A Note on Tainos: Whither Progress?
By José Barreiro
From Northeast Indian Quarterly, Fall, 1990, pp. 66-77.
This document is part of the Native America section of the documentary
collection, World History Archives, and is associated with the world
history resource page, Gateway to World History.
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Author's note: An appreciation is due John Mohawk, who contributed to an
early version of this article. References in the body of the text refer to
the Select Bibliography which follows this article. All ilIustrations
except the photograph on page 76 are taken from Onelio Jorge Cardoso, Los
Indocubanos. Havana: Gente Nueva, 1982.
Christopher Columbus, whose name literally means "Christ-bearing
colonizer," wrote in his diary shortly after the landfall that he and his
sailors saw "naked men" (there were also women), whom they found "very
healthy-looking." Landing at Guanahani, in the Bahamas, and sailing on to
Cuba and Bohio (Haiti/Santo Domingo), renamed Española, Columbus soon noted
a widespread language and system of beliefs and lifeways. Conferring with
various caciques (chiefs), he heard them call themselves "Taino." (Tyler
1988)
Taino culture was dominant throughout the Caribbean, a sea and island world
that was in turn cradle of Taino civilization. In agriculture, seafaring
and cosmology, Ciboney and Guanahatabey (western Cuba), Macorix and/or
Ciguayo (Bohio) and even Carib (Lesser Antilles) all followed the material
and much of the psycho-spiritual framework of the Taino. The original
Caribbeans spoke Arawak. The people of the Arawak language family still
comprise one of the more widespread American Indigenous cultures, with
relatively large kinship nations in the Amazon and Orinoco river basins of
South America. Throughout the Caribbean, usually in remote mountain ranges
and coastal promontories, remnant groups and communities of Taino-Arawak
and Carib descendants survive to the present. Aspects of the animistic and
material culture of the Taino-Arawak have been adopted by the mestizo
populations of the Caribbean and are interwoven into the Euro-African
fabric of the islands' folk universe.
The word Taino meant "men of the good," and from most indications the
Tainos were good. Coupled to the lush and hospitable islands over
millennium, and a half, the indigenous people of "La Taina" developed a
culture where the human personality was gentle. Among the Taino at the time
of contact, by all accounts, generosity and kindness were dominant values.
Among the Taino peoples, as with most indigenous lifeways, the physical
culture was geared toward a sustainable interaction with the natural
surroundings. The Taino's culture has been designated as "primitive" by
western scholarship, yet it prescribed a lifeway that strove to feed all
the people, and a spirituality that respected, in ceremony most of their
main animal and food sources, as well as the natural forces like climate,
season and weather. The Taino lived respectfully in a bountiful place and
so their nature was bountiful. (Jane 1930)
The naked people Columbus first sighted lived in an island world of
rainforests and tropical weather, and adventure and fishing legends at sea.
Theirs was a land of generous abundance by global terms. They could build a
dwelling from a single tree (the Royal Palm) and from several others
(gommier, ceiba), a canoe that could carry more than one hundred people.
The houses (bohios) were (and are today among Dominican and Cuban Cuajiros)
made of palm tree, trunk and thatch lashed together in a rectangle or
sometimes a circle pattern. The islands still have millions of royal and
other useful palm trees, from which bohios by the hundreds of thousands
could be built. The wood of the Royal Palm is still today considered the
most resistant to tropical rot, lasting untreated as long as ninety years.
1
The Tainos lived in the shadows of a diverse forest so biologically
remarkable as to be almost unimaginable to us, and, indeed, the biological
transformation of their world was so complete in the intervening centuries
that we may never again know how the land or the life of the land appeared
in detail. What we do know is that their world would appear to us, as it
did to the Spanish of the fifteenth century, as a tropical paradise. It was
not heaven on earth, but it was one of those places that was reasonably
close.
The Taino world, for the most part, had some of the appearance that modern
imaginations ascribe to the South Pacific islands. The people lived in
small, clean villages of neatly appointed thatch dwellings along rivers
inland and on the coasts. They were a handsome people who had no need of
clothing for warmth. They liked to bathe often, which prompted a Spanish
royal law forbidding the practice; "for we are informed it does them much
harm," wrote Queen Isabella. Their general physical appearance was
consistent with the appearance of other Indians of the Americas. They were
rarely taller than five feet six inches which would make them rather small
to modern North American eyes. They painted their bodies with earth dyes
and adorned themselves with shells and metals. Men and women chiefs often
wore gold in the ears and nose, or as pendants around the neck. Some had
tattoos.
From all early descriptions the Tainos were a healthy people who showed no
signs of distress from hunger or want. The Tainos, whose color was
olive-brown to copper, reminded Columbus of the people of the Canary
Islands, who were neither white nor black. He noted their thick, black
hair, short in front and long in back, and that it fell over muscular
shoulders. On some islands, the women wore short cotton skirts after taking
a permanent man but in others all the people went naked. In parts of Cuba
and Santo Domingo, some of the caciques, village or clan and nation chiefs,
wore a type of tunic on ceremonial occasions, but they saw no apparent need
to cover their breasts or genitals and they were totally natural about it.
