Renegotiating and Theorizing Heritage in the Context of “Disaster” in the Caribbean: The Entanglement of Haitian Disaster-Related Histories

ABSTRACT

This article examines how cultural heritage is negotiated in disaster contexts. One month after the earthquake on August 14, 2021 in Haiti, we surveyed damaged heritage sites and spoke with residents in the South and Grande-Anse departments about their experiences and perceptions. Via this research, we found a lack of disaster preparedness and few existing response mechanisms for managing cultural heritage amidst disaster. This article argues for more attention to heritage theory and practice in relation to disaster. It also shares concrete information about our research and its outcomes to create a dialogue between research needs and actual research results. Local voices are fundamental to the planning and decision-making necessary to sustain the future of Haiti’s cultural heritage. Heritage studies in the Caribbean need to formulate and theorize more cogent critical questions about heritage – in particular, about how it is envisioned in urgent times.

KEYWORDS:

• Heritage studies
• archaeological heritage
• disaster
• Caribbean
• Haiti
• coloniality
• local voices
• urgency

Introduction and context

Raoul Peck’s documentary Assistance Mortelle or, in its English translation, Fatal Assistance (2013) follows rebuilding efforts after Haiti’s 2010 7.0 magnitude earthquake; it brings in several local voices, including the reflections one of the Haitian members of the Interim Reconstruction Commission of Haiti (IRCH) which was formed in response to the quake. In the film, the Haitian official complains about Haitians being excluded from major decision-making by the Commission (Peck 2013, 27:51-29:02); the Haitian member of the Commission explains that “Haitian members of the Board of Directors [like her] only played an extra role, ratifying decisions made by the directors and executive committees.” This statement exposes the complexities of the aftermath of Haiti's 2010 cataclysm, which involved international and local actors, where inclusion should have been the backbone of decision-making. In spotlighting this type of exclusion, Peck’s documentary seeks to “debunk [foreign] humanitarian claims to a moral high ground in the aftermath of the earthquake, repurposing them as evidence of neoliberal incompetence and exploitation” (Dize 2017, 127). As the diegesis unfolds, narratives from different actors draw attention to underlying clashes between and among non-governmental organizations (NGOs), local and foreign governments, and politicians, thus allowing the viewer to consider which dominant power structures, discourses, and practices are at play.

In this article, we call upon Assistance Mortelle (2013) as a portal through which to enter our discussion of the relationship between disaster, damage, and humanity; these concepts are in an active epistemological relationship with each other as revealed in Peck’s film. This documentary provides an analytical language through which we can consider images and perceptions of Haiti’s 2010 and 2021 earthquakes, which are linked to our own direct experience in 2010 and our research in 2021. Peck’s analysis highlights how the damage suffered by humans and non-humans has been (and continues to be) negotiated ever since “the event.” An earthquake is more than a moment in time; its damage encompasses everything that follows. It is estimated that the 2010 earthquake caused around 250,000 human deaths and at least one million homes lost in addition to other devastation. The quake caused damage to heritage sites, including buildings that housed libraries and archives, as well as ethnographic, archaeological, and art collections in public and private institutions. We can also consider the damage from an economic point of view: the World Bank reports the 2010 earthquake resulted in losses estimated at the equivalent of more than 7 billion U.S. dollars (Government of the Republic of Haiti 2010a, 6). In their rapid transition from managing hazards to negotiating disasters, as showed in Peck’s (2013) film, humanitarian NGOs have emerged as parallel structures, duplicating services from the state. They have assumed the responsibility to solve problems related to primary social and economic needs in Haiti.

A decade after the devastating earthquake of 2010, the departments of Sud, Grande-Anse, and Nippes experienced another upheaval, an earthquake of 7.2 magnitude. This August 2021 tragedy recalled the devastating quake of January 2010, which was of similar magnitude. The second large-scale quake caused thousands of victims in the country to suffer not only financial losses but also significant social impacts. For example, the 2021 earthquake affected historic and cultural sites, urban landscapes, historical buildings, and nonmaterial heritage (Figure 1). As a result, local residents and heritage practitioners can easily remember what heritage components have been damaged and have disappeared.

Figure 1. A 2021 post-quake view of streets with damaged houses and other buildings in the city of Jérémie (a) and the city of Les Cayes (b), Haiti. Photographs by authors.

This article focuses on cultural heritage as a key element of how a society remembers and catalogues its history by analyzing the way heritage was envisioned in the Haitian post-hazards context in both 2010 and 2021. By recording damaged heritage sites and collecting local narratives about heritage in the aftermath of the 2021 earthquake, this project considers not only the current condition of Haitian cultural heritage, but also local historical processes, colonial legacies, and neocolonial practices. These processes, legacies, and practices impact Haitian society’s wellbeing and contribute to the current lack of local heritage infrastructure. In this context, we call on Mimi Sheller (2020, 12), who posits that the “ongoing violence of debt extraction, foreign military intervention, and the repeated effects of crises associated with ongoing neocoloniality, racial capitalism, neoliberalism, and structural adjustment policies” have created deep roots of impoverishment in Haiti.

Haiti’s current political, economic, and cultural structures have been shaped by historical processes; these processes have exacerbated the country's vulnerability to hazards, disasters, and hurricanes as social, not just environmental, problems. To illustrate this, consider Bellande’s (2015) study of Haiti’s deforestation, which explores the historic, colonial, and neocolonial causalities impacting Haitian society’s long-term environmental reality. Bellande’s work shows that there was a lucrative wood market from Saint-Domingue during colonization that continued until the nineteenth century. To pay a debt imposed by France on Haiti following its 1804 independence, the county made use of its precious wood trade, continuing deforestation. This historical practice has shaped Haiti’s current ecological vulnerability. Citing Felima (2009), Eberle (2022, 7) recently noted that “a lack of forested areas means fewer tree roots can hold the soil in place, increasing the risk of heavy rain and earthquakes triggering landslides.” Although hazards can be natural phenomena, even “environmental” disasters can be created and exacerbated by human activities since colonialism and other human-induced factors form the baselines for disaster creation. Because of Haiti's complicated history and continuing neocolonial policies, the country has endured environmental challenges and degradations, as well as social and economic problems.

In the aftermath of the 2010 earthquake, cultural heritage was central to Haiti’s post-destruction recovery project as put forward by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) through the International Coordination Committee for the Safeguarding of Haitian Cultural Heritage (CIC) (Bokova and Jean 2011). Centering Haiti’s heritage in recovery plans reflects an international mobilization for heritage; Haiti’s national long-term planning for heritage was not previously consistent. In this article, we interrogate the official politics of heritage that emerge in the cycle of disaster contexts. The reason that theorizing heritage in times of disaster is essential is that earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, and seasonal hurricanes continue to cause significant, cyclical issues in the Caribbean region. And, in the current heritage literature, there has not been enough attention to the consequences of these continuing issues on heritage. In this article, we examine documents related to heritage strategies produced in the emergency context and analyze field data collected after the cataclysm of 2021 in the south of Haiti (Michel, Jean, and Bien-Aimé 2022). We first examine how heritage politics emerge in a post-destruction context. Second, we analyze the historical roots of Haiti’s current lack of mechanisms to safeguard heritage. We mean here to trace the hidden and persistent structures of colonialism and coloniality that continue to impact Haitian society and its relation to eritaj (heritage, Haitian Creole), including landscapes, land, and natural sites (Jean et al. 2020). Communities may also experience unique social and cultural impacts during hazards and disasters. These nonmaterial harms include displacement, loss of community infrastructure, and disruption of cultural practices; these harms can have long-lasting effects on the well-being and identity of these communities. Using a heritage justice framework, we propose novel ways of imagining and understanding heritage and its broader significance in uncertain times. We then examine a post-catastrophe collection of narratives about life experiences related to heritage.

