted Essequibo to Great Britain/Guyana (Gomez & Montiel, 2021), and which Venezuela rejects as “null, invalid, [and] illegal” (“Venezuela ratifies,” 2023). Based on the arbitration judgment of 1899, the arguments were viewed as legally disparate, but what is less visible is that both Great Britain and the Republic of Venezuela advanced their respective territorial claims under a common rubric of “successor in title” (Scruggs, 1895). That meant the United Kingdom asserted sovereignty based on occupation rights ceded to it by prior Dutch settlement, and Venezuela rejected such Dutch sovereignty and claimed rights based on Spain’s purported “first discovery” and occupation (Jackson, 2006). However, what is less evident in those debates is that “successor in title” and sovereign claims through either “first discovery” (Spain/Venezuela) or “effective occupation of territory” (Netherlands/Great Britain/Guyana) are rooted in the Doctrine of Discovery. This racial “expropriation contract” (Mills, 1997) together with the imperial accessory, terra nullius, mandated European dominion over Indigenous territories on account of the “emptiness” of such lands, and the ontological and spiritual defilement of their original owners within a racist Judeo-Christian cosmography (Wynter, 2006). Based on John Locke’s Enlightenment theorizing of sovereignty, these territories were the savage “zones of non-being” (Grosfoguel, 2019) that were devoid of humanity, political order and European conceptions of property, and by racist colonial logic, bereft of any exercise of sovereignty (Hughes, 2020). This “secular, evolutionary logic” that selected and dysselected territory and the human (Wynter, 2006) would become the founding principle of the modern colonial capitalist world system which obliterates difference (racial, economic, social, cultural, ontological, epistemological) and institutes dualistic orders of civilized-uncivilized, rational-irrational, European-non-European, sovereign-non-sovereign and so on. Imbued with these outlandish European imaginings and fabrications, Columbus would deposit the “imperial debris” (Stoler, 2016) of the corpses of millions of Tainos (Arawaks), and a brutal “encomienda system of [Indigenous] slave labour and tutelage” (Samson & Gigoux, 2016) that combined with plantation slavery to initiate European modernity (Wynter, 1995).

In South America, these twin legal fictions functioned constitutively with another devastating imperial fantasy, the El Dorado myth, to energize European conquest and its detritus of Indigenous dispossession. Considered the inaugurating myth of the continent (Jackson, 2012), “El Dorado,” a Spanish translation for the legendary Indigenous city of Manoa, conjured images of gold that far “exceedeth any of the world” (Raleigh, 1595), meaning Europe. This myth, manufactured from a mere anecdote, galvanized European explorers to exert themselves in charting geographic routes to the golden city inland of the Guianas, which today is mapped to contemporary Venezuela and Guyana (Burnett, 2000). Mythic gold, which stirred an impoverished feudal-Christian Europe to fantasize about the affluence of 14th century Mali emperor, Mansa Musa, catalyzed the Portuguese to invade Senegal in 1441 and initiate the slave trade (Wynter, 1995), enacting a colonial conduit of exploitation and dehumanization between Africa, the Caribbean and Americas. It would take the discovery of goldfields in Caratal, Spanish Guayana (present-day Venezuela), to rupture an agreement that restrained Venezuela and Great Britain from encroaching on the contested Essequibo frontier, and consequently reignite the border dispute (Menezes, 1981). Matthews (1888) would blame the “cupidity of the Demerara [British Guiana] gold seekers” (p.2) for the breach, and wherever culpability lies, oil, as black gold and “mythos of the rise of the industrial west” (Watts, 1999, p.189), now baptizes Oil Dorado (Bulkan et al., 2023), and instigates “new panics” (Stoler, 2018) between these two South American settler states.

