Assignment 1 200 words

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Chapter Title: Taínos Chapter Author(s): Lynne Guitar, Lynne Guitar and Jorge Estevez

Book Title: The Encyclopedia of Caribbean Religions Book Subtitle: Volume 1: A-L; Volume 2: M-Z Book Editor(s): PATRICK TAYLOR, FREDERICK I. CASE, SEAN MEIGHOO Published by: University of Illinois Press. (2013) Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5406/j.ctt2tt9kw.113

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T Taínos cl assic taíno sPiritual BelieFs and Pr actices For the Classic Taínos, every living thing in creation, not just people and animals, but also trees, rivers, and rocks, had a goeiz, a soul, that sought to live in reciprocal balance with all the other beings. When a living being of this world died, it became an opia (or hupia), a living being of the spirit realm, the realm of the night. Some opias became cemís (or zemis)— special spirit helpers, spirit doubles. The opias in- habited caves by day, while the Taínos stayed in their bohios (homes) by night. The Taínos and the spirits, then, each in- habited their own realm—night and day—sharing one world, one vision, and interacting with each other through a com- plex series of rituals and artistic reminders of their need for each other—rituals and reminders that were an integral part of nearly every moment of each Taíno’s life from birth to the moment he or she passed on to the spirit realm. The Taínos are the “Indians” who were living on Kiskeya (Hispaniola, which is shared today by the Dominican Repub- lic and Republic of Haiti), Borinquen (Puerto Rico), Cuba, Jamaica, the Turks and Caicos, the Lucayos (the Bahamas), and the Virgin Islands when Christopher Columbus and his three small ships full of Europeans first arrived in the Caribbean in 1492. (The Taínos used to be called Island Ara- waks until archaeologist Irving Rouse pointed out what a misnomer it was, for the Taínos and mainland Arawaks are only very distantly related kin [see Arawak and Carib Reli- gions; Indigenous Religions].) Although there were once several million Taínos on the core island of Hispaniola alone— demographers have argued for five hundred years over numbers that range from less than a million to twenty million for the Taíno population on Hispaniola in 1492 (see Cook 1993; Deagan 1990)—a myth arose that the Taínos were wiped out within a few generations of the Europeans’ ar- rival. It’s true that traditional Taíno society was dismantled by the Spanish conquest and colonization, with their atten- dant battles, plagues, and abuses, but significant numbers of Taínos survived in the peripheral regions of the islands. They survived even in the very midst of the Spanish ranches, plantations, towns, and cities, where they and their children “passed” as Spaniards. Although no one in the modern Carib- bean speaks Taíno or lives exactly like the Classic Taínos did, Taínos have made a strong mark on the faces and cultures of the modern- day peoples of the Dominican Republic, Puerto

Rico, and southern Cuba, where the original Taíno popu- lation was most dense. There is a Taíno revival movement based out of New York/New Jersey and Puerto Rico that is growing stronger every year. Multifaceted, the principal goals of those connected to the movement are to research, compile, and recover Taíno language and culture and to re- kindle Nativist pride in all those of Taíno background. The word taíno appears to be a shortened version of ni- taíno, which is what the indigenous people of the region called out when European ships approached. Perhaps they meant to imply by this that they were “nobles,” for that is the word’s most frequently accepted meaning. It is more likely, however, that they meant they were “not cannibals,” which is another of the meanings for the word “nitaíno,” and it is the way in which most Spaniards who followed Columbus to the region used the term in the extant histories and documents. One thing we know for certain is that Taíno was not a collec- tive name that these indigenous people had for themselves. Rather, they appear to have identified themselves by indi- vidual yukayeke (population centers or villages) and by kaci- kazgo, the extent of the region under the control of a particu- lar kacike (cacique, chief ). Most archaeologists and linguists today concur that there were six to eight different indigenous groups just on the island of Hispaniola alone in 1492, each with its own language and slightly different customs, but that they used the language of the most populous and ad- vanced group, the Taíno, as a lingua franca. Taíno spiritual beliefs and practices appear to have been relatively uniform and widespread, too.

Caribbean Indigenous Peopling Sequence Archaeologists have identified a series of migratory move- ments that brought different indigenous peoples to the Caribbean over many millennia. (The most recent and com- plete detailed analysis of the Caribbean Indigenous Peopling Sequence can be found in Oliver [2009, 6–30].)

1. Guanahatabeys, called Ciboney, were a hunting- and- gathering people whose food base was fish and shellfish (though some also say they hunted the giant sloth and were the cause of its extinction in the Greater Antilles). They migrated by canoe from Central America to Cuba, then to Kiskeya, beginning around 5000–4000 bce.

2. At the same time (5000–4000 bce) another hunting- and- gathering people (Ortoiroid culture) migrated from the Orinoco River region of South America, canoeing north and northwest up the chain of the Antillean Islands to Puerto Rico. They reached the Mona Passage between Puerto Rico and Hispaniola around 1000 bce but do not appear to have crossed the passage for nearly two thousand years, though

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structure. The people and the culture that we call Taíno did not reach the Greater Antilles by canoe; their ancestors did. The Taíno culture developed in situ, characterized archaeo- logically by recognizable agricultural technologies and artis- tic features. The most advanced agricultural features of the Classic Taíno culture appear to have arisen in the northern valleys of Hispaniola’s Cibao, where the people developed a truly sedentary style of agriculture based not on the tropical forest technique of shifting plots cleared by slash- and- burn but on a type of prepared mound agriculture. Their specially con- structed agricultural fields were called konukos, which con- sisted of a number of knee- high mounds about eight to nine feet in circumference. Just as their ancestors had done in the island’s earlier slash- and- burn gardens, Taínos grew multiple crops on their konukos. Multiple cropping provides ground cover, which helps reduce weed growth, moisture loss, and soil erosion. The Taínos’ konukos were more productive and fertile for longer periods than slash- and- burn gardens, but constructing the mounded fields required a considerable in- vestment in time and labor. For both of these reasons, the Taínos were basically stable. Another thing that stabilized the Taínos was that once crops of bitter yucca, their pri- mary crop, were established (about one year from the time pieces of root were planted), harvesting was continuous over a period of several years. And the konukos required only occasional weeding and pest removal. There was no need to build storage barns, either, for the yucca could be left in the ground until needed. Having a stable food base allowed the populations in cen- tral Hispaniola to expand exponentially. Archaeologists have found evidence of their expansion and increasing intensifi- cation of sedentary food production, which are reflected in the Taínos’ increased use of burenes (the griddles on which they cooked casabe, the bread they made of bitter yucca) and in the remains of larger, more densely populated sedentary villages. Meanwhile, a cultural subgroup called Chican (after archaeological finds in the Boca Chica region just east of today’s capital of Santo Domingo) brought pottery making to its height. Chican styles have elaborately incised designs that appear to symbolize cemís. By 950 ce, the agricultural and artistic advancements had spread, culminating in the culture known today as Classic Taíno. Classic Taíno peoples are characterized not only by their advanced forms of agriculture and art but also by large seden- tary villages averaging five hundred to one thousand inhabi- tants—some with as many as five thousand to ten thousand inhabitants (see Las Casas 1995b; Martyr 1970; among other chroniclers). The bohios (standard houses) encircled a batey (plaza and playing field) in a manner that the Spaniards de- scribed as “disorganized” but was probably based on close- ness of kin relationship to the kacike. Facing the batey was

they probably established trade relations with the Guanahatabeys on Hispaniola.

3. Around 2000 bce, archaeological evidence suggests that another wave of hunting- and- gathering people from the Orinoco River region swept up the Lesser Antilles.

4. Approximately 1000–500 bce, the Caribbean’s first agriculturalists, the pre- Igneris, began migrating up the Antillean chain. They were also from the Orinoco River region. They reached Borinquen around 400–300 bce, conquering, pushing out, and/ or intermarrying with the previous nonagricultural settlers.

5. Another wave of agricultural peoples from the Orinoco River region (Saladoid culture) began to move into the Lesser Antilles around 500 bce. By 400–500 ce, they had begun to move into the Greater Antilles, fighting with, pushing out, and/or intermarrying with the earlier settlers, whose culture and language were very similar. The merged peoples are known as Igneri.