A closer look at cultural heritage

There is a considerable body of recent research focusing on how hazards and climate change are affecting local communities by exposing them to vulnerabilities (e.g., Attzs 2008; Barclay et al. 2022; Birkmann et al. 2022; Gencer 2013; Talbot, Poleacovschi, and Hamideh 2022). These analyses frequently single out colonial legacies as at the root of continuing ecological vulnerability (Gahman and Thongs 2020; Sheller 2020). Heritage is considered to be of great importance in many of these studies even as their analyses focus more on disasters’ broader social, political, and economic impacts. Scholars have also considered the impact of diverse types of hazards on Caribbean cultural heritage, including hurricanes, volcanic eruptions, earthquakes, hurricanes, and climate change (Boger, Perdikaris, and Rivera-Collazo 2019; Dunnavant et al. 2018; Siegel et al. 2013). There little legal framework to address many of these issues (Byer 2022), and so voluntary management and conservation approaches have dominated many of these discussions (Douglass and Cooper 2020; Ezcurra and Rivera-Collazo 2018; Fitzpatrick 2012; Hofman and Haviser 2015; Lerski 2019; Richards 2022; Siegel et al. 2013). This article calls on heritage practitioners in the Caribbean to formulate and theorize other cogent critical questions about how heritage is envisioned in urgent times. Instead of emphasizing prescriptive approaches that direct heritage professionals with recommendations, more theoretically grounded research could ask questions about and forge deeper understandings of the absence and presence of official heritage practices on the one hand and local peoples’ perceptions of heritage loss on the other.

Recently, after the cyclone Irma struck the Caribbean, Boger and Perdikaris (2019) used the disaster capitalism concept to describe dominant recovery efforts in Barbuda, which were to the benefit of rich and powerful residents and threatened to erode culture, identity, and traditional land relations in the name of development. At that time, Barbuda’s cultural heritage attracted far less media attention than its economic losses (Boger and Perdikaris 2019). In this context, cultural heritage can be defined as maintaining a low profile in the context of post-catastrophe political priorities. In our definition of cultural heritage, we include here natural sites, places of devotion, symbolic landscapes, archaeological sites, urban landscapes, and several other types of places with memories that are deemed to be affected by natural hazards.

In the aftermath of the 2010 earthquake in Haiti, Desmangles and McAlister (2010, 77) found that diverse cultural practices and beliefs cohabited in a complex relationship, where “some people have blamed others for causing the quake through their worship [of] ‘false idols.’” Similarly, research by Felix Germain (2011) addressed how Christian missionaries used narratives about the 2010 earthquake to attack Haiti’s intangible heritage, including vodou cultural religious practice. These analyses show how stereotypes and religious discourses can be used to justify dominant narratives about cultures and people's beliefs in times of disaster. At the same time, Irina Bokova, the director of UNESCO in 2010, advocated in the newspaper Le Monde that culture must become the “anti-seismic standard for reconstruction” (Bokova 2010, our translation). In this context, a special issue of MUSEUM International focusing on Haiti's heritage was published a year after the earthquake. Some of the papers highlighted international responses to heritage recovery in times of emergencies (Stolk 2010; Tandon 2010; Trézin 2010) and how places of heritage are claimed in post-disaster reconstruction (Bertrand 2010; Régulus 2010; Turgeon and Divers 2010). A few contributions also addressed memorialization and how people engage with their nonmaterial traditions and culture in the post-destruction context (Beauvoir-Dominique 2010; Jean-Julien 2010). This volume was edited and presented via a humanitarian assistance framework to respond to heritage in the context of disaster emergencies, at a time when “the homes, history and heritage of Haiti – the health of a people – seemed in the hands of humanitarian disaster response organizations” (Graham 2021, 90). The exclusion of local voices and the outsized power of nonlocal actors in Haiti is also emphasized in Ruhe’s (2017) analysis of how communities are affected when heritage sites are destroyed, heritage is threatened, and heritage practices are suspended after a disaster. The author found it “unclear if locals or international organizations are more likely to identify heritage priorities and guide preservation efforts” (Ruhe 2017, 163).

Other scholarship has also started to question how current public heritage policies and engagement strategies relate to long-term historical practices (Jean et al. 2020). For instance, the archaeological heritage reflecting the complexity of Haitian history is not given much attention in the politics of heritage in the country, which instead emphasizes the emblematic character of historic places and seeks to promote tourism development (Jean et al. 2020, 742). Oral storytelling, which also has deep cultural roots in the country, continues to be a highly relevant practice. Lindsay Graham (2021, 90) “analyzes the role of oral storytelling – and its digital incarnation – as an integral site of healing for local communities following Haiti’s 2010 earthquake.” Graham (2021, 96) additionally argues that “cultural heritage endeavors that utilize a bottom-up and top-down approach can foster improved global humanitarian participation and aid in promoting and sustaining well-being following disaster.” Yet, we would argue, a top-down approach to heritage can privilege dominant narratives and values over local perceptions; this is especially true in disaster contexts if the power structure dictates response priorities. To analyze how cultural heritage is negotiated in the context of disaster, we must consider which places, cultural sites, and memories are privileged in official action plans from the disaster governance agenda. Such a line of questioning forces scholarship to critically address what priorities emerge and how these priorities align with local people’s voices in reimagining heritage and landscapes. Addressing Haiti’s heritage in this way allows us to interrogate different discourses and practices of heritage in times of disaster. The article then takes up a framework that contextualizes the negotiation of heritage to counter more linear ways of understanding heritage in disaster times. In this way, we speak directly to debates aiming to unsettle dominant heritage practices and discourses; we point out the roots of heritage preservation challenges and call on heritage professionals to foreground people’s life experiences in disaster contexts.

Data collection and positionality

In this paper, we examine heritage negotiation in disaster contexts. Approximately one month after the earthquake that occurred on August 14, 2021, we conducted field visits in some places affected by the cataclysm. Our objective during these surveys was to visit impacted sites in order to capture how people perceive and envision heritage in the midst of a disaster. While many districts were affected by the earthquake, due to limited mobility and access, we visited four key cities – Les Cayes, Camp-Perrin, Jérémie, and Abricots (Figure 2). In each of these cities, we visited places of cultural heritage that had been affected, such as historical buildings and urban centers; we also interviewed residents about their perceptions of the impact of the earthquake on local heritage. Conducting this research so soon after the earthquake was vital for this project: as researchers working for many years on the ground in many parts of the country, we well understand the sociopolitical challenges that had emerged in Haiti after similar hazards in the past.

Figure 2. A map of the fieldwork locations and sites visited. Map by authors.