Deploying “hybridity as ideology” (Hintzen, 2004), both Venezuela and Guyana have eluded the indictments of settler colonialism. Venezuela, in its embrace of mestizaje (Salas, 2005), and Guyana, cooperativism (Jackson, 2005), have projected fallacious images of racial egalitarianism and unified nationhood that are undercut by abiding racial antipathies (African-East Indian conflicts in Guyana), and policies of institutionalized anti-Indigeneity. Feigning this “coherent peoplehood” (Hintzen, 2004), both countries affect a distinctive “colonial aphasia” in which colonial histories of Indigenous elimination are not forgotten, but “occluded from view” (Stoler, 2016, p.128). In this shroud of deliberate historical dismemberment, Indigenous displacement becomes misrepresented as an anachronistic “event” and not an ongoing “structure” (Wolfe, 2006), and therefore the “chapter of almost unrelieved tragedy for the Indian” (Watters, 1937, p.130) under Spanish colonization is isolated from the contemporary abuses and exploitation of Indigenous peoples, including the Hoti and Yanomami, in the Orinoco Mining Arc (AMO) of Venezuela. This state-sanctioned “extractive zone” (Gomez-Barris, 2017), actively promoted by President Nicolas Maduro, is a “mega-mining project” that “overlaps with several Indigenous territories” and unleashes cataclysms of extrajudicial and arbitrary killings, labour abuses, sexual exploitation, water pollution and diseases (Cultural Survival, 2021). And at Chinese Landing, a Kalinago/Karinya (Indigenous Carib) community in Guyana, similar extractivist depredations, enabled by outdated legalism (Bulkan, 2011), continued until precautionary measures were granted by the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) (Organization of American States, 2023), and the government was forced to cease mining temporarily (“Government halting mining,” 2023). The village leader’s, Orin Fernandes, lamentation, “We are not being treated like human beings on our own titled lands” (Papannah & Sutherland, 2022), reopens a familiar animalizing trope where Indigenous peoples in British Guiana were divested of their traditional territorial rights and rendered “cattle” that could be rounded up and consigned to reservations (Williams, 1936).  By relegating the colonial presence to the “distant fringes of national narratives” (Stoler, 2012, p.122), the Creole settler populations of each country–white criollos (Spanish descendants born in Venezuela) and Africans/East Indians (formerly enslaved and indentured labourers in Guyana) have managed to conceal the “violences in the interior borderlands” (Stoler, 2022, p.4) or racialized inequities within the geopolitical perimeters of these states. Additionally, by mobilizing the colonial remnants of the state (Hintzen, 2004), they amass personal fortunes through colonial practices of landlordism and rentierism (Karl, 1987; Bulkan & Palmer, 2016), the consequence of which is the dislocation of Native Indigeneity by Creole indigeneity, and imposition of Creole settler political rule (Jackson, 2012).

Given both the geographical and political remoteness of most of the Essequibo region—terrestrial or offshore—it could be seen as a tremulous frontier. According to anthropologist, Neil Whitehead (2003), within the European colonial imaginary, the space of “Guayana” or “Guianas,” which encompasses Guyana, was the considered the end point of exploration or “counterpoint of modernity.” Within this imaginary of expansionism, the Essequibo frontier therefore becomes a theatre for the performance of two settler modernities, and not the provenance of pre-existing Indigenous sovereignties. Of course, settler sovereignty emerges from the globalization of the European nation-state (Goettlich, 2021) and the idea of “territoriality” which involves delimiting geographic space (symbolic or material) and enforcing those boundaries using various mechanisms of power (Shattuck & Peluso, 2021), invariably displacing Indigenous sovereignty. Indeed, this is not unprecedented, for as the historical record illustrates, Great Britain, in its legal submissions to arbitration, had used the Indigenous peoples as its “trump card” (Menezes, 2010, p.186) to assert its territorial rights to the frontier regions, including the Essequibo. Hence, even though Guyana has been awarded de jure sovereignty over the Essequibo, both itself and Venezuela could be seen as “carrying their sovereignty with them into [this] frontier” (Hughes, 2020, p.216) with the civilizing aim of “Europeanizing” its strange landscape and “alien” Indigenous inhabitants (Mills, 1997) using the recolonizing settler technology of neoliberal capitalism. Doing so results in an unintentional congruence where the “Europeanized elites” (Cusicanqui, 2012) in each country resuscitate the persistent “settler imperative” (Alfred & Corntassel, 2005) of controlling and exploiting Indigenous territories and Otherness in pursuit of their own national and ontological destiny (Jackson, 2012).

