An Interview with Recuerdos de Nicaragua, Part Two
Moravian Mission Fields. Heathen Sumu Indians, ca. 1900. Recuerdos de Nicaragua collection.
Moravian Mission Fields produced this postcard with the caption "Heathen Sumu Indians." Sumu is a pejorative term for Mayangna tribal group in the Miskitu language. The Mayangna are a tribal group native to the Mosquito Coast. The family posed in the photograph are dressed in a traditional manner with the women wearing wrapped skirts, additionally, they are photographed barefoot. The Moravian Missionaries, who arrived on the Mosquito Coast, mainly from Germany in 1849, typically referred to Indigenous people dressed in their traditional clothing as "heathens." The missionaries discouraged the Indigenous populations from wearing their traditional garments, including tunu cloth, and encouraged them to wear Euro-American style dress and fashions such as bodices, skirts, dresses and pants for women with tops, pants, and suits for men. Western clothing and a "clean" appearance were considered to be a sign of a successful conversion to Christianity.
Last spring, Elise A. Mitchell recorded a conversation with members of Recuerdos de Nicaragua the founder and head archivist, Jasmine Chavez Helm, and Melanie White, the research and content manager. Recuerdos de Nicaragua is a physical and digital archive that chronicles the history of the Indigenous and Afro-descendant communities in the Mosquito Coast of Honduras and Nicaragua. They currently have a GoFundMe campaign to support their collections, digitization, and future programming. This published interview is based on their original conversation and has been edited for clarity.
Elise A. Mitchell (EAM): How did this project get started? How did you get started with the archive? You talked a little bit about your reasoning for choosing Instagram as well as TikTok. I was wondering if you could talk a little bit more about some of the kinds of images and objects that are in the archive. And also, if you could talk about how your ties to the region informed your archival practice more, although you guys have already reflected so much on that.
Jasmine Chavez Helm (JCH): Sure. I started the archive because of this absence that I have with my dad and my Nicaraguan family, and I always say, “In your absence, I found myself.” He alleged that we had Mayangna ancestry - and I want to be very clear that that's a legend. I did a DNA test. I am 20% Indigenous to Nicaragua, specifically, and I am 10% Tohono O'odham on my Mexican side. So, I am Indigenous through blood quantum, but not enough to belong to any particular nation. And when I was researching my Nicaraguan heritage, specifically the Mayangna, I searched on eBay - and I do not remember why I decided to search on eBay - but, I looked up Mayangna or Mosquito Coast, and this postcard published by the Moravian mission came up. And it said, “Sumo heathen Indians” or “heathen Sumo Indians.”
This was the postcard that literally launched this project. I saw they were dressed in what looked like a traditional manner. They had long hair, even the male baby in the photo had long hair. And the reference to the way they looked “heathen” just made me wonder: what are the dress practices of the Mayangna? Of the Indigenous people on the coast? And why are these Moravians calling them “heathens,” other than the fact they're not Christian? Is there something deeper here?
I worked on a paper to present at Progressive Connexions Conference in Palermo, Italy on fashion and photography. I found out how Moravians actually altered the dress culture of the Indigenous people and cemented the dress practices of Afro-descendants in the Mosquito Coast. Anytime a Moravian would see an Indigenous person dressed in their traditional manner, which would often include the wearing of tunu cloth as skirts, loincloths, or as shirts, they refer to them as “heathens” and viewed that as a marker of their indigeneity. The Moravians encouraged their Indigenous converts to dress in western style clothing.