6. By 950 ce, the Igneris had crossed the formerly stable frontier at the Mona Passage and had begun to settle Hispaniola and eastern Cuba, no doubt conquering and/or intermarrying with the Guanahatabeys, who had inhabited Hispaniola by then for approximately five thousand years. The agricultural techniques, artistic traditions, and other rituals and beliefs developed that today are identified as Classic Taíno. Taíno people and culture evolved in situ on Hispaniola—they were a mixture of the genes and cultures of at least four distinct peoples.

7. The Taíno population grew rapidly, because of their improved and very efficient agricultural and fishing techniques. With their agricultural and cultural traditions, they then spread back to Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands, for the Mona Passage had become an open channel, not a barrier. They also began settling Cuba, the Bahamas, the Turks and Caicos, and Jamaica.

8. Around 1200 ce, the last wave of indigenous peoples to sweep up the Antillean chain from the Orinoco River region was a people whom the Taínos called Caribs (they called themselves Kalinagos). By 1492, the Caribs had reached today’s Virgin Islands, which was the frontier between the two groups of indigenous peoples. They were bitter enemies, fighting for the islands’ resources, when Europeans arrived in 1492.

Lifestyle and Social Structure In order to understand Taíno spiritual beliefs and practices, it is necessary to first understand their lifestyle and social

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the Taíno kacikes. Some were more like principales or “head- men,” holding authority only in a particular yukayeke. Other kacikes held authority over several politically connected yu- kayekes—which together was called their kacikazgo. The most important kacikes, whom anthropologists call para- mount kacikes, held authority over kacikazgos that encom- passed large territories in which there were many yukayekes and many subsidiary kacikes. The kacikes used marriage alliances to expand their kaci- kazgos. The preferred successor was the son of the kacike’s eldest sister. If none of his sisters’ sons were available, a sis- ter herself could rule (a kacika) or the kacike’s own biologi- cal son. In ascending order, the Taíno terms for the various levels of kacikes were guaoxerí, baharí, and matunherí. When a potential successor to a kacikazgo was born, neighboring kacikes welcomed the baby with gifts at a spe- cial areito in his honor. The gifts included not only high- status material goods but also gifts of songs and names. Each name had religious and political significance. Samuel Wilson (1990, 117) has suggested that the kacike’s numer- ous names each contained elements of his “pedigree.” The most prominent, most politically and socially active kacikes, therefore, would have had the longest string of names. The chronicler Pedro Martyr wrote that Behecchio, the kacike of Jaraguá at the time of the Spaniards’ arrival (Behecchio was the most powerful of the paramount kacikes), had more than forty names, all of which were to be recited by heralds whenever he proclaimed an order. Among these names were Tareigua Hobin, which meant “prince resplendent as cop- per”; Starei, which meant “shining”; Huibo, “haughtiness”; and Duyheiniquem, “rich river.” If even one of the forty- plus names were omitted by the herald “through carelessness or neglect . . . the kacike would feel himself grievously out- raged” (1970, 1:386–87). There appear to have been five or perhaps six paramount kacikes on Hispaniola when Columbus arrived in 1492. The questionable one, Guacanagaríx, was a kacike living near where Columbus’s flagship, the Santa María, wrecked itself on a reef on Christmas Eve 1492—and where Fort La Navidad was built out of the ship’s wreckage. Guacanagaríx may have gained a status approximating that of a paramount kacike due to his association with the exotic strangers from a dis- tant land, strangers who might even have been considered gods, at least at first. It is difficult to gauge what his status may have been before “the encounter” in late 1492 (Helms 1980, 728). Elite collusion, then, was another strategy used by the Taíno elite to attain and expand on their privileged status. Succession to leadership was not simply a matter of heredity: “He who would be a successful chief may overtly have had to express the inherent energies and capabilities by which (along with genealogical legitimacy) he was presumed fit for

the kacike’s special house, which was also a kind of temple, called a kaney. The kacikes wielded a considerable amount of both political and spiritual power. At the time of the Span- iards’ arrival, the principal kacikes of Hispaniola apparently were consolidating and expanding their power. Had they not been interrupted, the individual kacikazgos would no doubt have soon been merged into a state- level society like that of the Aztecs or Incas. While not as intricately stratified or as rigidly organized as the Aztecs and Incas, the Taínos had at least two distinct social classes, nitaínos and naborías. These were relatively equivalent to the “noble” and “commoner” classes with which Europeans were familiar. Unfortunately, we know next to nothing about the naboría class. Naborías may have been descendants of “less pure” kinship lines, that is, descendants of Guanahatabey or the unnamed indigenous peoples of the third wave, or of kinship lines not as crafty in statesmanship as others. Naborías were described as the workers among the Taínos, less privileged than the nitaíno class. For example, they ate bread made of corn, while the nitaínos ate casabe, and they slept on the ground, while nitaínos slept in cot- ton hammocks. We do not know, however, if naboría houses were relegated to the periphery of the village, if naborías participated in the “communal” areitos (dances/songs), or what kind of work, exactly, was designated as too lowly for nitaínos to do—manatee hunting, for example, might have been seen as a prestige activity, not as “work.” Scholars such as Puerto Rico’s Jalil Sued- Badillo maintain that all the Taí- nos’ food production—including planting, hunting, fishing, and gathering/collecting—was done communally, but that the kacikes and their families reserved all the best for them- selves. Spanish chroniclers recorded far more information about the nitaínos than about naborías. They were particularly fascinated by the kacikes and behikes (closest English equiva- lent to the latter is “shaman”) whose families appear to have comprised the nitaíno class. There is no clear indication that merchants or artisans were included in the nitaíno class or that there was a permanent priesthood, although greater levels of specialization and stratification may have been de- veloping in the core regions by 1492.

The Kacikes Kacikes were political as well as spiritual leaders. It is clear, however, that kacikes did not rule alone. Not only did they share religious leadership with behikes, but both kinds of leaders ruled with the assistance of their cemís, their powerful spiritual guides. It is unclear whether a kacike be- came high ranking and successful because of the power of his cemís or if his cemís were considered powerful because he was a high- ranking, successful kacike—perhaps it was a combination of both. There was a clear hierarchy among

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the cotton skirts called naguas that the elite Taíno women wore after they were married (1970, 1:125). The kacikes’ sym- bolic role as distributor of casabe, which was celebrated with an elaborate annual areito wherein he received the first bread made from a new harvest and then redistributed it, is indica- tive that they were, in fact, controlling food tribute and re- distributing the surplus. Or it may be that the tribute was not accorded to the kacikes, per se, but to their spiritual doubles, their powerful cemís.

The Behikes The myth of Guaguyona reveals significant information about behikes (also written as bohutis, buhuitus, buhitihus, or similar spellings). Behikes were healers—which they accom- plished with the help of their spirit guides—and they shared spiritual leadership with the kacikes. Fray Ramón Pané, under orders from Christopher Columbus, recorded the myth of Guaguyona, among other observations about Taíno creation legends and spiritual beliefs. Guaguyona was a cul- ture hero who became the Taínos’ first behike when he was reborn on the island of Guanín after an illness, from whence he brought the first gold and other objects to his people. Gua- guyona was also known as the “unifier of the East with the West,” which may be why behikes, not kacikes, were the of- ficiators at the Taínos’ ballgames. Spaniards denigrated the behikes in their chronicles, representing their religious func- tions as demon inspired and their cures as hoaxes. Martyr wrote, “These men, who are persistent liars, act as doctors for the ignorant people, which gives them great prestige, for it is believed that the cemís converse with them and reveal the future to them” (1970, 1:172). Working hand in hand, then, with their spiritual advisers, behikes most frequently healed with herbs and potions ground up using special ritual mortars and pestles, with massages, with the music of sacred maracas, special songs and incantations, tobacco smoke, and “by adoration,” as his- torian Carlos Esteban Deive phrases it. That is, they spoke with the spirit that was causing an illness, after first fasting, purging, and inhaling cohoba to induce a trance state, dur- ing which they asked the spirit what it wanted. The spirits most frequently responded that they were angry because they had not received their share of the food, had not been treated with the proper respect, or had not had a shrine con- structed in their honor and remembrance. Once the spirit was appeased by doing what it requested, the patient’s illness would disappear (1989, 83). Behikes also healed by removing polluting objects from a patient’s body that had been “sent” by spirits or by rival behikes. It was these healings, in which the object was “magically” sucked or massaged out of the patient’s body, that the Spaniards perceived to be outright shams, for they frequently caught the behikes palming the objects beforehand. Perhaps the Taínos, like anthropologist

