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Celebrating and Recognizing Taíno Heritage | Connecticut House Democrats

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It was an honor to wrap up Hispanic Heritage Month by celebrating a historic moment for Connecticut and for Indigenous people everywhere with the passage of House Resolution 10 (H.R. 10), a measure proudly making Connecticut one of the first states in the nation to formally recognize and preserve the culture and heritage of Taíno descendants. Please click on the picture below to hear my and Rep. Christopher Rosario’s remarks on this measure that we championed.

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Despite all the claims of Native people’s extinction in the Caribbean, in this region, encompassing the thick mountain chains inland from Baracoa to Guantanamo, and through the wider sierras, a Cuban indigenous presence is still recognizable.

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Indigenous Cuba: Hidden in Plain Sight | NMAI Magazine

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Cuba is picturesque everywhere, but most visitors trek to the more accessible western end of the island – Havana and the nearby white-sand beaches, the historic bay and its boardwalk (malecón). This is the tourist mecca of colonial architecture and burgeoning arts, old time cars in a modern metropol…

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Economy

The Taínos were farmers and fishers, and practiced intensive root crop cultivation in conucos, or small raised plots. Manioc was the principal crop, but potatoes, beans, peanuts, peppers and other plants were also grown. Farming was supplemented with the abundant fish and shellfish animal resources of the region. Cotton was grown and spun into cloth, and along with the many other items produced by the skilled Taíno craftspeople, was used in a widespread trade network among the islands.

Taíno socio-political organization

The Taíno are thought to have been matrilineal, tracing their ancestry through the female line. The Taíno of Hispaniola were politically organized at the time of contact into at least five hereditary chiefdoms called cacicazgos. Each casicazgo had a clearly recognized territory, a system of regional chiefs ( caciques) and sub-chiefs, and a paramount ruler. At least two distinct social categories were recognized by the Taíno as subordinate to the caciques. According to the Spanish chronicles, the nitaínos were equated with nobles, and appear to have assisted the caciques in the organization of labor and trade. Behiques, or shamans, were part of the nitaíno group. The remainder of the population- equated by the Spaniards with commoners -were known as naborías. It is estimated that the cacicazgos each incorporated between seventy and a hundred communities, some of which had many hundreds of residents.

Taíno gender roles

Documentary accounts at the time of contact indicate that although the paramount rulers among the Taíno were most often men, women could also be caciques. Women seem to have participated at all levels in the political hierarchy, both wielding power and accumulating wealth. Pre-contact gender roles among the Taíno are not well understood, but most researchers indicated that gender roles among the Taíno were relatively non-exclusive, from political leadership and fighting as warriors to food production.

There were few social or economic activities that were assigned to only either men or only women. For example, constructing the conucos (raised mounds for farming) was done by men, and preparing the manioc was done by women, but both genders tilled, planted and harvested the fields.

Art and belief among the Taíno

One of the most distinctive characteristics of fifteenth century Taíno society (at least to the modern observer) is the creative and exuberant artistry in material culture. Taíno artisans produced a wide variety of craft items, including elaborate decorated ceramics, cotton and cotton products, ground and polished stone beads and ornaments, carved shell and bone ornaments, tools of stone, shell and bone, baskets and hammocks, carved wooden objects, tobacco, various foodstuffs, and exotic birds and feathers.

Because the Taíno themselves did not practice writing, most of the information we have about the Taíno comes from the observations of fifteenth century Spaniards in Hispaniola. Our understanding of them is therefore undoubtedly skewed toward the Spanish point of view, and there is no doubt that the Taínos must certainly have had their own set of complex set of observations about the Spaniards.

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Economy The Taínos were farmers and fishers, and practiced intensive root crop cultivation in conucos, or small raised plots. Manioc was the principal crop, but potatoes, beans, peanuts, peppers and other plants were also grown. Farming was supplemented with the abundant fish and shellfish animal

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Whose History Matters? Students Can Name Columbus, But Most Have Never Heard of the Taíno People " Zinn Education Project

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Whose History Matters? Students Can Name Columbus, But Most Have Never Heard of the Taíno People " Zinn Education Project

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Early in my high school U.S. history classes, I would ask students about "that guy some people say discovered America." All my students knew that the correct answer was Christopher Columbus, and every time I asked this question, some student would break into the sing-song rhyme, "In Fourteen Hundred and Ninety-two, Columbus sailed the ocean blue" - and others would join in.

"Right. So who did he supposedly discover?" I asked.

In almost 30 years of teaching, the best anyone could come up with was: "Indians."

I brushed that answer away: "Yes, but be specific. What were their names? Which nationality?" I never had a student say, "The Taínos."

"So what does this tell us?" I asked. "What does it say that we all know Columbus's name, but none of us knows the nationality of the people who were here first? And there were millions of them."

This erasure of huge swaths of humanity is a fundamental feature of the school curriculum, but also of the broader mainstream political discourse. We usually think about the curriculum as what is taught in school. But as important - perhaps more important - is what is not taught, which includes the lives rendered invisible. Young people, and the rest of us, become inured to the way in which certain people's lives don't count, the way in which the world is cleaved in two: between the worthy and the unworthy, those who matter and those who don't. The "don't matter" people are the ones the Uruguayan writer Eduardo Galeano called los nadies, the nobodies - "Who speak no languages, only dialects. Who have no religions, only superstitions. Who have no arts, only crafts."

For the Taíno people of the Caribbean, their erasure began almost immediately, with Columbus's arrival. It was not curricular, it was flesh and blood. "With 50 men we could subjugate them all and make them do whatever we want," Columbus wrote in his journal on his third day in the Americas. In 1494, Columbus launched the transatlantic slave trade, sending at least two dozen enslaved Taínos to Spain, "men and women, boys and girls," as he wrote. The next year, 1495, Columbus launched massive slave raids, rounding up 1,600 Taínos, from which the "best" 500, perhaps 550, were selected to be shipped to Spain. Of the hundreds of captives left over, "whoever wanted them could take as many as he pleased," one eyewitness, a Spanish colonist, Michele de Cuneo, wrote, "and this was done."

The Spanish priest Bartolomé de las Casas described what he called the "terror" launched by Columbus in his quest for gold and to suppress Taíno resistance:

It was a general rule among Spaniards to be cruel; not just cruel, but extraordinarily cruel so that harsh and bitter treatment would prevent Indians as daring to think of themselves as human beings or having a minute to think at all. So they would cut an Indian's hands and leave them dangling by a shred of skin and they would send him on saying, "Go now, spread the news to your chiefs." They would test their swords and their manly strength on captured Indians and place bets on the slicing off of heads or the cutting of bodies in half with one blow. They burned or hanged captured chiefs.

My students and I read and talked about this erasure - these horrific attacks on Taínos who might dare "to think of themselves as human beings." Because Columbus's policies of enslavement, terrorism, and ultimately, mass murder are so egregious, it's tempting to focus only on Taíno deaths. But those deaths can seem abstract and distant, unless we learn something about Taíno lives.

It has always struck me that Columbus himself expressed much more curiosity about the Taínos than one finds in corporate-produced textbooks - although in recent years, no doubt because of Indigenous activism, textbook publishers have discovered the Taínos, if only briefly and superficially. The Taínos were not literate, in the conventional sense, and so wrote nothing about themselves, but Columbus's journal offers intriguing, if limited, details. In the journal of his first voyage, Columbus wrote about the Taíno people's homes: "Inside, they were well swept and clean, and their furnishing very well arranged; all were made of very beautiful palm branches." He said there were "wild birds, tamed, in their houses; there were wonderful outfits of nets and hooks and fishing-tackle." Columbus writes that it was a "delight" to see Taino canoas (canoes) that were "very beautiful and carved... it was a pleasure to see its workmanship and beauty." After a little more than three months traveling from island to island, Columbus concluded that the Taíno people are "the best people in the world, and beyond all the mildest... a people so full of love and without greed... They love their neighbors as themselves, and they have the softest and gentlest voices in the world, and they are always smiling."

Of course, Columbus's curiosity was grounded in his single-minded quest for gold, and how he might exploit the Taínos to further that mission. As Columbus later wrote King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella: "Gold is a wonderful thing! Whoever owns it is lord of all he wants. With gold it is even possible for souls to open the way to paradise."

Columbus's portrait of the mild, soft, and gentle Taíno may conceal that they also tenaciously resisted the Columbus regime, once its exploitative and deadly nature became clear. This resistance has been called the first anti-colonial guerrilla war in the Americas. It began as early as Columbus's first trip back to Spain, when he left 39 Spaniards at his La Navidad settlement, confident that the powerful Spaniards could handle the supposedly timid Taínos. In response to the Spaniards' rapacity, the Taínos killed all 39 Spaniards, and burned their fort.

If Columbus's first trip, with three vessels and maybe 100 men, was an exploratory probe, the second trip, with 17 ships and between 1,200 and 1,500 men, was a full-scale invasion. When slavery turned out not to be profitable on la Española (the island that today is Haiti and the Dominican Republic), Columbus instituted a tribute system for the Taínos, demanding quotas of gold and cotton, with sadistic punishments for those who failed to comply. This system was "impossible and intolerable," wrote Bartolomé de las Casas.

The Taínos fought back, raiding Spanish forts and killing defenders. Taíno caciques, leaders, worked to build alliances throughout the island. The Taínos continuously resisted the heavily armed Spaniards for almost a year, from May 1495 to March 1496, but uprisings and resistance continued through 1503. According to Spanish accounts, Taínos also went on strike and turned to sabotage. One Spanish eyewitness wrote that the Taínos "thought they might expel [the Spaniards] by creating a scarcity of food. They therefore decided not only to plant no more crops, but also to destroy and tear up all the various kinds of cereals used for bread which had already been sown." Las Casas adds that the Taínos "would hide in the mountains," but when they "fled the Christians, there went with them disease, death, and misery, and an infinite number of fathers and mothers and children died in anguish."

Ironically, in their quest for a happy ending to this grim first chapter in European colonialism in the Americas, textbook writers also focus on food - but not on resistance. For example, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt's middle school text United States History Early Years concludes its section on Columbus:

The Columbian Exchange benefited people all over the world. Potatoes from the Americas became an important food for most Europeans. Corn became an important crop in Africa. Sweet potatoes were grown as far away as China. Today, tomatoes, peanuts, and American beans and peppers are grown in many lands.

The sole "review" question asks: "How did the Columbian Exchange change the diet of Europeans?"

This is how the textbook story ends: wondering about the eating habits of Europeans. Let's remember that enslaving Africans and shipping them to the Americas was also a part of the so-called Columbian Exchange. Africa was not only a receptacle for American corn. Columbus was granted the first royal permit to bring enslaved Africans to the Americas in 1501, less than a decade after his arrival.

Despite textbook attempts to conclude the story with a smiley-face, there is no happy ending. But there is a hopeful one - found in the remarkable resilience of the Taíno people. Contrary to some scholarship, the Taínos were not all killed off by Columbus and subsequent occupiers, and today members of the Taíno diaspora along with people in the Caribbean who claim Taíno ancestry are reviving and celebrating their culture. According to Christina M. González, writing in the fall 2018 issue of American Indian, the Taíno revival began around the quincentenary of Columbus's arrival. The renaissance focuses on language, art, religion, pharmacology, agriculture, fishing, cooking, and, of course, rethinking Taíno history. González writes, "Many in the movement call upon embodied memories of traditions and values disseminated across generations, often by family matriarchs, which espoused mindful relations in a world where all things have life, from plants, stones, rivers, forests, caves, sun and moon, to deceased relatives and disincarnate beings inhabiting their islands."

In recent years, genetic research has confirmed the ongoing Taíno presence in the Caribbean. According to José Barreiro, a scholar and a member of the Taíno Nation of the Antilles, genetic research in Cuba has found that almost 35 percent of Cubans have Native American mitochondrial DNA, with some regions as high as 59 percent. A University of Puerto Rico study of 800 randomly selected Puerto Ricans found 61.1 percent of individuals surveyed had mitochondrial DNA of Indigenous origin. But as a friend recently reminded me, people with Taíno cultural DNA had no need for scientific confirmation that they are still here - "hidden in plain sight," as José Barreiro subtitled his National Museum of the American Indian article on " Indigenous Cuba."

Columbus's treatment of the Taíno people meets the UN definition of genocide. But there has also been a curricular genocide - erasing the memory of the Taíno from our nation's classrooms. How else can we explain students' universal recognition of Columbus and almost total ignorance of the name Taíno? As we work to replace Columbus Day with Indigenous Peoples Day in our communities and schools, let's work to remember the people who were here first. Their lives mattered 500 years ago, and they matter today.

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Whose History Matters? Students Can Name Columbus, But Most Have Never Heard of the Taíno People " Zinn Education Project

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By Bill Bigelow This erasure of huge swaths of humanity is a fundamental feature of the school curriculum, but also of the broader mainstream political discourse. We usually think about the curriculum as what is taught in school. But as important - perhaps more important - is what is not taught, which includes the lives rendered invisible.

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Description of a museum exhibit, lots of information about culture, colonization, and the Taino movement in the 1970s.

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The objects that are generally considered to be the most emblematic of the Caribbean's Native heritage are its archeological artifacts. These form a dialogue with the Native symbols and drawings in caverns and on rocks best known by locals across the region. They fill the Caribbean's national museums and private collections. They contribute to regional visual imaginaries (like image banks for tattoos) and provide work for artisans who create crafts for tourists and masterful fakes for unknowing collectors. They have been deployed as symbols of resistance to colonialism and imperialism, but also to consolidate popular understanding of national identities.

For many audiences who consider these artifacts as part of their heritage, they arouse powerful questions about ancestry and invoke a sense of unresolved history regarding the colonial encounter between European, African, Indigenous and other peoples in the Caribbean.

In another lifetime - 2008 - I first approached the archeological Native American collections at the Smithsonian's American Indian and Natural History museums with an interest in the history of the collections themselves. How were these artifacts first collected, and how did they end up at the Smithsonian? What were the political contexts, the ideologies behind collecting and the market forces at hand? About the time I was poking around collections, I heard someone in the Smithsonian leadership talk about the Taíno movement in Puerto Rico, and I thought to myself, "How's that possible? Indians in Puerto Rico are extinct."

The Taíno Movement

I didn't imagine that in 2018 I would be opening an exhibit, not only about indigenous legacies in the Spanish-speaking Caribbean, but about the Taíno movement. Legacy doesn't raise hackles - it's a palatable topic and doesn't offend the official narrative which holds that Native American survival ( indio in this context) in the Great Antilles was impossible after colonization.

On the other hand, the Taíno movement, a declaration of Native survival through mestizaje (genetic and cultural mixing over time), reclamation and revival, was an intimidating topic for me as an exhibit developer and curator to tackle. This movement involves the descendants of Native peoples of the Spanish-speaking Caribbean and its U.S. diaspora, uniting under the label Taíno. It has emerged since the 1970s. Its participants are organized in diverse groups, informed by different, though often overlapping, social agendas and ideologies. They network and exchange information at in-person events including powwows and spiritual retreats and through online platforms such as Facebook. They are also a no-nonsense community that has been the subject of antagonistic scrutiny by some scholars who contest contemporary Taínos' claim on indigenous identity.

With time I realized that despite the sensitivity of this topic, which clashes with the sensibilities and historical frameworks of some people inside and outside this movement, information for making sense of Native heritage is something for which the public, especially Latino audiences, are hungry.

Indigenous peoples of the Caribbean never have much of historical presence past 1550, by which point, most narratives consider Native peoples to be so few in number, especially in comparison to the increasing enslaved African workforce, that they cease to exist. The paper archives of the countryside and backwoods do not exist. Where Native presence does persist is in the repertoire and archive of popular memory, family histories, folk stories, regional lore and as living spirits in Caribbean religious traditions.

One thing to remember about the Caribbean, even in seemingly more culturally homogenous areas like Cuba, the Dominican Republic and Puerto Rico, is that despite its size it contains lots of diversity. This variety is complicated by creolization, which is the intricate process of cultural changes and exchanges - in all directions - over time, and by micro-regional differences. The colonial economies, labor practices and settlement patterns of the islands were varied and changed over time. Spanish control and presence was both real in the force of its genocide, and also symbolic in its capacity to sustain control and effectively settle and exploit. As an example, in Hispaniola (today Haiti and the Dominican Republic), four Native villages were discovered on the northern coast in 1556 during a period in which the island's dwindling Native peoples had presumably all been counted by the official censuses.

Surviving 1492

The post-1492 survival of Native people, identity and culture in the region might be understood through overlapping forms of social positioning such as economic integration without too much intermarriage, isolation from the colonial order (going "off the grid") and intermarriage. On the eastern side of Cuba, scholars are increasingly finding evidence in records and archeology of Native peoples and their neighborhoods integrated into the local colonial economy, in occupations such as ranching or pottery-making. Maroon communities formed by Africans and Native peoples escaping slavery were intentionally isolated from colonial authority; the memory of Native ancestors is still alive and honored in surviving Jamaican maroon communities. Similarly, there is evidence for the movement of Native peoples from the Greater Antilles to the Lesser Antilles and to Arawakan-language speaking areas of South America during the violence, epidemics and rampant enslavement of the early colonial period.

Intermarriage, politely put, refers to the genetic and cultural exchanges between Native, African and European peoples. The outcome of intermarriage - mixedness ( mestizaje) is traditionally thought of as the end of the road for cultural Indianness. The Taíno movement, not unlike aspects of the Chicano movement, says just the opposite, that mixed race, descendants of indios have a right to reclaim and reconstruct this heritage, and that it is integral to their sense of spiritual and cultural wholeness.

Finding the Native peoples in the archives of the Dominican Republic and Puerto Rico requires serious academic inquiry. In the Dominican Republic regions like San Juan de la Maguana contain multi-layered Native histories that have spiritual dimensions like the invocation of the venerated chieftainess Anacaona (hanged by Spanish colonizers in the early colonial period). While some Dominican or Puerto Rican towns or areas are associated with the resettlement of particular Native communities (like the followers of Enriquillo or Natives from Mona Island), most of the family stories of Taíno movement participants situate their indio identity in the countryside. These accounts often describe somewhat isolated family homesteads relying largely on what they farmed or gathered from the surrounding forest for food, housing materials and domestic objects.

It merits restating that the social history of the countryside or back-country was usually only of superficial documentary interest to European travelers. It didn't emerge as a topic in national Caribbean histories in the 20th century or was usually perceived through particular lenses like Marxism, Afrodiasporic Studies or Women's Studies, which generally did not consider indigeneity. In the Dominican Republic and Puerto Rico, it is difficult to find textual documentation of Native communities or family groups. Despite increasing finds of Taíno genealogists which include church and civil records indicating ancestors' race as india/o, this is still an emerging area of inquiry which requires further mapping of family groups and which correlates with local histories.

While in eastern Cuba researchers have been increasingly successful in uncovering and presenting the evidence of Native survival within Spanish colonial society into the present, I wonder how much of this history can really be recovered through archival and archeological research. So much of it unfolded outside the realm of documentation. I can only imagine what the Greater Antilles offered socially for the mixed race, Native and African peoples "left behind" on the islands by the bulk of Spanish settlers who moved onto minerally richer lands in Mexico, Peru and elsewhere on the mainland.

For about 200 years the Spanish authorities ignored the hinterlands of the islands (and their people), which had freedom from racialized control and labor/resource exploitations. The added bonus was that new forms of protein, like pigs and cows, offered better odds of survival in the remote interior into which escaping peoples like Natives, enslaved Africans and European outcasts retreated. Unfortunately, this is a critical period in history (perhaps outside of history) for which we have few tantalizing glimpses, such as physician Dr. Hans Sloan's 1725 account of British Jamaica that describes the gardens and plant knowledge of the Natives farmers and hunters who had been integrated into colonial society. It should be noted that Native peoples from neighboring regions of the Caribbean were also enslaved and resettled in the Greater Antilles - such as the indigenous Jamaicans that formed new communities with African maroons, they too are ancestors and are part of the Taíno story.