Given the 2021 earthquake’s severity, we reasoned that the country would again be a location of unsettled narratives about and practices of heritage in the context of disaster. Our knowledge of Haitian social conditions and our own previous experiences with disasters in the country helped us reach a new critical understanding concerning heritage studies amidst disaster. Our approach emphasizes the complexity and interconnectedness of Haiti's many disaster-related histories. Given the historical context that shapes Haiti’s current social realities, any interpretation of heritage politics must be historically grounded. Previous scholarly perspectives on heritage in the context of disaster are varied; some work has been more prescriptive, offering recommendations for best practices and focusing on heritage preservation through different approaches. Here, our goal and agenda are different: to consider how heritage is envisioned and negotiated within society. To gather data, we enlisted the help of individuals who guided us to local heritage sites that had been damaged. Our multi-site survey encompassed historical monuments, the urban centers of Les Cayes and Jérémie, churches, cemeteries, waterfalls, and rivers, allowing us to observe the conditions of these places following the earthquake. We documented the quake’s damage through photographs and notes, and we georeferenced each site using GPS (Global Positioning System) coordinates.

In order to record the scope and significance of damage to heritage sites following the 2021 quake, we also held unstructured interviews with 24 people of which 14 were audio-recorded while 10 were recorded via written notes. Through open-ended questions, we explored local perspectives on sites that had been damaged and the significance of this heritage loss; interviewees also commented on how government officials were involved in heritage stewardship before, during, and after the earthquake in addition to local communities’ involvement and input in the co-safeguarding process. For example, many people in the Sud (South) region expressed disappointed about the absence of an official heritage response in the recovery process. We also found that interviewees’ perceptions about heritage often correlated to their social and economic experiences during the disaster recovery. By eliciting responses to guiding open-ended questions and analyzing the discourses that emerged in these interviews, we relied on local perspectives to help build our understanding of heritage in times of disaster; together with official documents about heritage recovery and management, these local perspectives helped us better understand the heritage practices that emerge in post-catastrophe times.

Heritage on the move, 2010 and 2021

The catastrophes of 2010 and 2021 affected many spaces with archaeological artifacts, religious symbols, historical objects, and artworks. In 2010, the International Council of Museums (ICOM) designated an “Emergency Red List of Haitian Cultural Objects at Risk” to help to combat the illicit trafficking of Haitian cultural heritage (ICOM 2010). According to general assessments from the Haitian Institute for the Protection of National Heritage (Institut de Sauvegarde du Patrimoine National or ISPAN), the January 12 2010 earthquake caused the loss of many buildings and sites classified as national heritage. Many cultural landscapes, historical sites, administrative buildings, museums, libraries, art galleries, churches, vodou peristyles (temples), artifact collections, theaters, art studios, and public markets were damaged or reduced to rubble (ISPAN 2010a). Hundreds of buildings dated to at least a century were damaged throughout the country.

Following the 2010 earthquake, to help to safeguard heritage, international institutions implemented the Haiti Cultural Recovery Project (Jean-Julien and Hornbeck 2023). The aim of this much-needed project was “to rescue, recover, safeguard, and help restore Haitian cultural materials damaged and endangered by the January 12 2010 earthquake and its aftermath, and train Haitians in conservation skills so they could carry on that work into the future” (Kurin 2011, 10). The Smithsonian Institution (USA) managed the project, with the Steering Committee including the Haitian Institute for the Protection of National Heritage (Institut de Sauvegarde du Patrimoine National or ISPAN), Haiti’s National Pantheon Museum (Musée du Panthéon National Haïtien or MUPANAH), the National Library of Haiti (Bibliothèque Nationale or BN), the National Archives of Haiti (Archives Nationales d'Haïti or ANH), and Haiti’s National Bureau of Ethnology (Bureau National d'Ethnologie or BNE).

On the side of the governmental policies, some effort in heritage safeguarding was made by ISPAN (ISPAN 2010b) as part of the project. These efforts were guided by the objective to build the sustainable capacity of established public heritage spaces by equipping them with adequate support and coordination to take care of museum collections in the long-term. While ISPAN identified many historical buildings and actively underlined heritage recovery projects focused on monuments after the 2010 earthquake (ISPAN 2010a; 2010b), other planned action items in the Action Plan for National Recovery and Development of Haiti (Government of the Republic of Haiti 2010b) were not as successful. This lack of success mirrors Haiti’s floundering progress on its overall reconstruction plan.

The Action Plan represents one of only a few documents developed by public authorities since the 2010 earthquake that highlights their commitment to the importance of culture in disaster management. This document first aimed to establish a cultural management system that on the one hand ensured the state's capacity to exercise its functions of observation, control, and regulation, and on the other hand allowed broad public access to cultural goods (Government of the Republic of Haiti 2010b). The document additionally guaranteed the development of cultural industries through the funding and creation of an appropriate legal framework (Government of the Republic of Haiti 2010b). Finally, through this document, the Haitian state wanted to foster international cultural cooperation and ensure the promotion of Haitian heritage through a cultural education program in schools (Government of the Republic of Haiti 2010b). An additional document, the National Disaster Risk Management Plan (2019–2030) or Plan national de Gestion des risques de désastre (2019-2030) aimed to assess disaster risks to national cultural heritage and to develop instruments and mechanisms for protecting and evacuating cultural property (Government of the Republic of Haiti 2021, 38). These top-down efforts were developed in a climate of urgency following earthquake damage. However, to most effectively implement actions in favor of cultural heritage co-stewardship, projects must also acknowledge local communities and grassroot projects to better engage them with co-safeguarding process in times of uncertainties.

On August 14, 2021, an earthquake destroyed many of the country's cultural centers, syncretic spaces, and historical sites (Figure 3); the devastation was particularly pronounced in the departments or regions of Sud, Grande-Anse, and Nippes. An official complete assessment of destroyed heritage sites has not been released, but information about some well-known sites has been reported. For example, in Abricots, we observed a grassroots project that involved cataloguing an endangered archaeological collection after the 2021 earthquake put in place by heritage professional Michaelle Saint-Natus from FLASSEF (Fondation Lise Antoine Saint-Natus/Sante Education Femme) in collaboration with Bureau National d'Ethnologie supported by Switzerland Embassy and Fokal (Fondasyon Konesans ak Libète). There was one rescue and recovery project after the 2021 earthquake led by Olsen Jean-Julien and his team at the Center for the Conservation of Cultural Assets at Haiti’s Quisqueya University (Centre de Conservation des biens Culturels – Université Quisqueya or CCC–UniQ); this project was among the first responses to heritage recovery in a post-destruction context (Jean-Julien and Hornbeck 2023). As explained in an online report from the international organization Cultural Emergency Response, which provided funding support for the initiative:

Just one week after the earthquake, Olsen and his team activated their local network and began training 18 people on cultural emergency preparedness and response. With a trained team of heritage heroes, together they safeguarded more than 7,000 artifacts including books, administrative records, parish archives, photographs, ritual costumes, musical instruments, objects of worship, paintings, and sculptures. (Cultural Emergency Response 2023)

Figure 3. The cumulative impact of the 2021 earthquake and Tropical Storm Grace on colonial ruins in Abricots (a), a damaged cemetery at Marceline, Camp-Perrin (b), an impassible Guinaudée River (5 km from Jérémie) following flooding just days after the earthquake (c), and an empty Canal d’Avezac in Camp-Perrin, whose flow was obstructed by landslides (d). Photographs by authors.