office,” writes Mary W. Helms (1980, 728). Chroniclers made reference to Taíno kacikes, at various times, using all of the common tools of diplomatic maneuvering that European elites used, including gift exchange, marriage strategies, war alliances, and another form of fictive kinship that is uniquely Taíno, the exchange of names called guatiao. The reciprocal responsibilities of those who exchanged names, who became guatiao, were similar to those of the blood brother relation- ships among North American indigenous peoples or the re- lationships among baptismal compadres in Latin America. Successful kacikes were accorded many privileges of rank, with the more powerful kacikes garnering more privileges. The chroniclers all recorded that, instead of living in a com- mon round bohío, kacikes lived in caneys, special rectangu- lar houses/temples facing the village’s central batey. And ka- cikes had multiple wives—Behecchio of Jaraguá had thirty. Select foods, such as the meat of the iguana and manatee, were reserved for the exclusive use of kacikes. They had spe- cial clothes and accessories that set them apart from others— capes embroidered with parrot feathers; medallions called guanín made of metal imported from the Yucatán; carved gold- and- pearl- embellished masks, elaborate crowns and belts. While all the other Taínos sat on the ground, kacikes sat elevated above them on intricately carved and polished wooden dujos (low seats or benches). Kacikes had elaborately decorated canoes, too, some of which could hold hundreds of people; when on land, some kacikes were carried about on litters. Kacikes were buried in caves, which were frequently decorated with petroglyphs and pictographs, or at other prestige burial sites, and their corpses were accompanied by elaborate grave goods. Sometimes a kacikes’s favorite wife was buried with him—alive. All of the kacikes’ special privileges and accoutrements were symbols of their awesome spiritual and political power. The kacikes who were able to communicate with the most powerful cemís were those who held the most political power. The cemís were the kacikes’ supernatural advisers, their supernatural allies. With the help of his cemís, a ka- cike decided what was appropriate propitiation to the spirits and when it was the proper time to hold a ritual or celebra- tion. In addition to being the Taínos’ spiritual leader, the ka- cike made the day- to- day decisions about labor: he decided who was to be a hunter, a fisherman, or cultivator; when new fields were to be cleared, planted, cared for, or harvested; when to build a new canoe or go on a turtle hunt. The kacikes also received tribute from the people under them, which the chronicler Bartolomé de las Casas wrote was called cacoma (1995a, 2:113). Martyr noted that the kacika Anacaona (she in- herited the kacikazgo in Jaraguá from her brother, the para- mount Kacike Behecchio) had a “treasure,” a collection of prestige goods that she had received as tribute that included dujos, carved wooden bowls, large balls of spun cotton, and

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appear to illustrate the spiritual interpretation of how pro- creation results from the combination of male and female. For the Taínos, the profusion of symbols and representa- tions that surrounded them was both a constant reminder of the society’s values and beliefs and a basic explanation of the complex magico- religious world that was all around them but with which only the kacikes and behikes could commu- nicate on a regular basis. The behike, in his sacred role of mediator, could communicate with both the living and the dead. He made sense out of the confusion, brought order to the Taínos’ world. Successful behikes were venerated and were granted privileges nearly equal to those of the kacikes, including prestige foods, distinguishing clothes, and adorn- ments. They dressed in black cloth, painted their faces black, and covered their bodies with black paintings and tattoos of their cemís.

Gender Roles Jalil Sued- Badillo has been criticized for exaggerating and romanticizing gender equality among the Classic Taí- nos; among other things, he and other academics point out that Taíno women could even inherit the role of kacika, leader of a kacikazgo. On the opposing side, academics such as Ricardo E. Alegría argue that Taíno women did not suc- ceed to the position of kacika until after the arrival of Euro- peans, which disrupted normal indigenous patterns of suc- cession. Nonetheless, Taíno society was quite likely far more gender equal than, for example, Spanish society at the turn of the sixteenth century, as it is in many societies without a state level of sociopolitical organization. This is indicated by the importance of matrilineal inheritance patterns and the prominence given female images among the Taínos’ myths and socioreligious symbols. The importance of the female for her reproductive capacity in association with the land and fertility was celebrated by the Taínos since antiquity, as evidenced throughout their myths. “The trinity of woman- land- moon,” Sued- Badillo writes, “has a wide diffusion in Prehispanic America,” as it does in most agricultural societies (1989, 21). The Taínos reckoned the pas- sage of time by the phases of the moon and planted crops at the time of the new moon, which strengthens the principles cementing the triad of symbols, for not only is timekeeping a wondrous, “magical” thing in most societies, but women’s menses are also in tempo with the phases of the moon. Women figure prominently in the ancient myths, but the majority of the symbolic images representing the various Taíno cemís are male, perhaps a reflection of a growing cult of male ancestor/cemí worship that Irving Rouse has seen evidenced in the material record from about 1200 ce. None- theless, figurines of gravid women are prevalent among the Taíno artifacts collected by archaeologists over the years,

Dale A. Olsen found among the modern- day Warao of Vene- zuela, did not consider the behike to be a charlatan at all be- cause the object, which they knew he had beforehand, “is not the complete object until its spiritual essence [or posi- tive balance] has been restored to it” by the healer—which is what effects the cure (1996, 226–28). The Taínos held the behike in awe because of his heal- ing abilities, but healing was also the most dangerous of the behikes’ many roles. If a noble patient died, the behike who couldn’t cure him was put to death. Pané (1988, 52) describes in gruesome detail how breaking his legs, arms, and head with sticks was not enough to kill a behike, for spirits in the form of snakes would take possession and heal his body. To make sure he was dead, after beating him, you had to tear out his eyes and crush his testicles. Behikes were far more than just healers. As spiritual leaders, they may have been as important to the success of a kacikazgo as the kacike. Robiou Lamarche (1992, 58–59) sug- gests that the kacike and behike were complementary pairs, with the kacike representing the powers of the sun, and the behike the powers of the moon. Behikes were renowned for their ability to communicate with nature spirits and the souls of the recently dead, in much the same way that kacikes were renowned for communicating with the Taínos’ legendary hero and creator cemís. (The two kinds of spiritual entities were not quite the same, although both were venerated.) The behike acted as a spiritual adviser to the kacike, as mediator during the Taínos’ ballgames, and as the “court diviner,” in addition to his many other roles. His most secret and power- ful rituals appear to have been conducted in caves, where the spirits of the dead were believed to reside. The pictographs and petroglyphs in the caves throughout Hispaniola are dominated by vivid images of bats and owls, the creatures of the caves that were associated with the spirits of the ances- tors; with birds and insects, representing terrestrial life; and with faces/heads of all shapes and sizes, suggesting that the spiritual essence of the human is in the head. The behike me- diated among them all. In addition to being the Taínos’ liturgical experts, di- viners, teachers, pharmacists, herbal healers, and surgeons, behikes most likely also directed the craftsmanship of cemís and other sacred art. They may have been the artists who cre- ated the pictographs and petroglyphs found in caves and on exposed rocks all around the island. The behikes’ art would have reinforced their position as both teacher and liturgical expert. Some caves appear to have been devoted to ensur- ing successful hunts, others to childbirth and courtship, and others may have been devoted to specific ceremonies and/or to specific cemís. Some rocks with deeply etched pictographs appear to be teaching tools. For example, there is one on the surface in the Bocu Yuma region with life- size figures that

