June Is National Caribbean American Heritage Month — And It Starts With a Prayer

By Dee Wells | Protect Our Culture

It’s June 1st.

For those of us with roots in the Caribbean, that date carries two things at once — a celebration and a caution. It’s the first day of National Caribbean American Heritage Month.  It’s also the first day of hurricane season.

So before we celebrate, we pray.

I pray that no storms form and affect the Caribbean or anywhere in the world. In Jesus’s name I pray. Amen.

That prayer came from Hawksnest Beach, St. John, US Virgin Islands — one of the most beautiful places on earth and the kind of place that reminds you exactly why culture is worth protecting.

What the Caribbean Really Is

The Caribbean is not a postcard.

It is not just turquoise water and white sand, though yes — the water is that blue and the sand is that white. The Caribbean is a people. A tapestry woven from African, Indigenous, European, East Indian, and Chinese threads, stitched together over centuries into something the world has never seen anywhere else.

It is Reggae and Calypso and Soca and fungi. It is jerk chicken and saltfish and patés and conch fritters. It is Carnival and J’ouvert, and church on Sunday morning in your finest clothes. It is grandmothers who could feed a village with what was left in the kitchen. It is grandfathers who built things with their hands that are still standing today.

It is a people who have always known how to make something out of nothing — not because they lacked, but because they were gifted with resourcefulness, creativity, and an unshakeable faith.

Manners. Elders. Respect.

If you grew up Caribbean or were raised by someone who did….you know the code.

You speak when you enter a room. You say good morning, good afternoon, good night. You don’t walk past an elder without acknowledging them. You don’t sit while grown folks stand. You say please and thank you not because someone is watching, but because that is who you are.

These weren’t rules written in a book. They were passed down in kitchens and on porches and at Sunday dinner tables. They were modeled by elders who understood that manners are not weakness, they’re the architecture that holds the community together.

This is Caribbean culture, and it’s worth protecting.

Resourcefulness as a Spiritual Gift

The Caribbean has faced hurricanes, colonization, economic hardship, and displacement.  And, yet, through all of it, Caribbean people have rebuilt. Every single time.

Not because it was easy, but because resourcefulness is in our DNA.

When the storms come, Caribbean people don’t wait for someone to save them. They secure what they can, they lean on each other, they pray, and then they get to work. That spirit of making do, of finding beauty in simplicity, of using what God gave you — that is not a coping mechanism. That is a philosophy. A way of living that the rest of the world is still trying to learn.

Why This Month Matters

National Caribbean American Heritage Month was established in 2006 to recognize the contributions of Caribbean Americans to the culture, economy, and identity of the United States.  These contributions are everywhere — in music, in sports, in politics, in medicine, in fashion, and in faith.

For those of us who carry the Caribbean in our blood, this month isn’t about recognition from the outside. It’s about remembering who we are from the inside.

It’s about calling your grandmother. Cooking the food your mother taught you. Playing the music that takes you home. Telling your children where they come from and why it matters.

It’s about protecting the culture before the storms of time and distance wash it away.

For St. John. For the Virgin Islands. For the Caribbean.

Hawksnest Beach will always be home. The water, the stillness, the way the light hits in the late afternoon — there is nothing like it in the world.

This June, as we celebrate National Caribbean American Heritage Month and ask God to keep the storms away, take a moment to document something. A recipe. A story. A memory. A photograph.

Because every culture has a story.  And yours is one worth telling.