Heritage surveys and narratives from the south of Haiti

We have listed several streets located in Les Cayes and Jérémie in Table 1, which logs places visited and observed during our research project. The interview narratives that we collected emphasize the immense implications of the 2021 earthquake on individuals’ social lives and economic livelihoods, in addition to broader ecological and environmental effects. Figure 3a shows damage at the most common archaeological site in Abricots. Figure 3b illustrates the quake's impact on cemeteries. These cemeteries serve as sacred grounds for honoring and memorializing ancestors as well as maintaining a community’s genealogical information. Soon after the earthquake, Tropical Storm Grace caused additional damage, including flooding and landslides in Haiti: Figure 3c is an uncrossable river and Figure 3d is a canal obstructed by landslides. These compounding tragedies impacted not only the environment but also communities’ social lives. Historically, more hurricanes have hit Haiti’s south as compared to earthquakes. For example, it is easy for people to recall past catastrophic hurricanes, such as 2016s Matthew, which devastated humans and non-humans alike. As recent hurricanes, tropical storms, and earthquakes form a palimpsest of destruction, with significant cumulative damage to some historical sites, some of the damages we observed may predate the 2021 earthquake. Regardless, the table makes clear that a diverse range of heritage sites has been affected, with each catastrophe experienced as a further insult building upon the last. Heritage sites at which we catalogued damage included colonial plantations places, fortresses, art and ethnographic collections, cemeteries, churches, vodou peristyles (temples), libraries, irrigation canals, bridges, rivers, and waterfalls (Table 1).

Table 1. Heritage sites at which damage was catalogued by the authors during their 2021 reconnaissance survey.

Places/Sites	Locality	Observation
Pemerle habitation	Camp-Perrin	Damage to and destruction of walls
Camp Gérard fort	Camp-Perrin	Severe damage to and destruction of walls
Gérard	Camp-Perrin	Damage to and destruction of walls
Saut-Mathurine falls	Camp-Perrin	Transformation into a muddy pool, reduction of waterfalls, rock fall
Cemetery and Peystile in Marceline	Camp-Perrin	Destruction of and cracks on the tombs
Cemetery Levy	Camp-Perrin	Cracks on the tombs
Cayes city	Cayes	Damage to many buildings, including the library of the IPDEC (Bibliothèque de l'Institut de promotion et du Développement de l'Education et de la Culture), the Cathedral of Notre Dame de l'Assomption, the Catholic church Sacré-Coeur, and the folkloric club Les Tirailleurs.
Laval and Tibi	Camp-Perrin	Destruction of and cracks on old colonial buildings
Canal d’Avezac	Cam-Perrin	Obstruction after flooding due to landslides
Ginaudée River	Jérémie	Impassable after the Tropical Storm Grace
Jérémie	Jérémie	Damage to many houses and buildings including the Cathedral Saint-Louis
Debarasse habitation	Jérémie	Destruction to and cracks on old colonial buildings
Kafou Soukri, Balisiers	Abricots	Destruction to and cracks on old colonial buildings

In our interviews with local residents, individuals remembered past hazards and observed the dynamics of change in heritage. In their post-destruction narratives, certain expressions and themes recur, including the lack of official responsibility, the importance of historical sites, the loss of heritage, social and economic impacts, memory, heritage value, tourism, belonging, and identity. Many interview narratives focus on the importance of historical sites. For example, the fortress site Camp Gérard (Figure 4) remains a place that is central to local historical memory in Haiti’s south. The site is experienced every year through school visits, which allow students to learn about its national historic importance. The site commemorates a historical anecdote of collective solidarity between Haitian freedom leaders Jean Jacques Dessalines and Nicolas Geffrard, who met here in July 1802 in order to work together for Haiti's future and freedom from the French colonial power. In Figure 4a-b, we can observe that are many rocks that had contributed to the camp walls that are now dislodged and fallen.

Figure 4. Fallen walls at Camp Gérard following the 2021 earthquake. Photographs by authors.

One interviewee, a local woman living in the small city Camp-Perrin explained that

The hazards bring confusion when the authority working on heritage is not present on the ground to assure the population about heritage value in a post-destruction context. As a result, people may pick up rocks at the site of Camp Gérard, because the site collapsed during the earthquake. However, the rocks from the site scattered on the ground can serve as evidence to remember what happened in those times. (Interviewee 7, September 5, 2021, authors’ translation from Haitian Creole)

By singling out Camp Gérard as a site at which people may reuse fallen materials, this interviewee stresses its heritage value, the importance of remembering it, and the risk of misunderstandings having a greater impact on the location. Several interviewees emphasized the value of heritage, with one school teacher explaining that

In the past, teachers used to emphasize [heritage sites], because of their importance. Sites like these demonstrate the strength and courage of our ancestors in the past. Despite the current state of the country, these sites’ history cannot be erased. It will always mark our memory, ideas, and history. (Interviewee 8, September 5, 2021, authors’ translation from Haitian Creole)

Another third interviewee at Camp-Perrin who is an educator remarked, that Camp Gérard “is a part of our memory lost, since monuments tell our history. That is why we need to identify and map all the sites, by engaging in education and raising awareness in the community, and [so] enhancing heritage value” (Interviewee 9, September 5, 2021, authors’ translation from Haitian Creole). Mitigating the impact of hazards on sites of memory requires a multi-faceted approach involving collaboration between communities, governments, and heritage organizations, among other participants. One kind of approach aims to map, document, and record sites so that if damage occurs in the future, heritage elements can be recreated to ensure their continuity. Of course, this strategy is most successful at sites whose value is broadly recognized by heritage professionals and locals. Sometimes, historical places are neglected because of lack of awareness and pressing socioeconomic challenges in the area. This type of neglect can cause the degradation of archaeological and other heritage sites both before and after catastrophes, leading to cumulative damage and loss. As an educator interviewed in Camp-Perrin explained,

The impact of the earthquake on [historical] buildings added to past destruction since inhabitants had to remove many ruins from their lands to establish more plots for cultivation. [This is] because farmers needed cultivation space. In this case, these monuments that were supposed to be renovated and maintained by heritage institutions did not mean too much to [local people]. However, they could contribute to tourism. (Interviewee 9, September 5, 2021, authors’ translation from Haitian Creole)

Building on Interviewee 9’s analysis of conflicting stakeholders in the process of safeguarding heritage, Interviewee 13 (a man who is a head of a local association) reported similar dynamics in the management of an old colonial plantation named Kafou Soukri in Balisiers, Abricots:

I saw the [site] and realized the conditions were not acceptable. That is why we created an organization, called Tonmtonm Lakay. The organization is still is active. The board talks to the local community about valuing the monuments. As far as I'm concerned, the local government sees the monuments, but they don't really know what they mean to them. If they really knew what [the site] means for them, they would never let us take responsibility [for its preservation] alone. They would value them. We have no support. You ask me to talk about this heritage in the community but the state never does that. They are not interested in knowing our past to construct our present and future. The local government doesn’t do that. That is why every time we see a visitor, we are happy. And we ask ourselves if there is a possibility for tourism to come back again. Tourism can help the economy. We can think of [the benefit to] society through the economy. (Interviewee 13, September 10, 2021, authors’ translation from Haitian Creole)