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tiles for ceremonial use or for commercial trade, the clearing of fields for konukos (a laborious task), the sowing, weed- ing, and harvesting of crops, building houses, constructing canoes, and so on. Several of the chroniclers mention both men and women working together to gather fish, but this might have been only at particular times of the year, when fish were spawning, for example, and the labor of the entire village was needed to reap the harvest. The kacika Anacaona told Bartolomé Colón that women were the expert sculptors of the wooden objects that were prized for trade and as pres- tige gifts (Martyr 1970, 1:125). Were there special ceramics, textiles, and straw art that were made only by women? Or only by men? Were there “men’s gardens” where ritual herbs like tobacco and those used in the cohoba ritual were grown? Did women have their own secret gardens for medicinal plants that only they knew how to grow, prepare, and use? One thing that is particularly striking is that most scholars (overwhelmingly male) who study the Taínos have attributed the “rise” of the Taínos to “the ease” with which they could harvest an abundant crop of yucca once they had mastered the konuko technique. Antonio M. Stevens- Arroyo, for ex- ample, says that the vast amounts of yucca grown by the Taí- nos “liberated” them “from the sporadic foraging of hunters and gatherers, permitting them to develop newly specialized forms of economic and social organization” (1988, 45). Sued- Badillo agrees, adding that “the progressive liberation of the work force from the chores” of food production permitted the Taínos to develop artisanal specialization, which he says was primarily in the female domain. He points out that the province of Jaraguá, which Las Casas called “the court of this island,” was so advanced that it innovated new technologies, such as methods of irrigation, which provided a substantial increase in food production (Sued- Badillo 1989, 14–15). There is a major problem with this rosy view of the bene- fits the Taínos reaped by an increasingly large supply of bit- ter yucca. Anthropologists who have studied living peoples dependent on casabe have found that the women describe themselves as drudges, saying that they are “enslaved” to the complicated, time- consuming process of washing, peeling, grating, and extracting the poisonous juices from the yucca root (a cyanic acid known as manihotoxina) and the other procedures to make casabe bread. After the grated pulp has been squeezed in an ingenious contraption called a cibucán, the women must spread it out to dry into flour, then gather it, store it, and, when ready to cook the casabe, they prepare the fire and the buren (“griddle”), cook the cakes, then set them out to dry before serving them. And do not forget all the work required to make the scrapers, graters, filters, bottles, jars, bowls, baskets, knives, cibucanes, and burenes needed to prepare and store not only yucca flour, but all the other foodstuffs as well.

and petroglyphs of Atabeyra, mother of the Taínos’ most im- portant cemí, Yúcahu (the god of yucca), are prominent at the largest and most complex of the batey sites so far dis- covered in the Caribbean, a site near Utuado on Puerto Rico called the Caguana Ceremonial Indian Park. According to Pané, both Atabeyra and her son, Yúcahu, were known by multiple names—she was Atabey, Iermao, Guacar, Apito, and Zuímaco; he was Yúcahu, Vagua, and Maórocoti. Since multiple names among the Taínos were indications of high rank and accomplishments, scholars such as Sued- Badillo and Eugenio Fernández Méndez have speculated that the mother’s having more names than the son is indicative of the importance attached to the female line by the Taínos. Fer- nández Méndez also suggests that the “primordial pair” rep- resented by Atabeyra and her son (Pané wrote that Yúcahu had no father) represented “both the duality and the unity” inherent not only in gender but in all things among the Taí- nos (1993, 29). The prominence of Atabeyra’s images at Caguana Cere- monial Indian Park may even indicate a rising symbolic im- portance granted to high- ranking females, both those living and dead but revered as cemís, much like what happened in Europe with the elevation of heroic queen figures and the Virgin Mary in the 1400s. We know that by the time Euro- peans arrived, or shortly thereafter, Taíno ballgames were frequently played with teams of married women versus single women, or women versus men—but women hit the balls with their knees and clenched fists, while men used their hips and buttocks. There were female warriors, female artisans, female leaders of areitos, and female behikes and kacikas among the Taínos. Some of the Taínos’ activities, however, appear to have been restricted to males, such as the gathering of gold and the cohoba ritual. Sued- Badillo (1989) points out, however, that both activities included women in the preparations. The Taíno men who went to gather gold, for example, first had to abstain from sex for twenty days, perhaps as a sacrifice to or symbolic union with Guabonito, the mythological “goddess” who created gold. In the cohoba ritual, women were in atten- dance on the male kacike and his senior counselors. But what about gender roles in the day- to- day activities of the Taínos? We know that Taíno women were responsible for the usual domestic activities that women are responsible for worldwide—childbearing, child care, food conservation and preparation. Sued- Badillo’s (1989, 33–36) research indi- cates that they were also responsible for the preparation of medicines and poisons, as well for domestic pottery, textiles, and basketry—but we do not know to what extent the nitaíno women shared these daily roles with naboría women. Nor do we know to what extent men and women may have shared responsibilities such as the production of pottery and tex-

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Real. In 1496, Columbus sent him to the heart of the gold mining region, where he lived for two years in the principal town ruled by Kacike Guarionex. It was there that he wrote his Relación acerca de la antigüedades de los Indios (Account of the Indians’ ancient times). (An English translation is con- tained in Ferdinand Colón’s Life of the Admiral.) Pané was handicapped by a chronic shortage of paper and ink, because the language spoken in Guarionex’s kacikazgo was signifi- cantly different than the language he’d learned in Macorix, and because he was confused by the dizzying pantheon of mythic beings and culture heroes whose stories he tried to capture on paper. Nonetheless, much of what we know about Taíno creation myths and Taíno spirituality comes from his brief work. Pané wrote that the Taínos emerged from two of His- paniola’s caves, which were called Cacibayagua and Ama- yauba, on a mountain called Canta (Pané 1988, chap. 1). The same Guaguyona who was hailed as the first behike carried away all of the island’s women and deposited them on the island of Matinino (chap. 4). (When Europeans heard this myth, they began an excited search for what came to be called “the Island of the Amazons.”) The mass kidnapping forced the Taíno men to get creative. One day, while bathing by the river, the men spotted some gender- neutral creatures. They got the help of an inriri, a woodpecker, to carve out the necessary female apertures in the creatures (chaps. 7 and 8). Thus they once again had women. The sea and all of its fishes came from a gourd in which a culture hero named Yaya put the bones of his dead son, Yayael, recorded Pané. Yaya himself had killed the boy be- cause Yayael was plotting to kill him (1988, chaps. 9 and 10). The sun and the moon came from a cave called Yobovava in a region of the island ruled by Kacike Maucia Tivuel. Pané him- self may have seen the cave, for he corroborates what other Spaniards wrote about the two stone cemís that the Taínos kept inside, two cemís that “sweated.” The cemís’ names were Boiyanel and Marohú, and the Taínos believed they were responsible for bringing the rains (chap. 11). A female cemí named Guabancex, however, was responsible for bring- ing on the heavy rains and winds of the hurricanes, which happened when she was angry. Guabancex had two assis- tants, cemís named Guatauva and Coatrisquie, who were re- sponsible for announcing her arrival and gathering together the waters (chap. 23). Such essentials of Taíno life as casabe and cohoba came from an encounter between a man named Ayamanaco and Demivan Caracaracol, who was one of a set of quadruplets that were taken by Caesarian out of the belly of a dead woman named Itibe Yauvava (Pané 1988, chap. 10). Demivan Caraca- racol’s brothers took a stone hatchet to the huge hump that he developed on his back and removed from it a live female land turtle (chap. 11). The story appears to be connected to

If it is true that the Taínos were in the process of switch- ing from a varied diet to one that relied predominantly on ca- sabe made from bitter yucca, as so many investigators have theorized, then perhaps the ritual or symbolic elevation of women seen in the Taínos’ material artifacts was to com- pensate for a devolution of women’s day- to- day equality with males, who alone were becoming more liberated than pre- viously. In fact, equality between the sexes may have been less and less pronounced among the Taínos as they evolved toward a state- level political structure. Live interment of the wives of deceased kacikes, for example, appears to have been a new practice in the fifteenth century, part of the Taínos’ “in- creasing trajectory toward stratification” (Sued- Badillo 1989, 44). And while polygamous practices inspired artisanal spe- cialization among the nitaíno women, they also represented justification for the exploitation of those women. There is much work still to be done on gender and the Taínos. If the status of women was devolving as the Taínos approached state level, it may not have affected all women. Taíno patterns might have followed those that the Mexi- can or Incan societies did as they evolved—nitaíno women among the Taínos might have enjoyed “parallel” or “com- plementary” roles to those of the high- ranking males. At the very least, however, the lives of the naboría females must have been getting progressively worse as more and more of their waking hours and energy were devoted to the onerous tasks involved in the production of casabe.