Framing the Exhibit

As the Taíno movement grows in numbers, complexity and public presence, it seemed like a disservice to do another Caribbean archeology exhibit without addressing the contemporary movement. Our public is deeply interested in this topic. It gets to the very origin story of the region and the whole of the Americas. Many outside the movement observe it with mixed emotions; the traditional history of the region makes the movement seem impossible, and yet every family seems to have a india/o in the family just a few generations back.

Furthermore, the heritage of the whole Caribbean is contested at several levels; some fear that embracing a contemporary sense of Taíno diminishes the contributions of African ancestors to national culture or personal identity. It is truly a contested heritage, and yet many Latinos of mixed racial/ethnic ancestry (i.e. most of us) are interested in their ancestral cultures as part of an effort to reconcile the violence of colonization. Contextualizing the Taíno movement in a way that respected the experiences and understanding of its diverse participants, and that created a space for all visitors to reconsider the meanings of ancestry and the relevance of indigenous knowledge in the present, became the central focus of this exhibit.

What are the exhibition's limitations? For one, due to the small size of our gallery, we contextualize the Taíno movement as emerging primarily from bottom up, representing a claim to indigenous identity rooted in a campesino, or rural, Native-mestizo experience and consciousness. Little space is left in the exhibition to explore the use of Native legacy in nation building projects by Caribbean intellectuals and institutions, and the influence of symbolic Indians (e.g. emblems of colonial injustice and anti-colonial resistance, or symbols of the nation) on the world view and political agenda of participants in the Taíno movement.

Another limitation of the exhibition is how we possibly under-emphasize the power of spirituality as a key force spurring the growth of the Taíno movement. For many of its participants, the Taíno movement offers a spiritually rewarding opportunity to reconnect with and honor neglected ancestors, forces from the natural world and supernatural beings/ancestral deities. For Caribbean peoples working with Native spirits (inside, but equally outside the movement), Native ancestors and spirit guides provide advice and warnings, and can be indispensable for healing or solving problems. A growing strand within the Taíno movement is also trying to reconstruct the religion of the Arawakspeaking peoples of the Greater Antilles prior to Christianization.

This project of spiritual reconstruction involves studying historical texts and comparative ethnographic studies of historic and contemporary Native peoples related to the Taíno peoples of the Caribbean. It also involves revelations through dreams and encounters with nature - phenomena called alternative ways of knowing that are difficult for most scholars to analyze. How could an exhibition effectively convey the spiritual dimensions of ethnicity and history, and the spiritual weight of ancestors on the present?

Lastly, initial plans for the exhibit entailed a geographic scope that brought the Spanish-speaking Greater Antilles into conversation with other areas of the Caribbean with important and different indigenous legacies such as Jamaica, Haiti, the Lesser Antilles and areas of the continent like the Garifuna-populated coast of Central America. The size of our gallery, and our desire as exhibition people to tell a comprehensible story, necessitated a tightened geographic and cultural scope.

What are the exhibition's greatest contributions? It is groundbreaking in its treatment of the contemporary Taíno movement for the following reasons. First, its point of departure is Native survival on the Greater Antilles, which we substantiate with the enduring (though not unchanged) presence of Native genes, culture, knowledge and identity among the descendants of the Taíno peoples of the region. Second, it respects and dialogues with the concepts of indigeneity, heritage and identity that are articulated by the participants in the Taíno movement. It also points at the gaps and privileges that exist in the historical archive of the Spanish Caribbean; while most Caribbean peoples lived in a rural context before 1950, the social history of the countryside, often lacking preserved archives and material culture, becomes an area of (intermittent) study only in the 20th century. The history of the region until then is largely an account of early conquest and settlement, pirate attacks, the movement of Spanish fleets, fortress construction and the activities of the Church.

Finally, and perhaps most importantly, this exhibition offers a more historically accurate understanding of mestizaje that makes the relationship between and legacy of African and indigenous peoples more explicit, from the maroon communities of the early colonial period to the contemporary healers of the region's different spiritual traditions.

I feel profoundly fortunate to have been part of a project that is grounded in the intersection of race, history and identity in the Americas. It is embedded in questions of ancestry, multiple identities and ethnic politics that, while representing a specific content - the Spanish Caribbean and its U.S. diaspora - relate to universal quandaries around heritage and framing history. Taíno: Native Heritage and Identity in the Caribbean will energize visitors' conversations around ancestry and history, and it will create new paradigms for understanding Native heritage in the construction of Caribbean identities, and the role of Native people and their knowledge in the survival, history, spirituality and culture of the region's diverse peoples.

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Taíno Survival: Back into History | NMAI Magazine

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No exhibition has actually addressed the topic of the survival of Native peoples in the Caribbean after 1492. The Native peoples of the region, represented by the durable elements of their material culture, are contained in museums within the pre-colonial moment.

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Protecting Puerto Rico's Coastlines & Indigenous Heritage

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Protecting Puerto Rico's Coastlines & Indigenous Heritage

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Last April, Alegna Malavé Marrero joined fellow community activists in removing the fencing and vegetative debris that block public access to the Cueva del Indio Nature and Marine Reserve in the northern town of Arecibo in Puerto Rico. A veteran of environmental protest, she came prepared with Puerto Rico's Council for Protection of Archaeological Lands regulatory policy Laws 111 and 112, which dictate the protection and preservation of terrestrial archaeological sites, including caves and caverns intrinsic to the conservation of Puerto Rico's natural and cultural heritage.

For the past seven years, both entrances to the reserve have remained illegally obstructed by business magnate José González Freyre, owner of Pan American Grain. González Freyre, who purchased land adjacent to the Nature Reserve, placed fencing and debris around the caves, effectively closing off access to the site. Home to a delicate ecosystem of flora, fauna, rock formations and marine species, like hermit crabs and the endangered green sea turtle, the reserve is also an archaeological site featuring hundreds of ancient rock art carvings from Puerto Rico's first inhabitants. Choosing April 9 for their manifestation was no coincidence; it marked the 31 st anniversary of the site's designation as a Natural Reserve by Puerto Rico's Department of Natural & Environmental Resources (DRNA). In 2015, the area was also named a Marine Reserve by the Puerto Rico Legislature.

According to these laws, it is a felony to appropriate, mutilate, or loot a registered archaeological site. Further, by charging visitors for parking, González Freyre is exploiting the site for personal profit.

Involved in organizing since 2005, Malavé Marrero has long advocated for protecting and preserving her country's natural resources, delicate ecosystems, and Indigenous heritage. From organizing grassroots efforts demanding the demolition of an illegal construction in Puerto Rico's northwestern coastal town of Aguadilla, to testifying at legislative hearings, to camping out for a week to protest private construction on public land, her mission is clear: to stop rampant development that is destroying Puerto Rico's marine and nature reserves.

As spokesperson for Defending la Cueva del Indio (DCI-681), an educational, community-based organization promoting the preservation of the Indigenous cave located along the region's coastal route PR-681, Malavé Marrero is determined to safeguard its cultural significance. On April 9 activists managed to remove part of the fencing, but community access to the caves remains closed.

Formally trained as a socio-spatial planner-focusing on land use based on ample citizen participation and sociological knowledge applied within an urban context-Malavé Marrero uses her knowledge of Puerto Rican regulatory policy to educate communities about illegal land use and the threats posed to agricultural and natural resources. She does so against the backdrop of current Governor Pedro Pierluisi's pro-statehood administration - one that prioritizes the interests of private investors. In this interview, Malavé Marrero shares insights on the current political climate she describes as "a threat not only to those of us living in Borikén [Puerto Rico's Indigenous name] but also to all of the natural species of marine life that call this their home."

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Lola Rosario: When many hear the word "coastline" they think of beaches, but in Puerto Rico it's more than that. Share with us what other coastal areas are being negatively impacted.

Alegna Malavé Marrero: In the town of Salinas, in southern Puerto Rico, the National Estuarine Research Reserve Bahía de Jobos is among 30 reserves managed by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration [NOAA]. It is an area made up of mangroves and beaches. Despite the on-site presence of guards from the DRNA, there have been documented witnessings of mangrove burnings and illegal construction of docks. Community members have been organizing since the 1980s, trying to protect the area known as Paso del Indio y Cueva León due to its ancestral significance. A place inhabited since the times of our Indigenous Taíno forebears, residents there are resisting displacement and fighting to protect their natural area.

It's important to understand the mangroves' critical role in forming the Estuarine Reserve's barrier between the open sea and dry land, especially during times of flooding. Deforestation and burning of mangroves are also destroying bird nests and marine life. All of this is happening in the federal government's presence . It must not go unnoticed; there have to be consequences.

LR: How does the government's pro-privatization stance factor into the equation of further endangering marine life and the archipelago's Indigenous heritage?

AMM: Pedro Pierluisi's administration insists on using Joint Regulation (JR) 2020, legislation pertaining to the Evaluation and Issuance of Permits Related to Development, Land Use, and Business Operations [this legislation was nullified by Puerto Rico Supreme Court in March 2023]. JR 2020 would reconfigure land use, but by renaming it an "Emergency Joint Regulation" Pierluisi's government is ignoring the court ruling and instead using it as a tool to facilitate the deregulation of territorial plans, allowing illegal constructions in natural, agricultural, and historical reserves. As a community organizer for the Asamblea de Pueblo (People's Assembly), I was tasked with educating communities about the dangers of JR 2020 and the importance of active citizen participation in public hearings and submitting comments to protect livability in the communities from commercial encroachment and displacement.

When we see what's happening in the neighborhood of Islote in the northern coastal town of Arecibo with the Cueva del Indio Nature and Marine Reserve, this administration's position is clear - privatization and dollar signs trump any environmental concerns. In 2016, José González Freyre closed off access to the archaeological site. When activists attempt to access the area, Carlos Mena, administrator of González Freyre's property, rebukes them by brandishing a firearm and charging between $10 and $35 for vehicle parking. Their privatization of the area was nothing more than usurpation and exploitation.

In July 2022, Islote community leader Lauce Colón Pérez reported the land appropriation, citing the DRNA's 1974 demarcation limits relevant to Puerto Rico's maritime terrestrial zone. According to the demarcation, the direct access route to Cueva del Indio that was established is currently being privatized by González Freyre. As for my organization, at DCI-681 our mission is to preserve the cultural significance of the Cueva del Indio with the goal of developing a sustainable management plan that conforms to the highest environmental and social standards. By forming alliances with community organizations, the municipality of Arecibo, the DRNA, and the Institute of Puerto Rican Culture, we would formulate a cohesive program - one that centers education on environmental and cultural protection.

LR: Thinking about land use and development, the slogan "The Beaches are Public Domain" comes to mind. Can you take us behind the scenes for a closer perspective on its meaning?

AMM: Our work is about much more than chants and rallying cries. "Las Playas Son del Pueblo" carries with it a reminder to the government and private interests that our beaches and natural resources are not for sale. Consider the situation in Cueva Las Golondrinas, a marine cave located in the northwestern coastal town of Aguadilla. Between 2019 and 2020, businessman Carlos Román González illegally obtained permits through his construction company, Aguadilla Pier Corp (APC), to begin building permanent structures on top of the cave. Over the past few years, there have been countless protests demanding that the DRNA order the demolition of the property (which includes a gazebo and an equestrian facility).

During a manifestation this past January, things got very intense. As unarmed activists approached the heavily guarded complex, taking videos and shouting, César Toledo Montilla, a member of Román González's private security detail, fired at the crowd of protestors. One of his bullets landed embedded in the lower leg of environmental advocate Ángel Luis Torres Rosado, who was subsequently rushed to a nearby hospital. Torres Rosado eventually healed from his physical injury; however, everyone understands the severity of what happened. That bullet could have easily ended someone's life. In this environmental struggle, the stakes are high. We're up against corruption and folks with deep pockets - it has been reported that Román González has made hefty monetary contributions to both of Puerto Rico's main political parties, the PNP [New Progressive Party] and the PPD [Popular Democratic Party]. Our commitment to the statement "the beaches are public domain" is non-negotiable.

LR: As a sociologist, what role does your academic background play in advocating for the coastlines vis-à-vis your interaction with police and local authorities?

AMM: I, and others, are in this struggle because we are fighting for this country we love so much. Being passionate about our heritage, natural resources, and the environment moves us to do what we do. Trained as a sociologist, I'm well attuned to the dynamics of protest. As activists/cultural advocates, our emotions are inextricably tied to this work - as I discussed earlier, potential dangers exist. That's why when I'm present at these manifestations, I watch over the physical and emotional safety of those in my group. Further, as the daughter of a nurse, our collective well-being is one of my priorities.

When it comes to local authorities, it's crucial to be mindful of their role. The police represent an inherent capacity of elected officials/government to control its citizens. What I denounce is the illegal use of force in their authoritative power against activists - it's visible in how the police are equipped with protective shields, helmets, batons, teargas, handcuffs, and sometimes even with guns. Clearly, they are present to maintain order. This being the case, I'm certainly not going to start arguing with them about Joint Regulation 2020 or other local ordinances. They'll say (as a few have said to me in the past), "I don't know about those laws, I'm just here following orders." So, I avoid debating legalese with them; I save that for when I'm in court testifying against illegal construction. Then, after presenting evidence in the form of video, photographic images, and missing permits, we wait for a judge to order the demolition of said construction. It is this document I show to the senior police officer in charge of the squadron at a given protest. By giving them the facts, I'm reminding them it's their job to ensure the law is upheld.

LR: And, are you seeing changes in those instances? Is the rule of law being followed?

AMM: In Puerto Rico, the government continues to allow illegal constructions in protected nature reserve areas. Where I am seeing change is in greater awareness of public domain land use and the legalities thereto. As environmental justice seekers, we need to utilize effective strategies in our fight. We do so through the use of knowledge of [legal] policy and education.

One instance that stands out recently relates to a wall [we painted on] at the beach in Sol y Playa on the west coast of Rincón, in protest of the illegal construction of a condominium pool directly adjacent to the shoreline. I heard a police officer referencing environmental law, which makes me very optimistic. This is a step in the right direction because now we have law enforcement officials becoming engaged and informed of the laws that are being broken.
Lola Rosario is a New York City-raised Afro Boricua cultural storyteller and spoken word poet. Her work focuses on feminism, cultural identity, and social justice issues impacting her ancestral homeland of Borikén.

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Protecting Puerto Rico's Coastlines & Indigenous Heritage

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Sociologist and environmental activist Alegna Malavé Marrero talks about the battle against privatization and corruption threatening natural resources and the nation's cultural identity.

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Climate Change and Colonialism: Living History at Puerto Rico’s Key Indigenous Ceremonial 

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Climate Change and Colonialism: Living History at Puerto Rico’s Key Indigenous Ceremonial 

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Climate Change and Colonialism: Living History at Puerto Rico’s Key Indigenous Ceremonial Sites

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“Offering” Smoke billows from a carved out conch shell filled with charcoal and shards of copal (tree resin). This is an offering to the ancestors at Tibes Indigenous Ceremonial Park, the oldest known…

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The Caribbean Indigenous Legacies Project: Celebrating Taíno Culture

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The Caribbean Indigenous Legacies Project: Celebrating Taíno Culture

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The Caribbean Indigenous Legacies Project: Celebrating Taíno Culture

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Mar 08, 2016 | By Isabella Roden Popular history holds that shortly after Christopher Columbus arrived to the Caribbean in 1492, the Arawakan-speaking Native people known as the Taíno were completely destroyed by slavery, European disease, starvation, and war.

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Beyond Paper Genocide: Taíno Recognition in Puerto Rico

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Beyond Paper Genocide: Taíno Recognition in Puerto Rico

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The name of the influential '90s Latin American metal band ANIMAL stands for Acosados Nuestros Indios Murieron Al Luchar, which roughly translates to "Harassed, Our Indians Died While Fighting." That our indios, or Native populations, were mostly exterminated except for a few extant pockets of survival, has become a fixture of contemporary Latin American discourse. In North America, US history books teach students that within 100 years of Columbus's arrival, the Natives of Puerto Rico had been assimilated, perished from disease, or massacred to the point of nonexistence.

However, the story these books tell is incomplete. Their text perpetrates paper genocide, or the disappearance of entire civilizations in official paper reports, data, and other records. This crime has been committed against several mainland-US Native populations, from the Native American tribes of Virginia, which eugenicist and physician Walter Plecker reclassified as "colored" in Virginia's 1924 Act to Preserve Racial Integrity, to Rhode Island's own Narragansett people, who engaged in a centuries-long struggle to achieve federal recognition, which was finally attained in 1983.

Despite this dominant narrative, I grew up hearing from my paternal family that we were, and are, Taínos-the longstanding Indigenous people of the Caribbean with whom Columbus infamously first made contact. My namesake, Guarocuya, comes from a former Taíno cacique, or prince. In the Caribbean, from Borinquen (Puerto Rico) to Xaymaca (Jamaica), there has always been a collective cry seeking to fight the notion that our communities were erased from history. And, although the circumstances of US mainland Native Americans today garners much attention, the parallel experience of Native Americans outside of the 50 states is often forgotten. Terms that include Natives of Puerto Rico and the US Virgin Islands, such as "Indigenous of the Americas," have recently come into use.

"The Taíno people were-and continue to be-trampled on by a set of legal, political, economic, and social mechanisms that systematically keep Indigenous people out of positions of political power."

However, the identity of modern Puerto Ricans differs drastically from mainland Native Americans-it represents a fusion of Taíno, African, and Spanish cultures, with American influence that stems from the territory's 1898 incorporation. Modern census practices perpetuate the paper genocide of Taínos, feeding into the false settler colonial narrative of our erasure. These practices must be amended to promote interculturalism and allow for self-identification.

The traditional historical discourse maintained by paper genocide is that Puerto Rican Taínos all disappeared through mass suicides and mestizaje (miscegenation), and such mestizaje supplanted any native identity. Terms such as mulatto and mestizo granted Spanish Catholic priests who registered births the power to greatly diminish the official numbers of Taínos. Under US rule, this treatment continued: The US Census limited its race and ethnicity categories to Hispanic, white, Black, or mixed. According to data collected by Spanish authorities, the Taíno population plummeted from an estimated one million at the time of Spanish arrival in 1493 to just 2,300 in 1787. Not one was documented in 1802. To systematically prevent the formation of more federally recognized tribes, the 1802 US Census reclassified any Puerto Rican who identified as "Indian" as "mixed."

illustration by Maria Hahne

Yet, in the 2020 US Census, over 92,000 Puerto Ricans self-identified as Indigenous. According to a 2016 National Geographic report, the latest genetic research showed that 61 percent of all Puerto Ricans have Native American mitochondrial DNA, revealing "a high number of genetic markers for a supposedly extinct people." In 2018, a team from the Center for Geogenetics at the University of Copenhagen managed to reconstruct the complete Taíno genome using an 8th to 10th century Taíno skeleton. The researchers were able to establish "clear similarities" between modern Puerto Ricans and Taíno genetic ancestry.

Historians such as Antonio Sotomayor from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign argue that Taíno culture, even more so than African or Spanish culture, had the largest contribution to the formation of a Puerto Rican identity. This is for a very simple reason: It is our mother culture, whereas the other two are overseas cultures. Evidence of Taíno influence abounds, illustrated by the simple example of someone attending a "barbeque" to try some "Caribbean" cuisine, which is infused with a taste of "guava," going off to smoke "tobacco" while resting in a "hammock" and ending the day by sailing in a "canoe" before the "hurricane" comes. All of these words are of Taíno origin.

"And, although the circumstances of US mainland Native Americans today garners much attention, the parallel experience of Native Americans outside of the 50 states is often forgotten."

The Census Bureau and the Bureau of Indian Affairs's refusal to acknowledge this evidence perpetuates a paper genocide that has occurred for centuries and clearly indicates the US government's systematic opposition to Native and Indigenous recognition. At the root of the problem is the issue that in Puerto Rico, a territory that has been under external rule for 528 years, foreign occupiers have always prioritized colonial interests over the diversity of peoples or nations. The Taíno people were-and continue to be-trampled on by a set of legal, political, economic, and social mechanisms that systematically keep Indigenous people out of positions of political power. In the hands of foreign elite, Puerto Rico has institutionalized colonialist systems and policies that maintain the status of the Taíno people as third-class citizens, or even non-citizens.

Oppressive systems have resulted in an American society in which Indigenous peoples are generally the most impoverished populations. Similarly punitive structures have not spared Puerto Ricans. Indigenous people in Puerto Rico suffer from myriad injustices, including, but not limited to, economic depression, poor education, and inadequate healthcare. Colonization has not ended: It may have transformed, disguised, and concealed itself, but it maintains its brutality against the poor.

Unlike colonialism, interculturalism recognizes the reality of a multicultural human family, and it promotes processes that value all cultures in an environment of mutual respect. It seeks to eradicate the historical positioning of dominant and subordinate cultures, instead focusing on appreciating and celebrating human diversity. The goal of interculturalism is the full integration of populations and cultures with their own identities, rather than their assimilation into a dominant national identity. Through intercultural dialogues, the swift judgment of casting out what is different from one's own culture gives way to considerations of the complexity of human society and diverse forms of human organization.

"According to a 2016 National Geographic report, the latest genetic research showed that 61 percent of all Puerto Ricans have Native American mitochondrial DNA, revealing "a high number of genetic markers for a supposedly extinct people.""

Along with generally promoting an intercultural perspective, the US Census Bureau and the Department of Interior's Bureau of Indian Affairs should allow for self-identification on the basis of parentage, family descent, or genetic ancestry. Proposals to implement self-identification have thus far fallen on deaf ears, largely due to the government's selfish fear that they would cause many new tribes to spring up and claim reparations or gambling licenses.

In the meantime, modern personal genomics technologies, such as those sold by Ancestry.com, 23andMe, or MyHeritage, allow Taíno descendants to research our ancestry. These genetic tests tell me that I am nearly 8 percent Indigenous American and that my Indigenous composition comes entirely from the Caribbean. This evidence clearly demonstrates the paper genocide committed by federal Native American policies: I carry a Taíno name, speak the Taíno language, and 8 percent of my DNA is entirely Taíno-yet Taínos are extinct? No one dares to deny my African, European, and Jewish roots, yet my Native ones face constant rejection.

Fortunately, hope is not lost: Many modern heritage rescue groups, such as the Taíno Jatibonícu Tribe of Boriken, the Taíno Nation of the Antilles, the United Confederation of the Taíno People, the Guatu Ma-Cu A Boriken Puerto Rico People, and Higuayagua, are actively working to foster and protect the Taíno culture. While many aspects of Taíno culture have been lost over time or mixed with Spanish and African cultures, our heritage remains unique, and we all want to be heard and recognized for who we are.

Anderson, Mark. "When Afro Becomes (like) Indigenous: Garifuna and Afro-Indigenous Politics in Honduras." Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Anthropology 12, no. 2 (2007): 384-413. https://doi.org/10.1525/jlat.2007.12.2.384.

Aquino, Luis Hernandez. "Diccionario De Voces Indgenas De Puerto Rico." Google Books. Editorial Cultural, 1977. https://books.google.com/books/about/Diccionario_de_voces_ind%C3%ADgenas_de_Puert.html?id=OpkuAAAAYAAJ.

Brockell, Gillian. "Here Are the Indigenous People Christopher Columbus and His Men Could Not Annihilate." The Washington Post. WP Company, October 14, 2019. https://www.washingtonpost.com/history/2019/10/14/here-are-indigenous-people-christopher-columbus-his-men-could-not-annihilate/.

Estevez, Jorge, Rene Perez, and Keisha Josephs. "Origins of the Word Taino." ResearchGate, September 2016. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/296694496_Origins_of_the_word_Taino.

Magazine, Smithsonian. "Ancient DNA Contradicts Historical Narrative of 'Extinct' Caribbean Taíno Population." Smithsonian.com. Smithsonian Institution, February 22, 2018. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/ancient-dna-contradicts-historical-narrative-extinct-caribbean-taino-population-180968221/.

Marcus, Susan. "Virginia's Racism toward Its First People Cannot Be Forgotten." The Washington Post. WP Company, December 12, 2019. https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/virginias-racism-toward-its-first-people-cannot-be-forgotten/2019/12/12/189ae1f4-1b6a-11ea-977a-15a6710ed6da_story.html.

Martinez-Cruzado, Juan C. "The Use of Mitochondrial DNA to Discover Pre-Columbian Migrations to the Caribbean: Results for Puerto Rico and Expectations for the Dominican Republic." ResearchGate, 2002. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/26406975_The_Use_of_Mitochondrial_DNA_to_Discover_Pre-Columbian_Migrations_to_the_Caribbean_Results_for_Puerto_Rico_and_Expectations_for_the_Dominican_Republic.

Miller, Greg. "How Mapmakers Help Indigenous People Defend Their Lands." Culture. National Geographic, May 4, 2021. https://www.nationalgeographic.com/culture/article/indigenous-cultures-mapping-projects-reclaim-lands-columbus.

Montgomery, Michelle R. "Identity Politics of Difference: The Mixed-Race American Indian Experience." Tribal College Journal of American Indian Higher Education, March 14, 2019. https://tribalcollegejournal.org/identity-politics-of-difference-the-mixed-race-american-indian-experience/.

Muratorio, Blanca. "Indigenous Women's Identities and the Politics of Cultural Reproduction in the Ecuadorian Amazon." American Anthropologist 100, no. 2 (1998): 409-20. https://doi.org/10.1525/aa.1998.100.2.409.

Nations, United. "United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples for Indigenous Peoples." United Nations, 2007. https://www.un.org/development/desa/indigenouspeoples/declaration-on-the-rights-of-indigenous-peoples.html.

Schroeder, Hannes, Martin Sikora, Shyam Gopalakrishnan, Lara M. Cassidy, Pierpaolo Maisano Delser, Marcela Sandoval Velasco, Joshua G. Schraiber, et al. "Origins and Genetic Legacies of the Caribbean Taino." Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 115, no. 10 (2018): 2341-46. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1716839115.

Sotomayor, Antonio. "La Colonia Soberana: Deportes Olímpicos, Identidad Nacional y Política Internacional En Puerto Rico." CLACSO, January 1, 2020. https://www.academia.edu/43426665/La_colonia_soberana_Deportes_ol%C3%ADmpicos_identidad_nacional_y_pol%C3%ADtica_internacional_en_Puerto_Rico.

Via, Marc, Christopher R. Gignoux, Lindsey A. Roth, Laura Fejerman, Joshua Galanter, Shweta Choudhry, Gladys Toro-Labrador, et al. "History Shaped the Geographic Distribution of Genomic Admixture on the Island of Puerto Rico." PLoS ONE 6, no. 1 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0016513.

Wade, Lizzie. "Genes of 'Extinct' Caribbean Islanders Found in Living People." Science, 2018. https://www.science.org/content/article/genes-extinct-caribbean-islanders-found-living-people.

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Yong, Ed. "How Ancient DNA Can Help Recast Colonial History." The Atlantic. Atlantic Media Company, September 18, 2019. https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2019/09/what-ancient-dna-says-about-puerto-ricos-history/598246/.

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Beyond Paper Genocide: Taíno Recognition in Puerto Rico - Brown Political Review

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The name of the influential '90s Latin American metal band ANIMAL stands for Acosados Nuestros Indios Murieron Al Luchar, which roughly translates to "Harassed, Our Indians Died While Fighting."

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Indigenous Taíno of Puerto Rico take their fight for visibility and rights to the UN

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Indigenous Taíno of Puerto Rico take their fight for visibility and rights to the UN

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Indigenous Taíno of Puerto Rico take their fight for visibility and rights to the UN

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Without U.S. representation, the Taíno take the fight for environmental justice and cultural preservation international.

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Indigenous Taíno of Puerto Rico fight for visibility, rights

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Indigenous Taíno of Puerto Rico fight for visibility, rights

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Source: Indian Country Today

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This story is published as part of the Global Indigenous Affairs Desk, an Indigenous-led collaboration between Grist, Indian Country Today, and High Country News.
In 2017, Hurricane Maria hit the Caribbean, destroying homes, killing thousands, and driving many from the region. Indigenous Taíno people in Puerto Rico were on the front lines of the disaster, which has since been compounded by environmental violence in the form of toxic military waste, luxury development on cultural sites, and other threats. But the Taíno struggle to get those concerns acknowledged by the U.S. and other governments. Now representatives are at the United Nations Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues (UNPFII) in New York to call attention to their situation. "If we're not getting visibility or any kind of recognition at the national level, we have no choice but to take it outside and try to build that visibility for our people," said R. Múkaro Agüeibaná Borrero, President of the United Confederation of Taíno People.

The Taíno people are Indigenous to the Caribbean and live in Puerto Rico, Cuba, the Dominican Republic, the U.S. Virgin Islands, and more. When Christopher Columbus first made landfall in 1492, the Taíno were the first people he met. Today, Puerto Rico is an unincorporated territory of the United States, which means that it is neither an independent country nor an official state. Puerto Rico has a non-voting member of Congress and does not have electoral college votes in presidential elections. Because of this colonial relationship, the Taíno have few platforms to make their concerns heard.

International forums like the UNPFII are a rare opportunity to directly engage with officials from the United States and other countries - providing space for the Taíno to advocate for policies that will help their communities. "There is a narrative that Taíno people were wiped out," Borrero said. "So we have to make statements at the international level, to say 'wait a minute, we are here.'"

Andrea Carmen, Yaqui and Executive Director of the International Indian Treaty Council, says that for the Taíno, Puerto Rico's political status presents challenges for the Taíno. "What makes them unique is they are still residents of a colony," she said. Carmen added that, like the Taíno, most Indigenous peoples around the world also lack state recognition, which makes the UNPFII and other international venues even more important in their fight for rights.

In a statement to the forum, Tai Pelli, another representative from the United Confederation of Taíno People, highlighted the environmental and climate crises facing Indigenous peoples in Puerto Rico. Increasingly powerful storms have destroyed homes and driven many from the island while illegal toxic waste dumping and military waste contamination are also serious issues. On the island municipalities of Vieques and Culebra, the U.S. military conducted weapons testing for over 60 years, leaving unexploded ordinance and dangerous chemicals behind. "Increasing cancer rates and other non-contagious diseases are a direct result of the environmental injustices our people confront every day," Pelli said.
Watch: ICT reporter Carina Dominguez talks UN Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues on 'ICT Newscast with Aliyah Chavez'
Pointing to luxury hotels and other development projects on culturally significant sites like the Dry Forest and the Kaguana Ceremonial Center, Pelli called on the UN to confront the issue with UNESCO, which oversees some of the sites, and demanded a review of UNESCO's protected areas mandate and greater transparency. "The wrath of greed and uncontrolled development are beginning to seem as dangerous as the hurricanes, earthquakes and pandemic that we are still trying to survive," she said.

The United Confederation of Taíno People also called attention to Taíno language revitalization efforts, which will lead to the publication of the first Classic Taíno Dictionary and Grammar Guide later this year. Borrero noted, however, that the International Decade of Indigenous Languages must not overlook Indigenous Caribbean languages and called on the Permanent Forum to give special attention to insular Caribbean Indigenous Peoples, including those in both self-governing and non self-governing territories.

"We're not only raising the visibility of who we are within the U.S.," he said. "We're also raising the visibility of our people for other Indigenous peoples so that we could build that solidarity regionally and internationally."

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Indigenous Taíno of Puerto Rico fight for visibility, rights

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This story is published as part of the Global Indigenous Affairs Desk, an Indigenous-led collaboration between Grist, Indian Country Today, and High Country News. In 2017, Hurricane Maria hit the Caribbean, destroying homes, killing thousands, and driving many from the region.

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How climate change is affecting mental health in some of the Caribbean's Indigenous communities

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How climate change is affecting mental health in some of the Caribbean's Indigenous communities

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How climate change is affecting mental health in some of the Caribbean’s Indigenous communities

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“Climate change events [cause] a disconnection through displacement and loss of our homes, our land, and our ways of doing things. Having to relocate and start over is traumatic.”

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A Call to Action: Combating Climate Change in the Caribbean

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A Call to Action: Combating Climate Change in the Caribbean

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Source: Cultural Survival

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As a young Indigenous woman of Guyanese Lokono-Arawak Tribal origin and heritage, born and raised in Barbados, I feel responsible for amplifying the voices of my brothers and sisters who disproportionately face climate issues head on in the region.

In the Caribbean, we are a mix of Indigenous, African, Asian, and European Peoples, who come from various socio-economic backgrounds. Caribbean Indigenous Peoples are still mostly viewed as extinct relics of a bygone era - and thus summarily confined to the dustbin of history, when in truth and in fact - we are surviving peoples and cultures, having constantly to redefine and defend our continuing existence in a contemporary Neo-Colonial world that prefers us to remain invisible to their usurping dominant societies that were illegally built in our lands and illegally forced upon our backs over 500 years after the genocide Christopher Columbus first unleashed in our region of the Americas and Caribbean. As Indigenous Peoples, we are at the frontlines of climate change due to our lifestyles and our reciprocal relationship with Mother Earth, our environment, and this experience is also shared across many villages, communities, islands, and the Caribbean region as a collective.

The long history of colonialism for the extraction of goods like sugar, coffee, cocoa, cotton, bananas, rice, citrus fruit, coconuts, and tobacco has impacted our food sovereignty and left our region dependent on imports from Europe and the United States, which has put us at a huge disadvantage in not only our self-sufficiency but also our ability to navigate and compete with today's global economy.

Hundreds of years of extractive colonialism have kept the Caribbean in a constant loop of economic dependency on other more influential continental governments. Tourism is one of the most important parts of the Caribbean Community and Common Market (CARICOM), which is an intergovernmental organization of 15 countries in the Caribbean with the purpose to promote economic integration and collaboration between its member states while also ensuring the benefits from the integration are equitably shared. . As we have seen, climate change adds another layer of threat to our economy due to our dependency on tourism as our main attractions like beaches due to erosion, coral bleaching due to temperature increases are slowly vanishing and will continue to if we cannot find a way to slow the process down and take steps toward prevention and reverse the effects as well as the increase in the frequency of droughts which affects the availability of water.

In Barbados, the impacts of climate change are visible as sea-levels rise, coastal erosion persists, and land slippage occurs. The United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres visited Barbados and witnessed these impacts himself, accompanied by our Prime Minister Mia Mottley, who is our first lady Prime Minister and the first ever to be so vocal on climate change in our region, she has also become famous for persuading creditors to accept a natural-disaster clause which is a sovereign debt contract giving the government a break from principal and interest payments in the event of calamity strikes and making us one step closer to safe proofing our islands finance. Prime Minister Mia Mottley is constantly advocating internationally on behalf of the Caribbean in relation to Climate Change to ensure that our issues are kept at the forefront.

What was not mentioned during Guterres' visit was that we, and many other Caribbean islands and nations, have observed a change in the rainy season, which was once months of daily moderate rainfall, to spans of days of dry heat broken by sudden deluges that result in flash flooding, which is destructive to our food systems.

Our dry seasons are also getting drier and hotter each year. More than half of our population lives on or near the coast and 95 percent of our tourism-related areas and important infrastructures such as the main government buildings, all the security forces buildings, all the desalination plants, and electricity generation facilities, and most of the financial headquarters for the island's economy are also found in these areas.

The change in weather patterns is also affecting our food sources and our abilities to practice our cultures. One of our seasonal delicacies is sea eggs ( Tripneustes ventricosus) which are very quickly disappearing from our shores, which directly threatens our food security and seasonal cultural practices. This year, we had one of the lowest recorded numbers of sea eggs harvested as our divers have reported that in areas where we would commonly find them couldn't find any, and in other areas the sea eggs were extremely immature at a time when they should be fully matured. Therefore, sea egg season, which is a big part of the local Barbados culture, could not be opened this year. This raises the question of what other delicacies and ways of living in the coming days, weeks, months, and years will become inaccessible or obsolete all together due to climate change?

Our relatives across the sea on the Island of Dominica, Chief Irvince Auguiste of the Dominica Kalinago tribe says that their experience of climate change is twofold, "The deforestation of certain water catchment areas for farming has affected the quantity of water in several rivers that are fed by multiple mountain streams. The traditional farming practices of land preparation for the cultivation of food are more unpredictable due to the changes in the weather patterns. Usually, farmers would cut down the land in the dry season around February or March and then plant in time for the upcoming wet season in May and June but nowadays the weather pattern is very different - and now completely unpredictable."

Chief and President of the United Confederation of Taino Peoples, Roberto Mukaro Borrero, shares, "The Taino in Borikén/Puerto Rico say that climate change is already here and that current indicators suggest that they will experience longer dry periods interrupted by more intense storms which will increase fresh water scarcity and unusual heat at unusual times and coastal erosion."

Moreover, in my own Indigenous community in Guyana, considered an extension of the Caribbean region, our Mahoka (Mahaica) River used to flood once in a decade during the rainy season, but since 2019 flooding has occurred every single year, and now the dry seasons are drier and hotter. Farmers used to be able to work with exposed backs from 7 am to midday, then take a two-hour rest and put in another three hours till 5 pm, then walk back home. Now the sun and heat are so unbearable that they have to cover their skin and work shorter days due to the intense weather conditions. Twenty-five percent of formerly productive hours are lost to each day with only six hours of labor possible because no one lives on the Tribal farmlands as they are many miles from the village.

In Barbados, as well as in the Caribbean region, most of our population lives and works within the coastal zone. Climate change projections say that coastal erosion is certain, along with a high risk of displacement for our coastal communities. Last but not least, it is predicted there will be a loss of tourism, due to expected eutrophication, ocean acidification, and sedimentation of coastal waters, and coral bleaching.

For Caribbean countries and islands with bodies of fresh water, their resources are already stressed as a result of forest and wetland depletion and degradation which also affects water quality. Fresh water is an invaluable life source for all living things, and the need for freshwater continues to increase due to the high water consumption of a growing population, extreme heat, agriculture, and other local and tourist community needs. In addition, the impacts of climate change are expected to lead to more contamination of water supplies through salt water intrusion, further forest and wetland depletion, and degradation, resulting in a decrease in water quality.

Access to fresh water also impacts agriculture. In the Caribbean, agriculture is the second most important source of employment and foreign exchange earnings. In addition, Caribbean fisheries supply 15 percent of our protein intake and the fisheries sector is also vulnerable to climate change due to rising sea level temperatures. Some of our most vulnerable communities are fisherfolk whose livelihoods are dependent on the wellbeing of fish and the sea. Climate change will likely cause a reduction in our agricultural and fisheries productivity which will, in turn, impact employment, earnings, and local food production and increase the risk to our food security.

Local Actions to Combat Climate Change

In the face of all these obstacles in terms of marine-related climate change coping efforts, one very promising action some of our nations have taken is to establish marine protected areas. These areas are lessening climate change pressures, thus with the goal to make fisheries more resilient in addressing the constant changes while strengthening ecosystems to support healthy fisheries and food sources for future generations. In a few of our nations, the Caribbean Fish Sanctuary Partnership Initiative has trained, equipped, and given boats to community-run sanctuaries, resulting in an increased number of fish inside and outside of these areas.

In St. Lucia, there are distinct zones marked as marine reserves, fishing priority areas, multiple-use areas, recreational areas, and yacht mooring sites. In these areas, St. Lucia has proven increased fish stock in and around the reserves that are healthy and show promise of increased resilience to climate change. Another example of project success is in Belize, where fisherfolk who consist of all ethnicities including Indigenous and Afro-Indigenous communities that have historically fished certain newly restricted areas will continue to have their human right to fish in those areas and with these new specified rights to these communities they are also given responsibilities related to the preservation of these ecosystems and have become partners in data collection, verification, and decision-making of the fisheries. This approach has so far resulted in sustainable catch rates improving and the decline in habitat health has stopped which in turn shows steps towards climate change resilience.

In Grenada, the government and community are working hand-in-hand on a project called "The Nature Conservancy's At the Water's-Edge," formed to create community action plans connecting social and physical vulnerabilities. They are testing hybrid reef technology by designing artificial reef structures to reduce wave energy and coastal erosion and to support coral growth and biodiversity. They are also training locals to plant and care for mangroves which will restore coastal vegetation to form a natural coastal defense. This project through its completion is designed to reduce 80-90 percent of wave energy for up to 30 years.

Fisherfolk as individuals have not been forgotten in these climate change resilient efforts either, as some nations have created insurance for fisheries called the Caribbean Oceans and Aquacultures Sustainability Facility (COAST). COAST is a parametric/index-based insurance aimed to make fisheries resilient to climatic events through giving funds directly to those in the fishing industry in the event of bad weather, storms, or hurricanes. Pay-outs will provide compensation immediately for lost income and damage related to fishing equipment so that fisher-folk can quickly be relieved and return to their trade as soon as possible. Along with insurance for fisheries, a mobile phone application is also being rolled out called FEWER. FEWER was developed by the ICT4 Fisheries Consortium and will send alerts of bad weather conditions and sea states to fisherfolk giving them early warnings of possible dangers and it allows fisherfolk to also share live information on local conditions and on missing people at sea.

When it comes to emissions, Barbados is striving to become a low carbon economy through sustainable energy usage and developments and lower the cost of climate-related adaptation which we will reap benefits from as a nation and region as a collective. In 2020 Barbados became the first country in the Caribbean to deploy electric buses which was done under the Barbados Transport Board for the benefit of public transport in our island and the significance of these electric buses is much lower greenhouse gas emissions than diesel-powered transit buses. By 2030, Barbados also plans to have 100% of its energy consumption come from renewable sources.

Furthermore, when it comes to agriculture and land management in our region, Caribbean nationals have become more aware of the risks, threats, and opportunities arising from climate change at the regional and national levels. Many projects on large and small scales are taking place throughout the Caribbean supporting the development and implementation of comprehensive awareness strategies and action plans, through mass media production and distribution, training and workshops, soil conservation, reforestation, flood mitigation, land and river bank stabilisation and water conservation.

In Jamaica, they are distributing water to farmers and want to begin harvesting rainwater and creating mini dams for irrigation. They have also begun to grow their crops using greenhouse technology and hydroponics.

As necessary and smart as all these climate change coping implementations are, the reality of them being replicated in other nations in our region isn't possible due to difficulties in accessing adequate financing and benefitting from the broader global economy. Many Caribbean states have been experiencing a financial crisis with economic activity shrinking and debt levels continuing to rise along with this investment flows and donor resources from abroad have also been dwindling. Many difficult budgeting decisions in the region are being undertaken, resulting in monetary and fiscal tightening. Many nations are still recovering from climate change-related disasters, economic instability, political instability, and the lack of technical and financial resources. One of the biggest challenges for the Caribbean is that agricultural issues and food security have not been part or a focus of any international discussions and their outcome documents.

We hope that the voices of our Caribbean farmers and agricultural communities can be heard at the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) Conference of Parties (COP26) and be included in the negotiations, and reflected in UNFCC's international policies framework and in future climate agreements. Climate-smart agriculture will offer our region crucial benefits in food security, mitigation, and adaptation to climate change and COP26 is crucial in achieving new international agreements that apply to all countries. Lastly, across the Caribbean and the world, Indigenous voices also need to be centered in addressing climate change, as our knowledge systems know best how to steward our lands, territories, and natural resources and we hope our voices, challenges, and experiences are heard and acted upon.

Figure: Overall climate vulnerability. Source www.gov.uk.
- Sabantho Aderi Corrie-Edghill (Lokono-Arawak), 22, is a member of the Pakuri Tribal Territory Indigenous community in Guyana. She is an Indigenous rights activist and artist and created the first Lokono-Arawak mural consisting of her Peoples' mythological creatures and it is located in her Tribal lands. At 18, she became the youngest woman to participate in the United Nations Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues Project Access Global Capacity Training Program sponsored via the Tribal Link Foundation. Top photo by Agnes Portalewska.

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A Call to Action: Combating Climate Change in the Caribbean

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By Sabantho Aderi Corrie-Edghill (Lokono-Arawak) As a young Indigenous woman of Guyanese Lokono-Arawak Tribal origin and heritage, born and raised in Barbados, I feel responsible for amplifying the voices of my brothers and sisters who disproportionately face climate issues head on in the region.

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Puerto Rico Seeks to Preserve Taino History, Revive Culture

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Puerto Rico Seeks to Preserve Taino History, Revive Culture

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Puerto Rico Seeks to Preserve Taino History, Revive Culture

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Sacred Indigenous lands are in danger of being bought and controlled by private companies.

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‘Stonehenge of Puerto Rico’: Site of Taíno Ceremonial Ball Courts Threatened by Privatization

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‘Stonehenge of Puerto Rico’: Site of Taíno Ceremonial Ball Courts Threatened by Privatization

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‘Stonehenge of Puerto Rico’: Site of Taíno Ceremonial Ball Courts Threatened by Privatization - Latino Rebels

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The Puerto Rico Senate is preparing to vote on a joint resolution that threatens to privatize the Caguana Ceremonial Ball Courts Site in Puerto Rico, according to a group of activists and Indigenous leaders.

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This Culture, Once Believed Extinct, Is Flourishing

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This Culture, Once Believed Extinct, Is Flourishing

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A new exhibition explores the cultural heritage of the Taíno, the indigenous people of the Caribbean

smithsonianmag.com

How does one celebrate a living, even thriving, heritage when the world thinks it disappeared hundreds of years ago? That is one of the questions asked by "Taíno: Native Heritage and Identity in the Caribbean," a new exhibition co-produced by the Smithsonian's National Museum of the American Indian and the Smithsonian Latino Center. On view at the museum's George Gustav Heye Center in New York City, the show explores the legacy of the indigenous peoples of the Caribbean (known as the Taíno people) and how this Native culture, which stems from the Arawak-speaking people of Cuba, Jamaica, Puerto Rico, Haiti and the Dominican Republic, has persevered and grown in influence-despite a mistaken belief that it is extinct.

It's a story of survival in the face of long odds. The arrival of Europeans to the Caribbean, beginning with Christopher Columbus in 1492, brought foreign diseases, enslavement, conquest and disruption to the indigenous people's agrarian lifestyle. This moment of contact proved devastating, leading to the loss of 90 percent of the Native people.

But while this destruction is the inciting incident of the exhibition, it's the surviving 10 percent of the people who are its focus. According to curator Ranald Woodaman, the Smithsonian Latino Center's exhibitions and public programs director, the show is about "the living legacy" of Native peoples in the Spanish-speaking Caribbean, in the Greater Antilles and on the U.S. mainland. He says that the show digs deeply into how the surviving 10 percent maintained and adapted their traditions, and how activism and Taíno identity developed into the current Taíno movement. The United Confederation of Taíno Peoples is an active participant of the United Nations Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues.

"In the last 20 years, a lot of Caribbean folks have said, 'where'd this movement come from? History books tell me the opposite,' and yet everybody who is Native has family stories and connections," says Woodaman. "This is a complicated story because in many ways we are reframing histories like survival and extinction. We're saying that we can survive through mixture and change." Many Taínos, today, are ethnically mixed descendants of not only Native peoples, but Africans and Europeans.

The exhibition explores how survival tactics included the surfacing and passing down of Native knowledge. One prominent example is what the show calls the "Native Survival Kit:" The traditional house known as a , constructed with plants or vines or other local materials resistant to weather; and the , the traditional garden plot. In the early 1900s, these traditional practices helped rural Cuban, Dominican and Puerto Rican communities with limited funds to be able to build their own homes and produce their own food.

Another example is , a flatbread made from yucca or cassava flour. Certain types of yucca may be poisonous-but when prepared right do not spoil (a valuable trait in the Caribbean heat, where wheat breads made by the Spaniards would quickly go bad). Understanding how to prepare casabe, and even how to use the extracted poison to help catch fish, meant the difference between life and death.

The began to be used in the early 1800s, and its meaning shifted over time. Today, it has been embraced by people of Native ancestry as a term that unites a wide range of historic experiences and identities. "It's an overall term that brings a lot of people of Indian ancestry, Native ancestry, together in the present moment," says Woodaman.

This sense of a common identity and efforts to preserve or celebrate it became more pronounced starting in the 1970s, as groups around the country sought to "highlight and make this legacy visible, but around different agendas and purposes," as Woodaman puts it. In Pittsburgh, the Caney Indian Spiritual Circle, focused on spirituality and healing, was established in 1982. In the tristate area of New York, the Arawak Mountain Singers formed in 1991 and grew active in the powwow circuit during that time. More recently, the yukayeke, or village, of Ya'Ya' Guaili Ara formed in the Bronx, dedicated to preserving, recovering and sharing its members' Native heritage. Each community focused on different areas of Taíno culture, but had much in common at the same time.

These efforts include language research-trying to reconstruct ancient linguistic traditions or explore the Taíno roots of familiar words (terms such as hurricane, hammock and tobacco have been credited to Taíno)-as well as environmental and public policy efforts.

The exhibition touches on how the growing popularity of DNA testing fits into all of this. "It indicates that there were larger populations of Native people who survived for a longer amount of time in the colonial period, for this genetic material to be so widespread," says Woodaman. But he discourages using the DNA testing as a way for individuals to attempt to determine exact percentages of ancestry, adding: "That is not what identity is."

While the exhibition focuses on the centuries-long perseverance of the Taíno people, it also features ancestral objects and artifacts that help to define the culture prior to colonization. Nearly 20 of the artifacts date from A.D. 800 to 1500, before European contact. Items from Puerto Rico, Dominican Republic and Cuba are in the show, such as cemís -stone, wooden or cotton artifacts used in spiritual ceremonies-wooden seats made for a political leader, or conch shells on which the face of a person has been carved.

"Taíno: Native Heritage and Identity in the Caribbean," curated by Ranald Woodaman with contributions from José Barreiro and Jorge Estevez, is on view in New York City at the National Museum of the American Indian's George Gustav Heye Center, One Bowling Green in lower Manhattan through October 2019. On Saturday, September 8, the museum presents: "Taino: A Symposium in Conversation with the Movement " from 10 to 5:30.
The origins of this exhibition began in 2008, when researchers identified a small trove of Taíno artifacts in the Smithsonian's collections that they wanted to bring to light.

"We thought, here we have the components for a really interesting exhibit that goes beyond Columbus and brings it to the present," says Woodaman. "It took a while to come to terms with how to make the most powerful, timely and relevant exhibit we could."

About Alex Palmer

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This Culture, Once Believed Extinct, Is Flourishing

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smithsonianmag.com How does one celebrate a living, even thriving, heritage when the world thinks it disappeared hundreds of years ago? That is one of the questions asked by "Taíno: Native Heritage and Identity in the Caribbean," a new exhibition co-produced by the Smithsonian's National Museum of the American Indian and the Smithsonian Latino Center.

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Here are the indigenous people Christopher Columbus and his men could not annihilate

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Here are the indigenous people Christopher Columbus and his men could not annihilate

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Here are the indigenous people Christopher Columbus and his men could not annihilate

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Historians once said the inhabitants of the Caribbean islands were extinct within 160 years of Columbus’s arrival. But new research shows that isn’t true.

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Meet the survivors of a ‘paper genocide’

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Meet the survivors of a ‘paper genocide’

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The people we now call Taíno discovered Christopher Columbus and the Spaniards. He did not discover us, as we were home and they were lost at sea when they landed on our shores. That's how we look at it-but we go down in history as being discovered. The Taíno are the Arawakan-speaking peoples of the Caribbean who had arrived from South America over the course of 4,000 years. The Spanish had hoped to find gold and exotic spices when they landed in the Caribbean in 1492, but there was little gold and the spices were unfamiliar. Columbus then turned his attention to the next best commodity: the trafficking of slaves.

Due to harsh treatment in the gold mines, sugarcane fields, and unbridled diseases that arrived with the Spanish, the population rapidly declined. This is how the myth of Taíno extinction was born. The Taíno were declared extinct shortly after 1565 when a census shows just 200 Indians living on Hispaniola, now the Dominican Republic and Haiti. The census records and historical accounts are very clear: There were no Indians left in the Caribbean after 1802. So how can we be Taíno?

Few historians have taken a deep critical look at these census records, even though Indians kept appearing in reports, wills and testaments, and marriage and birth records throughout the Colonial period and beyond. We survived because many of our ancestors ran off into the mountains. When the inquisition began in Spain in 1478, any Jew that did not want to be tortured or murdered had only to convert to Catholicism. They became known as conversos (converts). This practice was also applied to Taíno Indians. Then, after 1533, when Indian slaves were "granted" their freedom by the Spanish monarchy, any Spaniard who was reluctant to let their Taíno slaves go would simply re-classify them as African. Throughout, Spanish men in the Caribbean were marrying Taíno women. Were their children not Taíno?

Paper genocide means that a people can be made to disappear on paper. The 1787 census in Puerto Rico lists 2,300 pure Indians in the population, but on the next census, in 1802, not a single Indian is listed. (The photography project here reimagines that census data.) Once something is put down on paper there is almost nothing you can do to change it. Every encyclopedia has Columbus's accounts of his, and that he called us Indians and that not a single Indian was left in the Caribbean shortly after. No matter how you may look physically or assert your identity, you are extinct. This is paper genocide: a narrative created by the conquerors and perpetuated by every subsequent researcher.

I was born in the town of Jaibon in the Dominican Republic. As a young boy growing up in the United States, I had read that there was not a single drop of indigenous blood in the Caribbean, that every single Indian had been killed off. But people like myself always identified as indigenous. We always knew we had Indian ancestry.

In the early '90s we began meeting up at different native events such as pow-wows and festivals. We began a reclamation movement to try to preserve what we knew of the language and surviving practices.

Later DNA studies started to show that people in the Caribbean did indeed have Native American mitochondrial DNA: 61 percent of all Puerto Ricans, 23 to 30 percent of Dominicans and 33 percent of Cubans. That is a high number of genetic markers for a supposedly extinct people. In 2016, a Danish geneticist pulled ancient DNA from a tooth found in a 1,000-year-old skull from the Bahamas. This tooth had a full strand of Taíno DNA. Would we match? Of 164 Puerto Ricans tested, every single one matched the Taíno DNA. ( Get the facts on whether DNA tests can reunite immigrant families.)

All along, we have been writing ourselves back into history. The internet is our most powerful tool. Today, we have a whole cadre of young scholars who identify as Taíno. Asking new questions and questioning old answers, they are writing us back into history. Some books have stopped using the word extinction to describe us as well.

Another way we assert our identity is by attacking the census records. For a long time, there was no Indian option for people from Latin America-you were either Hispanic, white, black, or a mixture. When the Indian or indigenous option was placed in the Puerto Rican census, 33,000 people identified as Indian. Our identities have always been hidden in plain sight. That's what this photography project reflects.

We want the world to know that the Taíno people were not exterminated. We played an important role in the formation of our island nations. For us, learning this story is like finding a long lost relative, a piece of yourself that you knew nothing about. When I realized that much of our oral traditions, material culture, spirituality, and language is indigenous, I realized just how triumphant the Taíno people were. ( Here's how mapmakers are helping indigenous people defend their lands.)

I remember when I first came home as a child after discovering Columbus. I was so excited and I'd drawn a picture of the three little ships. When I got home my mother told me the real story. I was shocked. Millions of people died because of his thirst for gold and recognition. To get to a point today where the population at large, not just Caribbean or indigenous people, agree that he's not someone to be celebrated is very gratifying.

Whenever I contemplate my history and think of the atrocities committed by the Spaniards I wonder: What were the grandmothers and mothers doing as they watched their children, siblings, and parents slaughtered and raped, their villages pillaged and plundered? They must have prayed hard, as all suffering people do. But what happened to those prayers? Did they vanish in the air like smoke from a camp fire? Then it hits me: we the descendants are their prayers. We've come back to make things right, to tell our story.

Chief Jorge Baracutei Estevez is a retired Program Specialist at the Smithsonian's National Museum of the American Indian. He was part of the team that put together the museum's first Taíno exhibit. Now, he serves as the head of Higuayagua, a Taíno organization in New York and the Caribbean. He is working on documenting the oral histories of elderly Taíno.

Haruka Sakaguchi is a Japanese photographer based in New York. She and Chief Jorge Estevez created a hypothetical census entry to reimagine what an individual entry would have looked like in 1802, the year when the Indio population in Puerto Rico dropped from a recorded 2,312 (in 1797) to none. Sakaguchi asked her subjects to pose in clothing they felt encapsulated their identity.

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On Indigenous Peoples' Day, meet the survivors of a 'paper genocide'

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The people we now call Taíno discovered Christopher Columbus and the Spaniards. He did not discover us, as we were home and they were lost at sea when they landed on our shores. That's how we look at it-but we go down in history as being discovered.

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Indigenous Taíno of Puerto Rico Take Their Fight to the UN - Language Magazine

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Indigenous Taíno of Puerto Rico Take Their Fight to the UN - Language Magazine

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Puerto Rican Taíno representatives recently attended the United Nations Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues (UNPFII) in New York to call attention to their situation.

"If we're not getting visibility or any kind of recognition at the national level, we have no choice but to take it outside and try to build that visibility for our people," said R. Múkaro Agüeibaná Borrero, president of the United Confederation of Taíno People.

The Taíno people are indigenous to the Caribbean and live in Puerto Rico, Cuba, the Dominican Republic, the US Virgin Islands, and more. When Christopher Columbus made landfall in 1492, the Taíno were the first people he met. Today, Puerto Rico is an unincorporated territory of the US, which means that it is neither an independent country nor an official state. Puerto Rico has a nonvoting member of Congress and does not have electoral college votes in presidential elections. Because of this colonial relationship, the Taíno have few platforms to make their concerns heard.

International forums like the UNPFII are a rare opportunity to directly engage with officials from the US and other countries-providing space for the Taíno to advocate for policies that will help their communities. "There is a narrative that Taíno people were wiped out," Borrero said. "So, we have to make statements at the international level, to say 'wait a minute, we are here.'"

Andrea Carmen, Yaqui Nation and executive director of the International Indian Treaty Council, says that Puerto Rico's political status presents challenges for the Taíno. "What makes them unique is they are still residents of a colony," she said. Carmen added that, like the Taíno, most Indigenous peoples around the world also lack state recognition, which makes the UNPFII and other international venues even more important in their fight for rights.

The United Confederation of Taíno People called attention to Taíno language revitalization efforts, which will lead to the publication of the first classic Taíno dictionary and grammar guide later this year. Borrero noted, however, that the International Decade of Indigenous Languages must not overlook Indigenous Caribbean languages and called on the Permanent Forum to give special attention to insular Caribbean Indigenous peoples, including those in both self-governing and nonself-governing territories. In a statement to the forum, Tai Pelli, another representative from the United Confederation of Taíno People, highlighted the environmental and climate crises facing Indigenous peoples in Puerto Rico. Increasingly powerful storms have destroyed homes and driven many from the island, while illegal toxic waste dumping and military waste contamination are also serious issues. On the island municipalities of Vieques and Culebra, the US military conducted weapons testing for over 60 years, leaving unexploded ordinance and dangerous chemicals behind. "Increasing cancer rates and other noncontagious diseases are a direct result of the environmental injustices our people confront every day," Pelli said.
Pointing to luxury hotels and other development projects on culturally significant sites like the Dry Forest and the Caguana Ceremonial Center, Pelli called on the UN to confront the issue with UNESCO, which oversees some of the sites, and demanded a review of UNESCO's protected areas mandate and greater transparency. "The wrath of greed and uncontrolled development are beginning to seem as dangerous as the hurricanes, earthquakes, and pandemic that we are still trying to survive," she said.

"We're not only raising the visibility of who we are within the US," she said. "We're also raising the visibility of our people for other Indigenous peoples so that we could build that solidarity regionally and internationally."

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Indigenous Taíno of Puerto Rico Take Their Fight to the UN - Language Magazine

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Puerto Rican Taíno representatives recently attended the United Nations Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues (UNPFII) in New York to call attention to their situation. "If we're not getting visibility or any kind of recognition at the national level, we have no choice but to take it outside and try to build that visibility for our [...]

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Activists Protest Christie's Over Sale of Taíno Objects: 'These Aren't Just Cultural Heritage'

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Activists Protest Christie's Over Sale of Taíno Objects: 'These Aren't Just Cultural Heritage'

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Source: ARTnews

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Taino activist and educator Ra Ruiz Leon at Christie's in New York. Courtesy Stephanie Bailey

A sale of Pre-Columbian art and Taíno artifacts at Christie's set to take place in Paris tomorrow has become the subject of protests by Taíno activists and allies.

The sale, titled "Pre-Columbian Art & Taino Masterworks," includes 38 works from the Fiore Arts Collection of Taíno art. Many of the works in the sale are priced between $5,000 and $200,000. Among them are ritual spatulas carved from manatee bones, as well as shell, wood, and terra cotta ornaments. According to the sale catalogue, several of the objects have been on long-term loan at institutions including the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.

"We hope that people can realize they can make a stance against these auctions," said Stephanie Sherman, a member of Arayeke Yukayek, a Taíno tribe with members based across the U.S., and the person behind an online petition targeting the sale that has accrued more than 32,000 signatures. "We hope places that sell such artifacts like Christie's feel the pressure."

Sherman went on: "These aren't just cultural heritage. In the auction are cemi [idols], which we believe are spiritual beings that need to be fed, honored, and housed. We believe some of our powers are with them-we bury our dead with them. They all have immense cultural and sacred powers to us. They're not just inanimate objects."

Sherman is not the only one who has raised concerns about the auction. Mexican officials have also demanded that the sale be called off, claiming that the pre-Columbian objects that are also being offered are part of the country's "national heritage."

A Christie's representative did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

In an email statement provided to the activists, a spokesperson wrote that Christie's is "devoting considerable resources to investigating the provenance of works we offer for sale." It continued: "While we are respectful of different points of view and experiences, we feel it is important that the legitimate and legal market is upheld."

Stephanie Bailey, a cacike, or a chief, of the Arayeke Yukayek, said that the protests were part of an effort to show that the Taíno had hardly been killed off during European colonization of the Caribbean. Warfare and sickness brought by Europeans are known to have lead to deaths of millions, and thousands of Taínos were sold into slavery. For centuries, Western histories of the Caribbean claimed that the Taíno were extinct but more recently, historical records and DNA testing have confirmed that many modern self-identifying Taíno are the genetic descendants of the original Caribbeans.

"Using terms like 'artifacts' and 'extinct' increases an object's value, but we're out here, I'm here. We're not extinct," Bailey said.

Yesterday, Taíno activists gathered outside Christie's New York ahead of the sale. Sanakori Luis Ramos, a Behike- a Taíno medicine man-performed a ceremony. Its intention, Bailey explained, was to ask their ancestors for strength, understanding, and assurance amid, what she considers, a struggle for recognition. Plans are in place for other activists in France to launch a protest in Paris during the auction.

"Those people will have to walk through us to get to the auction-they'll see that Taíno are not an artifact," Bailey said. "We need to show them that our culture is not just a conversation piece to place on their mantle."

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Activists Protest Christie's Over Sale of Taíno Objects: 'These Aren't Just Cultural Heritage'

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A sale of Pre-Columbian art and Taíno artifacts at Christie's set to take place in Paris tomorrow has become the subject of protests by Taíno activists and allies. The sale, titled "Pre-Columbian Art & Taino Masterworks," includes 38 works from the Fiore Arts Collection of Taíno art.

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'We have not vanished': Advocate for Taíno people, long said to have disappeared, tells their story

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'We have not vanished': Advocate for Taíno people, long said to have disappeared, tells their story

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Oct. 10-SOUTH PORTLAND - Speaking to a small audience in the Redbank Community Center, Priscilla Colon said she's fighting history.

History books, even new books, say the Taíno people have perished. But the Indigenous people of the Caribbean encountered by Christopher Columbus have not died away, she said.

"I'm here. We're thriving."

Colon, who says she is Taíno, is working to rebuild Taíno language and culture with an organization called Casa Areyto.

A resident of New Hampshire, she speaks several languages and was in Maine on Sunday to mark Indigenous Peoples' Day. In 2019, Maine became one of several states to do away with Columbus Day.

While the Taíno people remain unknown to many, Pedro Vazquez, a member of the South Portland's Human Rights Commission and a Taíno descendant, said "it is essential to highlight this hidden history."

Columbus first encountered the Taíno in the Bahamas in 1492, according to the Library of Congress. He wrote to King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella of Spain that "I have taken possession of them" and "no opposition was offered to me."

Children are taught in school "that Columbus sailed the ocean blue in 1492, but they don't tell you what happened after that," Colon said. "There's a big silence."

When the Taíno people are mentioned, students are told they've disappeared, Colon said.

Actually, she said, some were forced into slavery and some died in wars against the Europeans. Others succumbed to diseases like influenza and smallpox. Colonial governments also stopped counting the Taíno population, Colon said, in what amounts to "a paper genocide."

Her grandparents and their grandparents were told that the Taíno did not perish and that some hid in the caves and mountains. Some married Europeans and Africans, Colon said. "The Taínos didn't disappear, it's just that their language and culture was changing."

Now, anthropologists are pointing to evidence of cultural continuity, including foods, how crops are harvested and herbal remedies. This shows "the Taíno culture is still there. It's just hidden," she said. "One of the biggest pieces of evidence is that Puerto Rican geneticists have finally proved that Taíno Indigenous DNA survived, that 61 percent of modern day Puerto Ricans carry that Indigenous DNA," she said.

That proves what her grandparents and their grandparents have been telling them all along, Colon said. "That we are here."

She and others are working to rebuild the remnants of the Taíno language, a new language.

"That is exciting for me having worked in language programs for so long," Colon said.

In 2019 Colon said she didn't have a connection to her ancestors because she had only read that the Taíno were extinct, but her parents told her she was Taíno. She started researching and discovered her ancestors.

The one message she offered for Indigenous Peoples' Day is "know that the Taíno Indigenous people, the first people of contact on that very day (in 1492) are still here. We have not vanished."

Understanding that makes a difference, she said, adding that some common words, like barbecue, hammock, potato, come from the Taíno people, she said.

"Who doesn't have a barbecue on the fourth of July?" she said. "You're not only borrowing the word, the very process of barbecuing was brand new to Europeans" when Columbus arrived in the Americas. "When they came they saw people roasting meat on a platform. That was the first time they experienced that."

Today, the Taíno culture is not taught in schools, but she's optimistic that history may eventually be corrected.

Others who have Taíno ancestors have started sharing online videos of the language, and are communicating with each other in Taíno, Colon said. She's excited to think "that modern technology is being used to text Taíno," the language their ancestors used in 1492.

And, Colon added, plans are in the works for a first-ever Taíno conference next year in Puerto Rico.

She asked her audience that each tell the Taíno history to one person.

"Then that person will tell another and all of a sudden we'll have millions of people know that the Taínos are still here and we're reclaiming our language and culture."

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'We have not vanished': Advocate for Taíno people, long said to have disappeared, tells their story

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Oct. 10-SOUTH PORTLAND - Speaking to a small audience in the Redbank Community Center, Priscilla Colon said she's fighting history. History books, even new books, say the Taíno people have perished. But the Indigenous people of the Caribbean encountered by Christopher Columbus have not died away, she said. "I'm here.

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Source: Cultural Survival

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A group of seven Taíno leaders were arrested yesterday for their 19-day occupation of the state-run archeological Caguana Ceremonial Center in Utuado, Puerto Rico, according to a recent email from Roberto Mucaro Borrero, the President and Chairman of the United Confederation of Taíno People US Regional Coordinating Office. The leaders protested at Caguana, a focal point for Taíno resurgence, to bring attention to the wide desecration of Taíno sacred sites.

The Taíno protest recent construction and renovation projects at Caguana that have closed access to the site where Taíno conduct ceremonies. Protesters are concerned with rampant grave robbing and disturbance on the island as housing and industrial development expand. They also accuse the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers of removing remains from a burial field in recent months, according to Indian Country Today.

Naniki Reyes Ocasio, one of the protesters, has been on a hunger-strike, pledging not to eat until Governor Anibal Acevedo Vila agreed to meet with the Taíno leaders. Organizations represented in the protest include the Caney Quinto Mundo, the Consejo General de Taínos Boricanos, and the United Confederation of Taíno People, according to Indian Country Today. Taíno leaders want the US Native American Grave Protection and Repatriation Act enforced for Taíno ancestral burial and ceremonial grounds in the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico.

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UNITED STATES: Taíno arrested on ceremonial grounds

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A group of seven Taíno leaders were arrested yesterday for their 19-day occupation of the state-run archeological Caguana Ceremonial Center in Utuado, Puerto Rico, according to a recent email from Roberto Mucaro Borrero, the President and Chairman of the United Confederation of Taíno People US Regio…

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Cuba’s Taíno people: A flourishing culture, believed extinct

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Cuba’s Taíno people: A flourishing culture, believed extinct

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Source: BBC

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A commonly repeated belief says that Cuba's indigenous Taíno people were extirpated shortly after the Spanish conquest in 1511. Yet signs of living Taíno culture appear as my car bounces down the track to El Güirito, a remote hamlet at Cuba's easternmost extreme that's sandwiched between the azure Atlantic Ocean and surging mountain ranges smothered in throttling green.

It's easy to see how pockets of indigenous people could survive in this wild, rugged place, passing down their genes through the centuries.

Arriving at El Güirito, I'm greeted by indios campesinos, humble farmers proud of their Indian heritage. Their coppery complexions, square jaws and prominent cheekbones - so distinct from elsewhere in Cuba - remind me of Amerindian faces I've seen in the Amazon.

Many rural Cuban families live in simple bohíos (thatched huts) with palm-plank walls. Yet nowhere else in Cuba have I seen graves topped by thatch and surrounded by guamo (conch) shells, preserving a Taíno superstition meant to thwart evil spirits. Nor still-smouldering plots of boniato (sweet potato), yucca and maize, newly cleared by slash-and-burn and heaped in earthen mounds, Taíno-style. Nor weathered campesinos prodding at the soil with coas, long, sharpened hoes that pre-date Columbus' arrival in Cuba on 27 October 1492.

I'm as close as I'll ever come to seeing the idyll Columbus saw on his first voyage to the New World.

"[The indigenous people] show the most singular loving behaviour... and are gentle and always laughing," Columbus recorded. Conquistador Diego Velázquez's arrival in 1511 would change that forever. Those Taíno not put to the sword or worked to death fell victim to smallpox, influenza and measles, against which they had no defence. Within 100 years of Columbus' landfall, virtually the entire indigenous population - heavily concentrated in the fertile lowlands of eastern Cuba - had perished.

Yet contrary to popular claims, Taíno bloodlines, identity and customs were never completely extinguished.

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Many survivors mixed with Spanish colonists or fled the flatlands to endure in palenques (hidden redoubts) in the rugged, densely forested mountains inland of Baracoa - an ancient Taíno village that, in 1511, became Cuba's first Spanish colony. Encircled by a mountain meniscus unfurling like an abanico fan around the Bahía de Miel (Bay of Honey), this insular enclave wasn't connected by road to the rest of Cuba until 1964.

Throughout the colonial period, Spanish authorities refused to acknowledge the existence of Taíno people. Yet 19th-Century records are full of references to caseríos (Indian kinship communities) in the mountains of eastern Oriente province. Even José Martí, revolutionary apostle of Cuban independence, recorded (in the days preceding his death in a Spanish ambush in May 1895) how he was tracked by the 'indios de Garrido' - Indian scouts from Yateras under the command of Spanish Lieutenant Pedro Garrido Romero.

As recently as the 1940s, Cuba's preeminent geographer and anthropologist Antonio Nuñez Jiménez - who would later hold top positions in the Castro government - had documented dozens of caseríos scattered throughout the Sierra del Cristal and Macizo Nipe-Sagua-Baracoa mountains. Following the 1959 Cuban Revolution, however, the communist government vehemently promoted the notion of the Taíno's extinction. It dissuaded distinct racial identification and instilled a singular mind set of 'Cubanness', intended to equalise everyone. "The government was drastic about it for years and didn't want it to come up," says José Barreiro, Cuban-American former director of the Office for Latin America at the Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian, in a 2016 article for Smithsonian Magazine.

Not even Baracoa and its remote, rugged hinterland was spared the government's gauche promotion of a singular 'New Man' mindset. "We families knew we were Indian, but as children we were told not to discuss it with other people," said Rafael Cobas Romero, a member of El Gūirito's Grupo Kiribá-Nengón, a cultural ensemble that keeps alive 19th-Century kiribá and nengón country music and dance forms that are rustic precursors to son, Cuba's iconic traditional music (of Buena Vista Social Club fame).

Today the living Taíno identity is acknowledged, and no longer viewed as a challenge to cubanidad (Cuban identity). Instead, it's promoted (albeit somewhat begrudgingly) as a touristic asset. Appropriately, I've brought my US motorcycle group to El Gūirito for a cultural 'people-to-people' encounter during our ride across Cuba (US embargo law states that US citizens traveling to Cuba for group travel may legally do so only for 'people-to-people educational exchange').

The ensemble strikes up, interpreting their traditional sounds with age-old Cuban instruments - the tambor (African drum), tres (Cuban guitar), claves (hardwood percussion sticks), güiro (gourd scraper), maracas, marimbula (plucked box), and a güayo scraper inherited from the Taíno serrated stone grating board used to shred yucca. Indios campesinos take our hands, kiss our cheeks and invite us to dance, showing us how to glide our feet across the floor like fish moving through water.

"Kiribá and nengón are rooted in our traditional guajiro (peasant) lifestyle. But our culinary traditions date back to the pre-Columbian era," Teresa Roché Lore, the group's director, explained.

Spread out before us is a buffet of uniquely baracoense dishes - distinctive from Cuba's predictable pork, rice and beans - served Taíno-style in coconut shells and jícaras (hollowed gourds) or laid out on bateas (wooden trays). I savour spinach-like calalú simmered in leche de coco (coconut milk), and bacán, a steamed corn dough stuffed with plantain and pork, wrapped in blanched banana leaves. There's lechita, shrimp in a well-seasoned coconut sauce, and a tiny opaque fish called tetí, fried then simmered in coconut milk with slivers of sweet peppers and onions. We end with delicious desserts, including yemitas, sweet balls of grated coconut and chocolate, and a chocolate drink called chorote made from coconut milk and cacao thickened with corn starch.

While many residents of El Gūirito display Amerindian features, Cuba's Taíno descendants can't always be identified by physical traits.

"You can be looking at a very Afro-Cuban or Iberian-looking person, but the DNA tells a different story," Barreiro says in the article.

The government's volte face echoes studies carried out in 2013 showing that Cuban blood is spiced with Taíno DNA, like ajiaco (a hearty Cuban stew of various meats, vegetables and tubers). The average proportion of Native American ancestry in the veins - 8% nationwide - climbs to 15% in eastern provinces (and far more in some individuals). It's almost exclusively derived from maternal lineage, likely from the conquistadors brutal rape of Taíno women.

"There are no more pure-bloods, but I know many extended families of Indian heritage that still live in their aboriginal areas," said Baracoa's historian, Alejandro Hartmann Matos, who has spent the past decade dedicated to rewriting the tale of the Taíno's demise. He estimates there are at least 4,000 Indo-Cubans who are biologically more Taíno than not.

"Many people in other communities have Taíno blood but won't admit it. We don't live exactly like our ancestors, but we're proud of our heritage," said Isolino Cobas Romero, a sun-beaten guajiro who leads the El Gūirito dance troupe.

Taíno culture is most fully preserved in La Caridad de los Indios, a constellation of small caseríos of some 1,600 kin, nestled high in the lush Sierra del Cristal mountains overlooking Guantánamo. La Caridad de los Indios was the most remote palenque where Indian families settled after being ousted from their last lowland territory in 1850.

"There are Indians all over these mountains," says 82-year-old Francisco 'Panchito' Ramírez Rojas, cacique (chief) of the Rojas-Ramírez clan, Cuba's main Taíno extended family. Even Granma, Cuba's official Communist Party newspaper, recently acknowledged the extended clan as living proof that the dictum of Taíno extinction is myth in an article titled Panchito, el último cacique (Panchito, the last chief).

The government's acknowledgement of living Taíno culture owes much to the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. Cuba was suddenly critically short on food and medicine. In desperation, it turned to indigenous knowledge of traditional farming and natural medicines, shining a spotlight on a culture it had long denied.

"There are medicines all around us," Panchito said, sweeping his arm in an arc. "The forest, this yard. They're an entire pharmacy."

The discovery that Cuba's indigenous healers use scorpion stings to treat arthritis led Cuban scientists to ground-breaking cancer treatments. "We found that scorpion venom acts as an anti-inflammatory agent. It also stimulates the immune system and shrinks tumours," explained Dr José Rodríguez Alonso, an Oxford-trained Cuban physician at Guantánamo's Universidad de Ciencias Médicas.

Since the Cuban Revolution, most caseríos now have a clinic and school, and residential bungalows (many with solar panels) built by the State. But the community's ways of life are infused with Taíno ceremonies, traditions and spiritual values common to many Native American cultures.

They fish tetí by the luna menquante (waning moon), and plant and harvest by the four lunar phases. They still pray to the sun, moon and Mother Earth. And they ask permission or forgiveness before harvesting or taking bark and leaves for cocimientos (healing remedies).

"The Spaniards killed most of us, but they left our roots," Panchito said. "We mustn't let this beautiful way that we have die." He's been passing on his knowledge to his children and grandchildren. But younger indios are leaving the mountains for a modern life in the cities. "Our race is disintegrating," he lamented wistfully.

But experiencing the ancestral rhythms and indigenous cuisine at El Gūirito - just 17km east of Baracoa - gives me hope. Watching Roché Lore and her kin guiding my group on the dance floor, I grasp how respectful visitation can be a viable way of helping keep alive traditional lifestyles by providing an income. Of investing indios campesinos in a future by giving touristic value to their past.

Burdened with the myth of extinction, most communities of Taíno descendants are still far off travellers' radar. I'm inspired to take my next group into the mountains.

Our Unique World is a BBC Travel series that celebrates what makes us different and distinctive by exploring offbeat subcultures and obscure communities around the globe.
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Cuba's Taíno people: A flourishing culture, believed extinct

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A commonly repeated belief says that Cuba's indigenous Taíno people were extirpated shortly after the Spanish conquest in 1511. Yet signs of living Taíno culture appear as my car bounces down the track to El Güirito, a remote hamlet at Cuba's easternmost extreme that's sandwiched between the azure Atlantic Ocean and surging mountain ranges smothered in throttling green.

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...no census can vie with the trained observer, and therefore attention must be called to the following statements of Captain W.S. Shuyler in a report onAugust 30, 1899: while work was being done on the roads, I had the occasion to watch crowds of 700 or 800 men gathered around the pay tables at Las Marias, La Vega, and Anasco. The frequency of the Indian type was very noticeable. While its almost certain that there is today no single Indian of pure stock in PR it is equally sure that the type can be seen every where in the mountain settlements. At San German I noticed a woman whose color, hair, and features were true Indian as seen in the Southwest of the US.

Report of General George W. Davis, War Department Census Of Puerto Rico 1899, LT. COL J.P. Sanger, Inspector-General, Director. Government Printing office 1900

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Taino History // Historia Taíno | United Confederation of Taíno People

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History of the Taino People of the past, present, and future

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What on Earth Happened to the Taino? Indigenous People of the Caribbean

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What on Earth Happened to the Taino? Indigenous People of the Caribbean

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Source: Masaman

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What on Earth Happened to the Taino? Indigenous People of the Caribbean

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Source: Britannica.com

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Taino, Arawakan-speaking people who at the time of Christopher Columbus's exploration inhabited what are now Cuba, Jamaica, Hispaniola ( Haiti and the Dominican Republic), Puerto Rico, and the Virgin Islands. Once the most numerous indigenous people of the Caribbean, the Taino may have numbered one or two million at the time of the Spanish conquest in the late 15th century. They had long been on the defensive against the aggressive Carib people, who had conquered the Lesser Antilles to the east.

