Taíno

• 1. Introduction

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  Spanish documents declared the Taíno extinct as early as 1550. Then came the 2010 United States census, in which 9,399 people in Puerto Rico identified themselves as Taíno.

  The Taíno were the Indigenous peoples of most of the West Indies. They were also the first New World people met by non-Norse Europeans. Their world stretched from the Lucayan Archipelago of The Bahamas, through Cuba, Jamaica, Hispaniola and Puerto Rico, to Guadeloupe.

  How does a people disappear from the written record and still show up in a modern headcount? Who were they before the ships arrived, and what did their own name really mean? What did they eat, fear, worship and fight over? And what does it mean to call yourself Taíno today, when scholars still argue about whether the word was ever theirs?

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• 2. A Borrowed Name

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  Constantine Samuel Rafinesque gave the Taíno their name in 1836, long after the people he described had met the Spanish. Nothing suggests the islanders used it as an ethnic label for themselves. Columbus either never learned a self-designation or never recorded one, and he simply called them "Indians". Bartolomé de las Casas was more precise. He wrote of "Lucayos" in the Bahamas and "cibonéyes" in Cuba, and he noted at least three languages on Hispaniola, including Lower Macorix, Upper Macorix and a shared tongue whose main dialect was Xaraguá.

  In 1871 the ethnohistorian Daniel Garrison Brinton called them the Island Arawak, tying them to the Lokono Arawaks of the mainland. That label, and its cousin Antillean Arawak, stayed in use until the 1990s. Then Irving Rouse and Basil Reid concluded that the islanders had built a language and culture distinct from the Lokono. Most specialists now use Taíno for the former Island Arawak nations, leaving out the Kalinago, or Island Caribs. Rouse sorted the Taíno into three groups. Classic Taíno lived in most of Hispaniola and all of Puerto Rico. Western Taíno lived across Cuba, Jamaica and the Lucayan archipelago. Eastern Taíno lived in the northern Lesser Antilles, from the Virgin Islands to Guadeloupe.

  The archaeologist L. Antonio Curet notes that scholars have criticised the word since at least 1897. Some proposed names closer to what the islanders called their lands: siboneyes, haytianos, jamaiquinos and borinqueños. Curet's complaint is that Taíno has no real anthropological or historical meaning and flattens many identities into one. Gabriel de la Luz-Rodríguez of the University of Puerto Rico calls it "the invention of the Taíno", a product of colonial rhetoric. The archaeologist José Oliver keeps using the word for convenience, despite its "problematic conceptual baggage". The researcher Jorge Estevez disagrees with the critics. He argues that the modern name and its older forms, nitayno and tayno, were words the peoples used for themselves across the Caribbean.

  The word seems to come from nitaino or nitayno, which named an elite social class rather than an ethnic group. José Barreiro translates it as "men of the good". Diego Álvarez Chanca, physician on Columbus's second voyage, recorded tayno twice in Guadeloupe, with the sense of good or prudent. José Oliver suggests what happened there. Captives from Borinquén, held by the Caribs of Guadeloupe, wanted passage home to Puerto Rico on Spanish ships. They used the word to say they were the good men, unlike their captors.

  Peter Hulme offers a stranger possibility. He thinks Columbus's sailors may have been the ones using the word. It may have been the only Native Caribbean word they knew, or a way of telling villagers on the shore that the newcomers were important people deserving deference.

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• 3. Roads From the Mainland

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  According to the Taíno creation story, the first people emerged from caves in a sacred mountain on present-day Hispaniola. Scholars hunting for deeper roots have built two competing theories.

  The first theory rests on linguistic, cultural and ceramic evidence. It traces the ancestors to Arawak speakers in the centre of the Amazon Basin. From there they moved to the Orinoco Valley, then along the coast of what is now Venezuela into Trinidad. They then travelled up the Lesser Antilles to Cuba and The Bahamas.

  Julian H. Steward originated the rival idea, known as the circum-Caribbean theory. In his picture the ancestors spread out from the Colombian Andes. One stream reached the Caribbean, while a parallel stream moved into Central America, the Guianas, Venezuela and the Amazon Basin.

  DNA studies add a timeline. They suggest the historic Taíno descended from a wave of pottery-making farmers, called the Ceramic Age people, who came from the northeastern coast of South America 2,500 years ago. They met the Archaic Age people, who had arrived some 6,000 or 7,000 years earlier from Central and South America. Ancestry studies show little intermarriage between the two, which fits the view that the newcomers replaced the earlier settlers. Newer evidence hints that Archaic Age people may have lasted until around 900CE in western Cuba.

