#taino

Despite the devastation of the early colonial era, the Taíno passed on their knowledge about their natural and cultural world to Europeans and Africans who arrived to the islands, and Native culture and people survive—and thrive—today. The Smithsonian’s Caribbean Indigenous Legacies Project (CILP), co-led by Ranald Woodaman, Exhibitions and Public Programs Director at the Smithsonian Latino Center, and José Barreiro, Assistant Director for Research at the National Museum of the American Indian, explores how Taíno culture continues to evolve and thrive, despite the first devastating encounter with European colonization. The Caribbean Indigenous Legacies Project tells this story of perseverance and helps provide a framework for understanding Taíno heritage in a multiethnic context.

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The Tainos were members of the great family of the Arawaks, a people originally from the Amazon who migrated to the Caribbean several thousand years ago.

- An expansion in the islands: The Tainos settled on several Caribbean islands, including Haiti, the Dominican Republic, Cuba, and Puerto Rico.

Persistence and Truth: Reflections of a Grandmother Transcending Colonial Denialism

A necessary response to the claims of Ms. Tanya Rodriguez and a reaffirmation of our living heritage throughout the Caribbean archipelago.

By Bibi Naniki Reyes Ocasio

As a grandmother of Boriken’s original people, I do not write these words from a palace of cold academia or politics, but from the sacred duty of protecting the memory of my female ancestors and the future of my grandchildren.  I respond to the theses of Ms. Tanya Rodriguez not with hatred, but with Lateral Kindness, inviting her to understand that our identity is not a “lie,” but a spiritual, cultural, and biological victory over oblivion.

The Name vs. the Nation: the essence that does not die.  It is true that the term “Taino” is partly a popularized academic construct.  However, it is a fundamental error to suggest that the name is an external label, or that the people do not exist.  As a grandmother, I do not defend a textbook term; I defend our essence as the original people of this land.  My existence does not depend on how the colonizer names us, but on our millennial persistence in Boriken and the archipelago.  Taino, an Indigenous word utilized by our Ancestors, describes in its variations: “blood,” “kinship,” “family,” “good people.”  It is not “thin air;” it contains gravity for a large number of Caribbean Indigenous Peoples and groups.

The “Paper Extinction” and the Erasure of Our Roots: The thesis of “erasure” relies on 16th century Spanish censuses that were tools of control.  Declaring “extinction” was an economic strategy to confiscate lands and remove protections.  By reclassifying our Ancestors as “mixed race” or “free people of color,” the empire executed a bureaucratic genocide.  Validating those censuses today is to validate the same mechanism of dispossession that attempted to destroy our families.

DNA: The cry of resilience of our Grandmothers.  Genetics is the record that the colonizer could not burn.  The fact that 61% of Puerto Ricans carry Indigenous mitochondrial DNA is the biological testimony of the systemic violence against our grandmothers by the invaders.  Our mixing was seldom by choice; it was largely a consequence of horror and a mechanism of survival.  Our grandmothers protected life and culture despite the abuse and disregard for our people.  To dismiss our identity because “we are mixed” is to re-victimize those women; we are the living proof that our grandmothers won.

Ethnogenesis: The sovereign right to evolve.  Science recognizes ethnogenesis, the living process through which peoples transform to survive.  No culture is static.  Our ethnogenesis - this resurgence of our consciousness - is not an “invention;” it is a revitalization.  To deny our existence because we have changed is to deny the very humanity of original peoples.

Caribbean Interconnectedness and Lateral Kindness: My voice as a grandmother is part of a larger chorus.  We recognize our sacred connection to our relatives in Ayiti, Cuba, Kiskeya, and throughout the Caribbean.  We are branches of the same ancient root, united by the sea.  We invoke Lateral Kindness to replace the colonial habit of insult and indignity in discussions, which created angry division, with respect and dignified dialogue.  Let us stop using academia to attack the identity of descendants and use it instead to heal the wounds of erasure.  We do not speak for others; rather, we witness and honor our collective persistence.