With the escalation in tensions, senior functionaries of each state issued contrasting statements about the effect of the dispute on Indigenous peoples’ lives. Venezuela’s Defense Minister, Vladimir Padrino, lauded the Yanomami people’s participation in the country’s referendum to annex Essequibo:

“Today, the Indigenous peoples have come to the homeland’s call to defend Guayana Esequiba. They who are the original settlers of the ‘lands of many waters,’ are the protagonists in this fight. Let’s go!” (“Venezuela: The Yanomami,” 2023).

And in a presentation to the National Assembly, Guyana’s Minister of Amerindian Affairs, Pauline Sukhai, warned of the vulnerability of the Indigenous peoples to Venezuela’s military mobilization:

“In the northwestern corner of Guyana, mainly Amerindians live there. They live under intimidation and heightened tension [… and] they will be impacted the most” (“Lives endangered,” 2023).

While Indigenous groups in each country have endorsed their respective state’s sovereign rights over the territory (“Venezuela: vote shows,” 2023; “APA commits,” 2023), and as we know in the case of Guyana, Indigenous peoples had declared loyalty to both the Dutch and British colonial regimes in opposition to the Spaniards (Menezes, 2010), these contrasting statements both leverage “a stylized indigeneity to deepen the legitimacy of their appeal” (Olson, 2015, p.161). Notwithstanding the Yanomami and Indigenous groups in Guyana, including at the border regions, are imperilled by heightened state-endorsed extractivism, these state elites “adopt a strategy of crossdressing” (Cusicanqui, 2012, p.99) that appeal to essentialist stereotypes of Indigenous peoples as pre-colonial, and simultaneously, multicultural centerpieces of a purportedly homogenous nation-state. This conjoined rhetorical strategy of “constitutive exteriority” (Olson, 2015) and “‘exalted’ interiority” (my term) effectuates the “theatricalization” (Cusicanqui, 2012) of Indigenous identities to underwrite the respective Creole nationalist projects and consolidate settler identity (Jackson, 2012). Remarkably, while busy presenting factual evidence at the Hague arbitral proceedings of the 1890s, neither Venezuela nor Great Britain “acknowledged that […] imperialist initiatives had taken place and were continuing on the unceded territories of Indigenous nations” (Bulkan, 2021, p.77). Thus, the socialized “white blindness” (Mills, 2007) that permitted European explorers to declare invisible visible Indigenous populations and lands was the same which the Venezuelans and British marshalled to legitimize their territorial claims. This “systematic misperception” (Mills, 2007) reappears, now afflicting the inner eyes of the Creole state, which refashions Indigenous peoples as “proto nationals” (Jackson, 2023), and coopts their identities to legitimize settler territoriality, again within the stranglehold of “sub-citizenship” (Stoler, 2018, p.543). Settler sovereignty is therefore the opacity into which the constitutive colonial logic of elimination and assimilation finds refuge and spiritualizes both settler and two-tiered nation-states (Tuck, 2009).