The Taino had plenty of cotton, which they wove into mats, hammocks and
small sails and numerous "bejucos" or fiber ropes. (Tyler 1988)
The Taino islands provided a vast array of edible fruits. The Arawaks made
specific use of many types of trees and plants from an estimated floral and
faunal range of 5,800 species. The jagua tree they used for dyeing cotton,
the jocuma and the guama for making rope, the jucaro for underwater
construction, the royal palm for buildings and specific other trees for
boats, spears, digging tools, chairs, bowls, baskets and other woven mats
(in this art they flourished), cotton cloth (for hammocks), large fishing
nets and good hooks made of large fish bones. Inspecting deserted seashore
camps, Spanish sailors found what they judged to be excellent nets and
small fishing canoes stored in water-tight sheds. Further upriver in the
villages, they saw large fields of corn, yucca, beans and fruit orchards
covering whole valleys. They walked through the squares of villages, all
recently swept clean, where they saw many kinds of drying tubers, grains
and herbs, and sunlight-tight storage sheds with shelves packed with
thousands of dried cassava (casahe or cazabi) torts. In one village,
sailors found large cakes of fine wax, a local product. (Rivero 1966)
The Taino were a sea-going people and took pride in their courage on the
high ocean as well as their skill in finding their way around their world.
They visited one another constantly. Columbus was often astonished at
finding lone Indian fishermen sailing in the open ocean as he made his way
among the islands. Once, a canoe of Taino men followed him from island to
island until one of their relatives, held captive on Columbus's flagship,
jumped over the side to be spirited away.
Among Tainos, the women and some of the men harvested corn, nuts, cassava,
and other roots. They appear to have practiced a rotation method in their
agriculture. As in the practice of many other American Indigenous
eco-systemic peoples, the first shoots of important crops, such as the
yucca, beans and corn were appreciated in ceremony, and there are stories
about their origins. Boys hunted fowl from flocks that "darkened the sun,"
according to Columbus, and the men forded rivers and braved ocean to hunt
and fish for the abundant, tree-going jutia, the succulent manati, giant
sea turtles and countless species of other fish, turtles and shellfish.
Around every bohio, Columbus wrote, there were flocks of tame ducks
(yaguasa), which the people roasted and ate. (Cassa 1974)
Father Bartolomé de las Casas, the Spanish friar who arrived on Columbus's
heels and lived to denounce the Spanish cruelty toward Indians into the
next century, wrote (exaggeratedly but impressively) about "vineyards that
ran for three hundred leagues," game birds taken by the tens of thousands,"
great circular fields of yucca and greater stores of cassava bread, dried
fish, corn fields and vast gardens of sweet yams. Tainos along the coasts
of Española and southern Cuba kept large circular corrals made of reeds
which they filled with fish and turtles by the thousands. In parts of
Puerto Rico and Cuba, Jivaro and Cuajiro fishermen used this method into
the 1950s. The early Taino and Ciboney of Cuba were observed catching fish
and turtles by way of a remora (suction fish) tied by the tail. (Fernandez
Mendez, Eugenio, Los Corrales de Pesca Indigenas de Puerto Rico, Revista
del Instituto de Cultura Puertoriqueña, Oct. 1960).
The Taino world of 1492 was a thriving place. The Taino islands supported
large populations that had existed in an environment of Carib-Taino
conflict for, according to archeological evidence, one and a half
millennia, although the earliest human fossil in the region is dated at
15,000 years. Tainos and Caribs may have visited violence upon one another,
and there is little doubt they did not like each other, but there is little
evidence to support any thesis that genocidal warfare existed in this
world. A Carib war party arrived and attacked, was successful or repulsed,
and the Tainos, from all accounts, returned to what they were doing before
the attack. These attacks were not followed up by a sustained campaign of
attrition. The Taino existence was not threatened, from these accounts,
more than a modern American's existence is threatened by street crime.
(Tabio y Rey 1985)
Bohio was the Taino name for Españiola, now Santo Domingo/Haiti. It means
"home" in Taino, was in fact home to two main confederated peoples: the
Taino, as predominant group, with three cacicasgos, and the Macorixes, with
two cacicasgos. There was also one small cacicasgo of Ciqueyo Indians on
the island when Columbus arrived. The three main Taino caciques were named
Bohequio of Jaragua; Guacanagari of Marien, and Guarionex of La Vega. The
two Macorix caciques were Caonabo, of Maguana, at the center of the island
and his ally, Coyacoa of Higuey. Mayabanex, also a good friend of Caonabo,
was cacique of the Ciguayo country. The three Taino caciques were relatives
and allies and had good relations. The Taino of Jaragua had a particularly
good agriculture, with efficient irrigation systems that regularly watered
thousands of acres of all manner of tubers, vegetables and grains. The
Macorixes and Ciguayos were strong warriors, known for a fierce dexterity
at archery. They balanced the scale with the peaceful Tainos, who often fed
them, and for whom in turn the Macorixes and Ciguayos fought against the
more southern Carib. Caonabo, a Marorixe cacique was married to Anacaona, a
Taino and sister of Behechio.
It is true that Caribbean Indian peoples fought with each other, taking
prisoners and some ritually eating parts of enemy warriors, but even more
often they accommodated each other and as "discovery" turned to conquest,
they allied as "Indians," or, more properly, as Caribbean Indigenous
peoples against Spanish troops. As a peaceful civilization, the Taino
caciques apparently made diplomatic use of their agricultural bounty to
appease and tame more militaristic groups. (Vega 1980)
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Indian Vision/Spanish Mission
The Tainos had many cosmological stories and fundamental cultural
principles. High among these was the organization of people to produce food
and the value of feeding everyone in each community. Whatever else can be
said of their ancient way of life, it contrasted starkIy with the Spanish
idea of economics in 1500. As Las Casas and others have attested, the
migrations to America occurred because no such principle was at work in
Europe during the same and later times. Even the earliest encounters
between Iberians and Tainos provide evidence of the fundamental American
Indigenous thinking about this human value, which is found throughout the
continent and continues to be one of the contrapuntal arguments between the
American Indian civilization and European civilization as fueled by
Judeo-Roman-Christian precepts.