The focus of my paper was on the Mayangna and the Mískitu, because they shared traditional dress practice in tuno cloth manufacturing, and on the Creole communities, specifically Caribbean, Black communities, who, through slavery, were already acculturated by force to wear western clothing. I was able to find documentation of some of their dress practices, in terms of the fact that wealthy Creole families participated in and wanted to wear European-style clothing. They were very fastidious about their dress and the way they looked because they wanted to look professional. Because of their proximity to Britishness or whiteness, and the fact they spoke English, they had a more elevated position than the Indigenous people, even though they were Black. However, they still experienced racism. There's an instance which I wrote about in my paper, in which a German missionary wanted to marry a Creole woman, and the Moravian Church was against it. However, she spoke Mískitu so they were like, “Oh, okay, you can marry her because she can help us in our conversion process.”
Dress was a racial tool, and a marker of someone's ethnicity, their race, their religious beliefs. That's how this project started. I kept searching for more and more postcards on eBay, on AbeBooks, on CardCow. These are all my resources - I'm giving away all my treasure troves - but I want other people to collect our history, and I want them to share it. I would really love for it to be a more community-based archive like Veteranas And Rucas or Nueva Yorkinos. I would love that. The Mosquito Coast is a small population of people, so we haven't received many submissions. Actually, I've received one or two. I mostly get oral stories and traditions, which I would love to publish at some point with those people. The project started from this one postcard. I gleaned a lot of information from that. The Moravians arrived in the Mosquito Coast in 1849. And their - Melanie, I'm sure you can add more to this - their presence is definitely felt in the region.
Melanie White (MW): That's what you picked up in your question, Elise, that so many of the images come from the Moravians. A lot of the images that “Recuerdos de Nicaragua” has archived are from Moravian periodicals. They would take photographs of their converts to prove to the larger Moravian Church the success of the mission in Caribbean Nicaragua. A lot of their periodicals feature photographs. There are also photographs of Moravian Sunday schools. So much of the photography came from them. But also, like one of the books that Jasmine mentioned, “Souvenir de Nicaragua,” there's a lot of these older travelogues - or there's not a lot - but a handful of nineteenth and early twentieth century travelogues and ethnographic accounts that feature descriptions and illustrations.
In my own research, I have found many images which, now that I'm done with my dissertation, I plan to migrate to the archive as well. I've encountered images by - for example, this guy named James W. G. Walker, who was a civil engineer in the US navy, and he was commissioned to go to the Caribbean Coast of Nicaragua and survey the land to assess the feasibility of a Nicaraguan canal in the late nineteenth century. This Nicaragua Canal project pre-dated that of the Panama Canal, and it was a prospect that was highly sought after. Multiple competing colonial powers had a vested interest in establishing a presence in the region because of it. It was a huge deal in the nineteenth century. In one of my dissertation’s chapters, I write about how he had his own personal photographic collection of particularly Black women and girls, as well as several photographs of Indigenous women and girls. I just found that incredibly interesting. That forms the backbone of one of the arguments of my dissertation, which is that the colonial enterprise in the region was not just about territorial conquest, not just about religious conversion, but there's also this weird, violent, erotic, and racial desire that crops up in the images and the archival materials.
That was a long way of saying that there are these various different sources where we have encountered these images, but by and large, so much of the material comes from the Moravian Church and the Moravian Archives in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. The Moravian Archives do have photographs, but it's so closed off to the public. The archive is in a relatively remote location and the collection has not yet been digitized. I know Jasmine has done some archival work there, and so have I. I think (with their permission, of course), that it’s also one of our goals to make these kinds of records more accessible than is typical of a more traditional archival model.
JCH: I really hope they would be interested in our angle, but I'm not sure they would be receptive to it because we're critiquing the Moravians and their colonization and forced conversion, in some cases, of the Mískitu and Mayangna and the Indigenous groups there. Once the website is up and we’re in a good place with it, I plan on reaching out to them to ask if we could start digitizing their collection on their behalf, which I'm sure would take a load off them. I just wonder how they would feel about our style of captioning. But you know what? They did what they did.
MW: Yeah, exactly.
EAM: I think a lot of places are interested in reckoning with their fraught histories right now. I would hope that they would be more receptive than we might typically imagine.
MW: Yeah, hopefully.