"Our stories are not footnotes": Raymond Jessurun's DCRW2026 keynote

When Raymond Jessurun opened the keynote at Dutch Caribbean Research Week 2026, he set aside the usual conference warm-up and said what he came to say. "Our stories are not footnotes." Our culture is not decoration. Our language is not a problem to be corrected. For a room joined from St. Martin, Aruba, Curaçao, Bonaire, Saba, Sint Eustatius, the Netherlands, and the wider Caribbean, it was a fitting place to begin, because the talk was about who gets to shape research in the first place.

Raymond is the DCDC Network's local coordinator for St. Martin, and his argument cuts close to why this network exists. Too often, he reminded us, the islands are studied separately, invited in only after the framework is already built, and asked to fit into categories shaped somewhere else. Questions of culture, memory, language, and labour get treated as side themes. He rejects that. Culture, he argued, is serious business: it is how people remember when the official record leaves them out, and how they explain themselves when outsiders explain them badly.

Culture as archive

He made the point concrete through the work of St. Martin writer Lasana M. Sekou, where the Great Salt Pond is not just geography but an archive. Salt as memory, labour, and resistance. Read that way, an island's history lives not only in government documents but in ponds, family names, burial grounds, songs, and silences. The job of research, then, is not only to collect data but to listen for the silences, and to ask what broke the chain when a record is missing or a family line cannot be traced.

Why this matters for an open-data network

For a network built around open data and FAIR principles, one passage deserves to be sat with. Digitization, Raymond said, is not the same as decolonization. A colonial record remains a colonial record even when it is scanned, cleaned, linked, and placed online. A database can follow a person through ownership and sale more clearly than it reconstructs a mother, a family, a name remembered by kin. That is not an argument against building digital archives. It is an argument for building them with descendant knowledge, oral memory, and community truth, so the tools do not quietly reproduce the blindness of the records they preserve. It is exactly the kind of question a digital competence network should keep asking out loud.

His keynote ranged further than we can do justice to here, into colonial schooling and the talent it filtered outward, into the long arc of labour from slavery through contract work to skilled migration, and into what real repair would have to touch. The full recording, published by NWO, is at the top of this page, and for anyone who wants it in text his written address and slides are below.

The research ethic we are taking forward

What we will carry forward is the research ethic he laid out at the end. Start from island reality. Work in the languages people actually use. Return the knowledge to schools, families, and communities. Strengthen local institutions instead of only extracting from them. Leave behind tools, training, and capacity. Measure success by community benefit, not only by publication. Multilingual life, he insisted, is not confusion but competence, intelligence shaped by history, and any method that cannot hear the language of the people will not understand them.

That standard is a challenge to all of us, this network included, and we intend to take it seriously rather than applaud and move on. In the coming weeks we will be revisiting how we describe our own way of working, so that the principles Raymond named show up in how the DCDC Network actually operates, onboards new members, and shows up across the islands.

Our thanks to Raymond, to the organisers of Dutch Caribbean Research Week 2026, and to everyone building research that stands with the people of the islands rather than only studying them.

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