Kali'na

The Kali'na communities of the lower Orinoco belonged to a wider Indigenous world extending along the Guiana coast. Rivers and sea passages connected communities whose relationships crossed the boundaries later claimed by European powers. During the seventeenth century, trade and alliances with the Dutch became important in the struggle over this region. These relationships also involved captive trading: some Carib groups carried people seized from other communities toward the Dutch settlements.

Spanish missions sought to gather Indigenous inhabitants into controlled villages, but many communities resisted such settlement. In the eighteenth century, expanding missions, warfare and colonial pressure disrupted the older networks along the Orinoco. Some Kali'na were taken into missions in the Barcelona plains and on the Caroni River; others withdrew southward or westward toward the Guiana interior. Their history in this period consequently includes both participation in regional trading and raiding networks and the coercion that displaced communities. Different groups negotiated, fought or moved as European settlements and mission territories expanded.