  Puerto Rico complicates the story. Studies in the 21st century found a high share of Amerindian mitochondrial DNA among its people, probably from intermarriage early in colonisation. The island's Indigenous ancestry may come from both the Ceramic and the Archaic groups, and the authors say a strong non-Amazonian contribution cannot be ruled out. Pottery from Puerto Rico and Hispaniola points toward the same double origin. A small group of Taíno may even have survived in the mountains at Indiera Alta.

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• 4. Chiefs, Kin and Women

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  Spanish chroniclers described four social classes among the Taíno: the cacique, the nitaínos, the bohíques and the naborias. By the time Europeans arrived, the Taíno shared land with older inhabitants. These were the Guanajatabeyes in Cuba and the Ciguayos and Macorix in Hispaniola. They were also in conflict with recent Carib settlers in the southern Lesser Antilles. Archaeological evidence suggests the islands supported a large population for roughly 1,500 years.

  A village chief was called a cacique, or a cacica when the ruler was a woman. Chiefs came from the nitaínos, usually through a particular maternal line. Bartolomé de las Casas and Peter Martyr d'Anghiera both reported that a chief was succeeded by a sister's son. D'Anghiera was more exact: the oldest son of the oldest sister came first, then the oldest son of the next sister. Other Spanish accounts disagree, and the rules may have shifted after the Spanish intrusion.

  Kinship ran through women, and a newly married couple lived in the household of the wife's maternal uncle. That uncle mattered more to his niece's children than their biological father did. He introduced the boys to the men's societies of his own clan.

  A cacique had spiritual duties as well as practical ones. He was expected to shield the tribe from natural and supernatural harm and to direct food production. His power depended on how many villages he controlled, through a web of family, marriage and ceremonial alliances. An early 20th-century Smithsonian study said such alliances let communities band together against threats, such as Carib attacks on Puerto Rico.

  Ramón Pané was a Catholic friar who travelled with Columbus on his second voyage and was told to learn the islanders' language and customs. He wrote that caciques tended to have two or three spouses, and the principal ones as many as 10, 15 or 20. Each marriage tied the chief to a family in another locality.

  A cacique carried a guanín, an alloy of gold and copper that came from South America. It stood for the first mythical cacique, Anacacuya, whose name means "star of the center" or "central spirit". Other badges of rank included cotton tunics, rare feathers, crowns, masks called guaizas, and necklaces of snail beads. Caciques sat on wooden stools so they rose above their guests.

  Below the chief, the nitaínos were the nobles, made up of warriors and the cacique's family. Advisors who assigned communal work, directed planting and harvesting, and kept the peace were chosen from among them. The naborias were the far more numerous working peasants. The bohíques were priests who advised the caciques, soothed angry gods and cured the sick. Before their rites they fasted for several days and inhaled sacred tobacco snuff.

  Taíno women lived in village groups with their children, while men lived separately. That arrangement gave women wide control over their own lives and over their fellow villagers. When men were away fighting, women became the main food producers or ritual specialists. Women appear at every level of the hierarchy, up to the rank of cazica. The wealthiest collected crafted goods to use in trade or as gifts.

  The Spanish treated them very differently. They took Taíno women as hostages for use in negotiations. Some sources say women became trade commodities, which some see as the start of more regular Spanish abduction and systematic rape of Taíno women.

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• 5. Plaza and Table

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  A Taíno settlement, called a yucayeque, was built around a central plaza. The largest villages were in Puerto Rico and Hispaniola, and the smallest were in the Bahamas. The plaza hosted games, festivals, rituals and public ceremonies, and it could be oval, rectangular, narrow or elongated. There people held areitos, ceremonies celebrating the deeds of their ancestors.

  Round houses called bohíos, made of wooden poles, woven straw and palm leaves, ringed the plaza. Each could shelter 10-15 families. The cacique's family lived in a rectangular caney with a wooden porch. Furnishings included cotton hammocks, palm mats, wooden chairs called dujo or duho with woven seats, and cradles for children. After marriage, women wore a small cotton apron called a nagua, while men and unmarried women usually went naked.

  Teams of 10 to 30 players took part in a ceremonial ball game called batey, played with a solid rubber ball. Usually the teams were men, though women sometimes played. The Classic Taíno played in the village plaza or on purpose-built rectangular courts that shared the name batey. Games are believed to have settled disputes between communities, and the most elaborate courts stand at chiefdom boundaries. Chiefs often wagered on the outcome.

