Surviving Storms // Building with Disaster in Mind

Building with Disaster in Mind

Adom Philogene Heron

// 11.01.2021

Still standing: The Ti KAi project

As a project team we draw heavily on the work of Dr Lennox Honychurch, Dominica’s foremost public scholar, who has written and presented widely on Dominica’s history, architecture, maroons and distinctive creole and indigenous culture. Over the years Lennox has distinguished himself is an anthropologist whose rich historical knowledge Dominicans repeatedly turn to in bid ground their present.

Here we share his recent work on the hurricane knowledge of the isle’s indigenous people and the resilience of Dominica’s traditional architecture. It is particularly brilliant. This work invites us to think the deep history of hurricane survival, and the indigenous (and later Creole) knowledge and cosmologies that enabled Dominicans to survive so many storms. Here we share his article from Dominica Geographic, Building with Disaster in Mind (2020) and a speech on the same theme delivered to the Organisation of Eastern Caribbean States (OECS) in 2018. We hope you enjoy the work as much as it has inspired CCC’s ti kai survey and other work.