Taíno Religious and Artistic Expression Creation Myths As difficult as it is to separate religion and spirituality from the sociopolitical aspects of the Classic Taíno way of life, it is nearly impossible to separate Taíno spiritual concepts from their art. Father Ramón Pané, sent to live among them in 1493 in order to record their religious beliefs, encountered what he described as a confusing profusion of spirits that walked in the night, along with legendary and mythological “gods,” anthropomorphic beings, “living” trees and stones, and ancestral remains—skulls or other bones or body parts, desiccated bodies, and so on—that the Taínos adored. Nearly all of the Spanish chroniclers refer to Father Ramón Pané as a “humble” Jeronymite monk (Order of Saint Jerome) (see Roman Catholic Church). Yet Pané is the first recorded Euro- pean to have learned an indigenous language and is remem- bered today not only as the first of the “New World” mis- sionaries but also as the first anthropologist in the Americas because of the special assignment Christopher Columbus gave him to record the legends, rituals, celebrations, and spiritual beliefs of the Taínos. Pané sailed from Spain with Columbus’s second fleet in late 1493. He began his missionary work among the Taínos in the kacikazgo of Macorix, in the fertile valley of the Vega

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are elaborately carved with human, animal, or anthropomor- phic features. Were the more elaborate cemís considered to be more powerful? That is quite likely. Francisco José Ar- náiz suggests that it was not only the artisanry of the design that indicated a cemí’s power, but that “its power was in re- lation to the type of material of which it was made” (1989, 141). Based on our own values, we might imagine that gold was the most precious and therefore the most powerful ma- terial from which to make or decorate cemís, and the Taí- nos did use gold to embellish religious and ceremonial ob- jects; however, guanín, a copper- gold alloy that shines more brilliantly than gold and that was probably imported from the mainland (and hence was more rare on Hispaniola than gold), was valued more highly by the Taínos. Also, cotton cloth, brilliantly colored feathers, rare colored stones (espe- cially green), and marble (which was said to be “of the femi- nine sex”) were highly valued materials among the Taínos. Even “lowly” materials were used, however, in the making of cemís, for material value was not the only determinant. Martyr wrote, “Some are made of wood, because it is amongst the trees and in the darkness of night they have received the message of the gods. Others, who have heard the voice amongst the rocks, make their cemís of stone; while others,

other indigenous American creation legends about turtles. To this day, people of Taíno descent respect the land turtle as a sacred animal and use its shell in the preparation of casabe.

Cemís Although Pané and most of the other chroniclers wrote that the Taínos “worshipped” and “adored” cemís, “cele- brated” or “prized” might be better verb choices. Consider how Christians celebrate and prize the cross and crucifix symbols but do not adore them or worship them, per se. Understanding how the Classic Taínos conceptualized cemís is complicated by the fact that when the Taínos spoke of cemís, the term appears to have encompassed two separate but linked concepts: (1) a spiritual being, a complementary counterpart or double, who acted as adviser to and protector of an earthly being and (2) the physical manifestation or sym- bol of that spiritual being on Earth. Las Casas wrote in his Apologética, “I asked the Indians several times: ‘Who is this cemí that you call upon?’ And they responded: ‘It is the one who makes it rain and makes the sunshine and gives us chil- dren and other good things that we want’ ” (1995b, 8:1152). The earthly manifestation of the cemí who was Yúcahu, the spirit of the yucca, for example, was embodied in the numerous three- pointed stones the Spaniards call trigono- litos that the Taínos made of clay, stone, bone, shell, and, perhaps, other less durable materials. At least some of these were buried in the konukos when the yucca was planted, in a ritual no doubt intended to increase and/or protect the crop. But not all stone cemís were representations of Yúcahu. Columbus himself noted that there were three dif- ferent kinds of stone cemís, each used for a different pur- pose: “Most of the kacikes have each three stones, for which they and their people feel great devotion. According to them, one of these stones helps the grains and vegetables grow, the second helps women give birth without pain, and the third secures rain or fair weather when they are in need of either” (Colón 1959, 152). Stone images of cemís have been recovered that are not three- pointed. Predominant among them are heads in vari- ous shapes and sizes, for the Taínos appear to have believed that the essence of a human being was in the head. There is even one surviving example of a cotton cemí in the form of a “doll,” inside of which is a human skull, no doubt that of a revered ancestor. The eyes of cemí images are particularly detailed and embellished, frequently with gold foil. Cemí images did not just adorn objects. It was frequently recorded that Taínos wore cemí symbols as painted and/or tattooed personal adornments. Cemí symbols no doubt adorned many other objects for personal, ritual, and general use that have not survived the passage of time. Some of the trigonolitos and other cemí figures that have been recovered are small, simple, unadorned, while others

Taíno trigonolito or three- pointed stone representing a cemí, Domincan Republic, 2000. Photo by P. Taylor.

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dujos. The traditional sling- back, low- profile shape of the dujo was designed “to facilitate” the kacike’s important func- tion as an “interpreter” of the cemís’ messages when he was in a cohoba- induced trance (1992, 63). No doubt personal items, as well as domestic and practi- cal objects owned by the other nitaínos, and perhaps even the naborías, were embellished with symbols of the cemís to remind the people of their reliance on them for everything from daily health and subsistence to fruitful childbearing and the successful outcome of wars. Few items made of per- ishable materials have survived the passage of time, but both Martyr (1970) and Las Casas (1995b) recorded that even the insides of Taíno huts were decorated with intricate designs woven in dyed straw, wood, and bark. The profusion of cemí symbols was decorative and, simultaneously, a constant re- minder of the peoples’ sacred obligations. Those obligations, of course, were not just to the cemís, who were otherworldly spirits, but to the kacikes and behikes because of their inti- mate connections to the most powerful of those spirits.

Fasting, Purging, and the Cohoba Ritual One of the most written about Taíno spiritual rituals was the kacikes’ taking of cohoba, a drug that induced a trance state and hallucinations that facilitated the Taínos’ commu- nications with their cemís. (Behikes are also said to have taken cohoba, but their rituals were most likely done in secret, for the chroniclers did not describe them.) The ka- cike, and sometimes the entire Taíno community, went on long ritual fasts as a sacrifice to the cemís before the kacike partook of the cohoba. Fasting is a nearly universal method for achieving a trance state and would have enhanced both the depth of the trance and speed with which it took effect. After the proscribed fasting period, and after a ritual com- munity bath, probably with special flowers and herbs, the ka- cike (and sometimes the whole community along with him) purged his stomach using both herbs and a vomiting stick.

who heard the revelation while they were cultivating their ages—that kind of cereal I have already mentioned—make theirs of roots” (1970, 1:173). Each of the nitaínos had his or her own personal cemís, perhaps as many as ten or more. It is not known whether naborías had cemís, or only nitaínos. Cemís—and their powers—could be passed down to successors, given as gifts, traded, or even stolen or acquired as war trophies. Kacikes and other nitaínos boasted about their cemís, bragging that theirs were more glorious than the cemís of others. The en- tire village or kacikazgo paid tribute to the kacike’s cemís, which protected and helped all the people. It is unclear, how- ever, whether a high- ranking kacike became paramount be- cause of the power of his cemís or if his cemís were consid- ered powerful because he was a high- ranking, successful kacike—perhaps it was a combination of both. It was probably the most powerful of a kacike’s cemís whose miniature image he wore on a pendant tied with string on his forehead. Archaeologists have found small figurines with holes for suspending them from a cord that may have been used for this purpose, but no other scholars have con- nected them to the Taínos’ ritual greeting of touching one another’s foreheads. Perhaps the ritual greeting was a way of paying obeisance to one another’s “spiritual double.”

Other Religious Art Sued- Badillo (1989) has suggested that the kacikes took advantage of the captive artisanry of their multiple wives to enhance the quantity and beauty of their possessions, hence also to enhance their power. These beautiful objects with spiritual power included all manner of practical things, from food and beverage containers to hammocks and canoes, as well as a wide array of ceremonial and religious items, such as figurines and trigonolitos, large sculptures for placement on what the Spaniards described as altars, effigy vases, dujos, vomiting spatulas, inhalers, and elaborate feather- and- gold headdresses, belts, capes, masks, collars, and bracelets. All were decorated with the symbolic representations of cemís, for cemís “had power, gave power and reflected power” (Ar- náiz 1989, 141). One of the most prized possessions of the kacikes was the dujo, a type of short- legged stool or chair. Dujos were skill- fully carved (probably by the kacike’s wives) out of a single piece of guayacán (lignum vitae) or mahogany that was then polished to a high gloss. Most dujos took the four- legged shape of anthropomorphic beings. Oviedo says this was “to signify that the one seated there is not alone” but is accom- panied by his cemís ([1535] 1959, Bk. 61, chap. 1). The ka- cikes also sat on dujos to elevate themselves above all the rest of their people, who sat on mats on the ground. Kacikes were even buried sitting on their dujos. Sebastián Robiou Lamarche suggests yet another reason the kacikes valued

Taíno dujo or ritual stool. Courtesy of the Museo del Indio, San Juan, Puerto Rico, 2001. Photo by P. Taylor.