  Granberry and Vescelius, writing in 2004, recognise two varieties of the Taíno language. Classical Taino was spoken in Puerto Rico and most of Hispaniola. Ciboney Taino was spoken in the Bahamas, most of Cuba, western Hispaniola and Jamaica. The people also carved petroglyphs, an early form of proto-writing. Their dugout canoes, called kanoa, carried anywhere from 2 to 150 people, and an average one held 15-20. English speakers still use their words barbacoa, hamaca, kanoa, tabaco, sabana and juracán in altered forms, including barbecue, hammock, canoe, tobacco, savanna and hurricane.

  The Caribbean had no large native land animals, so the Taíno ate hutias, lizards, turtles, birds and even earthworms. Manatees were speared. Fish and turtles were kept alive in weirs, while hutias and dogs were kept in corrals until needed.

  Taíno fishermen had clever tricks. One method was to tie a remora to a line fixed to a canoe. When the fish clamped onto a larger fish or a sea turtle, a diver went in to retrieve the catch. Another was to shred poisonous senna stems and roots and throw them into a stream, which stunned the fish without making them inedible. Young boys hunted waterfowl from flocks that, in Columbus's words, "darkened the sun".

  On islands such as Puerto Rico, Hispaniola and Jamaica, farming mattered most. The staple was yuca, grown in heaped mounds of soil called conucos. These mounds were typically three feet high and nine feet around, set in rows. They improved drainage and fertility, slowed erosion and let roots stay in the ground longer. Farmers planted with a wooden hoe called a coa. Women squeezed the poisonous variety of cassava to drain its toxic juice, then ground the roots into flour for bread. Batata, or sweet potato, ranked second.

  Maize grew in clearings made by slash and burn. Unlike on the mainland, it was eaten off the cob rather than baked into bread, since corn bread spoils faster than cassava bread in Caribbean humidity. Corn also became an alcoholic drink called chicha. The Taíno also grew squash, beans, peppers, peanuts and pineapples. Tobacco, calabashes and cotton grew around the houses, while palm nuts, guavas and Zamia roots were gathered wild.

  In his journal Columbus describes islanders lighting dried herbs wrapped in a leaf and inhaling the smoke. The word tobacco comes from the Taíno tabaco. It served in medicine and religious ritual. People smoked the leaves in pipes and cigars, or crushed them finely and inhaled them through a hollow tube. The coa used to tend tobacco was about five feet long, with a sharp point hardened in fire.

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• 6. Zemis and Caves

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  Atabey was the zemi of the moon, fresh waters and fertility. She also went by Atabei, Atabeyra, Atabex and Guimazoa. Her son Yúcahu, called Yucahú Bagua Maorocotí by the Taínos of Hispaniola, means "White Yuca, great and powerful as the sea and the mountains". He was the spirit of cassava and the sea.

  Guabancex was the harsher side of Atabey, a zemi of storms and hurricanes who commanded natural disasters. Her twin sons were Guataubá, a messenger who made hurricane winds, and Coatrisquie, who made floodwaters. Iguanaboína governed good weather. Her twins were Boinayel, the messenger of rain, and Marohu, the spirit of clear skies.

  Minor zemis covered the work of growing and the cycle of life and death. Baibrama was honoured for helping cassava grow and for curing people of its poisonous juice. Maquetaurie Guayaba ruled Coaybay, the land of the dead, where a dog-shaped zemi named Opiyelguabirán watched over the dead. Deminán Caracaracol was a cultural hero from whom the Taíno believed they were descended. Macocael was another hero, who failed to guard the mountain from which humans emerged. He was punished by being turned into stone, or into a bird, frog or reptile, depending on the telling.

  The word zemí also meant the physical objects and drawings that represented these spirits. Most were carved from wood, but some were stone, bone, shell, pottery or cotton. Petroglyph zemis appear on rocks in streams, on ball courts and on cave stalagmites, such as one in a cave at La Patana, Cuba. Yucahú was shown as a three-pointed zemí placed in conucos to boost the cassava yield. Other zemís take the form of toads, turtles, fish, snakes and faces both abstract and human-like.

  Some zemís came with small tables or trays, believed to hold a hallucinogenic snuff called cohoba, made from the beans of a Piptadenia tree. Trays have been found alongside ornately carved snuff tubes. Before certain ceremonies, people purified themselves by fasting or by using a swallowing stick to induce vomiting. Communal bread was then served, first to the zemí, then to the cacique, then to everyone else. Afterward the people sang the village epic to the sound of maracas and other instruments.