A telling event occurred when the Spanish were pressing against Guaironex's
Indians in Santo Domingo. Guarionex was one of the main five caciques of La
Española. His territory in the Valley of La Vega was highly esteemed for
its agricultural productivity. In 1494-95, after Columbus imposed a tribute
of gold to be paid by every Taino man, woman or child, Guarionex went to
the first colonizer with a counter offer. Ctiaironex's main chiefs gathered
over one thousand men with coas (planting sticks) in hand. They offered, if
Columbus would drop the gold tribute, to plant all the food the Spanish
would ever want to eat. They said to Columbus: we will feed you here on the
island and also all of your people back in Castile. You don't even need to
work. But of course, the colonizers wanted gold or, in lieu of it, slaves
and precious woods. This documented event where chiefs offer men with
planting sticks to appease Spanish hunger focuses the value of land as
equalizer, with the provision of basic sustenance as fundamental right of
everyone. (Tyler 1988)
By all descriptions, Taino life and culture at contact was uniquely adapted
to its environment. Population estimates vary greatly but put the number of
inhabitants in Española (Santo Domingo/Haiti) at approximately half a
million to seven million. Estimates for Cuba vary from 120,000 to 200,000,
with newer estimates pushing that number up. Whether one takes the low or
the high estimates, early descriptions of Taino life at contact tell of
large concentrations, strings of a hundred or more villages of five hundred
to one thousand people. These concentrations of people in coastal areas and
river deltas were apparently well-fed by a nature-harvesting and
agricultural production system whose primary value was that all of the
people had the right to eat. Everyone in the society had a food or other
goods producing task, even the highly esteemed caciques and behiques
(medicine people), who were often seen to plant, hunt, and fish along with
their people. In the Taino culture, as with most natural world cultures of
the Americas, the concept was still fresh in the human memory that the
primary bounties of the earth, particularly those that humans eat, are to
be produced in cooperation and shared.
Comparison of the life-style described by the early chroniclers and today's
standard of living in Haiti and Dominican Republic for the majority of the
population, as well as the ecological degradation caused by extensive
deforestation, indicates that the island and its human citizens were better
fed, healthier and better governed by the Taino's so-called primitive
methods than the modern populations of that same island. (Tyler 1988)
Like all American indigenous peoples, the Taino had an involved economic
life. They could trade throughout the Caribbean and had systems of
governance and beliefs that maintained harmony between human and natural
environments. The Tainos enjoyed a peaceful way of life that modern
anthropologists now call "ecosystemic." In the wake of recent scientific
revelations about the cost of high impact technologies upon the natural
world, a culture such as the Taino, that could feed several million people
without permanently wearing down its surroundings, might command higher
respect. As can be seen throughout the Americas, American indigenous
peoples and their systems of life have been denigrated and mis-perceived.
Most persistent of European ethnocentrisms toward Indians is the concept of
"the primitive," always buttressed with the rule of "least advanced" to
"most advanced" imposed by the prism of Western Civilization-the more
"primitive" a people, the lower the place they are assigned in the scale of
"civilization." The anti-nature attitude inherent in this idea came over
with the Iberians of the time, some of whom even died rather than perform
manual labor, particularly tilling of the soil. The production and
harvesting of food from sea, land and forests were esteemed human
activities among Tainos. As with other indigenous cultures, the
sophistication and sustainability of agricultural and natural harvesting
systems was an important value and possibly the most grievous loss caused
by the conquest of the Americas. The contrast is direct with the Spanish
(and generally Western) value that to work with land or nature directly, as
a farmer and/or harvester, is a lowly activity, thus relegated to lesser
humans and lower classes. This attitude is ingrained in popular thinking in
most Western countries through jokes about the "country bumpkin" and the
"city slicker" which invoke superior attitudes about "dumb" farmers. In
that tradition, the least desirable thing is to work with your hands.
In the Spanish annals, Española is described as the most "advanced" of the
greater Antilles. Tainos in Espanola were known for their good
communications and productive agriculture. Espanola was the center of Taino
culture, which appears to have traveled from there to Cuba and the outer
islands. Gardens, ballcourts, and huge areitos (roundances) with speaking
forums and poets characterized that lush island, which was confederated
into five main cacicasgos or kinship nations.
There was little of no quarreling observed among the Tainos by the
Spaniards. The old caciques and their councils of elders, were said to be
well-behaved, had a deliberate way of speaking and great authority. Las
Casas wrote, "the Indians have much better judgement and maintain much
better public order and government than many other nations which are
overwhelmingly proud of themselves and which hold Indians in contempt." The
peoples were organized to the gardens ("conucos") or to the sea and the
hunt. They had ball games played in bateyes, or courtyards, in front of the
cacique's house. They held both ceremonial and social dances, called
areitos, during which their creation stories and other cosmologies were
recited. Among the few Taino-Arawak customs that have survived the longest,
the predominant ideas are that ancestors should be properly greeted by the
living humans at prescribed times and that natural forces and the spirits
behind each group of food and medicinal plants and useful animals should be
appreciated in ceremony. (Las Casas 1971)
Contrary to popular imagination, the Tainos were a disciplined people.
