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As the Snow Melts before the Sunbeam: Writing 
the “Inevitable” Extinction of the Indigenous 

Peoples of the Americas  
Nasha Mavalvala 

 
Nasha Mavalvala is an undergraduate student at U of T, whose academic interests 
include Caribbean Studies, African Studies, and Women & Gender Studies. She is 
on the Caribbean Studies and Equity Studies Students' Unions, and aims to 
develop her academic practice alongside community organizing, continuing to 
search for holistic ways to engage in the multiple and traversing processes of 
decolonial, feminist & socialist liberation. 

 
Maximilian Forte asserts that “Indigenous peoples have 

been ever vanishing, almost as if disappearance was their 
predetermined historical role” (Forte, 1). This paper will speak to the 
various techniques of erasure that have historically served to remove 
indigenous peoples from their lands and detach them from their 
cultures. Using examples from European, North American, and 
Caribbean texts, I will discuss the myths of perpetual extinction of 
Indigenous peoples and how these myths have worked to annihilate 
the indigenous population—both culturally and physically—through 
fictitious repetitions within literature such as plays and poetry, but 
also through government documents, records and the enactment of 
policies of erasure. Forte writes, “One of the dominant myths of 
extinction, wrapped in terms of the then dominant evolutionism, had 
to do with extinction via miscegenation, a purely racial argument. No 
“pure” Amerindian equals no Amerindian.” I will address this in the 
context of the historical roots of racial classification and some of the 
contemporary issues surrounding racial determination. I suggest 
that since contact, the indigenous have been represented as 
perpetually dying out, and I discuss the concepts of 
predetermination and self-fulfilling prophecy in reference to this. 
“These things seem mysterious,” a Bostonian conceded in 1841, “but 
it would be impious to murmur at the decrees of fate” (Dippie, 12). In 
the National Uncanny, Renee Bergland writes, “The ghosting of 
Indians is a technique of removal” (Bergland, 4), referring to the 
widespread invocation of Native American ghosts in American 19th 
and 20th century classic literature. My definition of ghosting in 
application to this paper is the actual practices used to erase the lived 
histories of Indigenous peoples and used to deny their current 
existence and rights to self-determination. Omitting literal ghosts 
and spirits, I will use the aforementioned bodies of literature to 



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demonstrate how they employ the techniques of “ghosting” and 
erasure, diminishing indigenous presence through the falsification of 
a people’s history. 

 
In the National Uncanny: Indian Ghosts and American 

Subjects, Renee Bergland writes, “The ghosting of Indians is a 
technique of removal. By writing about Indians as ghosts, white 
writers effectively remove them from American lands, and place 
them, instead, within the American imagination” (Bergland, 4). 
While Bergland’s work centers around American literature and 
popular culture, her theory of removal by placing the Native within 
the imagination can also be applied to a post-colonial reading of 
Shakespeare’s The Tempest. This will not attest to Shakespeare’s 
intentions or mindset when writing the play, but simply as one 
understanding of this text. Specifically through the characters of 
Caliban and Sycorax, forces of erasure are at work in The Tempest. 
Written into popular imagination as a savage, sub-human “demi-
devil,” Caliban’s dehumanization pervades the popular 
consciousness of Colonial Britain. 

What have we here—a man or a fish?—dead or alive?  
A fish, he smells like a fish; a very ancient and 
fish-like smell; a kind of not-of-the-newest poor-John.A  
strange fish! Were I in England now, as once I was, and 
had but this fish painted, not a holiday-fool there but 
would give a piece of silver. There would this monster  
make a man—any strange beast there makes a man. 
When they will not give a doit to relieve a lame beggar, 
they will lay out ten to see a dead Indian. Legged like a 
man, and his fins like arms! Warm o' my troth! I do now  
let loose my opinion, hold it no longer: this is no fish, but  
an islander, that hath lately suffered by a thunderbolt. (2.2.24-35) 

Here Caliban is being observed by Trinculo during his first 
encounter with him. The immediate questioning of his humanity, 
“What have we here—a man or a fish?” and simultaneously that of 
his being, “dead or alive,” removes the possibility of his personhood. 
Even when Trinculo decides that he is “no fish, but an islander,” his 
lesser humanness has already been established within the audience. 
Trinculo thinks about the possibility of profiting from Caliban, “a 
dead Indian,” though alive; already he has been relegated to a 
position of death. The erasure of indigenous peoples also can be 
interpreted through the absent character of Sycorax, Caliban’s 



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mother. She is invoked quite often during the play, but only to 
indicate her absence. She is never able to voice her account of her 
story. Her deprivation of voice and the telling of her story through 
European voices is significant in Sycorax’s erasure and in her lack of 
access to have power in the story. It is not a negative absence of 
speech but a positive removal of voice. In addition, the fact that 
Sycorax was born in Algiers is made very evident. Craton writes of 
the European view of the Black Caribs, that “to emphasize the 
African origins of the windward Caribs was, of course, to stress 
that…they were no more indigenous than the Europeans” (Craton, 
72). Sycorax is from Algiers but is at the same time equated to being 
indigenous to the island, suggesting that there are no actual natives 
present and claims to the island are just as much—or more so—
European, than they are African.  

