I think it's sort of like.
Hello. I'm Sydney Hutchinson. I am an associate professor of musicology at Syracuse University in the state of New York.
And I'm also a research associate at Humboldt University in Berlin, which is where I currently live.
Yes, I am a Trump bug and I identify as an immigrant, so I should preface my talk by reporting that it's somewhat differently than printed on your
programme because my partner was to be Dora Haast and ethnomusicologist in Connecticut,
and she was going to co-write the paper with me on co-present.
But she could do neither of these because her mother passed away a few weeks ago.
So unfortunately, you're hearing only from me today,
and I also would like to thank the panellists and Alexa also for the organisation and the invitation, because I am very new to the area of Bermuda.
I'm a specialist in the Hispanic Caribbean and I research mainly in the Dominican Republic and amongst Latinos in the United States.
And I came to Bermuda for the first time last year because I was invited to speak at the Gumbo
Festival about connexions between the Gambier's and other masquerades in the Hispanic Caribbean.
Because the companies feel that their closest living masquerading relatives are the lawyers in the Dominican Republic,
although they've never actually met in person. And I'm hoping that I can facilitate this meeting, if not this year than next.
So thank you for welcoming me into your ranks, even though I'm very new to the area.
So my paper is titled Bermuda. I'm very reconnections. Covering and recovering indigenous Haiti in the black Atlantic,
companies are a Christmastime masquerade with historical ties to British Isles miming traditions or folk theatre,
as well as musical and choreographic practises with ties to Africa and the Caribbean,
which is widely understood to be Afro Bermudian or black Gregorian on Boxing Day and New Year's
campaigns traditionally take to the streets for parading and dance battles that highlight agility,
acrobatics and complex rhythms. Since that conveys inclusion and the 2001 Smithsonian Festival of American Folk Life in Washington,
DC, they've been recognised as a key national symbol.
Oh, there they are, and their image now appears everywhere, from government building displays to tourist souvenirs.
As you can see here, and they dance in an annual festival and at Bermuda Day.
Parallel to this process of nationalisation, companies themselves have been engaging in unofficial, transformative, transformative practises.
One group in particular, the Warwick Companies,
have for over a decade been involved in an exchange with the Pequod Native Americans from the northeastern United States,
to whom they're distantly related.
This exchange has transformed company practises and identities as they recover aspects of Bermudian history typically hidden from view,
a process one anthropologist has referred to as ethno genesis. I plan to explore how companies create new ethnic identities and recovered histories
through performance through new research projects that's just now in an exploratory stage.
But I am glad to report that I've just received word that I have received preamble travel
funding from the Tucson Foundation and Germany to return to Bermuda for two more trips.
Looking forward to this, I expect that studying the Gambia's reconfigurations of Bermudian identity will
contribute to our understanding of Caribbean histories and masquerades more broadly.
I also hope that this case study will broaden the notions of modernity and realisation associated with
the Black Atlantic and provide a concrete example of how identities are created through performance.
Well, companies are widely understood as Afro Bermudian and often understand themselves as such.
Their various components reveal the traditions,
complex history of intercultural remixing and how materials from different sources converged to create new forms with overlapping meanings.
The clothing, mask and headdress worn today evidence the influence of 20th century conditioned migrants who brought their wild Indian mass with it,
with its pinkish mesh masks, feathered headgear, tomahawks and bows and arrows and Bermuda.
This condition practise soon overrode an earlier tradition which was more closely
related to Jamaican Junction with its horned masks and horse shaped headdresses.
While historic Duncan, who masquerades likely represented black Caribbean understandings of their place in the plantation economy,
the wild Indian mass, which is similar to Caribbean black Indian traditions from Louisiana to Haiti.
Oh, there's a slight missing right there. Hmm. Maybe it will come up later seemed to symbolise freedom and a recognition of mixed roots.
In both cases come to symbolise marginalised communities of colour and their resistance to hegemonic Bermudian identities,
particularly and how these relate to British colonial notions of governing.
That Associate Association remains up to the 21st century, as can be seen in the artist Gavin Sinjar to Smith's 2003 founding of the one person,
Gambie Liberation Party and a run for Parliament that called on The Gambia community for support.
The GOP had little tangible effect on Bermudian politics.
Smith got 16 votes, but it did bring attention to issues like racial tensions and neo colonial governance strategies.
As in the U.S., race in Bermuda is typically conceived along black and white lines.
The presence of mixed African native communities in the Americas and native enslavement
in general was long covered up in the northeast United States in particular,
outright destruction of records,
overly simplistic census categories and a generalised refusal to recognise Indian survival, especially when it came through intermarriage,
meant that histories of Native American enslavement have been preserved mainly through oral tradition.
But such is not enough to gain federal recognition. And so some northeastern groups like the Picard's,
have dedicated themselves to genealogical research that would prove what they already knew that their ancestors were taken
as slaves to the Caribbean and that their descendants descendants still live in communities like St David's Island,
Bermuda. That's kind of too small to see, but if you don't know where St David's is at the top right of the little map there,
it's next to the international airport as, Oh, I already read that part, OK?