Particularly during their spiritual and healing ceremonies, natural
impulses were limited. In those important instances, strong abstinence over
sexual activity and eating were demanded, even under penalty of death. The
local cacique and his medicine man, the Taino behique, had the task of
calling the ceremonial times. Among these were the famous "areitos"
reported by Pane. These were round dances and recitation ceremonies, where
thanksgivings were made for various natural and plant spirits, and the
ancient stories were told. They included the most ancient of Creation time
stories, of Deminan and his three skydweller brothers, the four Taino
cosmological beings (four sacred directions) who walked on clouds and blue
sky over the spirit world of the Caribbean. Orphaned by their virgin mother
at birth, the sacred beings, called Caracaracolesin Taino, wandered the sky
islands, here and there receiving creative powers from ornery old shamans
who carried it from even farther back. This way, out of gourds (jicaras),
they created the oceans and fish; out of a turtle, the islands; from spirit
babies, toads; and from toads, the rains and waters; from clay and stars,
men; from jobo trees, their prayer statues; and, from the river manatee,
exquisite source of sustenance, women. 2 (Arrom 1989)
At the areito, carved wooden statuettes, called cemis, representing the
various forces, were polished and addressed, fed and smoked for. A tribal
meditation and vision took place, often with the use of the sacred herb,
cohoba, a hallucinogenic snuff compounded from the seeds of anadenanthera
peregrina. In the areito, elements of the plant and animal life were
remembered. There were areitos and cemis for the season of Huracan,
singings for the four beings, for the origin of the sun and moon, the ocean
and fishes, the snake and jutia, for the guayaba, the ceiba, the corn, the
name and the yucca. Yucca, a tuber and their main food, was the special
gift, and singularly represented by the Yucahu, the Taino's identification
for the Supreme or Original Being.
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Columbus and His Trajectory
To Christopher Columbus, and the Spanish Catholic kingdom behind him, the
voyage to the American lands sought a "discovery." The Grand Mariner was
among a handful in Europe to suspect that strong wind currents blew across
the great ocean, going west farther south and back east on the northern
latitudes. Why he knew this, how he came to be the first to ascertain it
for a major European power, what he sought and how he was thinking about
potential "discoveries" defines the true story, not only of Columbus, but
of the thinking and tenets that guided (and justified) the colonization of
the American Indian continent. It is a fact that Columbus knew that
conquest and Spanish political hegemony would follow a promising discovery.
He hoped to and did get very rich by his "discovery."
On August 3, 1492, Columbus sailed south to the Azores (a route he knew
well and where he would turn west) out the port of Palos, in southern
Spain. Thousands of Jews sailed out of Spain, mostly from the same port, on
the previous day. The inquisition was at its zenith in Spain in 1492; all
remaining Jews were to convert or die. Executions by fire were still
common. It was a pious, "Christ-bearing" Columbus who went forth with the
Catholic King's mandate, carrying the mission of conversion to fuel his
drive to "discover."
Landing in Guanahani (renamed San Salvador), Columbus planted a Spanish
flag, ordered a Catholic Mass and proclaimed himself Viceroy over the new
lands. For days, large dug-out canoes full of curious Lucayo-Arawak men
paddled out to the strange, giant ships. The large canoes glided quickly
over the water. Caciques (chiefs) went out with warriors carrying bows and
arrows and lances, but also food and other gifts. Cdumbus sought
information about larger land falls and about the source of golden amulets
he received as presents. From his log, we know what Columbus thought about
these new people and how he analyzed their worth. One can only wonder what
thoughts crossed the Tainos' minds at this first encounter, what
interpretation their unique cosmology could give these events.
The Tainos thought Columbus and his men strange enough to be gods, possibly
representatives of the four Skydwelling brothers in their Creation Story.
The bearded men with hairy, sand-color faces, with ships of many sails and
booming sticks that could cut across a swath of trees were thought to come
from the sky. Mystically overwhelmed and naturally friendly, the Arawaks'
first idea was to make peace. What they had a lot of, food and simple
ornaments, they gave freely. Columbus soon re-provisioned his ships' holds
with fresh water, dried fish, nuts, calabashes, and cazabi (yucca) bread.
During all of Columbus's first trip, in numerous encounters with Tainos,
both in Cuba and Santo Domingo, the clothed visitors were welcome and the
Tainos attempted to appease all their hungers. Wrote Columbus in his ship's
log, "They are so ingenious and free with all they have that no one would
believe it who has not seen it; of anything they possess, if it be asked of
them, they never say no; on the contrary they invite you to share it and
show as much love as if their hearts went with it. . ." (Jane 1930).
There is never any sense in Columbus's writing that the Tainos are
incapable, only that they were innocent and well-intentioned. He would come
to know that they were completely honest, as if the ability to deceive was
not a developed value among them. Columbus wrote that the young men
wondered at the shiny things, grabbing sabers by the edge and cutting
themselves for lack of experience, but that otherwise they were
quick-witted, knew their geography and expressed themselves well. The
Indians referred to more than "one hundred islands by name," Columbus said.