Then was this island—Save for the son that she did litter here, A freckled whelp, 
hag-born—not  honoured with A human shape. (1.2.281-4) 

 
The notions of non-existence of the indigenous peoples have 

been continuous since very soon after contact. The construction of 
the island as absent of humans (except for Caliban, who here is 
admitted to as human while he simultaneously dehumanized), is 
parallel to the initial and current rhetoric of “discovery” of the 
Americas by Columbus and Europeans. This idea in itself removes 
the original inhabitants of the land. In Racism and National 
Consciousness, Frederick Case speaks of the notion of the master, 
recognizing that in his mind, “he possesses an inalienable right over 
the land. He does not simply own it (a basic notion of capitalist 
civilization), he is master of it (a basic distorted vision of the 
relationship between humans and their environment)” (Case, 123). 
The colonizer claims this already inhabited land as his own. In his 
mind, he has discovered this land, and he settles his people on this 
newly “found” land. In this sense, the master also believes he 
possesses an inalienable right over the people of this land; the 
enslaver believes the same of the enslaved. By treating these peoples 
as objects, labeling them as savage, backwards, and barbaric, 
dehumanization is thus achieved. The widely spread concept of the 
Europeans’ discovery of the Americas “is an insult which reduces the 
original inhabitants of the Americas to a non-people, less than 
savages, simple animals. The notion implies that no human 
civilization had existed on this continent before the arrival of 
Europeans” (Case, 124). This denial of humanity serves to distance 



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the oppressive forces from those they are oppressing, allowing, in 
effect, a kind of absolution of moral guilt.  

In The Vanishing American, Brian Dippie argues that the 
myth of the perpetually vanishing Native American became self-
fulfilling, as it “accounted for the Indians' future by denying them 
one” (Dippie, xii). “The point was no longer whether or not the native 
population had declined in the past but that its future decline was 
inevitable” (Dippie, xii). Focusing on the 19th century onwards, 
Dippie demonstrates that the poetry and the general body of 
literature of the time started to heavily employ the rhetoric and 
imagery of nature to explain the fate of the indigenous peoples of the 
Americas. “The Indian was at the sunset of his existence; night was 
about to swallow a race fated to vanish ‘as the snow melts before the 
sunbeam,’ or ‘like the morning dew, insensibly and mysteriously to 
disappear, before the lights of civilization and Christianity’” (Hale, 
1819; cited in Dippie, 13). This kind of ephemeral and biological 
language suggests the “inevitability” and “naturalness” of the decline 
of indigenous peoples in a way that appeases the national 
consciousness. Snow must eventually melt, after all, under the fatal 
sunbeam of European contact. Sentiments such as William Tudor 
Jr.’s in 1815 regarding ‘the extinction of our savage precursors before 
the dawn of science and cultivation,’” (cited in Dippie, 13) allowed 
for the disavowal of American complicity in the devastation of 
indigenous peoples and instead made the Native Americans 
responsible for their own demise, as their barbarism and 
unwillingness or inability to adhere to Western “civilization” and 
“progress” made it natural that they must perish. 

 
 In his evaluation of the widely popular Hollywood film 

Avatar, Zizek asserts that it “teaches us that the only choice the 
aborigines have is to be saved by the human beings or to be 
destroyed by them. In other words, they can choose either to be the 
victim of imperialist reality, or to play their allotted role in the white 
man's fantasy.” As many colonial voices maintain, the indigenous 
simply could not be saved from their savageness. In his essay “The 
Black Caribs of St. Vincent,” Michael Craton shows that “without 
acknowledgment, [the British] echoed the sentiments of Columbus 
and his successors that good natives submitted to authority and had 
thereby the chance of redemption through being assimilated to 
European culture, whereas the obdurate were irredeemable savages 
fit to be enslaved if not extirpated” (Craton, 71). “Laws cannot reach 
them in their woods:” this statement made by William Young in his 



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report to the colonial government in 1795 reflects the common view 
of their inherent savagery and innate disposition to backwardness 
and barbarism. Thus, indigenous peoples are blameworthy for their 
own “unavoidable” degeneration while at the same time their 
predetermined dissipation is seen as natural as that of dew. 