Tall Oak Sweden is a matching Typekit Pequod who discovered familial links to St David's Island.
As a result, he brought a delegation to Bermuda to attend the island's first reconnections ceremony in 2002.
The work gambit troop was involved with reconnection from the beginning. Troop leader Irwin Trott explained to me that he first got involved because
two of the surnames genealogical research had revealed were linked to Pequod.
Burchill and miners belonged to his own two grandmothers. He and his troupe performed in the 2002 ceremony because and this is a quote,
the Pequod wanted my gunboats to show the elders that their tradition wasn't all lost.
There was enough evidence to see similarities. I believe it was six elders that came from the Pequod tribe, including the tribal chairman.
After they saw our performance, they held a council in Bermuda and made the decision to invite the Gumbi dancers
to Connecticut that same summer to showcase us to the rest of the tribal members.
And those are some photographs from the reconnection ceremony.
On the left are the Wampanoag Pekka and Narragansett.
Visitors to St David's Island, and on the right are St David's Islanders participating in the grand entry at the powwow that was held that year.
Trout did take his dancers to Connecticut,
where they were treated to all expense paid stays at the hotel and welcomed like family try, explains Quote.
When we got off the bus, they greeted us at the bus and hugged and embraced everybody and says, Welcome home cousins.
And that was just so amazing. Wampanoag and mashed peas who were at that powwow were impressed enough to invite the gambier's to their own gatherings,
leading to ongoing travels back and forth between Bermuda, Connecticut and Massachusetts.
In the intervening years, both sides have had opportunity to reflect on what they might still share.
For his part, toLook Weedon was astounded to find that Bermudian quote looks so much like us even today, after all that.
History has taken place and we look so much like them.
Trott added that Pequod found St David's ways of cooking seafood and making fishing nets very similar.
Dancing and drumming came to play particularly important roles in the renewal of ties.
As St David's Islander Nevis Felice told a Boston Globe reporter when attending the Mashpee Wampanoag powwow quote,
traditional dances were the only pieces of Wampanoag culture to survive centuries of slavery and cultural repression in Bermuda,
when while police recognised the dances had changed. She explained quote The East Coast tribe has been teaching us the culture we lost.
The cultural exchange takes place at roughly bi annual reconnection powwows held in St David's Island since 2000 to hear gun based play the
role of hosts inviting their distant relatives to join in discovering these connexions was a transformative experience for the war done.
Trott reports that when his son went to university in Canada, he took courses on Native American culture and history,
attended native student group meetings and learnt to sing powwow songs with native friends,
something he also does with the invited drums at the Bermuda powwow.
The work gumbo is now include visual references to Native North Americans in their outfits, their banner and felt following powwow dancers usage.
Warragamba is now referred to those outfits as regalia and a spirit of reverence and the steady beat of their bass drum.
They hear the power drum and then their own dance improvisations. They see a resemblance to Powell fancy dance.
Although Fancy Dance developed centuries after enslaved New Englanders were brought to Bermuda.
Both sides see an affinity that the work troupe demonstrated and their performance at the 2018 Gumbo Festival.
How can I click the link for a Caribbean is like me?
The reconnection process is striking for how it's layered upon earlier forms of what one might call fictive indigenous Haiti via the condition.
Wild Indian dance itself related to other black Indian masquerades like the Mardi Gras Indians of New Orleans.
While these groups likely have an even more recent mixed heritage in the gumbo is the way they construct and present notions of indigenous.
City is usually based more on imagination and creativity than on the practises of any specific
indigenous group and much less on interpersonal connexions with living indigenous people.
These facts make the companies work to connect with Native American relatives unique
and their focus on doing so through their experience of sonic and kinetic affinities.
Especially so, so to conclude.
We just want to argues that Bermuda's colonial government circulates colonial and paternalistic narratives about Bermudian history
that depict the island as racially harmonious and eliminate mention of black Bermuda and struggles from educational curricula.
This has resulted in the discrediting of black activism and prevents identification with other struggles around the black Atlantic, he says.
For some black Bermudian, including Gomez,
the situation has led to a design gentrification with Bermuda overall and a choice to identify as something else, such as simply African.
The new drive to identify as Native American may be another manifestation,
but it also points out a potential problem in the conception of the Black Atlantic.
Bermudian says British subjects may be engaged in the striving to be both European and black.
That Gilroy describes as not necessitating specific forms of double consciousness
because of how nation building projects make these identities appear to be mutually,
mutually exclusive. In contrast, Gilroy highlights what he calls stereophonic,
bilingual or bifocal cultural forms as typical of black cultures and modernity itself conveys indigenous affinities,
complicate Gilroy's view of black Atlantic culture, and striving to perform their links to other parts of the global south.
Companies make visible the others left out.
Even of this history of mutual othering, revealing forms that are multilingual multifocal not only stereophonic but conceived in surround sound.
This identity is based not on genetics, as results from genetic studies have been ambiguous.
Instead, it's based on performance created and activated through drumming and dancing.
And it's this performed identity and the political work it does that I want to investigate moving forward.