Maximilian Forte
I am a retired Professor of Anthropology, formerly in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at Concordia University in Montreal, Canada. I received an Honours B.A., with a double major in Latin American & Caribbean Studies, and Spanish Language, Literature, and Linguistics (including Latin America) at York University, from which I graduated in 1990, summa cum laude. I then decided to move to Trinidad & Tobago, where I enrolled in the post-graduate diploma program at the Institute of International Relations at the University of the West Indies, St. Augustine. After completing the one year program, I continued into the start of the M.Phil program, which I discontinued after two years. I was in Trinidad from 1990 until 1993. In 1994 I began a M.A. in Socio-Cultural Anthropology at the State University of New York at Binghamton, where I also continued and developed my interests in world-systems analysis, taking courses in other departments with Immanuel Wallerstein, Giovanni Arrighi, and Anthony King. I also completed the first year of the Ph.D program there, but then moved to Australia, where from 1997 through 2001 I completed my Ph.D in Anthropology at the University of Adelaide. I then moved back again to Trinidad & Tobago, where I remained until 2003, and eventually achieved Permanent Resident status, the first step on the way to gaining Trinidadian nationality. In 2003 I took up my first tenure-track position in Anthropology, in the Department of Anthropology and Sociology, at what was then called the University College of Cape Breton (the name changed to Cape Breton University in my final months there). In 2005 I accepted an offer for a second tenure-track position, in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at Concordia University in Montreal, where I received tenure and have since been promoted to full Professor. In 2024 I retired from Concordia. I remain attached to my interdisciplinary background, and most of my research has not fallen neatly within any one discipline. I continue to remain conversant with a great deal of work done by non-anthropologists.
Address: Department of Sociology and Anthropology
Concordia University
1455 de Maisonneuve Blvd. W.
Montreal, QC, Canada
H3G 1M8
Address: Department of Sociology and Anthropology
Concordia University
1455 de Maisonneuve Blvd. W.
Montreal, QC, Canada
H3G 1M8
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Did we as scholars anticipate living in a country where our universities would purge tenured professors, fire support staff, and expel registered students (even escorting them off campus in front of other students), because of their health status, their innate biological characteristics, and their desire to preserve their privacy and bodily autonomy free from discrimination? When did we become comfortable with violating the right to an education and the right to work? How did we come to accept this discrimination, this deliberate segregation of a category of persons from the rest of society? Did we predict that one day we would see a demarcated group of Canadians being targeted not just for segregation, discrimination, and demonization, but that they would also be denied their livelihoods? Did we imagine that leaders, from the Prime Minister to the Premier, would verbally assault this same group and use the most threatening and dehumanizing language against it? This is happening, right now, all around us, right in front of us. Now that history has found us, how do we meet history? Do we even stop to take notice? When are we going to stand up and speak out?
This paper was produced for Résistance Scolaire-Québec-Academic Resistance (RSQAR), a collective of Quebec professors and teachers at all levels of the education system who have joined with students and support staff in fighting against the state of emergency and coercive medical practices. For more information, see rsqar.net. It is also included in the Occasional Papers series of the Zero Anthropology magazine at zeroanthropology.net.
[Parts included here: Acknowledgements, Preface, Conclusion]
The Catholic Mission of Santa Rosa is something that helped to make Arima a distinctive town in Trinidad, accounting for nearly half of the Amerindian population of the colony in the 1800s. The baptismal registers of the Catholic Church in Arima, including those pertaining to its years as a Mission, offer us unique insights into the social history of Arima, its demographic and cultural transformations, while opening another window onto the profound political-economic and legal changes that occurred in the colony throughout the 19th-century. However, when the data from those baptismal registers are read in conjunction with government documents and texts from the time, we are faced with what might seem like a series of deep mysteries.