 
“The way they wrote us out of history,  

we will write ourselves back in”  
–aniki Reyes Ocasio, BorinquenTaino 

 
 Indigenous peoples were and still are attempted to be 
written out of existence through the severe underestimation of 
numbers and the perpetual decline of population.  
 
The poor Indians have resisted the pressure of civilisation, and finally sunk under 
the ascendancy of a more intelligent race. In the year 1783, the Indian population 
amounted to 2,032 souls, who, at the capitulation of the island, had declined, 
according to official returns, to 1,082 individuals. In the year 1830 there still existed 
689 survivors of that race… At present [1858] there cannot be above 200 or 300 
Indians in the colony, so that the aborigines may be said to be almost extinct. (De 
Verteuil, 173) 

 
And again in 1767: “There were, [Young] claimed, no more 

than 2,000 Vincentian Caribs in all (an understatement by perhaps 
80 Percent), of whom the Yellow descendants of the original 
inhabitants were no more than a tiny minority” (Craton, 73). In his 
1795 An Account of the Black Charaibs on the Island of St. Vincent, 
William Young reported that “The island was at that time [in 1763] 
inhabited by about 3000 Black Charaibs, or free Negroes, by 4000 
French (their Negroes included), and by about 100 Red Charaibs, or 
Indians; so reduced were that aboriginal people!” (Young, 18) 
Implicated in these statements are not only questions of numbers of 
Indigenous peoples but the designation of who is Indigenous. 
Young’s claim of the Black Caribs as “Negro usurpers” of “real” 
Caribs customs and heritage are parallel with current ideas of “pure 
blood,” qualifications, the governments’ deciding of who is 
indigenous, and the denying of self-determination. In speaking of the 
case of Trinidad & Tobago, Maximilian Forte writes: 
 
When it became desirable to dispossess the Amerindians of lands that were theirs, 
and were inalienable, the colonial project became one of defining them out of 
existence, so that their lands could be put up for sale. No purity meant no 
Amerindians which meant no Amerindian lands. Residence in the Mission of Santa 



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Rosa in Arima was determined by race: mixed-race offspring were no longer bound 
to the mission and could not in the future lay any claim to the mission lands. It 
mattered not that they were raised by Amerindian mothers, and may have identified 
themselves as Amerindian, what mattered was their “racial mixture.” 
 

In an article entitled, “Does Trinidad Recognize its 
Indigenous People?” Maximilian Forte writes: 

 
The fact of the matter is that the Government of Trinidad and Tobago has no legal 
definition of the term "indigenous peoples," and frequently appropriates the 
term for referring to all people born in the country, in contradiction to established 
international conventions. Secondly, the Government has recognized only one 
specific organization, and worse yet, it has recognized it in a manner that 
suggests it is the only possible representative of Trinidad's "Amerindians," 
rendering any other claimants to an indigenous identity as fakes. Thirdly, while 
claiming to recognize the Caribs, the Government has not signed any 
international conventions or agreements that pertain specifically to the rights 
of indigenous peoples.  (Emphasis in original) 

The United Nations Committee for the Elimination of Racial 
Discrimination “asked why the Caribs had all but 
disappeared, exactly how many were left, why they were not treated 
as a separate racial group and whether measures were being taken to 
help them, particularly in the economic and educational fields, so as 
to compensate them for the injustices they had suffered.”From the 
above passages, many complications arise. Who gets the right to 
identify or classify someone as indigenous or non-indigenous? As 
has been displayed above, racial mixtures such as the community of 
the Black Caribs, presently known as Garifuna, were constantly 
denied legitimacy of Indigeneity. Questions of cultural survival 
versus racial distinctions are essential to these complex issues. As 
Forte writes in his Indigenous Resurgence in the Contemporary 
Caribbean, “One can certainly speak of survival in the commonly 
accepted sense of the term, but cultural survival raises certain 
problems. Is culture to be likened to a biological organism, with a 
‘life’ and ‘death,’ and once ‘dead’ can never be resurrected? This 
would not be the consensus in anthropology, especially where the 
ideational concept of culture is treated like a dynamic system of 
meanings, and meanings do not live natural ‘lives’” (Forte, 10). Forte 
aptly asserts that “how one is ‘Indian’ in 2006 will not be the same as 
in 1492” (Forte, 10). 
 



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“National consciousness, which is not nationalism, is the only thing that will give us 
an international dimension” 

– Frantz Fanon, Wretched of the Earth, p.179. 