Another interviewee we met in Abricots who focused on the plantation Kafou Soukri in their answers explained,

We would like to see the site restored. As a result [of the restoration], the site would attract visitors. Our role in the community is to provide the site with visibility and to ensure safety for visitors to have a pleasant experience. So, it will be necessary to find an organization and institution to fill the enhancement and restoration roles. This is because we [local people] do not have enough resources to play this role. (Interviewee 12, September 10, 2021, authors’ translation from Haitian Creole)

Both these interviews about Kafou Soukri note a disconnect between a community who is eager to restore a local heritage site but lacks the financial means to do so and other actors, namely the government or nonlocal heritage organizations, with more financial means but less interest or knowledge about the site. With adequate investment, local municipalities could be crucial in heritage planning and act as a bridge to connect heritage institutions and communities. But in reality, this is rarely currently the case. Several interviewees pointed out the absence of culture offices in Abricots and other municipalities; these offices could communicate heritage strategies, public policies, planning and restoration plans. Many people we interviewed relayed that they had experiences emotional shock when witnessing sites that have been in the landscape for centuries disappear following the earthquake. However, broader governmental inaction and lack of prioritization means that few Haitian municipalities have taken on the mantle of heritage investment, management, and education. When considering local infrastructure and resources to promote and protect heritage in their communities, some interlocutors raised concerns about the lack of regional museums, heritage infrastructure, and public libraries in many parts of the country. These types of institutions could help to promote Haitian history and heritage through society. One interviewee, a male street vendor we met in Les Cayes explained that “we don’t even have enough infrastructure dedicated to first responses related to basic social needs before the earthquake, so reality becomes more complicated now” (Interviewee 3, September 4, 2021, authors’ translation from Haitian Creole).

In interpreting these responses, we may wonder in this context how the state can effectively implement disaster mitigation, construction codes, and heritage preservation if there are not enough professionals to support such efforts and no budget allocated for that purpose. Certainly, other evidence similarly suggests that the situation is dire. While it is clear that there are many archaeological sites in the Sud region of Haiti, there is no public museum there or even government heritage offices. Instead of simply wringing our hands or suggesting best practices within the existing impoverished heritage framework in Haiti, let us instead consider the historical roots of this current situation (Figure 5).

Figure 5. Damage to local churches following the 2021 earthquake, including the Catholic Church of Sacré-Cœur in the city of Cayes (a) as well as the destroyed roof (b) and ground rubble (c) from the Catholic Church of Saint Louis in the city of Jérémie. Photographs by authors.

Much research has already shown how the current socio-economic situation in Haiti is grounded, after the Haitian independence, in a vast international rip-off and repeated trickery by leading colonial powers of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, such as the US and France (Lucien 2016; Plummer 1992). In 1825, threatening imminent attack, the French government demanded that Haiti pay reparations for France’s loss of enslaved workers and the colony itself some two decades earlier in the Haitian Revolution. Resisting and surviving the long trajectory of such debt has gravely impacted the Haitian economic and social development, its environment, and its residents’ wellbeing up to the present (Denis 2018; Gaillard-Pourchet 1990). Indeed, more and more attention has been paid to the long historical consequences of this undue debt, with recent popular articles such as “The Roots of Haiti’s Misery: Reparations to Enslavers” recently published in the New York Times (Porter et al. 2022). This double debt compensated France for the loss of enslaved labor and stolen land to which they never had any legitimate claim. These debt payments, which number in the tens of billions of U.S. dollars in today’s money and were paid over more than a century, enriched both France itself and the French and U.S. banks who issue loans with interest to Haiti. The U.S. also invaded and occupied Haiti from 1915 to 1934 and then continued to control the country’s finances up through the late 1940s. This history of debt and exploitation pushed Haiti into a cycle of debts that hobbled the country for more than 100 years, draining away much of its revenue and reducing its ability to build the essential institutions and infrastructure of an independent nation (Porter et al. 2022). These are historical roots we cannot ignore in analyzing the lack of heritage infrastructure in the country.

Importantly, much of the loss of heritage sites with the 2021 earthquake cannot be financially quantified and instead represents a deeper kind of loss. For example, vodou peristyles (that is, temples) help to ground and hold communities together through shared spiritual values; many have been destroyed and damaged in regions affected by catastrophe. As these temples are in current use while also representing a connection to ancestral practices, healers and religious practitioners experienced the loss and damage of sacred spaces which had a profound effect on current religious activity. In our field research, we encountered three vodou practitioners at the folkloric club Les Tirailleurs in Les Cayes. They testified that they could no longer find appropriate spaces for their religious practices after damage and flooding in their peristyle. Both the earthquake and flooding have disrupted and decreased the spiritual activities which communities used to regularly perform.

Destroyed churches (Figure 5a, b, and c) represent another loss that extends beyond the financial or material realm: for instance, the Catholic church Sacré Cœur (Figure 5a) in Les Cayes remained an important historical landmark for the broader surrounding community. With the loss of churches, there is generally an expectation from residents that new churches will replace them. There is a shared sense of memory at these places for local communities. However, the residents with whom we spoke disagreed about how the churches should be rebuilt. For instance, some think churches should be rebuilt to replicate their previous historical style. For others, the form and style should be replaced completely; advocates for this modernizing approach argued that rebuilding churches with a more modern vision would not mean that the community memory of the previous historical buildings would be forgotten.

Figure 6. Damage at Saut-Mathurine, after the 2021 earthquake, affecting the waterfall at the site. Photography by authors.

Our fieldwork also challenged the divide between heritage and more “natural” sites like waterfalls, as interviews demonstrated how they can act as cultural landmarks in the community. As an example, consider the waterfall Saut-Mathurine, which attracts both domestic and international tourists. We visited the site and interviewed local residents several weeks after its devastation in the 2021 earthquake (Figure 6). The locals we interviewed emphasized that the waterfall is a source of revenue – indeed, a source of life, through which they can sell their local products. These interviews in Saut-Mathurine captured the complex interplay between such losses and a continued attachment to natural places that are also cultural landmarks of the community. In this context, one local man explained, “Having this site in our region is a privilege; losing it can be the loss of the biggest treasure of the region. And we have developed an inseparable relationship with this site. Many people are attached to it as part of their daily lives” (Interviewee 5, September 5, 2021, authors’ translation from Haitian Creole). When confronted with upheaval in their most familiar daily environments, interviewees often recounted the profound impact losing cherished places had on them and their cultural practices. Another local man explained.

Saut-Mathurine represents a grandiose thing for the community. The site can [continued to] improve economic life through tourism and [local] well-being if the government collaborates with the communities to develop the sector. And the site can be better developed in collaboration with us. (Interviewee 6, September 5, 2021, authors’ translation from Haitian Creole)

In the post-catastrophe context, official discourses about how to get tourism back on its feet always emerge as one of the principal priorities. These discourses often view culture as a vector of tourism with less attention paid to the importance local people place on historical, cultural, or natural sites. Therefore, official strategies for implementing long-term emergency plans for heritage rarely involve local institutions, such as municipalities, grassroots organizations, or individual residents. One interviewee [man, local resident] who lives in Abricots addressed the importance of including local voices in heritage co-safeguarding and planning. “One person alone cannot safeguard heritage. Working together is the best way to achieve heritage preservation goals because one individual cannot bring practicable solutions. The participation of the community is necessary” (Interviewee 13, September 10, 2021, authors’ translation from Haitian Creole).

