Page 10 - 10th Annual International Charles Town Maroon Conference and Festival Magazine

June 2018 Charles Town Maroon International Conference Magazine

Cockpit Country, into vast underground aquifers that processing plants, roads, railways, aerial tram lines and
supply six parishes with over forty percent of their ports. By the 1960s and into the mid 1970s, the small
fresh water and are the source of many springs, water island of Jamaica was the number one producer of
holes, and rivers, all of which are important habitat, bauxite and alumina in the world, providing North
hatcheries, and water for agriculture and tourism. America with the majority of the raw material needed
to make aluminum.
Cockpit Country is also the heart of Jamaica, once
home to Taino and African peoples fleeing genocide All aspects of the aluminum process, from extraction
and enslavement, it is a land rich in history and through alumina processing and aluminum smelting,
signifies to most Jamaicans a place of resistance, are toxic, destructive to the environment, detrimental
triumph and indigenous pride. The coming together of to the health of all living creatures, and in the hundred
Taino and Africans created a unique Maroon culture, plus years that aluminum has been commercially
one that disrupts and stands outside the colonial produced, the industry has displaced millions of
narrative of invade- conquer-settle-civilize. Jamaica indigenous and rural peoples all over the world.
achieved political “independence” from Britain in
1962 (though the British Monarch is still the titular The bauxite industry has been a primary contributor
head), in contrast, the Maroons achieved political to the collapse of rural communities in Indigenous
autonomy in 1739. lands. In Jamaica it has been responsible for a decline
in agriculture, displacing about 300,000 rural
Aluminum is the metal that made 20th century residents, leading to both the rapid and unplanned
modernity possible. Light weight, durable, versatile it urbanization of many parts of Jamaica, and the
became essential for aircraft, spacecraft, satellites, migration of Jamaicans abroad, especially to the UK
bombs, explosives, armament, ships, trains, buses, in the 1950s and 1960s.
automobiles, electrical lines, architecture, infra-
structure, household appliances, food and beverage Aluminum smelting is the most energy intensive
packaging, computers and other electronic devices … industrial process in the world, with a single aluminum
. the list goes on and on. smelter requiring more energy than an entire country
like Jamaica would use in a year. Because the biggest
Aluminum is necessary to the military industrial cost is energy, aluminum companies have always
complex and is therefore designated a “strategic bargained for the cheapest energy possible, and in
metal” by governments and stockpiled in its various addition to coal plants, electricity has historically been
stages. generated by huge hydro-electric dams that flood
thousands of acres of land and water sheds often
Bauxite is the ore from which aluminum is derived belonging to indigenous peoples.
through a process that begins with strip mining the ore,
processing it into alumina, then smelting alumina into Alcoa flooded Indigenous lands in Suriname with the
molten aluminum, that is then manufactured into any Afobaka Dam displacing the Saamaka Maroons and
number of shapes, sizes and alloys - from the thinness destroying their homes and way of life. Alcan did this
of aluminum foil to an entire airplane fuselage or wing. with the Kenny Dam in the Nechako river region in
Jamaica has exported bauxite and alumina since the British Colombia for their Kitimat aluminum smelter,
1950s when all the top aluminum multinational flooding the native lands of the Cheslatta T’En peoples
companies set up operations in Jamaica, buying about and destroying the salmon fisheries.
a tenth of the country’s land mass, and building

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