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enemy. Areitos may also have been held for no other purpose than to entertain or appease the people of the kacikazgo and/ or to bond them more closely to each other, to their kacike, and to his cemís. Areitos were also held to propitiate a par- ticular cemí or for educational purposes, for it was through song that the Taínos transmitted their histories and legends. The Taínos had no form of writing, so they kept their his- tory alive in their art and in songs, both of which are proven mnemonic techniques. Martyr writes that the Taínos learned about their history and legendary heroes (which he calls a “mass of ridiculous beliefs”) directly “from their ancestors . . . preserved from time immemorial in poems which only the sons of chiefs are allowed to learn” (1970, 1:172). He ex- plains later that “these poems are called arreytos. As with us the guitar player, so with them the drummers accom- pany these arreytos and lead singing choirs. . . . Some of the arreytos are love songs, other are elegies, and others are war songs; and each is sung to an appropriate air” (1:361). Many aspects of the areitos were ritualistic. For example, the participants (usually described as the entire village, but perhaps only the nitaínos) fasted, taking only “the juice of certain herbs,” for six to seven days. Just before the areito began, they cleansed their bodies in the river using the same herbs (Las Casas 1995b, 8:1155). The ritual bathing may have been obeisance to Atabeyra—in one of her mul- tiple guises, the mother of Yúcahu was the “goddess” of the water. Then they painted their bodies “in divers colors with vegetable dyes” and, to complete the purification, they vom- ited together as a sacrifice to the cemís. Martyr describes this part of the ritual in vivid detail: “They thrust a stick, which each carries on feast days, down their throats to the epiglottis or even to the uvula, vomiting and vigorously cleansing the body” (1970, 2:316). Next the kacike, seated on his dujo, partook of the cohoba and, hands on his knees in the ritual position, consulted the cemís. Afterward, he revealed the prophecies to the people. From that point, each areito, depending on its purpose (and whether the prophecy was favorable or not), followed a differ- ent sequence of celebration—but a focal point of each was a series of songs and dances in which participants alternated as leaders. Drums were not the only instrumental accompaniment, as Martyr believed. The Taínos had a wide variety of instru- ments that included drums, maracas (rattles—these were also sacred instruments that the behikes used for healing), güiros (scrapers), flutes, and other wind instruments. The rhythmic tinkling of strings of snail shells with which “both sexes weighted their arms, hips, calves, and heels,” added to the beat. Martyr wrote, “Loaded with these shells they struck the ground with their feet, dancing, leaping, respectfully saluting the kacike who [sat] at his door . . . beating on a drum with a stick” (1970, 2:316). As many as three hundred to

Again, this would have enhanced both the depth and speed with which he entered a trance state. Then the community’s women served him the cohoba—a finely ground dried pow- der that was probably a mixture of hallucinogenic drugs that included Piptadenia peregrina, Anadenanthera peregrina, and tobacco. In the Apologética, Las Casas described how the co- hoba mixture was mounded in a “round bowl . . . made of wood, very handsome” (1995b, 8:1152). The round wooden bowl that Las Casas described formed the headpiece of very elaborately carved statues, no doubt representations of a cemí. The kacike inhaled the trance- inducing powder using a special tube shaped like the letter Y and made of bone, wood, or fired clay—the tube was called a tabaco, a Taíno word that was mistakenly attributed to the smoking/inhaling herb. Some of the inhalers were elaborately crafted, others un- adorned. Among those collected by archaeologists is one de- picting a figure that is clearly male (remember that women did not partake of the cohoba, at least publicly); its genitals would have been set into the cohoba mixture and the feet of its uplifted legs inserted in the user’s nostrils. “Almost im- mediately” after inhaling the cohoba, wrote Martyr, “they be- lieve they see the room turn upside down, and men walking with their heads downwards” (1970, 1:174). They would lose consciousness, wake slightly, act “drunk,” and speak incoher- ently. It was in this state that kacikes and behikes communi- cated with their cemís, learning “the secrets” of future events (Las Casas 1995b, 81152–53). Pané was the first of the Spaniards to record that “purging” was not only part of a religious rite among the Taíno but a panacean method of healing as well. The many purga- tive “medicines” used by the Taínos and the proliferation of vomiting spatulas among their material remains—both unadorned and elaborately engraved—testify to the promi- nence of ritual fasting and purging among them. José Juan Arrom notes that the importance associated with vomiting makes sense “to a people who could die if they ingested bit- ter yucca without first extracting all of the poisonous juices.” He suggests that ritual vomiting was a sacrifice of “total puri- fication” aimed at appeasing “the fearsome cemí” who con- trolled the process of turning poisonous yucca into nourish- ing bread (1975, 113–14).

Areitos Areitos are another of the Taínos’ well- known rituals, for nearly all of the chroniclers went to great lengths to describe their fondness for these celebrations with songs and dances. There were different kinds of areitos that took place in the batey. There were areitos to celebrate annual events such as solstices, first plantings, and first harvests and to celebrate special events such as the marriage of a kacike, the birth of an important nitaíno, the coming of age of an important female, a visit from a neighboring kacike, or victory over an

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dropped abruptly to the ground and raced from one side to the other of the playing court, sending balls flying “as fast as the wind,” trying to score goals for their team while prevent- ing the opposing team from scoring (Bk. 7, chap. 2). The bateyes were fun sport but were also sacred rituals. Standing stones, frequently with pictographs and petro- glyphs of cemís, formed the boundary walls of the Taínos’ bateyes, which appear to have been situated so as to be in alignment with the sun during the four solstices. Robiou La- marche suggests that the batey’s rectangular shape was sym- bolic of the four cardinal directions (1992, 46–47). The most important of the batey sites found so far (Caguana Ceremo- nial Indian Park in Puerto Rico, near Utuado) was located in a valley among high mountain peaks, near the source of a great river—the same kind of location celebrated in so many of the Taínos’ sacred myths. The games of ball, then, may have served as vivid symbolic re- creations of the great difficulties the original culture heroes went through in order to bring the gifts of earthly life—water, fire, and yucca—to the Taínos. The Taínos cherished life and their islands so much that they believed the spirits of the dead continued to live in the caves that are so abundant, walking about at night to enjoy any and all of the things that a living human being might want to do at night. The Taínos did not consider these opia to be evil, as some Spanish chroniclers have suggested, and they certainly did not fear either opia or cemís. Just as life and death were in fragile balance, day and night also needed to be kept in balance—and the night belonged to the opia. The opia were so similar to humans, that the only way to tell an opia from a living Taíno was to check if he or she had a belly button. The Classic Taínos’ positive outlook on death as well as on life is a reflection of the healthiness of their entire society and belief system. It was a society where everyone— male and female, young and old, alive and dead, humans and spirits—lived in reciprocal harmony.

Lynne Guitar BiBliogr aPhy Alegría, Ricardo E. 1983. Ball Courts and Ceremonial Plazas in the

West Indies. New Haven, ct: Yale University Publications in Anthropology.

———. 1989. “Aspectos de la cultura de los indios taínos de las Antillas Mayores en la documentación etno- histórica.” In La cultura taína, edited by Sociedad Estatal Quinto Centenario, 117– 36. Madrid: Turner Libros.

Arnáiz, Francisco José. 1989. “El mundo religioso taíno visto por la fe católica española.” In La cultura taína, edited by Sociedad Estatal Quinto Centenario, 137–52. Madrid: Turner Libros.

Arrom, José Juan. 1975. Mitología y artes prehispánicas de las Antillas. Mexico City: Siglo XXi.

Atkinson, Lesley- Gail, ed. 2006. The Earliest Inhabitants: The Dynamics of the Jamaican Taíno. Kingston, Jamaica: University of the West Indies Press.

