The Queen of the Warao Na­tion Don­na Bermudez Bovell has added her voice to the grow­ing cho­rus of calls for Port-of-Spain May­or Joel Mar­tinez to con­vene an ur­gent meet­ing to dis­cuss the re­moval of the stat­ue of Christo­pher Colum­bus.

“Ar­chae­o­log­i­cal ev­i­dence shows that the in­dige­nous peo­ple of this coun­try have been here for at least 7,500 years and that Port-of-Spain was an im­por­tant in­dige­nous set­tle­ment,” Bermudez Bovell said.

“We want one of our free­dom fight­ers to re­place Colum­bus to re­con­nect this coun­try with its whole past. Our his­to­ry did not start 500 years ago.”

In 2017, di­rec­tor of the Cross Rhodes Free­dom Project, Shaba­ka Kam­bon, an hon­orary mem­ber of the Warao com­mu­ni­ty, joined in­dige­nous el­ders at the may­or’s of­fice to hand over a let­ter ask­ing him to fa­cil­i­tate a na­tion­al di­a­logue. At a pre­vi­ous meet­ing in 2018, which in­clud­ed a wide cross-sec­tion of civ­il so­ci­ety, a di­rect de­scen­dant of slave mas­ter Hip­poly­te Bor­de who erect­ed the stat­ue in 1881 joined the call for re­moval.

“The la­dy plead­ed with the may­or say­ing that she want­ed him to re­move her grand­fa­ther’s stat­ue be­cause it did not re­flect the core val­ues of our coun­try and we thought that would be enough,” Bovell re­called.

“Re­gard­less of what any­one says lo­cal­ly our peo­ple have been call­ing for the end to the glo­ri­fi­ca­tion of Colum­bus since we first spoke at the Unit­ed Na­tions in 1977. We sin­cere­ly hope that the may­or is pay­ing at­ten­tion to what is hap­pen­ing around the world to­day where sim­i­lar mon­u­ments to evil are be­ing torn down and that he is ready to look crit­i­cal­ly at the ones we have here.

“May­or Mar­tinez says he re­spects the first peo­ple we want him to show it.”

Christo­pher Colum­bus once con­sid­ered a hero is now in­creas­ing­ly re­viled for his pri­ma­ry role in the ini­ti­a­tion of the geno­cide of the in­dige­nous peo­ple of the Amer­i­c­as and the transat­lantic slave trade.

On Tues­day, a mon­u­ment to Colum­bus was top­pled, burned and dumped in a lake in Vir­ginia and an­oth­er was be­head­ed in Boston as part of the on­go­ing reper­cus­sions of the killing of George Floyd.