A Spat Over a Spit

Somewhere in the middle of the movie, natives are supposed to capture Johnny Depp's character, Captain Jack Sparrow, and spit-roast the swashbuckling pirate with fruits and vegetables "like a shish kebab," said Bruce Hendricks, the Walt Disney Pictures executive in charge of production.

"It's a funny, almost campy sequence," he said of a film also populated by ghost pirates and zombies. "There are a lot of silly moments in it."

But some of Dominica's Carib inhabitants are offended by what they consider an insinuation that their forebears were cannibals. They've called on the 3,500-strong population that is the last surviving indigenous group in the Caribbean to choose between fleeting fame and tribal honor. Chief Charles Williams asked his community to boycott the project, but most have welcomed the financial infusion.

To those Dominicans who see the economic benefits of the film shoot, it is a frivolous spat over a fantasy story. To others such as Williams, it is a blot on the image of the Caribs. The group is a minority on Dominica, whose 70,000 people are mostly of African descent.

Disney argues that the film is fiction, but Williams says it draws on history.

"Pirates did come to the Caribbean in the 15th, 16th and 17th centuries," he said. "Our ancestors were labeled cannibals. This is being filmed in the Caribbean."

History books still cast the Caribs as cannibals during the time of the European settlement of the Caribbean that began in the 15th century but didn't reach Dominica, a tiny island in the eastern Caribbean, until 200 years later. But the indigenous people, the chief argues, were simply defending themselves.

"Today, that myth, that stigma is still alive," Williams said, denying that the Caribs ever ate those they vanquished. "Today, Disney wants to popularize that stigma one more time, this time through film, and film is a powerful tool of propaganda."

He recalls watching Western films as a boy in the 1960s and cheering for the embattled white settlers rather than the displaced indigenous people. "They were the stars of the film," Williams said. "They were the ones being attacked."