Cassá, Roberto. 1974. Los Taínos de la Española. Santo Domingo: Editora de la Universidad Autónoma de Santo Domingo.

four hundred dancers participated at a time, weaving around the batey “with their arms around each others’ shoulders” (Las Casas 1995b, 8:1317). The Taínos celebrated all that was good, beautiful, and positive in the world with song and dance. Songs and dances were a way to thank the cemís for helping them to live happy and healthy on Earth. Sacred songs were among the most valued of the prestige gifts exchanged among Taíno nobles. The exchange of songs created strong bonds of fictive kin- ship and reciprocal responsibility. Martyr noted this several times when explaining why one kacike or another would not turn traitor against another “Indian” or Spaniard, that is, when he wrote about how the kacike Mayobanex defended Guarionex, who had taught him and his principal wife “to sing and dance, a thing not to be held in mediocre consider- ation” (1970, 1:146).

Bateyes Most of the Taíno rituals that we know about were offici- ated by the kacikes, but the ballgame played in the batey was officiated by a behike. The term batey, like many of the Taínos’ terms, encompassed two linked concepts: the multipurpose ballgame that they played and the usually rectangular plaza where they played it and celebrated their areitos. (This sug- gests that the batey’s use as a site for celebrating areitos was secondary, for its principal use appears to have been for the ballgame.) Many scholars, basing their hypotheses on knowl- edge of the ballgame among the indigenous peoples of Meso- america, have suggested that the batey was a form of ritual warfare. Bateyes were probably played in lieu of battles and/or to bond together neighboring villages or kacikazgos or groups of Taínos within a kacikazgo. Fernández Méndez suggests that “each game was an invocation to the gods” (1993, 18–19). The outcome of the game was considered to be divinely pro- phetic, which must have added a thrilling component both for the players and for the spectators who surrounded the court to cheer the game on—the kacikes and their families sat in places of honor at the head of the playing field. The game of batey was played in a manner similar to mod- ern soccer, with two competing teams of twenty to thirty players each. The balls “were made of the roots of trees and herbs and juices and a mixture of [other] things . . . like a black pitch,” wrote Oviedo ([1535] 1959, Bk. 7, chap. 2)—it was the first time Europeans had encountered rubber. The players wore hoops about their hips and elbows, probably for protection as well as to send the ball back across the court at high velocity—many museums boast examples of circu- lar stone “belts” and elbow rings, but these were most likely molds for the actual hoops worn by the players, which were probably made of rubber stuffed with straw and with cotton woven around them. Oviedo described how exciting it was to see the agility of the players as they leaped high in the air or

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Sued- Badillo, Jalil. 1989. La mujer indígena y su sociedad. Río Piedras, Puerto Rico: Editorial Cultural.

Thomas, David Hurst, ed. 1989. Columbian Consequences, Vol. 1, Archaeological and Historical Perspectives on the Spanish Borderlands West. Washington, Dc: Smithsonian Institution Press.

———, ed. 1990. Columbian Consequences, Vol. 2, Archaeological and Historical Perspectives on the Spanish Borderlands East. Washington, Dc: Smithsonian Institution Press.

———, ed. 1991. Columbian Consequences, Vol. 3, The Spanish Borderlands in Pan American Perspective. Washington, Dc: Smithsonian Institution Press.

Vega de Boyrie, Bernardo, Carlos Dobal, Carlos Esteban Deive, Ruben Silie, José de Castillo, and Frank Moya Pons. (1981) 1988. Ensayos sobre la cultura dominicana. Santo Domingo: Fundación Cultura Dominicana.

Veloz Maggiolo, Marcio. 1989. “Para una definición de la cultura taína.” In La cultura taína, edited by Sociedad Estatal Quinto Centenario, 17–26. Madrid: Sociedad Estatal Quinto Centenario y Turner Libros.

Wilson, Samuel M. 1990. Hispaniola: Caribbean Chiefdoms in the Age of Columbus. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press.

———, ed. 1997. The Indigenous People of the Caribbean. Gainesville: University Press of Florida.

taíno sPiritualit y today The Spaniards who, beginning in the last decade of the 1400s, took over the islands of the Greater Antilles (today’s Hispaniola, shared by the Dominican Republic and the Re- public of Haiti, and Puerto Rico, Cuba, and Jamaica), Turks and Caicos, the Bahamas, and the Virgin Islands tried their best to turn the “pagan” indigenous peoples—those who sur- vived the conquest, that is—into proper Christian subjects (see Christianity; Roman Catholic Church). They only par- tially succeeded. Today we call all those indigenous peoples “Taíno,” although there were actually more than half a dozen different indigenous groups sharing these islands. We know now that there were far more indigenous peoples when the Spaniards arrived than their estimate of two hundred thou- sand—in fact, there appear to have been two million to four million on Hispaniola alone (Cook 1993; Deagan 1990)—and we know that they were not wiped out, as the Spanish chroni- clers reported. By running away to peripheral parts of the islands or to the mainland, some Taínos avoided not only the Spaniards but many of the Europeans’ “invisible allies,” the bacteria and viruses that killed off 80–90 percent of the islands’ indigenous peoples (Cook 1993). They formed cima- rrón (runaway) communities along with runaway African slaves, thereby keeping many aspects of their cultures alive. Many Taíno women survived by marrying Spaniards and adopting the Castilian language, clothing, and culture—in public; within their homes, they raised their mestizo chil- dren (who had built- in immunities to the Europeans’ dis- eases) in mostly traditional indigenous ways. Throughout the ensuing centuries, on the larger Carib-

———. 1992. Historia social y económica de la República Dominicana. 2nd ed. 2 vols. Santo Domingo: Editora Alfa y Omega.

Colón, Ferdinand. 1959. The Life of the Admiral, by his Son Ferdinand. Translated by Benjamin Keen. New Brunswick, nJ: Rutgers University Press.

Cook, Noble David. 1993. “Disease and the Depopulation of Hispaniola, 1492–1518.” Colonial Latin American Review 2(1–2): 213–45.

Deagan, Kathleen. 1990. “Sixteenth- Century Spanish- American Colonization in the Southeast U.s. and the Caribbean.” In Columbian Consequences, edited by David Hurst Thomas, 225–50. Washington, Dc: Smithsonian Institution Press.

Deive, Carlos Esteban. 1989. “Chamanismo.” In La cultura taína, edited by Sociedad Estatal Quinto Centenario, 81–89. Madrid: Turner Libros.

Fernández Méndez, Eugenio. 1993. Art and Mythology of the Taíno Indians of the Greater West Indies. San Juan: Ediciones El Cemí. Originally published as Arte y Mitología de los Indios Taínos de las Antillas Mayores. San Juan, Puerto Rico: Ediciones El Cemí, 1979.

Guitar, Lynne, Pedro Ferbel- Azcarate, and Jorge Estevez. 2006. “Ocama Daca Taíno (Hear Me, I Am Taíno): Taíno Survival on Hispaniola, Focusing on the Dominican Republic.” In Indigenous Resurgence in the Contemporary Caribbean: Amerindian Survival and Revival, edited by Maximilian C. Forte, 41–67. New York: Peter Lang.

Helms, Mary. 1980. Ulysses’ Sail: An Ethnographic Odyssey of Power, Knowledge, and Geographical Distance. Princeton, nJ: Princeton University Press.

Keegan, William F. 2007. Taíno Indian Myth and Practice: The Arrival of the Stranger King. Gainesville: University Press of Florida.

Las Casas, Bartolomé de. 1995a. Obras completas, Vols. 1–3, Historia de las Indias. Compiled by Paulino Castañeda, Carlos de Rueda, and Carmen Godínez e Inmaculada de la Corte. Madrid: Alianza Editorial.

———. 1995b. Obras completas, Vols. 6–8, Apologética historia sumaria. Compiled by Paulino Castañeda, Carlos de Rueda, and Carmen Godínez e Inmaculada de la Corte. Madrid: Alianza Editorial.

Martyr d’Anghiera, Peter. 1970. De Orbe Novo: The Eight Decades of Peter Martyr D’Anghiera. Translated by Francis Augustus MacNutt. 2 Vols. New York: Burt Franklin.

Oliver, José R. 2009. Caciques and Cemí Idols: The Web Spun by Taíno Rulers between Hispaniola and Puerto Rico. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press.

Olsen, Dale A. 1996. Music of the Warao of Venezuela, Song People of the Rain Forest. Gainesville: University Press of Florida.

