In the Francophone Caribbean, the process of métissage began in 1635, when Pierre Belain d'esnambuc first established a French settlement in Martinique. Initially, the French colonizers concluded peace treaties with Pilote, a Carib chief who took an active role in supporting and extending the French reign over the island, and as a publication by the priest and early colonial chronicler Jean–Baptiste du Tertre shows, Martinique became divided into two roughly equal parts between the ‘demeure des François’ [sic] who settled along the Caribbean coast, and the ‘demeure des sauvages’ who took refuge in the hilly interior and along the more rugged Atlantic coastline. Violence between the French and the Caribs escalated, however, and it became apparent that this small territory would not be successfully shared. In 1660 the treaty of Basse–Terre (Guadeloupe) decreed that the Carib population would be forcibly removed from the Lesser Antilles. A number of Caribs fled to the island of Dominica, which to this day is home to the only Amerindian reserve in the Caribbean.

Although the Amerindians were all but exterminated from Martinique and Guadeloupe by the beginning of the eighteenth century, contemporary authors repeatedly reassert Amerindian ties. This is an ongoing ‘travail de mémoire’ in the Caribbean, and a particularly fine cultural example is the Musée Départemental d'Archéologie précolombienne et de préhistoire in Fort–de–France. The Amerindian past pre–dates European ‘discovery’, colonization and slavery, and invoking this aspect of Caribbean cultural heritage becomes an important method of resisting European hegemony. In the extended essay Ecrire en pays dominé, Patrick Chamoiseau imagines the conquest of Martinique from a number of perspectives, including those of D'esnambuc and an Amerindian. He notes that Amerindian customs live on in contemporary society, and can be accessed both through archaeological findings and in the more fluid form of everyday language: