Indigenous peoples of the Caribbean

The indigenous peoples of the Caribbean included the Taíno, the Island Caribs of the Lesser Antilles, and the Guanahatabey of western Cuba.

Introduction

Some scholars consider it important to distinguish the Taíno from the neo-Taíno nations of Cuba, Puerto Rico, and Hispaniola, and the Lucayan of the Bahamas and Jamaica. Linguistically or culturally these differences extended from various cognates or types of canoe: canoa, piragua, cayuco to distinct languages. Languages diverged even over short distances. Previously these groups often had distinctly non-Taíno deities such as the goddess Jagua, strangely enough the god Teju Jagua is a major demon of indigenous Paraguayan mythology. Still these groups plus the high Taíno are considered Island Arawak, part of a widely diffused assimilating culture, a circumstance witnessed even today by names of places in the New World; for example localities or rivers called Guamá are found in Cuba, Venezuela and Brazil. Guamá was the name of famous Taíno who fought the Spanish.

Thus, since the neo-Taíno had far more diverse cultural input and a greater societal and ethnic heterogeneity than the true high Taíno (Rouse, 1992) of Boriquen (Puerto Rico) a separate section is presented here. A broader language group is Arawakan languages. The term Arawak (Aruaco) is said to be derived from an insulting term meaning "eaters of meal" given to them by mainland Caribs. In turn the Arawak legend explains the origin of the Caribs as offspring of a putrid serpent.

The social classes of the neo-Taíno, generalized from Bartolomé de las Casas, appeared to have been loosely feudal with the following Taíno classes: naboría (common people), nitaíno' (sub-chiefs, or nobles), bohique, (shamans priests/healers), and the cacique (chieftains, or princes). However, the neo-Taíno seem to have been more relaxed in this respect.

Administrative and/or national units

The Spanish found that most Cuban peoples for the part living peacefully in tidy towns and villages grouped into numerous principalities called Cacigazgos or principalities with an almost feudal social structure Bartolomé de las Casas. They were ruled by leaders or princes, called Caciques. Cuba was then divided into Guanahatabey, Ciboney-Taíno (here neo-Taíno), and Classical (high) Taíno ISBN 0-8173-5123-X. Cuba was then divided into Guanahatabey, Ciboney-Taíno, and Classical Taíno ISBN 0-8173-5123-X. Then some of Western Cuba was Guanahatabey. and some Siboney (see below). Taíno-like cultures controlled most of Cuba dividing it into the Cacigazgos or principalities. Granberry and Vescelius (2004) and other contemporary authors only consider the cazigazgo of Baracoa as classical or high Taíno. Cuban Cacigazgos including Bayaquitiri, Macaca, Bayamo, Camagüey, Jagua, Habana y Haniguanica are treated here as "neo-Taíno" . Hispaniolan (Haïti) principalities at about 1500 included Maguá (Cacique Guarionex); Xaraguá (Behecchio); Maguana (Caonabo); Higüey also called Iguayagua (Higüayo); Cigüayo (Mayobanex), and unnamed region under Cacique Guanacagarí (Wilson, 1990). These principalities are considered to have various affinities to the contemporary Taíno and neo- Taíno cultures from what is now known as Puerto Rico and the Dominican Republic and Haiti, but are generally believed somewhat different ISBN 0-8173-5123-X.

Farming and fishing

The adroit farming and fishing skills of the neo-Taíno nations should not be underestimated; the names of fauna and flora that survive today are testimony of their continued use. Neo-Taíno fishing technologies were most inventive, including arpón (harpoons), and nasa (fishnets) and traps. Neo-Taíno common names of fish are still used today (DeSola, 1932 ; Erdman, 1983; Florida Fish and Wild Life Commission (Division of Marine Fisheries) 2002; Puerto Rico, Commonwealth, 1998). Agriculture included a wide variety of germplasm, including corn (maiz), peanuts, tomato, squash, and beans plus a vast array of tree fruits. Tubers in most frequent use were yuca (Manihot esculenta) a crop with perhaps 10,000 years of development in the Americas; boniato (the "sweet potato" — Ipomoea batatas), and malanga (Xanthosoma sp.)