  Some stories explain how the world began. One says the Sun and Moon came out of caves. Another describes the first people, who lived in caves and came out only at night because the Sun would transform them. A sentry turned into a giant stone at the cave mouth, and others became birds or trees. In a third, the Taíno descend from Deminán Caracaracol and a female turtle born from a blister on his back.

  The oceans have their own origin. The great spirit Yaya killed his son Yayael, who was about to kill his father. Yaya placed the bones in a gourd, and they turned into fish. Deminán Caracaracol accidentally broke the gourd, and all the world's water poured out.

  The souls of the dead, called Jupias, went to Coaybay. They rested there by day, and at night they took the form of bats and ate guava.

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• 7. Contact and Collapse

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  On the 12th of October 1492, Columbus and his crew landed in The Bahamas and became the first Europeans to meet the Taíno. The island he renamed San Salvador, Spanish for Holy Savior, was known to the Taíno as Guanahaní. In his diary he described a tall, well-proportioned people. He wrote that they "are very gentle and without knowledge of what is evil; nor do they murder or steal". He also told his sovereigns they could believe that "in all the world there can be no better people".

  The welcome did not last. A group of about 24 Taíno were abducted and forced to sail with Columbus on his 1494 return voyage to Spain. On his second voyage, in 1493, he began demanding tribute from the Taíno of Hispaniola. According to Kirkpatrick Sale, every adult over 14 had to deliver a hawk's bell full of gold every three months, or 25 pounds of spun cotton if there was no gold. Those who failed to bring tribute had their hands cut off and were left to bleed to death.

  Resistance followed. In 1511, Antonio de Montesinos, a Dominican missionary on Hispaniola, became the first European to publicly denounce the abduction and enslavement of the island's Indigenous people and the encomienda system. That same year, several Puerto Rican caciques allied with the Caribs to try to drive out the Spaniards. They included Agüeybaná II, Arasibo, Hayuya, Jumacao, Urayoán, Guarionex and Orocobix. Indio-Spanish forces under Governor Juan Ponce de León crushed the revolt. The chieftain Hatuey had fled Hispaniola for Cuba with 400 Natives to unite the Cuban peoples. He was burned at the stake on the 2nd of February 1512.

  In the 1520s, a chieftain named Enriquillo mobilised more than 3,000 Taíno in a rebellion on Hispaniola that succeeded. His people received land and a charter from the royal administration.

  The encomienda forced many Taíno into fields and mines in supposed exchange for protection, education and a seasonal salary. The historian David Stannard calls it a genocidal system. Ponce de León was the first to introduce forced labour among the Taíno. Rebellions drew violent Spanish expeditions known as cabalgadas, aimed at capturing Indigenous people. Many Taíno fled to other islands and the mainland. Emperor Charles V eventually abolished the encomienda as a form of enslavement, but only after many military campaigns.

  Nobody knows how many Taíno there were. Early estimates for Hispaniola, probably the most populous island, run from 10,000 to 1,000,000. The highest estimates for Jamaica and Puerto Rico are 600,000. A genetic analysis in 2020 put the figure at no more than a few tens of thousands. In his multi-volume History of the Indies, published in 1561, Bartolomé de las Casas claimed that over three million people died from war, slavery and the mines between 1494 and 1508. He wrote that only 60,000 remained when he arrived in 1508, and asked, "Who in future generations will believe this?" Researchers today think his pre-contact figures are exaggerated. Karen Anderson Córdova estimates a maximum of 500,000 people on the island.

  Within 30 years, between 80% and 90% of the Taíno died. The arrival of many Spaniards raised the demand for food, and farming shifted to Spanish methods. Some Taíno refused to plant or harvest, hoping to frustrate the newcomers. Food ran so short in 1495 and 1496 that some 50,000 died of famine. Historians say infectious disease did more damage than any warfare. Scholars point to smallpox, influenza, measles and typhus, but also to the continuing systems of bondage.

  The historian Andrés Reséndez of the University of California, Davis, argues that disease alone cannot explain the destruction. Europe rebounded after the Black Death, but the Caribbean never did. He also notes that smallpox is not mentioned in the New World until 1519, so it may have spread more slowly than assumed. In his view, "slavery has emerged as a major killer". The anthropologist Jason Hickel estimates that lethal forced labour in the mines killed a third of the Indigenous people there every six months.