Later writings of Columbus, Las Casas, Pedro Martir de Angleria and other
Caribbean chroniclers gave many instances of Taino quick-wittedness and
eloquence of expression. "They are a very loving people and without
covetousness," Columbus wrote. "They are adaptable for every purpose, and I
declare to your Highnesses that there is not a better country nor a better
people in the world than these." And also: "They have good memories and
inquire eagerly about the nature of all they see." Columbus noted that
after eating, the caciques were brought a bouquet of herbs with which to
wash their hands prior to washing in water.
Everything seemed exotic to the Admiral and in fact he was witness to a
culture and a way of life arising from a totally different civilization-and
a quite logical and compelling culture, one with a significant sense of
time and existence but consistently relegated to "primitive" status on the
ladder of stages of civilization elaborated by Western scholars. Only
leaving aside the ascendancy view of civilization can one envision that
Taino civilization was also in a developmental process - one with its own
definitions, but just as genuine and important and universal as the
European process.
Among the islands, Columbus asked directions to the court of the Great
Khan, of whom he had read in Marco Polo's journals. Captive Lucayo-Arawaks,
in the classic first of many future cross-cultural miscommunications,
guided his way toward their "Khan," the island of Cuba, which they called
Cubanakan. it would take a full season for the Tainos, happy people of
paradise, to lose their essential good will for the Spanish, who
increasingly demanded women, continued to take captives by surprise, and
virulently announced their hunger for the yellow metal the Indians called
guanin-the Spanish "oro" or English "gold."
At the entrance to the Bay of Bairiay, in eastern Cuba, the three Spanish
ships hove to through a night of thick tropical rain before awakening to a
"beauty never before seen by the eyes of man," according to the ship's log.
That same day Columbus told his log about "green and gracious trees,
different from ours, covered by flowers and fruits of marvelous flavors,
many types of fowl and small birds that many with great sweetness."
However, though he waxed poetic, the Admiral's main task was sizing up the
real estate and its inhabitants. He did so with a banker's eye. Columbus's
venture was financed by powerful investors who wanted a return and his
ship's log betrays three major concerns: finding the court of the Great
Khan (for trade), finding gold in quantity, and estimating the resource
exploitation value of land, slaves, precious woods, woven and raw cotton,
and fruits. "Our Lord in his mercy," Columbus wrote, "Direct me where I can
find the gold mine." (Tyler 1988)
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Conquest of Española
The conquest of Española began in earnest with Columbus's second trip.
Fifteen hundred adventurers, ex-prisoners and ex-soldiers with experience
in the final campaigns against North African Moors came back with Columbus.
They came seeking their private fortunes and would be ruthless in this
pursuit. The Spanish (Castillian, Aragonese, and Extremaduran) soldier of
1494 was a deadly foe. He had good steel armor and swords, arquebuses,
cross-bows, trained mastiffs, and excellent cavalry.
One battle had already been fought. During Columbus's first trip, his
flagship, the Santa Maria, ran aground and was wrecked. As a result, a
fort, called Fort Navidad, was built and some forty men volunteered to stay
behind. They were charged with maintaining good relations with the Taino
and with searching for the source of gold. They were true to the later
mission though not to the former.
Almost immediately the men broke into factions, fought each other and
proceeded to harass the Taino population, hoarding as many as five women
apiece. While Guacagarani, the local cacique, remained loyal to his promise
to Columbus that he would care for the men, a band of conquistadors carried
on their terror campaign deep into the territory of another cacique,
Caonabo, who had made no promises. Caonabo would not tolerate the
depredations and ordered attacks first on the intruding band and later on
the fort itself. All the Spanish were killed but the attack became
justification for retribution upon Columbus's return with seventeen ships.
The Spanish mounted almost immediate military campaigns against Indian
villages. For several years the fights went back and forth and by 1496,
according to Las Casas, only one third of Indian Española was left. Other
historians assert that the pace was not quite as quick, that it took until
about 1510 for that kind of extermination. Plagues played a big role in the
decimation of the Indian population, first in Espanola, later in Puerto
Rico, Cuba, the Bahamas, and good parts of Florida. A type of biological
warfare that followed human migration from Europe into the Indian
populations was an immediate factor at the time of contact and it
contributed greatly in the decimation of Indian resistance.
Gold mines had been discovered. Well-armed Spanish patrols captured Indians
as needed to work gruelingly in the gold mines. The wanton cruelty and
disregard for human life by the fifteenth century Spanish in the conquest
of the Indies is darkly legendary. Often, Indian miners died of starvation,
though food could be had easily. As many Indians were easily enslaved
through raids during the early years, the life of an Indian had little
value.
Caonabo, the most respected cacique in Española persisted a few years until
captured by trickery and punished by a Columbus lieutenant, Alonso de
Hojeda. Columbus ordered Caonabo decapitated but later sent him on to Spain
as a slave (the cacique was lost at sea, in the same disaster that claimed
Guaironex). Hojeda himself sliced off the cacique's brothers' ears. These
types of actions precipitated general insurrection among the Taino Indians.