Taíno pharmacopoeia

As with all Arawak (Schultes, Raffault. 1990) and similar cultures there was considerable use of natural pharmacopoeia (Robineau, 1991).

Taíno studies

Taíno studies are in a state of both vigorous revival and conflict (Haslip-Viera, 2001). In this conflict deeply embedded cultural mores, senses of nationality and ethnicity struggle with each other. The Syboneistas undertook studies and wrote of neo-Taínos as part and cover for independence struggles against Spain (Fajardo, 1829 - circa 1862; Gautier Benítez, 1873).

Sexual mores

Neo-Taíno sexual freedom is well documented by such as Bartolomé de las Casas, Fernández de Oviedo and Américo Vespucio. Father de las Casas writes: "The Indian women of Cuba, as once did women of many places, went naked. Married women wore a small skirt or apron, called an enagua, which did not cover their breasts and rarely reached the knee. These women in the marriage ceremony, took to the marriage chamber all the friends of the husband, and later emerged to the cry Manikato, the cry of victory." (Father Bartolomé de la Casas, circa 1500). Yet there are some who question this in a debate recalling the old controversies surrounding Margaret Mead.

The legend of the mermaid is said to arise from the Ciboney account of seductive, sexually generous Aycayia, the incarnation of beauty and of sin who gave men pleasure but robbed them of will. She and her six lusty sisters were punished, and Aycayia was condemned to the care of an ancient crone Guanayoa, and sent to an isolated place called Punta Majagua. This exile did not improve the situation because she was constantly "visited" by men. Finally, sent to sea, she was said to have transmuted into a mermaid.

Neo-Taíno and Taíno art

Taíno and related art has been celebrated in several significant exhibitions (Alegria, and Arrom 1998; Bercht, et al. 1997; Bullen, Dacal et al.; Kerchache, 1994, most notably in Paris Maciques, 2004)/

Neo-Taíno music (areíto) survives as echoes in the rich traditions of the popular music of the Caribbean, but is believed to continue to exist in its purest form and associated spirituality among the Waroa of Venezuela (Olsen, 1996)

Metallurgy

The art of the neo-Taínos demonstrates that these nations had metallurgical skills, and it has been postulated by some e.g. Paul Sidney Martin, that the inhabitants of these islands mined and exported metals such as copper (Martin et al. 1947). The Cuban town of (San Ramón de) Guaninao means the place of copper and is surmised to have been a site of pre-Columbian mining (Zayas, 1914).

Peoples of the Caribbean

Taíno

Main article: Taíno

The Taíno, an Arawak people, were the major population group throughout most of the Caribbean. Their culture was divided into three main groups, the Western Taíno, the Classic Taíno, and the Eastern Taíno, with other variations within the islands.

Classic Taíno

The Classic Taíno lived in eastern Cuba, Hispaniola, and Puerto Rico. They spoke a dialect called Classic Taíno. Compared to their neighbors, the Classic Taíno had substantially developed agricultural societies. Puerto Rico was divided into twenty chiefdoms which were organized into one united kingdom or confederation, Borinquen. Hispaniola was divided into roughly 45 chiefdoms, which were organized into five kingdoms under the leadership of the chief of each area's premier chiefdom. Beginning around 1450, Classic Taíno from Hispaniola began migrating to eastern Cuba; they are conventionally known as the Cuban Taíno. The Cuban Taíno gained power over some of Cuba's earlier Western Taíno inhabitants, the Ciboney, but no regional or island-wide political structure had developed on the island at the time of Spanish colonization of the Americas.

Eastern Taíno

The Eastern Taíno inhabited the Leeward Islands of the Lesser Antilles, from the Virgin Islands to Montserrat. They had less sophisticated societies than the Classic Taíno.