Regardless of the cogency of the disparate territorial claims before the International Court of Justice, what this dispute elucidates is that Indigenous self-determination is always sacrificed to the (re)constitution of the Creole settler state (Jackson, 2023). And while some may argue—based on recent Indigenous support for Venezuela and Guyana—that Indigenous peoples in both countries have submitted voluntarily to state-sovereignty, it is important to mention that even when Indigenous peoples identified as imperial subjects, as happened in British Guiana, they did not view European sovereignty as coterminous with the dissolution of rights enshrined in Native title. In fact, as Bulkan (2016) asserts, these nations had “a clear sense of their territorial boundaries–correlated with language–which they defended against others” (p.352-353). As many Guyanese champion the “exemplary leadership” (Bhagwandin, 2023) of Creole elites, what remains buried in the “cumulative debris” (Stoler, 2016) of settler nationalism is the founding courage of the Kalinago/Karinya peoples (Indigenous Carib) who resisted Spanish encroachment into the “Wild Coast” of present-day Guyana, thereby confirming their status as the de facto first defenders of the territory (Rodway, 1896). Unearthing this deliberately displaced knowledge dispenses with the “damage-centered” (Tuck, 2009) narratives which enable the suppression of Indigenous historicity and heroism and sanction the misguided valorization of Creole nationalism. Indeed, colonial aphasia is not only the purposeful amputation of these histories of Indigenous valor, but also the “difficulty in speaking” (Stoler, 2016) them on account of lacking the vocabulary for their articulation.

This aphasic silencing and “muteness” are evident in how conveniently the nation-state is rendered axiomatic in ongoing debates about this controversy. At no point in the impassioned discussions of national sovereignty is there the admission that Indigenous nations “never adopted a nation state” (Samson & Gigoux, 2016), but instead were conscripted into its “conceptual arrays” (Mills, 2007) of settler sovereignty, and domesticated by its “state-created identities” (Alfred & Corntassel, 2005). And more importantly, that national borders are “impositions” which “undermine the sovereignty of indigenous polities” (Sullivan, 2022, p.2) by restricting transborder movements of Indigenous peoples. On a “Special Map of British Guiana Illustrating the Venezuela-Guiana Boundary Dispute” (Philip & Son, 1897), there appears the text “Guaranos” overlapping and transgressing the border, and colour-coded British territory (pink) and Venezuela possessions (green). According to Williams (1928), “Guaranos” is one of the many spellings for the Warau peoples, one of nine Indigenous nations native to Guyana, who because of the arbitrary border demarcations and hegemony of the European nation-state system, have been partitioned, some “under the government of Venezuela, and some under that of British Guiana” (p.203).

Contrary to this Cartesian imperative to divide and sequester, however, Indigenous nationhood rests upon relationality and kinship in which “there is no absolute authority, no coercive enforcement of decisions, no hierarchy, and no separate ruling entity” (Alfred, 2014, p.467). Seen thus, Indigenous sovereignty advances a decolonial vision that imagines an “otherwise life” (King et al., 2020) of entanglement between human and non-human worlds, and hence, a flight from the strictures of colonial grids of elimination and domestication. As Creole settlers agitate over the precise demarcations of the Guyana-Venezuela border, Mango Landing, a remote village bordering the two feuding nations, emerges into wider consciousness to rupture the cleaving fictions of national borders and duplicitous fixity of settler sovereignty. There, as one resident explains, “If the border were to close, it would strangle us. Venezuelans and Guyanans” (“Far from Venezuela,” 2023), effectively underscoring the porousness of the frontier, and neutralizing the imperial Manichean vision that haunts and revitalizes this conflict. If the bordered land reinvigorates the “ecologicidal” (Grosfoguel, 2019) civilization of the modern colonial world system, then the Indigenous borderlands are the “zones of refuge” (Chan as cited in Alfred & Corntassel, 2005, p.605) into which “the wretched of the earth” (Fanon, 1961) can flee to liberation. Maybe there, away from the clutches of imperial formations and colonial debris, they can realize Native futurities “without a settler state” (Tuck & Yang, 2012).

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About the Author

Romain Khan is a Doctoral student who identifies proudly with his Caribbean roots. His research critically engages the confluence of decoloniality, racial subjection and the geopolitics of knowledge in relation to the ongoing modernist project in the Caribbean's newest petrostate, Guyana.