McBurnie received Trinidad and Tobago’s Humming Bird Gold Medal for her cultural contributions.
1 January 1969 marks the year McBurnie was awarded Trinidad and Tobago’s Humming Bird Gold Medal, one of the nation’s highest honors. By then, her decades of artistic and educational work had made her a foundational figure in the country’s cultural history.
This recognition was historically significant because it symbolized the nation’s formal embrace of the very folk traditions McBurnie had spent much of her career legitimizing. Her work had long resisted colonial and elite prejudices that treated Afro-Caribbean dance as inferior or unsophisticated. By honoring her, Trinidad and Tobago affirmed that folk culture was central to the national story rather than peripheral to it.
The award also reflects McBurnie’s enduring impact as a cultural institution-builder. Through performance, teaching, and the Little Carib Theatre, she created a durable infrastructure for artistic expression in Trinidad. For a woman working in the mid-twentieth century, especially in a field shaped by gendered and racial barriers, this honor marked a powerful public recognition of leadership, creativity, and nation-building through the arts.