In 1496, Columbus led an assault later known as the Battle of the Vega and
called by his followers the principal battle against paganism, in part to
punish a cacique, Guatiguanax, who had killed ten Spaniards and burned
forty others. Guatiguanax had taken revenge for the killing of one of his
own elders, who had been torn to death by a Spanish mastiff commanded by
two Spanish soldiers. Columbus captured many Indians that he sold into
slavery during this campaign. (Fernandez-Armesto 1974)
One immediate factor of the invasion of the Caribbean is that Spain
immediately shipped out increasing numbers of transmigrants to the newly
"discovered" islands. A transmigration took hold that was similar to the
Amazonian one of present-day Brazil. It is contended here that this initial
migration to the Indian country of the Americas was caused by mostly the
same factors that cause the transmigrations today-the landlessness and
general poverty of the European peasant after displacement from land as
land production became increasingly measured for its commodity value rather
than its people-feeding value.
After 1502, when the gold foretold by Columbus was found in Española,
migrants came by the thousands. Las Casas complained later: "Nobody came to
the Indies except for gold-in order to leave the state of poverty which
plagues all classes in Spain." The roads to the mines were like ant hills
with arriving Spanish, wrote de Angleria. Many in the first wave were poor
Spanish nobleman with parasitic ways and their even poorer servants. The
Indians complained that the Spanish ate too much and worked little.
In time, the Spanish commendadors realized that they had brought too many
people to the island. But it can be safely asserted that the immediate
process of transmigration precipitated itself because of the misery of the
inhabitants of Spain in their homeland. It will remain a consistent theme
in the process of peopling the Americas with Europeans. Wrote Las Casas:
"Allowing too many people to emigrate from Spain has always been one of the
principal reasons behind the devastation of the Indies."
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The Last Spanish Crusade
Once military superiority was established, the persecution of the Indian
people by the Spanish was characterized by unimaginable cruelty The Indian
had no personhood, the Spanish conquest allowed no regard whatsoever for
the human life of an Indian.
"It was a general rule among our Spaniards to be extraordinarily cruel to
the Indians," Las Casas wrote. The Spanish men relished working their steel
swords on the Taino flesh, often cutting hands off at the slightest
offense. They would test their swords and manly strength on captured
Indians and place bets on the slicing off of heads or the cutting of bodies
in half with one blow," Las Casas told.
In a single act of revenge after an Indian attack, the Spanish soldiers
captured 700 villagers and stabbed them all to death. The war cacique they
hanged, as this was an abhorred form of death to the Tainos. Angleria
records that during this incident some soldiers attempted to protect
children. One soldier took a young boy in his arms, but the boy was stabbed
by another soldier who came from behind with a lance. Another good soldier
had a boy by the hand, and a passing soldier cut the boy's legs with his
sword. When lsabella's successor, Queen Juana (the protectress) heard about
this massacre, she was moved to order an investigation. Fray Nicholas de
Ovando, then governor, held a posthumous trial for the slaughtered caciques
and cacicas. As witnesses, he brought in the men who did the killings.
There were many pitched battles where Indians routed the Spanish soldiers,
and organized resistance persisted for fifty years, but Spanish cannon,
steel swords, horses and dogs overwhelmed the Indians. One by one, Spanish
captains approached the ruling nucleus of the tribal leadership. The
techniques used to lure and trap the sincere Taino were strictly
Machiavellian. The Spanish would sue for peace and start negotiations at
which the caciques would put on large feasts. Then the Spanish would
attack.
One Spanish governor, Ovando, did this to destroy the powerful woman
cacique, Anacaona, whose people he sought to "encommend" to new Spanish
arrivals. He chose Christmas day, after three days of generous feasting,
dancing, storytelling, and games. Anacaona had arranged a large areito,
where her councilors were singing of the ancestors. At a signal from
Ovando, Spanish soldiers seized Anacaona and all her nobles. The nobles
were burned in a pile. Anacaona, the Taino queen, was hung. (Tyler 1988)
One by one, the caciques of Española fell and their peoples were given over
to Spanish masters, or "encomendados," who literally worked the majority of
them to death. Cuba, Puerto Rico, and Jamaica followed. In Puerto Rico,
Caribs and Tainos joined battle against the Spanish and later migrated
together to the islands in the Lower Antilles. In Cuba, the Tainos allied
with the Ciboneys to mount several major rebellions. They were aided by the
warnings of Hatuey, a cacique from Espaflola, who had seen the Spanish
system in his own land. Hatuey was joined by a Cubano cacique, Guamax, to
initiate a general warrior resistance that would carry on to the 1530s.
Hatuey, who warned other Indians that gold was the only god of the Spanish,
was captured and ordered burned alive. The story of Hatuey's execution,
recorded by Las Casas, is still told to children in eastern Cuba.
A Spanish friar attempted to convert this first Cuban national hero, tied
and ready as soldiers with lit torches approached. The friar explained
about conversion, baptism and the Catholic concept of heaven and hell. He
offered to baptize Hatuey, thus cleansing all of his sins against the
Christian God. Hatucy is said to have requested time to think on the offer.
In the Taino culture, the dead are carried by the living and ongoing
generations. They live in a parallel world and must be recognized and fed.
A great deal of ceremonial attention is given this fundamental human
responsibility by the Caribbean and Meso-American Indian cultures. No doubt
a traditionalist such as Hatuey carried his own peoples' medicines and song
into his final moment.
Hatuey finally responded: "And the baptized, where do they go after death?"
"To Heaven," said the friar.
Hatuey: "And the Spanish, where do they go?"
Friar: "If baptized, of course, they go to heaven."
"So the Spaniards go to heaven," Hatuey responded. "Then I don't want to go
there. Don't baptize me. I prefer to go to hell."