When they were first encountered by Europeans, the Taino practiced a high-yielding form of shifting agriculture to grow their staple foods, cassava and yams. They would burn the forest or scrub and then heap the ashes and soil into mounds that could be easily planted, tended, and irrigated. Corn (maize), beans, squash, tobacco, peanuts (groundnuts), and peppers were also grown, and wild plants were gathered. Birds, lizards, and small animals were hunted for food, the only domesticated animals being dogs and, occasionally, parrots used to decoy wild birds within range of hunters. Fish and shellfish were another important food source.

Traditional Taino settlements ranged from small family compounds to groups of 3,000 people. Houses were built of logs and poles with thatched roofs. Men wore loincloths and women wore aprons of cotton or palm fibres. Both sexes painted themselves on special occasions, and they wore earrings, nose rings, and necklaces, which were sometimes made of gold. The Taino also made pottery, baskets, and implements of stone and wood. A favourite form of recreation was a ball game played on rectangular courts. The Taino had an elaborate system of religious beliefs and rituals that involved the worship of spirits (s) by means of carved representations. They also had a complex social order, with a government of hereditary chiefs and subchiefs and classes of nobles, commoners, and slaves.

The Taino were easily conquered by the Spaniards beginning in 1493. Enslavement, starvation, and disease reduced them to a few thousand by 1520 and to near extinction by 1550. Those who survived mixed with Spaniards, Africans, and others. Taino culture was largely wiped out, although several groups claiming Taino descent gained visibility in the late 20th century, notably in Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the U.S. state of Florida. In 1998 the United Confederation of Taino People, which characterizes itself as an "Inter-Tribal authority," was created as an umbrella organization for the affirmation and restoration of Taino culture, language, and religion. Whereas the Taino are not officially recognized as a group by any governments, those who consider themselves Taino claim the right to self-determination.

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Taino, Arawakan-speaking people who at the time of Columbus's exploration inhabited what are now Cuba, Jamaica, Hispaniola, Puerto Rico, and the Virgin Islands. Once the most numerous indigenous people of the Caribbean, the Taino may have numbered one or two million at the time of the Spanish conquest.

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The Paris Agreement: An “Incremental Advance” for International Recognition of the Rights of Indigenous Peoples

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The Paris Agreement: An “Incremental Advance” for International Recognition of the Rights of Indigenous Peoples

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Source: CARIBBEAN ORGANIZATION OF INDIGENOUS PEOPLES

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Paris, France - The 21st Conference of the Parties of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC-COP21) officially adopted the Paris Agreement on Saturday, December 12, 2015. The Agreement, with the legal force of a UN Treaty, was agreed to by all the 195 States (countries) present. Once ratified by at least 55 States, it will go into legal force in 2020. It commits all countries, for the first time ever, to cut their carbon emissions while also recognizing the special circumstances of developing countries. The States also adopted the "Paris Decision" which is not legally binding, but commits States to immediately begin the process of reducing greenhouse emissions that cause climate change.

Some commentators are denouncing the Paris Agreement as a failure while others are hailing it as an historic triumph. But for Indigenous Peoples, the Paris Agreement can be seen as another step forward for the recognition of their rights in international law.

The International Indigenous Peoples Forum of Climate Change (IIPFCC) and the Indigenous Peoples Caucus representing over 200 indigenous delegates attending this session from around the world, was invited to make a formal statement at the COP21 closing plenary. The IIPFCC closing statement, presented by elder Frank Ettawageshik (Little Traverse Bay Bands of Odawa Indians), highlighted the three key messages advocated by Indigenous Peoples during the two-week session. These included a call for the rights of Indigenous Peoples [to] be recognized, protected, and respected within a broad human rights framework in both the preamble and the operative sections of the Agreement; a temperature goal of no more than 1.5 degrees Celsius increase over pre-industrial levels; and recognition, respect for and use of Indigenous Peoples' traditional knowledge, with their free, prior, and informed consent, in measures for adaption to climate change. The IIPFCC statement, while expressing that Indigenous Peoples were "keenly disappointed" at the shortfalls in meeting these calls, noted that all three Indigenous Peoples messages were "addressed to some degree" in the final Agreement.

In particular, the inclusion of "the rights of Indigenous Peoples" in the preamble paragraph of the Agreement, achieved despite the consistent opposition of some States throughout the process, is a significant and unprecedented step forward. This is the first time this phrase has appeared unqualified in a legally binding UN Treaty, environmental or otherwise. The same phrase was included the preamble of the Paris Decision, although both say that States "should consider", while Indigenous Peoples and human rights advocates called for the use of the stronger word "shall".

As noted by hereditary Chief Damon Corrie, Lokono Arawak of Barbados, "strong support by a group of States including Philippines, Mexico, Costa Rica, Peru, Chile, Tuvalu, Indonesia, Canada and others, standing in solidarity with Indigenous Peoples throughout the negotiations, was required to achieve these inclusions in the final Agreement.

Despite disappointment that the phrase 'rights of Indigenous Peoples' and Human Rights in general did not also appear in the Agreement's operative section, International Chief, attorney and member of the UN Expert Mechanism on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (EMRIP) Wilton Littlechild, Ermineskin Cree Nation, clarified that "the preamble of a Treaty provides the context and framework for interpreting and implementing the entire document." The Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties supports his assessment. On this basis, Chief Littlechild called the Paris Agreement an "incremental advancement for recognition of the rights of Indigenous Peoples in international law."

The Paris Agreement also calls on State parties (countries) to hold "the increase in the global average temperature to well below 2°C above pre-industrial levels and to pursue efforts to limit the temperature increase to 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels." The 1.5 temperature goal was a core position not only of Indigenous Peoples, but the Small Island Developing States.

Article 7 of the Agreement addressing Adaptation affirms the need for a participatory, transparent, gender-sensitive approach based on science and "as appropriate, traditional knowledge of indigenous peoples and local knowledge systems". UN Special Rapporteur on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples Victoria Tauli Corpuz noted that Indigenous Peoples' traditional knowledge, innovations and practices are recognized in both the Agreement and the Decision, and stated that moving forward "the challenge is how to operationalize this decision."

The inclusion of Indigenous Peoples' core positions both in the Paris Agreement and Decision was the result of the monumental, coordinated and unified efforts by the Indigenous Peoples Caucus throughout COP21. Despite the shortfalls, the inclusion of "the rights of Indigenous Peoples" in both preambles provides a basis for future advocacy to ensure that all programs addressing Climate Change are carried out with respect for the rights of Indigenous Peoples as affirmed in the UN Declaration for the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, including land and resource rights, free prior and informed consent, traditional knowledge and Treaty rights.

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The Paris Agreement: An "Incremental Advance" for International Recognition of the Rights of Indigenous Peoples

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Paris, France - The 21st Conference of the Parties of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC-COP21) officially adopted the Paris Agreement on Saturday, December 12, 2015. The Agreement, with the legal force of a UN Treaty, was agreed to by all the 195 States (countries) present.

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The Taíno were an Arawak people who were the indigenous people of the Caribbean and Florida. At the time of European contact in the late 15th century, they were the principal inhabitants of most of Cuba, Jamaica, Hispaniola (the Dominican Republic and Haiti), and Puerto Rico.

In the Greater Antilles, the northern Lesser Antilles, and the Bahamas, they were known as the Lucayans and spoke the Taíno language, a derivative of the the Arawakan languages.

The ancestors of the Taíno entered the Caribbean from South America. At the time of contact, the Taíno were divided into three broad groups, known as the Western Taíno (Jamaica, most of Cuba, and the Bahamas), the Classic Taíno (Hispaniola and Puerto Rico) and the Eastern Taíno (northern Lesser Antilles). A fourth, lesser known group went on to travel to Florida and divided into tribes. At present, we know there are four named tribes; the Tequesta, Calusa, Jaega and Ais. Other tribes are known to have settled in Florida, but their names are not known.

At the time of Columbus' arrival in 1492, there were five Taíno chiefdoms and territories on Hispaniola, each led by a principal Cacique (chieftain), to whom tribute was paid. Ayiti ("land of high mountains") was the indigenous Taíno name for the mountainous side of the island of Hispaniola, which has retained its name as Haïti in French.

Cuba, the largest island of the Antilles, was originally divided into 29 chiefdoms. Most of the native settlements later became the site of Spanish colonial cities retaining the original Taíno names. For instance; Havana,Batabanó, Camagüey, Baracoa and Bayamo are still recognised by their Taino names.

Puerto Rico also was divided into chiefdoms. As the hereditary head chief of Taíno tribes, the cacique was paid significant tribute. At the time of the Spanish conquest, the largest Taíno population centers may have contained over 3,000 people each.

The Taíno were historically enemies of the neighbouring Carib tribes, another group with origins in South America, who lived principally in the Lesser Antilles. The relationship between the two groups has been the subject of much study. For much of the 15th century, the Taíno tribe was being driven to the northeast in the Caribbean and out of what is now South America, because of raids by the Carib, resulting in Women being taken in raids and many Carib women speaking Taíno.

The Spaniards, who first arrived in the Bahamas, Cuba, and Hispaniola in 1492, and later in Puerto Rico, did not bring women in the first expeditions. They took Taíno women for their common-law wives, resulting in mestizo children. Sexual violence in Hispaniola with the Taíno women by the Spanish was also common. Scholars suggest there was substantial racial and cultural mixing in Cuba, as well, and several Indian pueblos survived into the 19th century.

The Taíno became nearly extinct as a culture following settlement by Spanish colonists, primarily due to infectious diseases to which they had no immunity. The first recorded smallpox outbreak in Hispaniola occurred in December 1518 or January 1519. The 1518 smallpox epidemic killed 90% of the natives who had not already perished. Warfare and harsh enslavement by the colonists had also caused many deaths. By 1548, the native population had declined to fewer than 500. Starting in about 1840, there have been attempts to create a quasi-indigenous Taino identity in rural areas of Cuba, the Dominican Republic, and Puerto Rico. This trend accelerated among the Puerto Rican community in the United States in the 1960s.
Terminology
The Taíno people, or Taíno culture, has been classified by some authorities as belonging to the Arawak, as their language was considered to belong to the Arawak language family, the languages of which were present throughout the Caribbean, and much of Central and South America.
The early ethnohistorian, Daniel Garrison Brinton, called the Taíno people the "Island Arawak". Nevertheless, contemporary scholars have recognized that the Taíno had developed a distinct language and culture.

Modern historians, linguists and anthropologists now hold that the term Taíno should refer to all the Taíno/Arawak tribes except for the Caribs, who are not seen to belong to the same people. Linguists continue to debate whether the Carib language is an Arawakan dialect or creole language, or perhaps an individual language, with an Arawakan pidgin used for communication purposes.
Spaniards and Taíno
Columbus and his crew, landing on an island in the Bahamas on October 12, 1492, were the first Europeans to encounter the Taíno people. Columbus described the Taínos as a physically tall, well-proportioned people, with a noble and kind personality.

Columbus wrote:

They traded with us and gave us everything they had, with good will...they took great delight in pleasing us...They are very gentle and without knowledge of what is evil; nor do they murder or steal...Your highness may believe that in all the world there can be no better people...They love their neighbours as themselves, and they have the sweetest talk in the world, and are gentle and always laughing.

At this time, the neighbors of the Taíno were the Guanahatabeys in the western tip of Cuba, the Island-Caribs in the Lesser Antilles from Guadeloupe to Grenada, and the Timacua and Ais tribes of Florida. The Taíno called the island Guanahaní which Columbus renamed as San Salvador (Spanish for "Holy Savior"). Columbus called the Taíno "Indians", a reference that has grown to encompass all the indigenous peoples of the Western Hemisphere. A group of Taíno people accompanied Columbus on his return voyage back to Spain.

On Columbus' second voyage, he began to require tribute from the Taíno in Hispaniola. According to Kirkpatrick Sale, each adult over 14 years of age was expected to deliver a hawks bell full of gold every three months, or when this was lacking, twenty-five pounds of spun cotton. If this tribute was not brought, the Spanish cut off the hands of the Taíno and left them to bleed to death. These cruel practices inspired many revolts by the Taíno and campaigns against the Spanish -some being successful, some not.

In 1511, several caciques in Puerto Rico, such as Agüeybaná II, Arasibo, Hayuya, Jumacao, Urayoán, Guarionex, and Orocobix, allied with the Carib and tried to oust the Spaniards. The revolt was suppressed by the Indio-Spanish forces of Governor Juan Ponce de León. Hatuey, a Taíno chieftain who had fled from Hispaniola to Cuba with 400 natives to unite the Cuban natives, was burned at the stake on February 2, 1512.

In Hispaniola, a Taíno chieftain named Enriquillo mobilized over 3,000 Taíno in a successful rebellion in the 1520s. These Taíno were accorded land and a charter from the royal administration. Despite the small Spanish military presence in the region, they often used diplomatic divisions and, with help from powerful native allies, controlled most of the region. In exchange for a seasonal salary, religious and language education, the Taíno were required to work for Spanish and Indian land owners. This system of labor was part of the ' encomienda'- the strongest protecting the weak for the purpose of economic gain .
Modern Taino Heritage
Groups of people currently identify as Taíno, most notably among the Puerto Ricans and Dominicans, both on the islands and on United States mainland. The concept of the "living Taíno" has been proven in a census in 2002. Some scholars, such as Jalil Sued Badillo, an ethnohistorian at the University of Puerto Rico, assert that the official Spanish historical record speak of the disappearance of the Taínos, but survivors had descendants and intermarried with other ethnic groups. Recent research notes a high percentage of mixed or tri-racial ancestry among people in Puerto Rico and the Dominican Republic, with those claiming Taíno ancestry also having Spanish and African ancestry.

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The Taíno were an Arawak people who were the indigenous people of the Caribbean and Florida. At the time of European contact in the late 15th century, they were the principal inhabitants of most of Cuba, Jamaica, Hispaniola (the Dominican Republic and Haiti), and Puerto Rico.

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The Taíno civilization indigenous to the Greater Antilles-Caribbean Sea (Hispaniola) flourished in the islands including Cuba, Hispaniola (Haiti and the Dominican Republic), Jamaica and Puerto Rico before and during the time when Christopher Columbus landed on the beaches of the New World in 1492.
On December 6th, 1492 Christopher Columbus landed at Mole St. Nicholas in Haiti's north. Thus began a totally new phase of life on the island of Hispaniola. Most people are aware that Christopher Columbus landed at San Salvador on October 12th, 1492, thus discovering the New World for Spain. Less known is that his second land fall was at Mole St. Nicholas, Haiti on December 1492, or that the first settlement in the New World was La Navidad, on Haiti's north coast. This settlement, which housed sailors from the Santa Maria which sank off Haiti's coast, was founded on December 24th, 1492.

Columbus did not discover a lost or unknown land. There was a flourishing civilization of native Americans. The primary group was the Arawak/Taíno Indians. Arawak is the general group to which they belong, and describes especially the common language which this group of native Americans shared. They ranged from Venezuela through the Caribbean and Central America all the way to Florida. However, the particular group of Arawak-speaking people who lived on the island of Hispaniola were the Taíno Indians.

Through archeological excavation much has been learned about the Taíno as well as documentation from Fray Ramón Pané. Fray Pané was appointed by Columbus to record the Taino customs. Living amongst the Taíno, Fray Pané learning their language, religion and worship of the zemi gods as well as Taino music, and culture.

Some Pre-Columbian historians consider the Taíno as Arawaks because they spoke Arawakan and had originally traveled to the Caribbean from the Amazon Basin in the North Eastern part of South America during the 6th century.

The Taíno society was basically a gentle culture - in fact the word "Taíno" means Good and Noble. Their society was characterized by happiness, friendliness and a paternal, highly organized hierarchy.

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The Taíno civilization indigenous to the Greater Antilles-Caribbean Sea (Hispaniola) flourished in the islands including Cuba, Hispaniola (Haiti and the Dominican Republic), Jamaica and Puerto Rico before and during the time when Christopher Columbus landed on the beaches of the New World in 1492. On December 6th, 1492 Christopher Columbus landed at Mole St.

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Celebrating Culture, Combating Legacy of Colonization

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Suffolk hosts Indigenous leaders at Sargent Hall event

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Suffolk hosts Indigenous leaders at Sargent Hall event

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Suffolk University hosted Indigenous speakers of the Taino Tribe in the Sargent Commons on Oct. 17, giving the Suffolk community an opportunity to engage in a powerful discussion of Indigenous culture, experiences and hopes for the future.

The people, a subgroup of the Arawak people, are from the Bahamas, Greater Antilles and the northern Lesser Antilles. According to the High Chief of the Taino Tribe, Caciquan Tureyqua Taino Cay, the namesake of the tribe comes from a peaceful greeting the people gave Christopher Columbus upon his arrival to their land.

"The Taino were the first Indigenous people to greet the Spanish in 1492. The name Taino was given by Columbus when the men greeted him saying 'taino.' 'Taino' means 'we are good and noble,' an extension of well-wishes," Cay said in the lecture.

The history of the Taino people is one of forced assimilation and loss of autonomy, according to Cay.

"We were victims of genocide, but genocide doesn't completely consist of the complete annihilation of a group physically, it also comes through ethnicide, the destruction of culture, the destruction of self-governance and the destruction of one's own viability and knowledge to land, birth rights and orientation," Cay said.

The effects of colonization are irreversible, as Cay explained through the example of his own family.

"There were census-takers who would add an -iz at the end of Cay, so it wasn't Cay anymore, it was Cayiz, which is actually Spanish and not of Arawakan origin," Cay said. "Still, there are members [of my family] who have chosen to keep that. This is how irreversible the process of colonization is, the process of encomienda, where whoever resided on a territory had to adopt the name of the Spanish landowner in order to have any viability in commerce or in society."

Through the lecture, attendees learned about Taino culture and their celebrations, called Arteito.

"Areito is a celebration of culture, it's a celebration of ancestry, because the ancestors are always present in our cultural reference, and it's a celebration of particular events. We can have Areito for the birth of a child, for a marriage, to celebrate recovering from a natural disaster, because we want to look in each other's faces and celebrate with each other. This is how we choose to commemorate our time," Cay said.

Violeta Ayacayia Anani Nanichi Cruz Del Valle, a Taino singer-songwriter, led the room in a water cleansing ritual.

"Water is the most sacred element to the Taino. First thing in the morning, the Taino people, our ancestors, had a complex for a ritual of water bathing and water cleansing that went far beyond simple physical hygiene," Cruz Del Valle said.

Cruz Del Valle first instructed those in attendance to draw a circle on a piece of paper representing the container of space, with a spot in the middle representing the space of existence. Through the circle, a simplified version of the Taino Earth Medicine Wheel was created, symbolizing open-mindedness, wisdom, introspection and awakening. After writing affirmations in the circle, Cruz Del Valle instructed all to rub their hands together to generate energy and cup the water sitting in the circle in front of them.

"We just gave that water, filled it with our memories, with our energy. That is what the Tainos did. Every morning, they would get up, go by the river, do this ritual and pour the water over themselves, as a way to start the day," Cruz Del Valle said.

Moving forward, the goal of Cay and the Taino people is to reclaim the culture and rights to autonomy that were taken from their ancestors.

"We believe the first step towards remedy for the Taino people, to recover from holocaust and victimization, is reclamation of our Taino identity and birthrights through reclassification, through self-identification, through our recording of, and ratification of, our own affidavits, tying back to our charters and our constitutions," Cay said.

Through outreach programs such as this, Cruz Del Valle hopes the information is shared and spread, increasing awareness and appreciation.

"I think it is important to get this information out to the diaspora. There are so many of us that do not have this information, and the more of us that do, that start digging, it's like a flame; you light the next one and the next one, and it grows. At the end of the day, the Taino people, we were all one. Wherever you were from, they would take you into their tribe. As a human race, I think it's important for us to know our roots," Cruz Del Valle said.
Follow Maren on Twitter @Maren_Halpin26

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Suffolk hosts Indigenous leaders at Sargent Hall event

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Suffolk University hosted Indigenous speakers of the Taino Tribe in the Sargent Commons on Oct. 17, giving the Suffolk community an opportunity to engage in a powerful discussion of Indigenous culture, experiences and hopes for the future. The Taino people, a subgroup of the Arawak people, are from the Bahamas, Greater Antilles and the northern...

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This educational initiative is dedicated to increasing the visibility of Indigenous Peoples from throughout the Caribbean region and the Diaspora in the Spirit of Our Ancestors.

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Did You Know: The term areito (also spelled areyto) is a Taíno word that describes a socio-ceremonial blend of dance, music, song, and poetry. The areito played a significant role in the social, political, and religious life of the Taíno People. In the 15th and early 16th century, Spanish chroniclers in the Caribbean noted that the arieto were presented in the main plaza of the Maestri, N. Areitos: Ancient Caribbean Taíno Dancing and Singing Ceremonies, ThoughtCo., https://www.thoughtco.com/areitos-ceremony-169589 iukaieke (also spelled yucayeque) or village. Sometimes Atkinson L-G. 2006. The Earliest Inhabitants: The Dynamics of the Jamaican Taino. Kingston, Jamaica: University of West Indies Press. areito were conducted in a designated area in front of the home of a León T. 2016. Polyrhythmia in the Music of Cuba. Polyrhythmia in the Music of Cuba. Diagonal: An Ibero-American Music Review 1(2). kasike or chieftain. These plazas or ceremonial grounds called batei had their borders defined by standing stones, often decorated or carved with various images, or by earthen embankments. Dances during an areito could vary a great deal. Sometimes there were step-patterns moving along specific pathways. Walking patterns that went no more than a step or two in either direction were also used. According to a few of the descriptions given by Spanish chroniclers, some dances were comparable to what would be called line dances today. All the dances were lead by a Saunders NJ. 2005. The Peoples of the Caribbean. An Encyclopedia of Archaeology and Traditional Culture. Santa Barbara, California: ABC-CLIO. Scolieri PA. 2013. On the Areito: Discovering Dance in the New World. Dancing the New World: Aztecs, Spaniards, and the Choreography of Conquest. University of Texas Press: Austin. p 24-43. tekina (a guide, teacher or dance master) of either sex who would use a call and response pattern of song and steps. Areito leaders determined the steps, words, rhythm, energy, tone, and pitch of a dance sequence. The dances could be based on ancient clearly choreographed steps or new choreography could be presented in this evolving art form. Simmons ML. 1960. Pre-Conquest Narrative Songs in Spanish America. The Journal of American Folklore 73(288):103-111.
Thompson D. 1983. Music Research in Puerto Rico. College Music Symposium 23(1):81-96.
Thompson D. 1993. The "Cronistas de Indias" Revisited: Historical Reports, Archeological Evidence, and Literary and Artistic Traces of Indigenous Music and Dance in the Greater Antilles at the Time of the "Conquista". Latin American Music Review / Revista de Música Latinoamericana 14(2):181-201.
Wilson SC. 2007. The Archaeology of the Caribbean. New York: Cambridge University Press.

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Did You Know: The term areito (also spelled areyto) is a Taíno word that describes a socio-ceremonial blend of dance, music, song, and poetry. The areito played a significant role in the social, political, and religious life of the Taíno People.

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Taino Self-determination | United Confederation of Taino People

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A unification mechanism for Taino People

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Searching for Cuba's Pre-Columbian Roots

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Searching for Cuba's Pre-Columbian Roots

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Fighting to reclaim Cuba’s indigenous culture, and to persuade Cubans to explore their pre-Columbian Taíno roots.

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A newfound quest for identity has led some Cubans to reclaim their Taíno Indian heritage

Smithsonian Journeys Quarterly

Roberto Ordúñez Fernández first began unearthing artifacts in and around Cuba's eastern tip more than 40 years ago, at the age of 17. He hasn't stopped since. Ask anyone in the small city of Baracoa for el arqueólogo and you'll be directed to his narrow row house near the seafront. Most of what Ordúñez has found was left behind by the Taíno, an Arawak Indian people that Columbus encountered in Baracoa when he first landed there, in November of 1492.

Ordúñez is best known for establishing Baracoa's Cueva del Paraíso (Cave of Paradise) Archaeological Museum, which opened in 2004. Set in what had been an abandoned Taíno cave at the edge of town, it's the only Taíno museum on the eastern tip of Cuba. "It was a dream," says Ordúñez. "When I told people here what I wanted to do, they thought I was crazy."

Ordúñez himself would admit he's relentless-but in Cuba, where private initiatives are often hindered or blocked by government bureaucrats, he is also unusually effective. Before founding the museum, he fought to protect land containing archaeological sites just east of Baracoa, and won. He has battled for permission to excavate artifacts that are in imminent danger of being washed out to sea or destroyed by real estate development. And now he is building another Taíno museum on the second floor of his house.

Ordúñez is a solitary fighter, but he's not alone in his struggles. His quest is part of a small yet growing movement to reclaim Cuba's indigenous culture, and to persuade Cubans to explore their pre-Columbian Taíno roots.

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The Taíno were the most populous of several groups who inhabited Cuba when Columbus sailed into Baracoa harbor. The explorer described them in his journal as a friendly and generous people who lived simply, noting pointedly, "They will make good servants." He wasted no time in erecting a wooden cross on the shore. Not long after that, he enslaved the Taíno in the name of Spain.

The Taíno began to die out quickly-from smallpox, violence, and overwork at the hands of the Spanish colonizers. But despite claims to the contrary, they didn't disappear completely. Some fled into the mountains. Others mixed with colonists or Africans fleeing slavery, sometimes maintaining Taíno customs and farming practices.

The colonial authorities refused to recognize the existence of the Taíno as a people, assigning their own last names to the remaining indigenous population. "[They wanted] to eliminate Indian identity so there would be no indigenous title to the land," says José Barreiro, a member of the Taíno Nation of the Antilles and director of the Office for Latin America at the Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian. But this did not stop some Taíno from asserting their land rights in court, albeit without success. The last indigenous land claim in Cuba was denied in 1850.

Researchers who looked for a surviving Taíno culture during the 20th century failed to recognize what was right before their eyes. "They were looking for people with loincloths and didn't find any," Barreiro says. "They didn't see the nuances." Taíno in Cuba can't always be identified by physical traits, adds Barreiro's research partner, Baracoa historian Alejandro Hartmann-their customs are often the only evidence of Indian heritage. "People still believe in mother earth and father sun," he says. "They go ask for permission from Taíno gods like Osaín before they harvest something."

Genetic analysis has recently bolstered the case for the continuing Taíno presence in the Caribbean. A 2003 study in Puerto Rico showed that 61 percent of randomly selected subjects had mitochondrial DNA of indigenous origin. "You can be looking at a very Afro-Cuban or Iberian-looking person, but the DNA tells a different story," Barreiro says.

After the 1959 Cuban Revolution, the new leadership tried to foster a stronger sense of "Cubanness," and frowned upon talk of separate racial identities. "The government was drastic about it for years and didn't want it to come up," says Barreiro. But the sudden collapse of the Soviet Union caused an identity crisis among Cubans, who suddenly found themselves short on food and basic supplies-and more likely to turn to traditional knowledge for making goods and medicines they needed. Only in recent years have the nuances of Cuban identity, including Taíno roots, become an acceptable topic for discussion in the eyes of the government.

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When I visited Ordúñez at his Baracoa house, he waved me through the open front door into a living room crammed with bags of cement stacked to the ceiling and a red 1950s Česká motorcycle. In the narrow corridor that remained, he had managed to find room for furniture. I squeezed through and joined him on the sofa, in front of a box fan.

Ordúñez launched into a tutorial on the Taíno, bolting upstairs to gather a basket of artifacts for me to inspect. For over a decade, Ordúñez and his partners have been excavating in the nearby village of Boma, where they found what could be the burial site of Guamá, a Taíno cacique (chief) who resisted the Spanish colonizers for a decade before he was killed.

Ordúñez told me that he learned his field from Antonio Núñez Jiménez, a Cuban revolutionary turned archaeologist who had hidden out with Fidel Castro in the mountains west of Baracoa. As I turned over clay idols in my hands, Ordúñez proposed an excursion to Boma later that week.

On the appointed day, despite heavy rains the night before, Ordúñez and I set off early on his Česká, heading toward the mountains to the east. We soon left the paved road for a rocky dirt path and finally came to a stop where a handful of young children appeared at the top of a hill, shouting the archaeologist's name. Their numbers grew as we walked up toward the cave where Ordúñez believes his team recovered Guamá's remains.

The bones have been relocated to the Cueva del Paraíso Museum, in Baracoa, and today there is only a replica grave in their place, with a single chain to discourage people from getting too close. "After we found Guamá here, the kids would come and dig when we were gone," said Ordúñez, shaking his head. He hopes to conduct more excavations in the area soon, funds permitting.

Enthusiasm has increased among the children in Boma since Ordúñez initiated a community project, including archaeology lessons in the local school. On weekends he teaches kids to perform areítos, a type of Taíno ceremony. Where possible, the performance is based on archaeological findings and early colonial accounts. But generally speaking, he acknowledges, the performance is more fantasy than fact. Ordúñez wants the kids to perform for tourists, to raise money for the new museum and educational programs.

The government used to crack down on such inauthentic displays, but with the increasing demand for indigenous culture from cash-wielding tourists, authorities have become more tolerant. Many Boma residents think the activity is harmless. "The kids would be out wasting their time if they weren't practicing," said a woman whose husband is of Taíno descent, and who was reluctant to be named.

Farther east along the coastal road, past the sleepy oceanside village of Bariguá, Ordúñez and I visited two more caves with petroglyphs and drawings in iron oxide. The Cuban military has partially walled off one of the cave openings, with a lookout slot and what appears to be a shelf for a gun.

The drawings inside are scant and simple: faint depictions of people, sea creatures, maybe a lizard. The caves themselves are small and accessible to anyone from the roadside. Some of the images have been irreparably scratched, as if someone has tried to erase them from history.

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Back in Baracoa, my search for traces of Taíno culture turned up questionable leads. Fact and lore competed for attention. I heard unreliable information about which crops and foods were actually indigenous. Various sources told me about connections between contemporary Cuban rhythms and Taíno music, although experts like Hartmann say there is no relation at all. Most conversations about ethnic identity showed a marked ambivalence: "I am part Indio," went a typical comment, "and I learned about the Indios growing up. But I am Cuban."

I stopped in a tattoo parlor just off the new Taíno-themed pedestrian walkway, in the city center. Five inked-up men were crammed into a space the size of a closet. I asked one with a sleeve of patriotic tattoos if the shop offered any indigenous designs. "Sure," he said. "Aztec, Mayan-whatever you want."

Just when I was losing faith that I would find anyone in Baracoa besides Ordúñez and Hartmann who were truly engaged with Taíno heritage, I came across Mildo Matos's art studio. In his 50s, Matos remembers the Taíno aspects of his childhood in a tiny village on the arid southern coast of Guantánamo Province; his grandmother was Taína. As a boy, he ate casabe, a Taíno bread made from grated yuca (cassava root). His family built huts called bohíos on their land and grew indigenous crops. "I didn't realize how different we were from other Cuban families until I went away to art school," said Matos.

As a student, Matos took up oil painting. But for years before the Taíno appeared in his work, he painted other subjects. Now his studio walls are covered with dynamic depictions of Taíno gods, though his style stems more from 20th-century European traditions than from cave drawings or idols. "I use a lot of surrealism, because [like Taíno symbolism] it is also about reinterpreting nature and natural phenomena," he said.

For Matos, exploring his ethnic identity is an active process of retrieval, reconfiguration, and reinterpretation: "Identity is personal-everyone has to do the work for themselves." One problem, he added, is the lack of historical and archaeological resources for Cubans who do wish to understand their Taíno heritage. "All of the important artifacts are in Havana," said Matos-"or the U.S."

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One significant Taíno artifact that is no longer available to people on Cuba's eastern tip is the Gran Cemí of Patana, a stone idol that American archaeologist Mark Harrington removed from the Patana Caverns in 1915. Harrington was excavating there on behalf of George Gustav Heye, whose collection was transferred decades later to the Smithsonian Institution. The Gran Cemí now resides in storage at the National Museum of the American Indian (NMAI) Cultural Resources Center, in Maryland, awaiting the outcome of repatriation negotiations between the United States and Cuba. "The museum and all parties in Cuba are in conversation," said Eileen Maxwell, director of public affairs at the NMAI. "We anticipate receiving a formal repatriation request in due course."

My guide to the Patana Caverns was Alexis Morales Prado, a self-taught archaeologist whose hobby led to a full-time job. Before he founded the local office of the Empresa Nacional para la Protección de la Flora y Fauna-a government agency that oversees the preservation of land and cultural heritage-Morales spent decades as the state prosecutor of Maisí, Cuba's easternmost municipality. The crime he most prosecuted was the unauthorized slaughter of cows. Now he works to gain protected status for land in Maisí that contains Taíno sites.

I found Morales at his home near the village center. He is tall, with expressive blue eyes and graying hair. Cuban flag patches ornamented one of his shirtsleeves and his khaki vest. A small machete hung in a leather sheath at his waist. "I work in facts, not fantasy," he said. "Language. What I can see. Some people are nothing more than intellectual jineteros (hustlers)."

According to Morales, many people in Maisí have Taíno blood and follow Taíno customs by virtue of their inherited relationship with the land-but not all of them identify as indigenous. Morales is working on a new museum to house Taíno archaeological finds from the region, set to open at the end of 2016. He also teaches in the local schools, where his students learn how their current way of life is part of a living past. "They still use some of the same hunting and fishing methods. They'll bring in Taíno mortars they found in their backyards that their families use to prepare food," Morales marveled. "They use Taíno words."

Morales teaches children how to distinguish real artifacts they may find-like a mortar with subtle but intentional carvings for different grips-from unadorned rocks. He took me out to the future museum to show me examples, but guards turned us away: no visitors allowed, no explanations given. "They won't even let me in-and my stuff is in there," Morales said. But he had another solution: "Let's stop by my parents' place."

His parents weren't home, but there was a hungry cat waiting inside with her newborn litter of kittens. Morales rummaged through the fridge to find something to quiet them, then opened a glass display case in the living room. He turned and passed me a large earthen Taíno bowl. I cupped its rounded edges firmly, eyeing the concrete floor and imagining the worst. The bowl was about a thousand years old, Morales said. I was relieved to hand it back to him after he emerged from his parents' bedroom dragging two plastic storage bins of Taíno artifacts that had been underneath their bed. The bins contained rocks with coral fossils, mortars, graters-probably for yuca-picks, hatchet heads, ceramic fragments, miniature stone and clay idols, all of it in earthy browns and grays, except for a single contemporary artifact: a white plastic hair clip.

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Morales and I later drove in a 1959 Land Rover to La Patana, situated at the end of a red-dirt road best traversed on a horse or in a four-wheel drive vehicle. The local school has only eight students. The village was all but deserted when we arrived, so we continued our hike to the Patana Caverns down a precipitous trail of jagged rock.

To remove the Gran Cemí from its cave, Mark Harrington's team had to cut the idol into five pieces with a two-man lumber saw. The pieces were then packed in cedar boxes and hauled by mules to Maisí, where they were loaded onto a boat headed for Baracoa, and later transferred to a Norwegian freighter making a stop in New York City.

Before its removal, the idol must have been an imposing sight; it had been carved into a four-foot-high stalagmite with an even wider base. Still, Harrington nearly failed to see it. The cave's mouth opens wide to a high-ceilinged antechamber, tempting anyone who enters to look upward past the idol's former resting place, toward an enticing passageway that disappears into the darkness. This leads into a rotunda filled with bats, whose presence thwarted all three of Harrington's attempts to thoroughly explore the deeper space. He noticed the idol only while recovering from his third try.

I did not read Harrington's account of his Patana expedition until after I had visited the cave, and don't recall seeing the millions of roaches he witnessed on the floor of the corridor leading into the rotunda. But that's probably because I was too preoccupied with the thousands of bats that formed a funnel cloud when Morales and I entered their space in the two-tone glow of my smartphone and his flashlight.

In pursuit of the more mysterious chamber, I, like Harrington, had also failed to note the petroglyphs that still remain at the cave's entrance, and now I too was sweating through my clothes and suffocating in the rotunda's foul air. By the time I thought to ask Morales what marvels awaited us, I could hardly hear myself over the beating wings and piercing cries. "None," he shouted back over his shoulder. "I wanted to show you the heat trap!" Frenzied bats clipped my arms and legs. Warm guano clotted in my hair. Head down, I turned and sprinted back to the entrance as fast as I could manage on a soft floor of droppings.

Only when I was back at the cave entrance, alone and breathless, could I finally appreciate the space. Petroglyphs stared out from the walls. The spot where the Gran Cemí used to stand came into focus, a haunting stump of a rock remaining in place of a figure once infused with life. The Taíno may be destined to be defined, at least in part, by their absence.

I remember the first Taíno idol I held, as I sat in Roberto Ordúñez's living room: a three-sided clay figure called La Muñequina (the little doll). As I turned each of its sides to face me, it became a frog, a skull, and then an owl. For the Taíno, this idol was an indivisible symbol of life, death, and wandering souls-though not necessarily in that order.

It was a Taíno belief that the dead had their own spirits, and that these could pass back into the world as people, animals, even objects. Their presence wasn't regarded as a haunting, however. It was simply as if those who had died had taken a new shape in order to exist again alongside the living.

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smithsonian journeys travel quarterly: cuba

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Searching for Cuba's Pre-Columbian Roots

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Smithsonian Journeys Quarterly Roberto Ordúñez Fernández first began unearthing artifacts in and around Cuba's eastern tip more than 40 years ago, at the age of 17. He hasn't stopped since. Ask anyone in the small city of Baracoa for el arqueólogo and you'll be directed to his narrow row house near the seafront.

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Source: Smithsonian Magazine

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If you have ever paddled a canoe, napped in a hammock, savored a barbecue, smoked tobacco or tracked a hurricane across Cuba, you have paid tribute to the Taíno, the Indians who invented those words long before they welcomed Christopher Columbus to the New World in 1492.

Their world, which had its origins among the Arawak tribes of the Orinoco Delta, gradually spread from Venezuela across the Antilles in waves of voyaging and settlement begun around 400 B.C. Mingling with people already established in the Caribbean, they developed self-sufficient communities on the island of Hispaniola, in what is now Haiti and the Dominican Republic; in Jamaica and eastern Cuba; in Puerto Rico, the Virgin Islands and the Bahamas. They cultivated yuca, sweet potatoes, maize, beans and other crops as their culture flourished, reaching its peak by the time of European contact.

Some scholars estimate the Taíno population may have reached more than three million on Hispaniola alone as the 15th century drew to a close, with smaller settlements elsewhere in the Caribbean. Whatever the number, the Taíno towns described by Spanish chroniclers were densely settled, well organized and widely dispersed. The Indians were inventive people who learned to strain cyanide from life-giving yuca, developed pepper gas for warfare, devised an extensive pharmacopeia from nature, built oceangoing canoes large enough for more than 100 paddlers and played games with a ball made of rubber, which fascinated Europeans seeing the material for the first time. Although the Taíno never developed a written language, they made exquisite pottery, wove intricate belts from dyed cotton and carved enigmatic images from wood, stone, shell and bone.

The Taíno impressed Columbus with their generosity, which may have contributed to their undoing. "They will give all that they do possess for anything that is given to them, exchanging things even for bits of broken crockery," he noted upon meeting them in the Bahamas in 1492. "They were very well built, with very handsome bodies and very good faces....They do not carry arms or know them....They should be good servants."