In World’s Within, Vilashini Cooppan writes: “Race 
precludes what nation promises; race imprisons whereas nation 
liberates, inventing everything anew, from the structures of familial 
organization to the language of national community to 
decolonization’s famous ‘creation of new men’” (Coopan, 141). Race 
necessarily plays a pivotal role in the issues surrounding the question 
of Indigeneity. How does being marginalized within a geographical 
area of world marginalization differ from being marginalized in a 
“developed” or “First world” country? In both instances, the 
indigenous are not included as citizens of the nation or in the making 
of a “national identity;” where they are included in the national 
consciousness is in the form of gift shop souvenirs of a cultural 
heritage or past. Can the indigenous peoples of the Caribbean be 
seen as the periphery within the periphery? Or does this lead to an 
“oppression Olympics” in a region where the struggle of Afro-
Caribbean peoples and the Black consciousness movement have been 
struggling to form a self-determining national consciousness? 
Bergland writes, “On the one hand, America is and always has been a 
colony of Europe; on the other, America is an imperial power. But 
both of these facts are somehow shameful in the American context, 
since American nationhood is built in the denial of colonialism” 
(Bergland, 13, emphasis added). 

 In North America the ghosting of Natives can represent or 
be a manifestation of repressed ‘white guilt’ because the nation is 
built on foundations of White Supremacy and this notion is 
constantly reified in post-colonial America. But the Caribbean, the 
construction of Caribbean nationhood, rather than being built in the 
denial of colonialism, is rooted in the historical and current 
recognition of colonialism, its legacies, and in anti-colonial struggle. 
Whereas America denies colonialism and therefore remains in its 
uncomfortable relationship with it, the Caribbean is a site of 
decolonization, as it seeks to educate and detach from the bonds of 
colonial thought. In order to do this, the states of the Caribbean must 
necessarily take into account its diverse population, including (and 
perhaps especially) their Indigenous peoples, as a truly decolonized 
nation cannot deny the political, cultural, or social existence of any of 
its citizens. Forte claims that theses of extinction “have been a 



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hallmark of island Caribbean historiography.” He continues, “On the 
other hand, challenges to notions of disappearance, efforts to resist 
political and economic marginalization, the formation of new 
regional organizations, and the recent growth in a committed body of 
scholarship focused on these issues, collectively produce resurgence. 
In all cases, contemporary indigenous peoples of the Caribbean 
refuse to be measured by the relics of their past or to be treated 
condescendingly as mute testimonials to a disappearing history, or a 
“history of disappearance” (Forte, 3). 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

  



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Works Cited 

Bergland, Renee. “Indian Ghosts and American Subjects,” National 

Uncanny: Indian Ghosts and American Subjects. Hanover: University 

Press of New England, 2000. 1-24. 

 

Case, Frederick Ivor. Racism and National Consciousness. Toronto: 

Other Eye Books, 2002. 

Cooppan, Vilashini. “Ghostly Forms: Race, Nation and Genre in Frantz 

Fanon,” Worlds Within: National Narratives and Global Connections in 

Postcolonial Writing. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009. 140-

180. 

 

Craton, Michael. “The Black Caribs of St. Vincent: A Reevaluation,” 

The Lesser Antilles in the Age of European Expansion .Gainsville: 

University Press of Florida, 1996. 71-85. 

 

De Verteuil, Louis Antoine Aimé. “Chapter V. Population-Ethnography-

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Administration, Present Condition, and Prospects. London: Ward & Lock, 

1858. 171-205. 

 

Dippie, Brian. The Vanishing American: White Attitudes and U.S. 

Indian Policy. Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 1982. 

 

Fanon, Frantz.“The Pitfalls of National Consciousness,” The 

Wretched of the Earth. New York: Grove Press, 1963. 148-205. 

 

Forte, Maximilian C. “Introduction: The  Dual Absences of Extinction 

and Marginality—What Difference Does an Indigenous Presence 

Make?” Indigenous Resurgence in the Contemporary Caribbean. 

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Maximilian C. Forte. "Carib Identity, Racial Politics, & the Problem 

ofBelonging."Review of the indigenous Caribbean. 1 May 

2011..<http://indigenousreview.blogspot.ca/2011/05/carib-

identity-racial-politics-problem.html>. 

 

Maximilian C. Forte. "Does Trinidad Recognize Its Indigenous 

People?." Review of the Indigenous Caribbean. 10 March 2007. 

<http://indigenousreview.blogspot.ca/2007/03/does-trinidad-

recognize-its-indigenous.html>. 



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Shakespeare, William. The Tempest. New York: Oxford University 

Press, 1987. 

 

Young, William. An Account of the Black Charaibs in the Island of 

St. Vincent’s, with the Charaib Treaty and other Original 

Documents, compiled from the papers of the Late Sir William 

Young, Esq. London: J. Sewell, Knight and Triphook, 1795. 

 

 