The story of Hatucy's execution is a persistent oral telling in Camaguey
and Oriente provinces in Cuba. There is a tradition of pilgrimage to the
site of the deed, a place called Yara, near the city of Bayamo. The
tradition refers to the "light of Yara" that appears to visitors. The power
of physical vigor is associated with this belief. Indeed, a major Cuban
rebellion against the Spanish, called the Cry of Yara, started in the same
area near the City of Bayamo in 1868. (Cruz 1988)
The Greater Antilles region was settled slowly over the next two hundred
years. Smallpox decimated large numbers of Tainos, and malaria, brought in
by African slaves, also played a role. Many Indians fled west and south.
During the conquest, many of the Taino ceremonial materials were
transferred to western Cuba, hidden and found decades later. (Rivero 1966)
Small veins of gold were finally found in Cuba, but the discoveries
coincided with Cortez's expedition to Yucatan and his "discovery" of the
Aztec and Mayan mainland. The great quantities of the precious yellow metal
in meso-America obviated the urgency to settle Cuba, as Española turned to
sugar cane (Cuba would follow), and Havana became a port of call for
African slavery and the shipment of gold and other treasure from the
Spanish Main.
Many Puerto Rican Tainos or Boriquas, among a total number of perhaps
50,000-100,000, with a dozen caciques, and of indistinct religion and
customs from the Cubeflos or from Española Tainos, appear to have migrated
to-the islands of Lesser Antilles and possibly back to the South American
mainland. Several Carib settlements to the east of them had been
traditional enemies, but helped organize withdrawal of many Tainos to the
Lesser Antilles. The Spanish never penetrated the wall of Carib resistance
beyond the Taino territories. As many as a third of Borinquen Tainos fled
into the mountains and disappeared and much the same can be said for
Indians in Cuba and Santo Domingo.
Among the first conquistadors and among the new Spanish arrivals,
particularly the men from the Canary Islands and Galicia, many were known
to take one or more wives among the Indian villages. There were noted
alliances and nuclei of mestizajes stemming from these early
intermarriage's. In Santo Domingo, they settled along the Yaque River and
into the Marien region. This "nascent, native feudalism . . . claimed
hegemony over whole tribes. and was a subtle breakaway from Columbus's
factoria system." (Floyd 1973)
The concubinage system set up by the old chiefs and some new Spanish men,
both in Cuba and Puerto Rico, and the"guatiao" (exchange of names ceremony)
in Santo Domingo created a few somewhat ordained mestizajes, one that would
sustain a core of indigenous traditions to modern times.
There were incidents of sympathetic individual Spanish men marrying Indian
women and thus removing the cacicas and their particular tribes from the
encomienda system. The Spanish did this mostly to gain labor and advantage
and at times as a way to remove themselves from the central authority all
together. For the remaining indian caciques, it was a way to marry their
remaining people and take status as one of the new people, neither white
nor pure Indian Taino, but with at least the ability to establish families
and hold land. The comendadores took after this practice when they could.
One Cristobal Rodriguez (nicknamed "La Lengua") a well-known Spanish-Indian
interpreter, was exiled for arranging the marriage of a cacica to a Juan
Garces, "probably with the intent to remove her tribe from the encomienda
system. (Floyd I 973).
A very few Indian communities, deep in the highest mountain valleys, did
manage to survive in isolation in cuba for nearly five hundred years. These
are the communities of Caridad de los Indios and others in the Rio Toa
region.
In Cuba's Camagucy province, Vasco Porcallo de Figueroa, a particularly
vigorous lieutenant from Narvaez's army took dozens of Indian wives and
spawned a generation of more than a hundred mestizos. Rather than continue
to fight, Camagucybax, the old cacique of the savanna organized marriages
from among his people and Porcallo's children. Later, Porcallo invited some
fifty Spanish families to send young men and women to settle in Camaguey
where he coupled his mixed offspring to the new arrivals. They named the
new mixed generation "Guajiro," a Taino word possibly coined by the cacique
Camagucybax and meaning "one of us" or "one of our countrymen."
Porcallo and his fellow conquistadores provided no gentle model of "pater
familias." Powallo's rule was so brutal that many Taino families in the
region committed suicide rather than submit to his encomienda. Near
Baracoa, Cuba, at a coastal village named Yumuri, a promontory stands in
mute tribute to the many Taino families who, according to local oral
history, jumped to their deaths off its cliffs while taunting their Spanish
pursuers. (Wright 1916)
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Whither progress?
Did the Spanish (read the West) represent progress to the Indian peoples?
Did Indian people advance as a result of the great encounter? Or was there
possibly something the West might have learned from the American indigenous
peoples? The Indian populations had little opportunity to teach their
culture to the newcomers. The encomienda system, which distributed whole
tribes outright to conquistadores for working gold mines and tilling soil,
destroyed the Tainos and surrounding peoples with genocidal tempo. Swept
aside, the Indian populations retreated to remote areas as their
civilization was truncated and their ancient communal patterns were
destroyed. Five hundred years later, it might be appropriate to appreciate
what more we might have now known, had their humanity been respected and
their social-cultural knowledge intelligently understood.
That the Tainos (the term actually describes the sachem families from among
the island Arawaks) could keep their quite numerous people strong and well
fed, yet prescribe both agriculture and fisheries of a reduced scale, and
using the softest of technologies, reaped sufficient yet sustainable yields
of food, housing, and other resources, is a significant achievement.