Based on our observations, we found that there was little official response to improving the living conditions of many families in Haiti’s south after the earthquake, and there was no heritage emergency preparedness at all. While conducting interviews, we frequently heard criticism relating to heritage safeguarding, heritage loss, and the absence of official heritage planning. Such critical views about heritage safeguarding force us to consider how we can improve the process to include local voices in order to navigate the pressing matters facing Haiti that extend beyond the heritage landscape: environmental degradation, political instability, climate change, community wellbeing, and development projects (Stancioff 2018).

Re-negotiating heritage in time of uncertainties

How heritage is renegotiated in the context of disaster may provide a model for a more locally inclusive approach to a variety of other challenges. In the next section, we consider the building blocks necessary to understand in order to build an approach: heritage practices more broadly in Haiti, the broader socioeconomic challenges of Haitian society, and people’s lived experiences with affected cultural sites. In the context of disaster, individuals of marginalized backgrounds are often excluded from the process of co-safeguarding heritage; we propose the approach of heritage justice to mediate new ways of imagining and understanding heritage and its future in uncertain times.

Post-destruction planning and practices

Earlier in this paper, we asked, what are the politics of heritage that emerge during disasters? This simple question forces us to consider how discourses and practices of heritage are envisioned in uncertain times. Even with Haiti’s continuing experience with hazards, its heritage recovery strategies have not been defined as a long-term plan. The objectives of the Action Plan (Government of the Republic of Haiti 2010b) following the 2010 earthquake disaster were accompanied by the presence of the media and the potential for investment by the international community. At this time, discourse on culture was central in the reconstruction project’s narrative. However, over the decade that followed, the government never translated this discourse about disasters related to heritage into long-term management practices.

Nonetheless, the memory of disasters is very present in Haiti, as it leaves many traces that are unintentional clues to the past (Corbet 2020). This memory can be seen in the dislocation of the state, growing political and economic precariousness, and the use of religions as palliatives to fragmented national unity (Corbet 2020). It is imperative for Haiti to adapt its culture and heritage better to its national development. The Haitian sociologist, Laennec Hurbon (2019) thinks this should fundamentally start with the regularization of essential services before moving on to the bureaucratic restructuring that would allow for a better valorization of heritage. Therefore, the action plan for the country's recovery and development should be an integral part of a plan for the revitalization of urban and rural sectors. The plan should be grounded in existing cultural norms and respect local populations’ dignity.

The practices of heritage recovery in the aftermath of the 2010 earthquake were controlled by international institutions that financially and technically supported the disaster response operations (Kurin 2011). The main international disaster responders, such as the UNESCO and the Smithsonian Institution, reported a lack of preparedness and lack of appropriate means for safeguarding collections at Haiti’s public heritage institutions. Even though certain local official institutions such as ISPAN (Institut de Sauvegarde du Patrimoine National or the Haitian Institute for the Protection of National Heritage) did their best to respond, these institutions’ missions do not cover Heritage Emergency Response (HER), which requires specialties other than just heritage conservation. Thus, the process of caring for culture during this time of disaster was grounded in a broader international and humanitarian response to heritage (Araoz and Mercier 2010; Kurin 2011; Perloff-Giles 2011; Tandon 2010). The fundamental question is: when it comes to identifying and prioritizing cultural sites and collections in disaster situations, how do the heritage policies and agendas of different institutions influence, connect, and support one another?

This question aligns with a broader concern about the role of multiple voices in defining heritage agendas for the future. For example, after assistance from international institutions following the 2010 earthquake disaster, in what conditions should Haiti’s public institutions have curated national heritage, including archaeological collections? And who decides? The international mobilization to safeguard heritage has included positive steps forward in stabilizing and rescuing certain cultural heritage elements. For example, this mobilization helped set up a conservation center for cultural heritage at the Université Quisqueya after the 2010 earthquake. At this same time, the Haitian government prioritized so-called “gingerbread” houses (a turn-of-the-twentieth-century Haitian architectural style defined by complex latticework and fretted wood) for international conservation assistance from World Monuments Fund (https://www.wmf.org/project/gingerbread-neighborhood). Drawing from Vincent Joos (2021) discussion of “heritage houses” in the book Urban Dwelling, one might also interrogate what became the small gingerbread houses and buildings that were identified and marked by ISPAN in the aftermath of 2010 earthquake? How is this heritage protected and can these protected structures house other heritage? For example, it has been observed that museum collections, including archaeological objects, are generally poorly preserved in most public museums in Haiti (Joseph 2017; Vendryes 2013). Yet, even these interrogations reveal crucial gaps in understanding the types of practices that should be set for the future of heritage, specifically when it comes to achieving inclusive and concrete action plans for protection of culture.

The earthquake of August 14, 2021 again brought up questions about the role of the state in implementing and applying public policies for cultural heritage. No governmental Heritage Emergency Response plan had been set up in the intervening decade since the 2010 quake. Even with sometimes greater coordination between local and international heritage institutions in 2021 (e.g., www.culturalemergency.org), the lack of a long-term national recovery plan has left much cultural heritage on the verge of loss and oblivion, expanding the list of irremediable effects in times of increasing uncertainty. For example, the rapid construction of housing and roads in addition to new large-scale agricultural projects have typically occurred without preliminary surveys assessing cultural heritage and archaeological resources that may be affected. Walner Osna (2022) critiqued a mega tourism project that was designed for the Ile à Vache island (south of Haiti proper) in the aftermath of the 2010 earthquake. It was fundamentally an economic priorities project, grounded in neoliberal politics; Osna demonstrated this project caused land dispossession, displacement of individuals and families, and impoverishment of the local populations (Osna 2022). In addition, we would add, the affected region contains significant archaeological resources (Rouse and Moore 1984), including maritime heritage sites that were not considered for conservation as part of the project.

Challenging the roots

We do not pretend that financial support for heritage is the primary criterion for maintaining it. However, it is a reality that many postcolonial states still deal with the colonial system’s continuous reproduction, in which systemic neocolonial political power influences society’s social and economic goals. While everyone should have the opportunity to enjoy heritage, systemic gaps in access prevent this from happening. The path connecting people to their heritage as a source of personal and communal enjoyment can be blocked by a lack of cultural infrastructure. Since many young people and adults in Haiti lack access to historical knowledge through museums, cultural landscapes, or historical places, they do not know, for instance, what the materiality of past inhabitants looks like despite studying their history from an early age in schoolbooks. Building a society’s infrastructure is essential since it entails improving people’s social and material conditions and creating better and more equitable ways to appreciate their heritage and environment. However, the protracted and ongoing struggles that many postcolonial societies face today impact both the material existence of cultural heritage and the social infrastructure necessary to secure communal wellbeing and workable solutions for heritage. By social infrastructure, we mean “the networks of spaces, facilities, institutions, and groups that create affordances for social connection” (Latham and Layton 2019, 3). However, combining several historical perspectives pertinent to the contemporary situation in Haiti helps us better comprehend the challenges of cultural co-safeguarding efforts. Colonialism and its later replications have hindered Haitian society’s ability to respond to environmental challenges, disasters, and the need for heritage safeguarding, as well as to broader social and economic challenges.