Western Taíno

Main articles: Ciboney and Lucayan people

The Western Taíno lived in the Bahamas, central Cuba, westernmost Hispaniola, and Jamaica. They spoke a dialect known as Ciboney Taíno or Western Taíno. The Western Taíno of the Bahamas were known as the Lucayans. They were wiped out by Spanish slave raids by 1520. Western Taíno living in Cuba were known as the Ciboney. They had no chiefdoms or organized political structure beyond individual villages, but by the time of Spanish conquest many were under the control of the Cuban Taíno in eastern Cuba.

Igneri

Main article: Igneri

According to oral history, the Igneri were the original Arawak inhabitants of the Windward Islands in the Lesser Antilles before being conquered by the Island Caribs arriving from South America. Contemporary sources indicate that the Caribs took Igneri women as their wives while killing the men, resulting in the two sexes speaking different languages. This appears to be a confusion of the reality: despite the name, the Island Carib language was Arawakan, not Cariban. Irving Rouse suggests that small numbers of Caribs conquered the Igneri without displacing them, and gradually adopted their language while retaining the Carib identity. Though they were Arawaks, the Igneri language appears to be as distinct from the Taíno language as it was from the mainland Arawak language of South America.

Island Caribs

Main article: Island Caribs

By the contact period, the Island Caribs inhabited the Windward Islands of the Lesser Antilles, from Dominica to the south. They self-identified with the Kalina or mainland Carib people of South America, and were noted for their warlike lifestyle. Contemporary accounts asserted that the Island Caribs had conquered the Windward Islands from their previous inhabitants, the Igneri. However, the Island Carib language was Arawakan, not Cariban. Irving Rouse suggests that small numbers of South American Caribs invaded the Windwards and conquered the Igneri without displacing them; they gradually adopted the local language while maintaining the Carib identity. By the 17th century, male Caribs also spoke a Cariban-based pidgin language. The Island Caribs outlasted their Taíno neighbors, and continue to live in Dominica. Their language became extinct in the 20th century, but an offshoot survives as the Garifuna language, primarily spoken by Black Caribs in Guatemala.

Guanahatabey

Main article: Guanahatabey

A separate ethnic identity from far western Cuba. They were an archaic hunter-gatherer people who spoke a language distinct from Taíno, and appear to have predated the agricultural, Taíno-speaking Ciboney.

Ciguayo

A separate ethnic people that inhabited the Peninsula of Samaná and part of the northern coast toward the Nahua in what today is the Dominican Republic, and, by most contemporary accounts, differed in language and customs from the classical or high Taíno who lived on the eastern part of the island of Hispaniola then known. According to Eustaquio Fernandez de Navarrete, they were “warriors and spirited people,” (“gente animosa y guerrera”). The Cronista de Indias, Pedro Martir accused them of cannibalism: “when they descend from the mountains to wage war on their neighbors, they kill and eat some of them” (“trae[n] origen de los caníbales, pues cuando de las montañas bajan a lo llano para hacer guerra á sus vecinos, si matan á algunos se los comen”). Fray Ramón Pané, often dubbed as the first anthropologist of the Caribbean, distinguished the Cigüayos’ language from the rest of those spoken on Hispaniola. Bartolomé de las Casas, who studied them and was one of the few who read Ramón Pané’s original work in Spanish, provided most of the documentation about this group. Linguists Granberry and Gary Vescelius believe that the Cigüayos emigrated from Central America. Wilson (1990) states that circa 1500 this was the kingdom Cacicazgo of Cacique Guacangarí.

Macorix

Another separate ethnic group that lived on the eastern side of the island of Haiti or as Columbus called it, Hispaniola. Their region today is in the Dominican Republic. According to las Casas, their language was unintelligible for the Taínos, but may have been similar to the Ciguayo (Wilson, 1990).

"There were three distinct languages in this island, unintelligible to each other. ; one was the people we called of Macoíx Below, and the other were the neighbors from Macoríx above (Tres lenguas habia en esta Isla distintas, que la una á la otra no se entendia; la una era de la gente que llamábamos del Macoríx de abajo, y la otra de los vecinos del Macoríx de arriba).