In short order, Columbus established the first American colony at La Isabela, on the north coast of Hispaniola, in 1494. After a brief period of coexistence, relations between the newcomers and natives deteriorated. Spaniards removed men from villages to work in gold mines and colonial plantations. This kept the Taíno from planting the crops that had fed them for centuries. They began to starve; many thousands fell prey to smallpox, measles and other European diseases for which they had no immunity; some committed suicide to avoid subjugation; hundreds fell in fighting with the Spaniards, while untold numbers fled to remote regions beyond colonial control. In time, many Taíno women married conquistadors, combining the genes of the New World and Old World to create a new mestizo population, which took on Creole characteristics with the arrival of African slaves in the 16th century. By 1514, barely two decades after first contact, an official survey showed that 40 percent of Spanish men had taken Indian wives. The unofficial number is undoubtedly higher.

"Very few Indians were left after 50 years," said Ricardo Alegría, a Puerto Rican historian and anthropologist I interviewed before his death this past July. He had combed through Spanish archives to track the eclipse of the Taíno. "Their culture was interrupted by disease, marriage with Spanish and Africans, and so forth, but the main reason the Indians were exterminated as a group was sickness," he told me. He ran through the figures from his native island: "By 1519, a third of the aboriginal population had died because of smallpox. You find documents very soon after that, in the 1530s, in which the question came from Spain to the governor. 'How many Indians are there? Who are the chiefs?' The answer was none. They are gone." Alegría paused before adding: "Some remained probably...but it was not that many."

Possibly as many as three million souls-some 85 percent of the Taíno population-had vanished by the early 1500s, according to a controversial extrapolation from Spanish records. As the Indian population faded, so did Taíno as a living language. The Indians' reliance on beneficent icons known as cemís gave way to Christianity, as did their hallucinogen-induced cohoba ceremonies, which were thought to put shamans in touch with the spirit world. Their regional chieftaincies, each headed by a leader known as a cacique, crumbled away. Their well-maintained ball courts reverted to bush.

Given the dramatic collapse of the indigenous society, and the emergence of a population blending Spanish, Indian and African attributes, one might be tempted to declare the Taíno extinct. Yet five centuries after the Indians' fateful meeting with Columbus, elements of their culture endure-in the genetic heritage of modern Antilleans, in the persistence of Taíno words and in isolated communities where people carry on traditional methods of architecture, farming, fishing and healing.

For more than a year, I searched for these glimpses of Taíno survival, among living descendants in New York City and dusty Caribbean villages, in museums displaying fantastic religious objects created by long-dead artists, in interviews with researchers who still debate the fate of the Taíno.

My search began in the nooks and crannies of limestone caves underlying the Dominican Republic, where the Taíno believed their world began. "Hispaniola is the heart of Taíno culture and the caves are the heart of the Taíno," said Domingo Abréu Collado, chief of the speleology division in the Dominican Ministry on Environmental and Natural Resources. He clapped on a hard hat at the entrance to the Pomier Caves, a complex of 55 caverns less than an hour's drive from the gridlock of Santo Domingo. He led me from the eye-numbing brilliance of tropical noon into a shadowy tunnel, where our headlamps picked out the image of a face carved into stone, its eyes wide in surprise.

"That's Mácocael," said Abréu. "This guy was supposed to guard the entrance of the cave at night, but he got curious and left his post for a look around outside. The sun caught him there and turned him to stone." The sentinel, whose Taíno name means "No Eyelids," now stands guard for eternity.

More than 1,000 years before the Spaniards arrived, local shamans and other pilgrims visited such caves to glimpse the future, to pray for rain and to draw surreal images on the walls with charcoal: mating dogs, giant birds swooping down on human prey, a bird-headed man copulating with a human, and a pantheon of naturalistically rendered owls, turtles, frogs, fish and other creatures important to the Taíno, who associated particular animals with specific powers of fecundity, healing, magic and death.

Abréu, a lean man with sharp features, paused before a sweaty wall crowded with images. "So many paintings! I think they are concentrated where the points of energy converge," he said. Abréu's headlamp fell upon images of stick figures who seemed to be smoking pipes; others bent over bowls to inhale snuff through long tubes. These were the tribal leaders who fasted until their ribs showed, cleansed themselves with vomiting sticks and snorted cohoba powder, a hallucinogen ground from the seeds of the Anadenanthera peregrina, a tree native to the Caribbean.

The cohoba ritual was first described by Friar Ramón Pané, a Hieronymite brother who, on the orders of Columbus himself, lived among the Taíno and chronicled their rich belief system. Pané's writings-the most direct source we have on ancient Taíno culture-was the basis for Peter Martyr's 1516 account of cohoba rites: "The intoxicating herb," Martyr wrote, "is so strong that those who take it lose consciousness; when the stupefying action begins to wane, the arms and legs become loose and the head droops." Under its influence, users "suddenly begin to rave, and at once they say . . . that the house is moving, turning things upside down, and that men are walking backwards." Such visions guided leaders in planning war, judging tribal disputes, predicting the agricultural yield and other matters of importance. And the drug seems to have influenced the otherworldly art in Pomier and other caves.

"Country people are still afraid of caves-the ghosts, you see," said Abréu. His voice was accompanied by the sound of dripping water and the fluttering of bats, which swirled around the ceiling and clicked in the dark.

The bats scattered before us; we trudged up into the daylight and by early the next morning we were rattling through the rain-washed streets of Santo Domingo bound for the northeast in search of living Taíno, in Abréu's opinion a dubious objective. Formerly an archaeologist for the Museum of the Dominican Man, he was skeptical of finding real Indians but was happy enough to help scout for remnants of their influence. The first signs began to appear around the town of Bayaguana, where the road narrowed and we jounced past plots of yuca, plantains and maize, some of which were planted in the heaped-earth pattern favored by Taíno farmers of old. New fields, cleared by the slash-and-burn methods Indians brought here from South America, smoldered along the way. On the fringes of Los Haitises National Park, we met a woman who had set up shop beside the road to sell casabe, the coarse, flat Taíno bread made from yuca. "None left," she said. "I sold the last of it yesterday." We began to see simple, sensibly designed houses with thin walls of palm planks and airy roofs of thatch, like those depicted in Spanish woodcuts from Columbus' day.

The road ended at Sabana de los Javieles, a village known as a pocket of Taíno settlement since the 1530s, when Enrique, one of the last Taíno caciques of the colonial period, made peace with Spain and led some 600 followers to northeastern Hispaniola. They stayed, married Spaniards and Africans, and left descendants who still retain indigenous traits. In the 1950s, researchers found high percentages of the blood types that are predominant in Indians in blood samples they took here. In the 1970s, dental surveys established that 33 out of 74 villagers retained shovel-shaped incisors, the teeth characteristic of American Indians and Asians. And a recent nationwide genetic study established that 15 percent to 18 percent of Dominicans had Amerindian markers in their mitochondrial DNA, testifying to the continued presence of Taíno genes.

None of this would surprise Ramona Primitiva, a villager whose family has long embraced its indigenous antecedents. "My father used to tell us we came from the Indio," she said, using another name for the Taíno. "My family has always been here. We didn't come from somewhere else." We sat in white plastic chairs at the local store, grateful for the shade of an overhanging roof and happy to have neighbors join the conversation.

"My father used to tell us we were descendants of the Indians," said Meregilda Tholia Johelin.

"My ancestors were Indio," said Rosa Arredondo Vasquez.

"My grandmother said we came from the Indians," said Gabriela Javier Alvarez, who appeared with an aluminum guayo, Taíno for the grating boards once fashioned from rough stone and used for shredding yuca roots.

Jurda Arcacio Peguero wandered by, eavesdropped for a moment, then dashed next door to fetch a batea, Taíno for a long wooden tray for fruits or vegetables. "It's an old one," she said, handing over an object fragrant of garlic and worn buttery smooth from use.

The villagers did not call themselves Indian or Taíno, but they knew how Indian traditions had shaped life in the community. Most had kept a long silence about their indigenous heritage for fear of being ridiculed: Indians were country people-uneducated campesinos stereotyped as gullible or backward. The bigotry has softened somewhat, but nobody wants to be considered a rube.

It was late in the day when we said our farewells and turned for the capital, back down a rutted road through lumpy green hills. "I'm sorry we couldn't find an Indian for you," Abréu said, sensing my disappointment. Brooding in the passenger seat, I wondered if the prevailing academic wisdom might be true-that the Taíno had been extinct as a distinct people for half a millennium, existing at best as hybrids in fragments of their old homeland. Did any pure Taíno survive?

That question was the wrong one to ask. It took a nudge from Jorge Estevez, a self-described Taíno from New York City, to remind me that notions of racial purity went out the window with Adolf Hitler and the eugenics movement. "These concepts are really outdated," said Estevez, who coordinates educational workshops at the Smithsonian's National Museum of the American Indian in New York. "There's no such thing as a pure Taíno," he continued, "just like there are no pure Spaniards. It's not even clear about the ethnicity of Christopher Columbus! The guys who came with him were mixed with Moors, with Sephardic Jews, with Basques-a great mixture that was going on. That story continues."

Even the Taíno evolved as a distinct people only after centuries of traveling and merging with other populations in the Antilles. "So when people ask if I am pure Taíno, I say 'yes,'" said Estevez, who traces his roots to the Dominican Republic and has the shovel incisors to prove it. "My ancestors were from a plethora of different tribes. They mixed with a lot of others to become Taíno. What you have to look at is how the culture persists and how it is being transmitted."

Estevez, a former pugilist who retains a boxer's brawn and grace, unzipped a black suitcase and began unpacking objects to bolster his argument for the survival of a Taíno culture: a feather-light makuto, a basket woven from palm fronds; ladles, cups, plates and a musical instrument known as a guiro, all made from gourds; a wooden batea for carrying produce, like the one I had seen in the Dominican Republic a few days before. These were not dusty artifacts from a museum but utensils made recently by Antillean villagers who still use them and call them by their Taíno names. "My mother knew how to weave these things," he said, holding up the makuto. "We also made casabe." As he got older, Estevez steadily collected Indian lore and objects from a network of uncles and aunts in the islands, adding new evidence to his suitcase every year. "All my life I've been on this journey looking for all these Taíno things to see how much survival is there," he said.

Relegated to a footnote of history for 500 years, the Taíno came roaring back as front-page news in 2003, when Juan C. Martínez Cruzado, a biologist at the University of Puerto Rico, announced the results of an island-wide genetic study. Taking samples from 800 randomly selected subjects, Martínez reported that 61.1 percent of those surveyed had mitochondrial DNA of indigenous origin, indicating a persistence in the maternal line that surprised him and his fellow scientists. The same study revealed African markers in 26.4 percent of the population and 12.5 percent for those of European descent. The results encouraged a Taíno resurgence, with native groups urging Puerto Rican schools to take note of the indigenous contribution to Caribbean history, opposing construction on tribal sites and seeking federal recognition for the Taíno, with attendant benefits.

Though the question of Indian identity is often fraught with political implications, it is especially pronounced in Puerto Rico, which still struggles with its status as a territory of the United States. The island enjoys neither the benefits of statehood nor the independence of a nation, with deep divisions between proponents for each. Ardent nationalists view the recent surge in Taíno activism as a threat to political unity. Activists say their adversaries are promoting Eurocentric history and a colonial class system. Even Taíno leaders occasionally view one another with hostility.

"Here in Puerto Rico, power plays are rampant," said Carlalynne Melendez Martínez, an anthropologist who has launched the nonprofit group Guakia Taina-Ke, Our Taíno Land, to promote native studies. Her goal is to boost Taíno culture by reviving the Arawak language, preserving cultural sites and establishing preserves for indigenous people. "We're teaching the language to children and teaching people how to farm. We don't do songs and dances for the tourists," she said, referring to a competing group.

In Puerto Rico's central mountains, I came upon a woman who called herself Kukuya, Taíno for firefly, who was getting ready for a gathering of Indians in Jayuya, a town associated with both revolution and indigenous festivals. She had grown up in New York City but had lived in Puerto Rico for 35 years, having been guided to this remote community, she said, by a vision. Green-eyed and rosy-cheeked, she said her forebears were Spanish, African, Mexican and Maya as well as Taíno.

"My great-grandmother was pure-blooded Taíno, my mother of mixed blood," she said. "When I told people I was Taíno, they said, 'What, are you crazy? There aren't any left!' But I don't believe you have to look a certain way. I have all of my ancestors within me."

Like Kukuya, thousands of Puerto Ricans have been discovering their inner Taíno in recent years. In the 2010 census, for example, 19,839 Puerto Ricans checked the identity box marked "American Indian or Alaskan Native," an increase of almost 49 percent over the 2000 count, when 13,336 checked it. Neither canvass provided a Taíno option.The native population represents less than 1 percent of Puerto Rico's 3.7 million people, but indigenous leaders consider the latest head count a milestone-further proof that some Indians live on long after they were thought to be annihilated.

"What I'm really excited about is that there's a lot of youth coming into this and challenging the status quo," said Roberto Mukaro Borrero, president of the United Confederation of Taíno People. Borrero, a New Yorker of Puerto Rican parentage, has tried to soothe fears about a Taíno land grab based on Indian identity.

"I want to make it clear that we're not here to take back Puerto Rico or the Dominican Republic," he said. "Or to establish a casino. If you just look at the statements we've made over the last ten years, there's not one mention of casinos, kicking anybody out of the country or being divisive in any way. We just want a seat at the table."

Still, some scholars remain skeptical. "You have to be aware of people running around saying they're Taíno, because they are after a federal subsidy," said Bernardo Vega, a former director of the Museum of the Dominican Man and the Dominican Republic's former ambassador to the United States. Yvonne M. Narganes Storde, an archaeologist at the University of Puerto Rico agreed. She gives the activists credit for preserving important sites on the island, but she sounded wary of their emphasis on establishing a separate Taíno identity. "All the cultures are blended here," she said. "I probably have Taíno genes. We all do. We have incorporated all these cultures-African, Spanish and Indian. We have to live with it."

A few pockets of Taíno culture remain in eastern Cuba, an area shaped by rugged mountains and years of isolation. "Anybody who talks about the extinction of the Taíno has not really looked at the record," said Alejandro Hartmann Matos, the city historian of Baracoa, Cuba's oldest city, and an authority on the island's earliest inhabitants. Hartmann, a Cuban of German ancestry, had invited me to meet Indian descendants from the island's Oriente region, as well as to mark the 500th anniversary of Baracoa, founded in 1511. Joining us was José Barreiro, assistant director of research at the Smithsonian's National Museum of the American Indian. With Hartmann, Barreiro has been tracking descendants of the Indians since 1989. Based on their research, the pair estimate that at least 5,000 Indians survive in Cuba, while hundreds of thousands likely have indigenous roots.

Late one night, after a day of quincentennial celebrations with live music, dancing, poetry recitations and occasional tots of rum, Barreiro and I sat bleary-eyed around a kitchen table as the indefatigable Hartmann raced through a list of historical references to Indians of the Oriente, beginning in 1492, when Columbus sailed into Baracoa harbor, planted a wooden cross on the shore and praised the place for its "good water, good land, good surroundings, and much wood."

"Indians have appeared in the record ever since," said Hartmann. Indigenous people established the city of Jiguaní in 1701 and formed the all-native Hatuey Regiment in the Cuban war against Spain in 1895. José Martí, founding father of Cuba's independence movement, frequently mentioned Indians in his war diary. Mark Harrington, an American archaeologist conducting fieldwork in 1915 and 1919, found natives still hanging on in eastern Cuba. He was followed-in the 1950s, '60s and '70s-by anthropologists who scoured the region recording the skeletal structure, blood type and other physical attributes of Cuban villagers with indigenous ancestry. "So if you look to the past," said Hartmann, "you see this long record of Indians living here. Anyone who says otherwise is speaking from ignorance."

And today?

"Just look around!" said Hartmann, spreading his arms wide. In a week of exploring Baracoa and its environs, we had encountered many Cubans with the high cheekbones, coppery skin and other features that suggest Amerindian ancestry. And while it was clear that indigenous families have intermarried with Africans and Europeans, we met villagers in Baracoa and the nearby settlements of Playa Duaba and Guirito who proudly identified themselves as Indian. They kept the old traditions, planting their dense gardens, praying to the moon and sun for strength, gathering wild plants for healing and marking the passage of time without clocks or watches.

"When I see the vivijagua ant come out of his nest and crawl across the rafters in the morning, I know it's time to go to the fields," 75-year old Francisco "Panchito" Ramírez Rojas told us. "When the chipojo lizard comes down from the palm tree to get a drink of water, I know it's noon. I also know it's noon when my shadow disappears and I'm standing on my own head," he said, getting up from our lunch table to illustrate his point.

A lean man bronzed by years in the sun, Panchito radiated a natural authority, which had earned him the title of cacique in the community of La Ranchería, not far from the U.S. naval station and prison at Guantánamo Bay.

Ramirez took the opportunity to search for useful plants in the woods along the Toa River. Striding up to a cedar, he patted the rough trunk as if it were an old amigo. "This tree is a relative," he said. "It has feelings like we do, so it should be treated with respect. If you make tea from the bark of this tree, it has a lot of power. It's good for colds and respiratory problems. But if you don't ask permission before you cut the bark, it may not work. So I always say a little prayer so the tree knows I'm serious and I want to share its power. 'Give me your strength for healing.' That's what I ask."

Hearing Ramirez, I felt the hairs on the back of my neck bristling: His method of conversing with plants was almost identical to one described by 15th-century Spanish chroniclers. Although those accounts have been widely published, it is doubtful that Ramirez ever read them: He is illiterate. He learned his craft from a great-uncle and other elders who were natural healers in his mountain community.

"If we expect to get food from the earth," he says, "we have to give something back. So at planting time we always say a prayer and bury a little stone or a coin in the field, just a little message to the earth, so that she will help with production."

Like those who taught him, Ramirez is passing his knowledge on, to a son, Vladimir Lenin Ramírez Ramírez, and to other family members, so they will keep the traditions going. "The young ones will carry on for us," Panchito Ramirez said. But he admitted concern over the dwindling of Indian communities, which have been reduced by marriage to outsiders. "I'd like for my children to marry Indians, but there just aren't enough of us. So our people are leaving the mountain to find new families. They're scattered all over."

Robert M. Poole is a contributing editor for Smithsonian. Photographer Maggie Steber is based in Miami.

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If you have ever paddled a canoe, napped in a hammock, savored a barbecue, smoked tobacco or tracked a hurricane across Cuba, you have paid tribute to the Taíno, the Indians who invented those words long before they welcomed Christopher Columbus to the New World in 1492.

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Native America Calling: Indigenous resistance to gentrification in Puerto Rico

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Native America Calling: Indigenous resistance to gentrification in Puerto Rico

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Indianz.Com > News > Native America Calling: Indigenous resistance to gentrification in Puerto Rico

Native America Calling: Indigenous resistance to gentrification in Puerto Rico

Indigenous resistance to gentrification in Puerto Rico

Tax breaks and other incentives are driving wealthy, outside investors to buy up property in Puerto Rico.

That's pushing housing prices up, exacerbating the island's debt crisis, and threatening the country's long-held tradition of public access to beaches. It's also causing concerns for Indigenous communities.

Guests on Native America Calling

Today on Native America Calling, Shawn Spruce speaks with Roberto Borrero (Taino), president of United Confederation of Taino People

Gualterio Alomar (Taino), president of the Organization for Culture of Hispanic Origins

Tai Pelli (Taino), international relations and human rights officer for the United Confederation of Taino People.

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Native America Calling: Indigenous resistance to gentrification in Puerto Rico

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Indianz.Com > News > Native America Calling: Indigenous resistance to gentrification in Puerto Rico Native America Calling: Indigenous resistance to gentrification in Puerto Rico Indigenous resistance to gentrification in Puerto Rico Tax breaks and other incentives are driving wealthy, outside investors to buy up property in Puerto Rico.