Our argument echoes and builds on other critical analyses in heritage studies that look at today’s issues by understanding the historical roots of contemporary social struggles (e.g., Winter 2013). We consider this historical dimension not to deny the responsibilities of the state in providing for the protection of and access to heritage. Rather, we recognize that some decision-making and priorities of the Haitian state carry the heavy weight of a coloniality that still haunts Haitian society (Camilus 2015; Camilus and Dorismond 2020; Casimir 2018; Dubois 2009; Gustinvil 2013; Michel 2021). Haitian people’s disconnection from their cultural heritage stems not only from their current social conditions, including the country’s environmental conditions; this disconnection is instead historically rooted. For example, coloniality and its aftereffects have helped to sustain large-scale corruption in the country that contributes to massive economic inequality and instability. As a result, the country is unable to improve social and economic life and wellbeing by, for example, finding appropriate means to stimulate cultural heritage projects (e.g., building museums, caring for the collections). The continuing echoes of coloniality in modern-day Haiti limit the means by which the state can anticipate possible threats to heritage like disasters or other ecological manifestations such as climate change that affect humans and non-humans alike. Georges Eddy Lucien’s book Une Modernisation manquée (2013) exposes the weight of coloniality and the long-term consequences of the American occupation (1915-1934) on Haiti’s built environment and infrastructure. The consequences of these historical facts, in line with Ferdinand’s (2021) theory of “double fracture,” are the result of an environmental fracture put in place by a capitalist system paired with a colonial fracture that instituted racial slavery and the domination of Haitian people’s ancestors.

We believe that deep engagement of people from different social backgrounds is necessary to build a much-needed pathway toward heritage safeguarding in Haiti. It becomes likewise critical to consider what kinds of heritage futures are possible in postcolonial societies given historically rooted constraints. For instance, many postcolonial countries suffer from an absence of supporting infrastructure for their heritage. In times of emergency, these countries therefore face special challenges in protecting and curating cultural heritage. For example, on the African continent, studies in multiple countries have identified a lack of capacity to “manage” cultural resources due to the low heritage budget (Chirikure, Ndoro, and Deacon 2017; Fasae et al. 2017; Fredholm 2016; Ndlovu 2011); these low budgets and reduced managerial capacities can have cascading impacts on cultural heritage in times of disaster. A recently held online seminar series, Local Voices: The Uses of Archaeological Heritage in the Caribbean, attracted a diverse range of participants, including many Caribbean scholars, students, and heritage practitioners in addition to local and international researchers. In this series, participants repeatedly raised concerns about the lack of funding for the protection and restoration of cultural heritage as one of several issues facing the Caribbean region (Jean, Malatesta, and Jacobson 2021).

A critical discussion, however, is needed to move beyond the idea of good or bad governance that can often dominate discussions on heritage “management” and preservation in postcolonial contexts. We must acknowledge the historical struggle of postcolonial societies, such as Haiti, that has been dominated by historical extraction, neocolonial policies, and long trajectory of debt. It is these burdens that challenge postcolonial societies seeking appropriate means of improving inhabitants’ social conditions, including through heritage safeguarding. Such acknowledgements are a necessary foundation for bold viable heritage plans that encompass disaster preparedness. Indeed, these societies’ continuing neocolonial structure impacts how they prioritize culture and heritage within their political agenda. By clarifying this fact in the coloniality of disaster, we can begin to see the ways in which long-lasting colonial legacies and inequalities shape experiences and responses to disasters in postcolonial contexts (e.g., Bonilla 2020). Indeed, we argue that in the context of disaster, material and nonmaterial heritage, can be ripped away from the collective wellbeing to fanfare a “coloniality of priority” that, in the end, strengthens the socio-political structure that has already been established.

Lived experience

Haiti’s cultural heritage is enmeshed in its people’s broader wellbeing. In past research in the country, Graham (2021, 98) found that “the loss of the physical sites – churches, town-centers, historical structures – in which people constitute themselves as a community inflicts yet another layer of trauma – cultural trauma – and further erodes a survivor's sense of self.” In this context, we delineate overlapping layers of memories into three interlocking groups: memory of hazards, memories of disasters as recurring events, and the memory of heritage that has been damaged or lost. Addressing heritage in this context allows us to understand, “its past, present, and future … is a profoundly human experience and a lived reality” (Mika 2018, 18). These heritage-and disaster-related memories align with multiple ways of seeing, feeling, resisting, and expressing emotions and narratives. To understand local stories related to heritage in the post-destruction context, we sought to observe the reality on the ground and conduct interviews with local people. In our research, we found that many Haitians’ conception of heritage extends beyond devotional, religious, spiritual, and historical places to include natural sites like rivers and waterfalls, which are crucial to individuals’ and communities’ everyday life and deeply embedded in complex social, environmental, economic, and political interactions. These narratives, provided by our interviewees, also add to the conversation by revealing the considerable socio-economic impact caused by damages to nonmaterial cultural heritage – we must not ignore, for example, the loss of key spiritual landmarks, particularly vodou peristyles and churches, and the role played by such heritage sites not just in religion but also in economic life. Certainly, historical places such as ruins of plantations and fortresses are significant to local history, but so are more natural sites like the Saut-Maturine waterfall. After experiencing the effect of the landslides that had obstructed the passage of water in Saut-Maturine, a shared sense of belonging – and loss – can be found in the meaning of such natural sites for the community.

To close an interview with one of the survey's participants in Camp-Perrin, we asked for some last thoughts. The participant sharply answered in French “Nous sommes debouts,” which translates to Nou kanpe doubout in Haitian creole and we stand up in English. That is a simple expression. However, it communicates resistance. Resistance is a personal or communal strategy embodied in a continuous living process which people engage with or without governmental or international aid. Increasingly, authorities now expect individuals and local communities to take responsibility for disaster risk reduction themselves, in the name of local resilience, without outside help. In the hazard-prone regions of Haiti that we visited, knowledge of warning signs and how to respond to danger is based on collective memory and history. In many cases in Haiti, where disasters are recurrent human phenomena, the population has learned through experience to decipher the signs of risk to assess their severity. With these hard-won abilities and strong feelings solidarity, local people developed a repertoire of first responses (Schuller and Morales 2012). Individuals retain and transmit risk knowledge from generation to generation through multiple social practices related to their immediate environment. The way local individuals reimagine the future during catastrophe calls for a more radical understanding of disaster response that goes beyond a traditional narrative about poverty and governmental mismanagement (Ulysse 2015). For example, through mobility strategies (Sheller 2012), one can envision a better future through internal or external migration to overcome traumas and memories of catastrophes. Moreover, nou kanpe doubout is a way of living, knowing, and experiencing life, whatever the circumstances where humans – with their agency – reimagine the future in times of disaster. This way of experiencing life goes beyond the technocratic dimension of resilience enacted by the government during the relief and recovery process. Instead, it implies re-envisioning how resilience is understood, not as a political metaphor from NGOs or a mainstream political discourse, but rather more as lived experience embedded within the realities of social life, through which people renegotiate the meaning of life, heritage, and their memories of catastrophes.