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• 8. Survival and Revival

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  Census records from 1514 show that 40% of Spanish men on Hispaniola had Taíno wives, according to the Dominican historian Frank Moya Pons. Some of their mixed-race descendants later intermarried with Africans, producing a culture with Creole features. From the second half of the 19th century, an idealised Indigenous past, especially a Taíno one, grew prominent in Dominican literature and fed the nation's indigenismo movement. Gabriel Haslip-Viera and J. Alcántara Almánzar suggest this was partly an effort to distance Dominicans from African heritage and from Haitians. The term Indio became a self-description for most Dominicans, branching into shades from Indio Oscaro (dark) to Indio Lavado (medium) and Indio Claro (light). Rural Dominicans still keep Taíno elements in language, farming, food, medicine, fishing, architecture and oral history.

  In Cuba, the abolitionist and British consul David Turnbull visited in the 1830s and said people in Guanabacoa, El Caney and Jiguaní had Indigenous heritage. In the 1840s, José de la Torre reportedly saw 50 "pure blooded" Taíno dancing at El Caney. José Martí, the poet and Cuban national icon, reported help from "los Indios de Garrido" in the 1895 war of independence. In the early 20th century, the archaeologist Stewart Culin counted 800 local Indigenous people near Yateras and Baracoa, largely from three families: Gainsa, Azahares and Rojas. In 1945 the historian Pichardo Moya told the Cuban Academy of History that the idea of Indigenous Cubans being exterminated was widely accepted but wrong. He blamed nationalistic histories for ignoring the evidence. Jason M. Yaremko adds that communities like Yateras stayed "invisible" until recently, and he urges fieldwork in the records of Cuba's former Indian towns and parishes.

  In Jamaica, the Yamaye Guani Taíno People represent Yamaye Taíno communities and campaign for Indigenous rights. Enrolled members may receive a Yamaye Iri, meaning "name of the land". Under Spanish rule, Taíno men and women fled to the Blue Mountains, where they mingled with escaped enslaved Africans. They were among the ancestors of the eastern Maroons, including communities led by Juan de Bolas and Juan de Serras. The Maroons of Moore Town claim Taíno descent, and the Yamaye Council of Indigenous Leaders began life as the Maroon Secretariat.

  Puerto Rico's census of 1777 listed 1,756 indios, and the 1787 census listed 2,032. It is unclear who was counted, and some may have hidden to avoid enslavement. Loida Figueroa says Native Puerto Ricans were all called Indian until the early 19th century, when Governor Toribio Montes relabelled them pardos. Later, American schooling pushed English and Anglo-American clothing, and some children with Taíno heritage were sent to the Carlisle Indian Industrial School. In 2010, alongside those who chose Taíno, 1,098 people in Puerto Rico identified as "Puerto Rican Indian" and 1,410 as "Spanish American Indian". In total, 35,856 Puerto Ricans identified as Indigenous. Many modern Taíno link their survival to Las Indieras, the mountain interior whose name means "the place of the Indians". Local groups are also trying to reconstruct a Taíno language they call Taíney, and the Guainía Taíno Tribe has been recognised by the governor of the US Virgin Islands.

  In 1976, The Millville Daily of New Jersey reported that a school culture club was studying Taíno heritage. By 2006 there were a couple of dozen Taíno descendant organisations from Florida to Puerto Rico and California to New York, with memberships in the thousands. Historian Ranald Woodaman calls the movement "a declaration of Native survival through mestizaje". Puerto Rican schools now teach Taíno history through dance, costumes and crafts. The geneticist Martínez Cruzado of the University of Puerto Rico at Mayagüez says this helps people feel connected. Sceptics point to mestizaje as proof the modern Taíno are something new. Descendants answer that mixing is how their culture persisted. Curet notes that creolisation does not disprove claims of Indigenous survival, though he warns that these claims may undervalue African heritage.

  A 2018 DNA study mapped the genome of a tooth from a woman who lived in the Bahamas between the 8th and 10th centuries. The team compared it with 104 Puerto Ricans from the 1000 Genomes Project, who had 10 to 15 percent Indigenous American ancestry. They were more closely related to the ancient Bahamian woman than to any other Indigenous American group. Mitochondrial DNA of Indigenous origin turns up in 61% of Puerto Ricans, up to 30% of Dominicans and 33% of Cubans. A study of eastern Puerto Rico, where most people tested claimed Taíno ancestry, found 61% Indigenous mitochondrial DNA and 0% Indigenous Y-chromosome DNA. That pattern suggests part of the Creole population descends from unions between Taíno women and European or African men.

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