Was Arima’s mission an Indian Mission after all? Was the mission established “for the good” of the Amerindians? How many Indigenous people lived in the Arima Mission, and in Trinidad as a whole? Who counted them? How were they counted, and why? Were the Amerindians segregated from other races? Why did Arima come to be seen as a centre of Indigenous culture in Trinidad? Exactly how did the Amerindians “vanish” from the Mission? Did the mission help to perpetuate Amerindian social and cultural forms in Trinidad, or did it promote their dissolution? Did the Amerindians gladly convert to Catholicism and adhere to an austere lifestyle of obedience and service in the misson? What explains the alleged “decline” in Trinidad’s Indigenous population? Did the Arima Mission have a secret side?
These questions are answered in this book by using two sets of documentary sources: complete data from the Baptismal Registers of the Santa Rosa RC Church about Indigenous and Mestizo persons in the Arima Mission and after (1820 to 1916), reproduced in full in this book; and, newly available historical reports from the 1800s, including the earliest report in print of a visit to the Arima Mission. This book provides new estimates of both the Amerindian population of the Arima Mission and all of Trinidad; revised, updated, and expanded census data for Trinidad’s Amerindian population from the late 1700s to the mid-1800s is also provided, making it the most comprehensive accounting thus far. Ethnohistorians will gain valuable insights and detailed notes about using baptismal registers as sources of data. However, the larger questions about the politics of counting a target population are addressed through a critique of the four dominant myths concerning the Arima Mission.
This book, based entirely on primary sources and reproducing—in full—all of the entries in the baptismal registers from 1820 to 1916 concerning Arima’s Amerindian, Mestizo, and much of its Spanish-language population, addresses the questions above by presenting some striking findings that advance a provocative narrative. Colonial oligarchic domination, the political economy of racism, and the creation of inequality and poverty now stand out.
Contributors to this volume: John Talbot, Mandela Coupal Dalgleish, Robert Majewski, Lea Marinova, Chloë Blaszkewycz, Iléana Gutnick, and Maximilian C. Forte.
Did we as scholars anticipate living in a country where our universities would purge tenured professors, fire support staff, and expel registered students (even escorting them off campus in front of other students), because of their health status, their innate biological characteristics, and their desire to preserve their privacy and bodily autonomy free from discrimination? When did we become comfortable with violating the right to an education and the right to work? How did we come to accept this discrimination, this deliberate segregation of a category of persons from the rest of society? Did we predict that one day we would see a demarcated group of Canadians being targeted not just for segregation, discrimination, and demonization, but that they would also be denied their livelihoods? Did we imagine that leaders, from the Prime Minister to the Premier, would verbally assault this same group and use the most threatening and dehumanizing language against it? This is happening, right now, all around us, right in front of us. Now that history has found us, how do we meet history? Do we even stop to take notice? When are we going to stand up and speak out?
This paper was produced for Résistance Scolaire-Québec-Academic Resistance (RSQAR), a collective of Quebec professors and teachers at all levels of the education system who have joined with students and support staff in fighting against the state of emergency and coercive medical practices. For more information, see rsqar.net. It is also included in the Occasional Papers series of the Zero Anthropology magazine at zeroanthropology.net.
[Parts included here: Acknowledgements, Preface, Conclusion]
The Catholic Mission of Santa Rosa is something that helped to make Arima a distinctive town in Trinidad, accounting for nearly half of the Amerindian population of the colony in the 1800s. The baptismal registers of the Catholic Church in Arima, including those pertaining to its years as a Mission, offer us unique insights into the social history of Arima, its demographic and cultural transformations, while opening another window onto the profound political-economic and legal changes that occurred in the colony throughout the 19th-century. However, when the data from those baptismal registers are read in conjunction with government documents and texts from the time, we are faced with what might seem like a series of deep mysteries.
Was Arima’s mission an Indian Mission after all? Was the mission established “for the good” of the Amerindians? How many Indigenous people lived in the Arima Mission, and in Trinidad as a whole? Who counted them? How were they counted, and why? Were the Amerindians segregated from other races? Why did Arima come to be seen as a centre of Indigenous culture in Trinidad? Exactly how did the Amerindians “vanish” from the Mission? Did the mission help to perpetuate Amerindian social and cultural forms in Trinidad, or did it promote their dissolution? Did the Amerindians gladly convert to Catholicism and adhere to an austere lifestyle of obedience and service in the misson? What explains the alleged “decline” in Trinidad’s Indigenous population? Did the Arima Mission have a secret side?
