What Is a West Indian?

From a West Indian perspective, our existence does not begin with Christopher Columbus.

Columbus did not discover us, create us, name our existence into being, or establish the West. His arrival represents a moment of realisation for Columbus and the people from his world: a realisation that peoples, lands and civilisations existed in the western direction beyond the geographical world familiar to them.

The concepts of Orient and Occident existed long before Columbus. Orient relates to the rising of the sun, the East. Occident relates to the setting of the sun, the West.

Within the West Indian belief, this distinction is important, because West is not understood merely as a modern colonial label. It represents a geographical position and, within our developing philosophical framework, a distinct human experience shaped by the conditions, environments and civilisations of the Western world.

Indias Occidentales, the Western Indies, therefore represents European recognition of an existing western reality, not the creation of that reality.

The people were already here. The lands were already here. Their identities, knowledge systems, relationships, environments and histories did not begin when Europeans became aware of them.

For this reason, West Indian history should not automatically begin with European arrival.

Within this framework, West Indian is being re-realised as a status: an identity belonging to peoples of the West whose meaning must be investigated through geography, language, history, Indigenous knowledge, archaeology, culture and the lived development of the peoples themselves.

WIN therefore distinguishes between two histories: the history of a people, and the history of when outsiders became aware of those people. Those are not the same thing. Christopher Columbus belongs to the second. The West Indian belongs to the first.

The West Indian Proposition

Within the West Indian belief, West is more than a direction on a modern map. The ancient distinction between the Orient, where the sun rises, and the Occident, where the sun sets, provides a starting point for reconsidering how eastern and western peoples developed within different environments, circumstances and systems.

WIN is interested in investigating whether these different conditions also contributed to different patterns of culture, cognition, social organisation, spirituality, relationship with nature and ways of understanding the world. This aspect remains a West Indian research proposition, rather than something established merely by the historical meaning of the words Orient and Occident.

We therefore do not begin with: "Who did Columbus discover?" We begin with: Who were the peoples of the West before Europe realised they were here?

The West, the Unknown Land, and the Name

The way Europe named the West tells its own story, and it supports our distinction between a people and the moment outsiders became aware of them.

Long before the modern Caribbean map, there was a Welsh tradition that a prince named Madoc sailed west beyond Ireland in the year 1170 and reached, in the words of the old narrative, a land unknown. That tradition does not describe a place called the West Indies. It describes an unnamed western land reached by someone from the East.

The name came later, and it came from Europe looking back. In 1584 the Welsh writer David Powel connected that unknown western land to the newly encountered American world. Then in 1589 Richard Hakluyt published the account under the heading "The most ancient Discovery of the West Indies by Madoc the sonne of Owen Guyneth Prince of North-wales, in the yeere 1170." In other words, a sixteenth-century writer applied a sixteenth-century category, the West Indies, to a twelfth-century story about an unknown land.

This is exactly the pattern we are pointing to. The label "West Indies" here is an act of European classification, placed onto a western reality from the outside and after the fact. It does not prove that anyone used the words "West Indies" in 1170, and it does not prove where, or whether, such a voyage happened. The land in the story is simply the West: already there, already unnamed by its visitors, waiting to be recognised rather than created.

Why This History Matters

Our work is not only philosophical. It is grounded in documentary evidence of how "West India" and "West Indian" became formal geographical and institutional terms within the British imperial system.

The West India Regiments offer one clear example. These were military units of the British Army, and permanent regiments carrying the West India designation emerged in 1795 during the French Revolutionary Wars. Although named for the West Indies, these regiments did not serve only in the Caribbean. They were deployed in the Caribbean and in parts of West Africa, connecting the region to a much wider imperial system. The original regiments were reduced over time and the remaining formations were disbanded in 1927. A later West India Regiment was created in 1958 in connection with the West Indies Federation, and disappeared following the collapse of the Federation in the early 1960s.

This record shows that, by the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, "West India" and "West Indian" were not merely informal descriptions. They appeared in official organisation and could identify institutions and people associated with Britain's Caribbean possessions.

We hold this evidence carefully. It demonstrates how the terminology developed and hardened after the sixteenth century, but it does not prove that the same terminology existed in earlier periods. The identity of the West Indian is older than any of these labels. The labels simply mark the moments when outsiders began to name a people, and a West, that were already here.