Labeled as "primitive" and "backward," even today, it has boen arguably not
improved upon.
The label "primitive" is almost always a denigrating assignation. In
academic historical thinking, the so-called "primitive peoples," whether in
their "savage" and "barbaric" stages, were of a lesser time (the past) from
which we (the humans) are thought to have progressed. however, in
contemporary development theory, the most "advanced" thinking uniformly
incorporates "scale" and the concept of "appropriate technologies." Such
new fields as "sustainable agriculture" and "eco-systems management," and
the theoretics of "no growth" are establishing themselves in colleges and
universities. Their applicability and practicability in a world of fragile
ecologies are increasingly accepted. Taino life, in fact, most of what
heretofore has been branded as "primitive" and thus not worth emulating
about indigenous cultures, is viewed in a totally different light as
humankind enters the twenty-first century. "Primitiveness" which should
only define a people's "primary" relationship with nature, might be seen as
a positive human value and activity in these ecologically precarious times.
The history of the European contact with America and its subsequent
conquest has been written and rewritten but seldom from an indigenous
perspective and never from the continuity of an Indian survival over that
history Western historians have had a tendency to disregard the Indian oral
sources and many a fundamental lie about Indian culture has been carried
from early written texts into the modern day. Not a few Indian elders have
told their children, upon sending them to the western school: "Remember
your culture. Don't forget who wrote the history."
To the American indigenous peoples, members of a unique civilization, first
sight and first contact with Columbus and his caravels could only mean that
a new and yet incomprehensible manifestation had arrived. Most of the early
contact stories throughout the hemisphere confirm that the indigenous
response was almost uniformly friendly, curious, and extremely respectful.
What came back, uniformly and abruptly, was arrogant interrogation and a
superior attitude. unrelenting brutality followed, one exploding in sexual
temper and blood furies never before imagined, certainly not by the Tainos,
and never equalled in all the (often questionable) annals of Sun sacrifice,
cannibalism and inter-tribal warfare.
The actual brutality imposed on Indians by the European conquest is now
more or less accepted history. What has not decisively changed is the
notion that it was, after all, justifiable. Throughout the hemisphere, the
average non-Indian American is early infused with the notion that Europe
brought "civilization" to the Americas, that Amerindian peoples were mired
in an early, "primitive" version of the universal historical process, that
they were savages, pagans, and, most damningly, cannibals. But one still
needs to wonder Iabout the nature of savagery between two peoples, one of
whom worked for and provided food as an uncommercialized staple to its
members, and another which could shed copious blood for the gold of the
earth.
In his ship's log, the Admiral recorded how well formed and muscular the
Taino men and women were, with "no bellies, and good teeth." He noted, too,
what good servants they would make, reminding King Ferdinand that slavery
has been justified historically many times. To King Ferdinand, as a
justification for enslavement, Columbus wrote: "Many other times it has
already happened men have been brought from Guinea . . .They (the Tainos)
will make excellent servants." Columbus speculates that a few Spanish
soldiers could enslave the Tainos: "They are all naked and neither possess
weapons nor know of them. They are very well fitted to be governed and set
to work to till the land and do whatever is necessary. They also may be
taught to build houses and wear clothes and adopt our customs With fifty
men, all could be subdued and made to do all that is desired." Time would
prove the battle more difficult than expected, though the end result would
ultimately be as Columbus predicted.
This fifteenth century Spanish idea that non-Christian peoples could be
oppressed at will is rooted in the thesis of the Cardinal bishop of Ostia,
Henry of Susa, in the thirteenth century, who successfully postulated that,
"heathen peoples had their own political jurisdiction and their possessions
before Christ came into the world. But when this occurred, all the powers
and the rights of dominion passed to Christ, who, according to doctrine,
became lord over the earth, both in the spiritual and temporal sense."
(Tyler 1988)
Guacanagari, a Taino cacique who befriended Columbus and was in turn sold
into slavery for his trouble, twice sent Columbus face masks made of gold.
I think he meant to say: "Gold is such your interest that it is what you
are. Your face must be of gold; gold must be the identity your eyes look
through."
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Notes
1. In the middle of a housing shortage, current planning in Cuba
discourages the building of bohios. They are considered symbols of the
"past" and associated with "under-development." In Cuba, for many
years, the bohio-dwelling Guajiro was isolated and subject to harsh
and arbitrary mistreatment at the hands of the Rural Guard. Eastern
Guajiros in Cuba today have more access to modern conveniences but
complain about government regimentation over their agricultural
practices and market. They still build many bohios, some quite
comfortable, out of the Royal palm. Return
2. Page note: Friar Roman Pane', who wrote the earliest Native cosmology
in the Americas, (Macorix field work commissioned by Columbus: Winter,
1493) uses the term, "anguilas," or eels, to describe what his
informants spoke of as a large, slippery, river animal "with a form
similar to a woman. Given the centrality and abundance of the manatee
for the peoples of the Greater Antilles, it might be assumed that the
old story refers to the manatee, rather than the eel, in this fecund
context. Return
IAC's Historical Overview of Extension is the courtesy of IAC--(Kristie)
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Return to the top or to the Native America History Archives.
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Please send criticisms and suggestions to Haines Brown
(brownh@ccsu.ctstateu.edu). This file was created on 25 October, 1995
(
geocities.com/capitolhill)