— Bartolomé de las Casas

Recent studies show that the Macorix people coexisted with the Tainos on the Hispaniola. The names San Francisco de Macorix and San Pedro de Macorix in the Dominican Republic, are but indirect references to the political divisions of the cacicazgo. The Spaniards wrongly assumed that the names given to the different territories were a reference "to what they called a Cacicazgo:

a region dominated by a cacique. Cacique comes from the Taíno word kassiquan, meaning 'to keep house,' or meaning: 'a lord, dominating a great territory.' The different names given by the five regions in reality was given by the indigenous people based on the various Indigenous groups living on those areas.

— Federico djs Amador

Florida tribes

The Tequesta of the southeast coast of the Florida peninsula were once considered to be related to the Taíno, but most anthropologists now doubt this. The Tequesta had been present in the area for at least 2,000 years at the time of first European contact, and are believed to have built the Miami Stone Circle. Carl O. Sauer called the Florida Straits "one of the most strongly marked cultural boundaries in the New World", noting that the Straits were also a boundary between agricultural systems, with Florida Indians growing seed crops that originated in Mexico, while the Lucayans of the Bahamas grew root crops that originated in South America.

It is possible that a few Lucayas reached Florida shortly before the first European contacts in the area, but the northwestern Bahamas had remained uninhabited until approximately 1200, and the long established presence of the existing tribes in Florida would have likely prevented any pioneering settlements by people who had only just reached the neighboring islands. Analysis of ocean currents and weather patterns indicates that people traveling by canoe from the Bahamas to Florida were likely to land in northern Florida rather than closer to the Bahamas. A single 'Antillean axe head' found near Gainesville, Florida may support some limited contacts. Due to the same ocean currents, direct travel in canoes from southern Florida to the Bahamas was unlikely.

The term and context of the Ciboney (Siboney)

Ciboney (also Siboney) is a term preferred in Cuban historic contexts for the neo-Taíno nations of Cuba.

Our knowledge of the Cuban indigenous cultures which are often, but less precisely, lumped into a category called Taíno (Caribbean Island Arawak) comes from early Spanish sources, oral traditions and considerable archeological evidence. The Spanish found that most Cuban peoples were, for the most part, living peacefully in tidy towns and villages grouped into numerous principalities called Cacicazgos with an almost feudal social structure (see Bartolomé de las Casas). They were ruled by leaders called Caciques. Cuba was divided into Guanahatabey, Ciboney-Taíno (here neo-Taíno), and Classical (High) Taíno. Some of western Cuba was Guanahatabey and some Siboney (see below).

Taíno-like cultures controlled most of Cuba, dividing it into cacicazgos or principalities. Granberry, Vescelius (2004), and other contemporary authors only consider the cacicazgo of Baracoa as Classical or High Taíno. Cuban cacicazgos including Bayaquitiri, Macaca, Bayamo, Camagüey, Jagua, Habana y Haniguanica are considered neo-Taíno. These principalities are considered to have various affinities to contemporary Taíno and neo-Taíno cultures from Puerto Rico and Hispaniola, but are generally believed to have been somewhat different.

Ethnic/cultural derivatives

Guajiros and Jibaros

The common name given to the rural inhabitants of Cuba is Guajiros. This word is believed derived from the neo-Taíno honorific title Guaoxoerí (your mercy) given to the nitaínos of lesser nobility; other higher ranking salutations were Baharí (your lordship) and Matumberí (your highness) (Zayas, p. 244-245 and 270). Although Guajiro is often translated as peasant, this is a misnomer, unlike peasants which in Spanish are called peónes by definition those who travel on foot, Guajiros often ride their small tough Criollo horses, are usually armed with cutlasses (machetes), and lived predominantly in separate scattered housing or small towns. This dwelling spacing apparently derives from circumstances left over from the times of the cimarrón (La Rosa Corzo, 2003), and the repressions of the count of Valmaceda in the Ten Years' War and that of Valeriano Weyler in the 1895–1898 Cuban War of Independence. The Guajiros usually form the bulk of the fighting force in Cuban wars; thus a better translation would be yeoman. In modern Cuba, with growing urbanisation, Guajiros are still named rural inhabitants as well as habitants of small towns ("pueblo") in contrast to urban habitants. They preserve cultural attributes as the Guajiro music, mostly from Spanish and African roots, and typical food.