Conclusion: Heritage justice

The traces of thousands of years of Haitian history are present in the country’s landscape. Some material traces have disappeared or nearly so, being continuously exposed to different environmental conditions and human actions, such as looting, construction, and uncontrolled tourism (Jean et al. 2020). Others have not yet been documented and interpreted via scientific research and many people (even schoolteachers, students, and government officials) remain unaware of their existence. While recognizing that impacts on some heritage features are inevitable from hazards and are part of the heritage process and dynamic (Holtorf 2020; Rico 2016), heritage practitioners, professionals, and institutions should consider the value of local engagement in co-safeguarding the past: local voices are valuable in the process of knowledge production about the past and in decision making about heritage co-stewardship and care. We have seen the importance of community voices in reclaiming initiative to contribute to a future that involves documentation, co-safeguarding, and promotion of local heritage. Museum infrastructure has stagnated in Haiti for years; this lack of institutional investment adds to the already significant challenge of preventing looting and damage to its collections, sites, and museums. Considering the lack of governmental means for heritage safeguarding and the way heritage is envisioned in the context of disaster cycles, we believe the practice of heritage justice can contribute to navigating toward a more just and bright heritage future for Haiti. The Puerto Rican scholars Pagán-Jiménez and Ramos (2008) have addressed how archaeological practices in the Caribbean that are undertaken outside of the “archaeologies of liberation” movement can remain embedded in the reproduction of coloniality. This approach highlights a means to further local voices in the mechanisms that influence decision-making in cultural heritage planning. In explaining a heritage justice approach, Fortenberry (2021) examines how policies and priorities of heritage tourism and conservation practices are used to exclude, erase, and diminish the contributions of communities of African descent and their material histories and to disconnect communities from tourism economies in St. George’s, Bermuda and Falmouth, Jamaica. Joy (2020) similarly calls for heritage justice approach to understand the demands of Benin for the return of heritage objects from Western museums as well as the violent destructions of global heritage in Mali.

In the previous section, we discussed the deep historical roots of Haiti’s struggle for its people’s wellbeing as well as the challenge of heritage safeguarding in the context of disaster. In this context, greater local involvement and initiative in heritage projects has benefits not only to cultural heritage but also to society more broadly: it can foster community solidarity and strengthen social bonds. We propose heritage justice as an intellectual and political pathway to toward better heritage practices that move beyond a reactionary stance following discrete catastrophes like the earthquakes of 2010 and 2021: the definition of the disaster context for heritage should be unsettled to include other threats such as climate change, land management, and neoliberal development projects. Heritage justice provides a framework for meaningful discussions and an opportunity to examine and ameliorate the effect of the “coloniality of disaster” on the community's life and heritage. Generally, it is difficult to control hazards. However, when appropriate responses are implemented, we can reduce these hazards’ impact on societies and their heritage. By foregrounding cultural heritage assets in heritage planning as well as in the cycle of disaster management plans, heritage justice approaches can repair past decisions that have replicated coloniality in Haiti. Past approaches that favor top-down decision making and garner little local involvement have failed to consider the how places of memory, archaeological sites, and landscapes exist in relation with local people’s life experiences and knowledge. In the heritage justice approach, participative local discourses and practices counteract and overrule priorities authorized by the hegemonic structure in the context of disaster policies. Heritage justice champions the voices of people who are not officially part of governmental and international heritage planning, but nonetheless are active participants and guardians of heritage. Heritage justice recognizes and restores local people’s capacity to co-identify archaeological sites, sites of memory, cultural traditions, and symbolic landscapes; these places and practices may be on the verge of being lost and thus call for the active collaboration of local people and groups with national and international institutions and researchers in defining the long-term agenda for heritage co-safeguarding. Despite ongoing destruction and the mounting impact of hazards and climate issues, cultural heritage in Haiti remains immersed in a complex temporality; it is not only what this heritage tells us about the past and how it is understood in the present, but also what its future can be. Heritage justice can open a space for critically revisiting the way heritage is envisioned in the context of hazards such as earthquakes as well as in a broad array of other political, social, and economic conditions that threaten its preservation and maintenance.

Acknowledgements

Joseph Sony Jean was hosted by the Constant family in Camp-Perrin. Our gratitude is extended to Jean Constant, Cécile Casséus, and Cellinie Constant. Thanks to Joseph Ismael Marcelin for driving Jean with the motorbike to Les Cayes, Camp-Perrin town, Saut-Mathurine, and other places in the vicinity of Camp-Perrin. Other people were really helpful during our research. We name here Camélie Montima, Gervais Calvaire, and Alex Silmé. Our gratitude is due to the Chavenet family in Jérémie, where we were hosted by Hans and Francois and went to Débarasse plantation. With Anaïse, we visited Madère, the potential place where General Dumas lived. Thanks also to Alain Victor in Jérémie. In Abricots, our gratitude extends to Madame de Verteuil who hosted us and Marie Bodin who helped us visit the old colonial plantations and a cemetery in Abricots. Théodore Jean Junior from Bureau National d’Ethnologie and Constant Jean Sergo were with us at Jérémie and Abricots. We express our gratitude to Fondation Canez Auguste and Flassef and Michaelle Saint-Natus for supporting our trip to the South by arranging logistics and transportation via Sunrise and to LAngages DIscours REprésentations (LADIREP) Ladirep of Université d’Etat d’Haiti. We finally thank Kathryn Wellen and Alessandra Benedicty-Kokken for reading the first draft of the paper, the chief editor Lydia Marshall for her assistance, and the anonymous peer reviewers for the significant commentary and suggestions made to improve our ideas.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This research is funded in part by two grants obtained by Joseph Sony Jean: Nederlandse Organisatie voor Wetenschappelijk Onderzoek, NWO-Veni (VI.Veni.211F.084) (2022) and Fund for Scientific Research (FRS/FNRS) (2021). Research was further supported by grants obtained by Jerry Michel from Fondation des sciences de l' homme, Fondation pour la Memoire de l'Esclavage, Rectorat de l' Université d' Haiti, LAngages DIscours REprésentations (LADIREP) Ladirep of Université d'Etat d'Haiti, and Le Fonds pour la Recherche et le Dévelopement de la Banque de la Republique d'Haiti.

Notes on contributors

Joseph Sony Jean

Joseph Sony Jean is a Haitian archaeologist. He holds a PhD in archaeology from Leiden University. He is an NWO-Veni fellow and a researcher at Leiden University and KITLV (Royal Netherlands Institute of Southeast Asian and Caribbean Studies, Leiden). Jean received training in First Aid to Cultural Heritage in Times of Crisis, jointly organized by ICCROM, the Smithsonian Institution, and the Netherlands National Commission of UNESCO in 2015. He teaches the annual course Patrimoine Archéologique for the Master’s Program “Histoire Memoire et Patrimoine” at the State University of Haiti. His archaeological research focuses on the long-term landscape transformation of Haiti, combining ethnographic, historical, oral history and ethnohistoric sources. His works also lies in Critical Heritage Studies, particularly the politics of heritage and the relationships between contemporary societies and heritage.

Jerry Michel

Jerry Michel is Haitian sociologist. He is a lecturer at the State University of Haiti. He is qualified as Maître de Conférence (senior lecturer) by the National Council of Universities (CNU) in France and is currently a researcher at LAVUE (Laboratoire Architecture Ville Urbanisme Environnement) UMR 7218, at the French National Center for Scientific Research, in addition to the University Paris 8 Vincennes-Saint-Denis.