These questions are answered in this book by using two sets of documentary sources: complete data from the Baptismal Registers of the Santa Rosa RC Church about Indigenous and Mestizo persons in the Arima Mission and after (1820 to 1916), reproduced in full in this book; and, newly available historical reports from the 1800s, including the earliest report in print of a visit to the Arima Mission. This book provides new estimates of both the Amerindian population of the Arima Mission and all of Trinidad; revised, updated, and expanded census data for Trinidad’s Amerindian population from the late 1700s to the mid-1800s is also provided, making it the most comprehensive accounting thus far. Ethnohistorians will gain valuable insights and detailed notes about using baptismal registers as sources of data. However, the larger questions about the politics of counting a target population are addressed through a critique of the four dominant myths concerning the Arima Mission.
This book, based entirely on primary sources and reproducing—in full—all of the entries in the baptismal registers from 1820 to 1916 concerning Arima’s Amerindian, Mestizo, and much of its Spanish-language population, addresses the questions above by presenting some striking findings that advance a provocative narrative. Colonial oligarchic domination, the political economy of racism, and the creation of inequality and poverty now stand out.
Contributors to this volume: John Talbot, Mandela Coupal Dalgleish, Robert Majewski, Lea Marinova, Chloë Blaszkewycz, Iléana Gutnick, and Maximilian C. Forte.
[Parts included here: Acknowledgements, Preface, Conclusion]
The Catholic Mission of Santa Rosa is something that helped to make Arima a distinctive town in Trinidad, accounting for nearly half of the Amerindian population of the colony in the 1800s. The baptismal registers of the Catholic Church in Arima, including those pertaining to its years as a Mission, offer us unique insights into the social history of Arima, its demographic and cultural transformations, while opening another window onto the profound political-economic and legal changes that occurred in the colony throughout the 19th-century. However, when the data from those baptismal registers are read in conjunction with government documents and texts from the time, we are faced with what might seem like a series of deep mysteries.
Was Arima’s mission an Indian Mission after all? Was the mission established “for the good” of the Amerindians? How many Indigenous people lived in the Arima Mission, and in Trinidad as a whole? Who counted them? How were they counted, and why? Were the Amerindians segregated from other races? Why did Arima come to be seen as a centre of Indigenous culture in Trinidad? Exactly how did the Amerindians “vanish” from the Mission? Did the mission help to perpetuate Amerindian social and cultural forms in Trinidad, or did it promote their dissolution? Did the Amerindians gladly convert to Catholicism and adhere to an austere lifestyle of obedience and service in the misson? What explains the alleged “decline” in Trinidad’s Indigenous population? Did the Arima Mission have a secret side?
These questions are answered in this book by using two sets of documentary sources: complete data from the Baptismal Registers of the Santa Rosa RC Church about Indigenous and Mestizo persons in the Arima Mission and after (1820 to 1916), reproduced in full in this book; and, newly available historical reports from the 1800s, including the earliest report in print of a visit to the Arima Mission. This book provides new estimates of both the Amerindian population of the Arima Mission and all of Trinidad; revised, updated, and expanded census data for Trinidad’s Amerindian population from the late 1700s to the mid-1800s is also provided, making it the most comprehensive accounting thus far. Ethnohistorians will gain valuable insights and detailed notes about using baptismal registers as sources of data. However, the larger questions about the politics of counting a target population are addressed through a critique of the four dominant myths concerning the Arima Mission.
This book, based entirely on primary sources and reproducing—in full—all of the entries in the baptismal registers from 1820 to 1916 concerning Arima’s Amerindian, Mestizo, and much of its Spanish-language population, addresses the questions above by presenting some striking findings that advance a provocative narrative. Colonial oligarchic domination, the political economy of racism, and the creation of inequality and poverty now stand out.