In Puerto Rico, the rural inhabitants are called Jibaros. It should be noted that the term jíbaro, according to the Catholic online encyclopedia, is also the name of a tribal group in South America, it meant "mountain men." Jíbaro means "People of the Forest" in the Taíno language. So the term obviously came with them as they immigrated from South America. However "jíbaro" – as is used in Puerto Rico, is not used the same in Cuba or the Dominican Republic, which were populated with the very same Taíno people. In Cuba the word jibaro is used to denote something wild or untamed, such as "perros jibaros " or wild dogs.

Guajiro nation

The term Guajira/Guajiro, also refers to indigenous Arawak nation of the Guajira Peninsula between Venezuela and Colombia. For a small compendium of myths of this Nation please see: de Cora, Maria Manuela 1972. Kuai-Mare. Mitos Aborígenes de Venezuela. Monte Avila Editores Caracas.

Later nations in this general area

The Arawak, Caribe and other Meso American coast and the Amazonian cultures can be considered as part of a tenuous continuum of nations, linked by some shared vocabulary, ethnic links, agricultural practices, reinforced by bride abduction, and continuous exogamy. After the violence of the Spanish Conquest, and subsequent events of African Slavery and rebellion, nations and cultures with diverse amounts of Arawak ethnicity, culture, and/or traditions transmuted and arose. Some of these Nations had mixed, or even predominantly African roots and include the Cimarrón of Cuba and the Maroon (people) of Jamaica and Guyana.

The names of these three distinct cultures are transliterations of the original, apparently Taíno or Siboney root, Cimarrón. The equivalent high Taíno root may well be Jíbaro, which is a name commonly given to a perhaps related South American Nation the Shuar who have many Arawak type cultural customs, and which are said by some to have lost its language, and forced to adapt Quechua as the common language (lengua general). Whether such nations as the Garifuna, and Miskito should be included is left to academic debate.

See also

• Arawaks
• Island Caribs
• Cariban languages
• Garifuna people
• Igneri
• Indigenous Amerindian genetics
• Indigenous peoples in Jamaica
• List of Spanish words of Indigenous American Indian origin
• List of Taínos
• Maipurean

References

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"He therefore went to the island of Guadalupe, anchored there and sent boats ashore well armed. But, before they arrived, a number of women came out of the woods carrying bows and arrows, and with feathers on their heads, apparently resolved to defend the island … to northern islands … When the ships came very close to shore, they saw many Indian men coming out on to the beach with bows and arrows, which they shot at our men with great daring and great shouts. But they shot in vain, for their arrows fell short … The houses were square not round like on the islands, and in one of them a human arm was found cooking in a stew pot." (pp. 195–196)

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http://www.yale.edu/ynhti/curriculum/units/1993/2/93.02.12.x.html#top

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http://www.banrep.gov.co/blaavirtual/credencial/hamerica.htm translated '.. the women go naked and are libidinous, lewd, and lustful but despite this their bodies are beautiful and clean...."

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  Hill, Jonathan D. and Fernando Santos-Granero (eds.). 2002. Comparative Arawakan Histories. Rethinking Language Family and Cultural Area in Amazonia. University of Illinois Press, Urbana and Chicago. ISBN 978-0-252-02758-1

  Hulme. Peter 2000 Remnants of Conquest. The Island Caribs and their Visitors, 1877–1898. Oxford University Press ISBN 0-19-811215-7

  La Rosa Corzo, Gabino (translated by Mary Todd) [1988] 2003 Runaway Slave Settlements in Cuba: Resistance and Repression, University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill ISBN 0-8078-2803-3 ISBN 0807854794

  De la Riva Herrera, Martín 2003 La Conquista de los Motilones, Tabalosos, Maynas y Jíbaros. CETA Iquitos, Perú ISBN 84-89295-05-0 ISBN 9972-9410-7-8