The Taino

The Taino

First Contact
“They do not carry arms nor are they acquainted with them, because I showed them swords and they took them by the edge and through ignorance cut themselves.” Columbus’s first impression of the people we now know as Tainos was monumental and contradictory; shortly after saying they had no acquaintance with armaments he noticed some of them bore wounds on their bodies only to be told: “how people from other islands nearby came there and tried to take them, and how they defended themselves.” Clearly, the Tainos understood violence and warfare, despite Columbus’s claims of their militant ignorance. His views, however, were echoed by later observers. “By nature the most humble, patient, and peaceable,” Bartolome de las Casas wrote a half century later, “holding no grudges, free from embroilments, neither excitable nor quarrelsome.” This idyllic description of a peaceable people, without knowledge of steel armaments and devoid of hostile temperaments, fits Casas’s purposes perfectly. A priest who was set upon exposing the rampant horrors committed by his countrymen in the decades following Columbus’s arrival to the Caribbean, Las Casas saw absolutely nothing worthwhile in Spain’s endeavors to colonize and evangelize the natives. Every action committed by Spaniards was evil, and every Spaniard was Satan incarnate; the natives they encountered seemingly bore the innocence and ignorance of man in the garden of Eden, and were but caricatured distortions of real human beings. Las Casas’s heart was in the right place, but his account yearns for balance. As such, his writings must be taken with a degree of caution.
In the fifty years between Columbus and Las Casas, the Tainos of the Bahamas, Cuba, Hispaniola, and other islands throughout the Greater Antilles suffered the complete shake-up of their lives and world. First to encounter European arrivals, the Tainos were initially generous towards the newcomers and vice versa: “they took everything and gave of what they had very willingly,” Columbus records of the people of San Salvador. But when relations between Columbus and the Tainos of Hispaniola soured, after his return from Europe, they proved themselves apt fighters on their native ground. This initial conflict kicked off a series of devastating wars and rebellions that witnessed the annihilation of most of Hispaniola's Tainos. Later campaigns against the people of Cuba proved equally as bloody.
Disease was the great executioner, however; Spanish swords wielded with verve in the tropical heat could only do so much. As Charles Mann notes: “Before [Christopher] Colon none of the epidemic diseases common in Europe and Asia existed in the Americas...Shipped across the ocean...these maladies consumed Hispaniola’s population with stunning rapacity.” With no immunity to speak of, the Tainos were lambs before the pathological onslaught. Population density on Hispaniola, still remarked upon by Las Casas decades after the initial infections, made them even more susceptible to obliteration. Being carriers, the Spanish unwittingly opened Pandora's box, unleashing foreign maladies upon helpless native populations years before they ever set foot inland, or were ready to make any major penetrations into the continental interiors. People died in Inca Peru of smallpox or measles without ever having seen a European, for example. Because of this, it's easy to point the finger at the Spanish and condemn them for being disease-ridden, but they had no control over transmission and little enough understanding of what caused disease among themselves. That meant little, however, to the people perishing by the thousands in agony all across the Americas; one the darkest legacies of the Columbian exchange.
Arawak
What we know regarding Taino culture is, again, limited to Spanish observations. The Tainos were an oral dominated culture, which was prevalent throughout the pre-Columbian world, and spoke a language called Arawak. In the midst of the catastrophe sweeping their lives, however, the Tainos were given the opportunity of recording their beliefs and sacred rights for posterity. An obvious paradox of the Spanish conquests was their propensity for moving among the natives in an effort to record in writing as many cultural aspects as possible. The efforts of friars in post-Aztec Mexico, recording every facet of that defeated empire’s way of life and thinking, set the foundational stones for our modern historical and anthropological understandings of them. Preceding them all were the efforts of Friar Ramon Pane on the island of Hispaniola.
Hispaniola in the 1490’s was a swiftly changing environment. War and disease were carrying off Tainos by the thousands, but enough of them remained for Pane to record their stories for later generations. Indeed, no less than Columbus himself commissioned the work - ironic when you think about it. Taino beliefs centered on carved idols, called Zemi, in which the ancestral spirits were housed. Zemi were supposed to possess great power over the natural world; if roused to anger they could unleash the furious deluge of a hurricane so common even to the modern Caribbean. Placating them and interpreting their will was the task of the priestly class, to whom all deference was due as the intermediaries between the people and the ancestral spirits. Public ceremonies grounded communal life in common cause and enabled the people as a whole to beseech the ancestors for guidance and favor. Purification through vomiting was followed by song and dance as people praised their ancestors with rhythm and beat. Such ceremonies were often central to village life.
Centralized authority rested in the hands of a principal Cacique (chieftain), of whom there were five on Hispaniola when the Spanish arrived. Not a single unified polity, the Tainos kingdoms nonetheless shared a common language, were marked out by precise geographical boundaries, and bonded further by their deeply rooted religious cosmology and matrilineal system. A three-tiered hierarchy began with the common people, going up through the noble and priestly class, and finally on to the ruling cacique. Definitely not the gentle souls of Las Casas, nor the incompetent warriors Columbus makes them out to be; the Arawak Tainos,for generations, had been dealing with raids from nearby islanders called Caribs, whom Tainos believed were cannibals. Growing military competency against these raiders was leading to a cultural mutation among the Tainos, just as Spanish ships settled off their coasts. When Spanish disease and steel began to whittle them down, the Tainos did not go meekly. Butchered though they were, Taino resistance raged across the Caribbean islands of Hispaniola, Cuba, and Puerto Rico, flaring up into rebellions even after the Spaniards thought them quelled. Defiant to the end, Tainos slowly disappeared as an independent people with a distinctive culture; their lives and worldview irrevocably shattered with the coming of Columbus.

The people called ‘Tainos’ were spread across the islands of the Lower Antilles. Cuba, Jamaica, Hispaniola, and others were home to separate Taino tribes, each with their own individual stories and lore. One of their myths, relating to the creation of the world, provides deep insight into their spirituality. What is it? How does this story reflect the Taino as a people and their worldview? Check out this video to learn more::

• Book 1
• Book 2
• Book 3

• Website 1
• Website 2