Oviedo y Valdés, Gonzalo Fernández de. (1535) 1959. Historia general y natural de las Indias. Madrid: Gráficas Orbe.

Pané, Ramón. 1988. Relación acerca de la antigüedades de los Indios. Santo Domingo: Ediciones de la Fundación Corripio.

Robiou Lamarche, Sebastián. 1992. Encuentro con la mitología Taína. San Juan, Puerto Rico: Editorial Punto y Coma.

Rouse, Irving. 1992. The Tainos: Rise and Decline of the People Who Greeted Columbus. New Haven, ct: New Haven University Press.

Sauer, Carl Ortwin. (1966) 1992. The Early Spanish Main. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Stevens- Arroyo, Antonio M. 1988. Cave of the Jaguar: The Mythological World of the Taínos. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press.

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My family comes from a village called Jaibón in the moun- tainous Cibao region of the Dominican Republic. We immi- grated to the United States about thirty- five years ago, bring- ing many of our indigenous Taíno beliefs and rituals with us (see Indigenous Religions). Throughout my life I have listened intently to my mother, Doña Luz Patria Estevez, and to my grandmother, Doña Olympia. I have asked them questions and observed them, and carefully recorded in my head all that I saw and heard from them as well as from all the women I saw and heard during family get- togethers, when they cook and speak of the customs of our campo, the countryside. Why have I paid so much attention to them? Be- cause they make me feel proud of where we come from and who we are. All that I know about Taíno spirituality comes from those cherished women, and now from other people whom I have met from my homeland and the other Carib- bean islands in the course of my work for the Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian. It seems that the more I look for Taíno spirituality, the more I find. The examples are everywhere, from the country- side and the mountain communities of our islands to the streets of Santo Domingo, Old San Juan, and New York City. Taíno spirituality is especially revealed in nature. For ex- ample, my mother told me that owls are bad omens—to hear them at night is a bad sign, and if an owl rests on your bohio (home) at night, it is a sign that death will soon follow. In most Native American traditions, the owl is seen as a crea- ture that delivers bad omens, whereas Europeans usually see the owl as a sign of wisdom. Mother also talks about the spirits that roam the mountains at night, and the lights of the cocuyos (fireflies) that are their eyes. If you encounter these beings, you have to yell and curse at them so they will leave you alone. I can’t remember how many times I awoke to the sound of my mother loudly telling some spirit where it would end up if it did not leave our house! She told us about the good animals, too. For example, if you encounter a yaguasa (a type of duck) on the road in the middle of the night, you have to change directions because the yaguasa warns you of bad things ahead. Then there are the stories of family mem- bers who could change into any animal they wanted to, like my mother’s uncle Choro who could conjure up this power by singing certain songs. Singing was important in most of the Classic Taíno rituals. Samuel Wilson, in his study of His- paniola: Caribbean Chiefdoms in the Age of Columbus, notes that a song was one of the most valued of all Taíno gifts. My mother tells me that chewing on the bones of a certain ani- mal at a specific time of the night can make you invisible, and at one time people would put guamos (conch shells) in a circle around the grave of a deceased person, although she doesn’t remember why this was done. My mother insists, though she doesn’t know the reason behind this belief either, that the shell of the hicotea (freshwater turtle) brings bad luck if

bean islands, many of the people who became Dominicans, Haitians, Cubans, Puerto Ricans, and Jamaicans have kept alive their original indigenous bloodlines as well as many ele- ments of their original indigenous cultures, including indige- nous concepts of spirituality. The Caribbean diaspora has taken many of these Taíno descendants to the United States, Canada, South America, and all across the world. There some have discovered the value of being “Indian” and, along with many Puerto Ricans and now a few Dominicans, began a Taíno revival movement. In the mid- 1990s, while conducting research on the Taíno for my doctoral degree in history at Vanderbilt University, I had the great good luck of befriending Jorge Estevez, a Taíno from the Dominican Republic who works at the Smithsonian Museum of the American Indian in New York City and is one of the leaders of the Taíno revival movement. Jorge Estevez has not acquired his vast knowledge just from archaeological finds, documentary and linguistic analyses, and other aca- demic studies. In addition to these sources, he has learned much of what it means to be Taíno from other indigenous peoples, including his own mother and grandmother, knowl- edge that has been passed from generation to generation in the traditional indigenous way. The following entry is his ex- planation of Taíno spirituality today.

Lynne Guitar

A Practitioner’s Perspective I remember standing on a New York City street corner with my friends, hanging out way past midnight just like all the other teenagers, when suddenly I got that strange familiar feeling and I knew I had to rush home. As I ran up the stairs to our sixth- floor apartment, I could feel it getting stronger, that nagging sensation of needing to be home. This upset me because I knew why I felt this way, why I always felt this way around this time, and that my mother, with her Taíno ways, was the cause. As I opened the door of our apartment, I could see that the house was dark except for a flickering light in the center of our kitchen table. That light is my mother’s way of summoning us. Since I was a small child, I have watched her do the summoning ritual many times. She makes a wick out of cotton and ties it onto two small sticks in the shape of a cross or an X and floats it on top of a glass or cup full of water and oil. She lights the wick and raises it to the north, south, east, and west while saying a prayer in her head. Then she places the light in the center of the table, knowing that, once this is done, the person the prayer is intended for will want to rush home. There is, however, something else—wherever the wick of the candle falls, it indicates the direction the person has headed in. If it falls to the east, the person has headed in that direction or is still there, and so on. The four cardi- nal directions are very important in Taíno rituals, no matter where we are.

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people back home still leave offerings of casabe in caves that they believe are inhabited by “Indian” spirits. Furthermore, yucca is always planted during a waning moon, which appears to have had a spiritual basis for the Classic Taínos, though we no longer know the associated beliefs. Many of the medicinal plants that we use today that are indigenous to the islands are also planted during specific lunar cycles and picked at spe- cific times of the day, according to ancient custom. In Puerto Rico, people say they can hear ancestral voices in the Yunque rainforest. People from mountain communi- ties in Cuba and the Dominican Republic hear the voices of our Taíno ancestors at night, especially by the rivers—ritual bathing preceded most Classic Taíno ceremonies—or in- side certain caves, where spiritual rituals and trainings took place long ago. Many go into the caves and touch the an- cient petroglyphs and pictographs in the hope that our an- cestors will cure them of illness. And people in the campo of the Dominican Republic and Haiti insist that there are “wild Indians” living in caves, who they call bien- bien. Interestingly, my Taíno ancestors believed that “the people” originally emerged from caves on our island. In some places, today’s Taínos keep cemís (sacred objects made by the ancient Taí- nos) on their home altars along with clay pots full of water. They find the cemís in caves or buried underground through- out the islands. The invading Spaniards recorded that Clas- sic Taínos used these cemís to represent either ancestors or deities. Although we do not clearly remember the meanings of these objects, we still feel a sense of kinship toward them. On all three of the Spanish- speaking Caribbean islands, neo- Taíno art, which includes the making of cemís, is very popu- lar today, mostly due to the tourist trade, but a sense that this is “ours” is also taking place. I believe it’s a spiritual connec- tion. Our most guarded Taíno traditions have been passed down only from mother to daughter, sister to sister, etc., through the maternal line, although I have heard that there are certain branches of power that only men possess. My mother explained that a person only shares their special knowledge when they are on their deathbed—this helps ex- plain why so much traditional knowledge has been lost! I have spoken with curanderos (healers) from the Dominican Republic and Puerto Rico, most of who happen to be women (see Dominican Republic—Curanderos/as). Few curanderos will readily share their knowledge of how they heal, but when they occasionally do speak up, an immense new world is re- vealed, for they have retained a whole “library” of traditional medicine and spirituality in their memories that scholars are only now beginning to tap into. My mother believes that any healers who are willing to speak about their knowledge of spiritual healing, or a per- son who brags about having certain powers, probably doesn’t know anything at all. My friends Doña Angélica Vargas and

kept in the house but is quick to point out that the bottom of the shell was traditionally used to spread the yucca flour when making casabe (cassava) bread. The conflicting good/ bad beliefs about the hicotea baffled me. It wasn’t until I was much older and read the Taíno creation stories preserved by Fray Ramón Pané that I understood, for the stories make it clear that my ancestors had taboos against eating the flesh of freshwater turtles because it was believed they were a mater- nal ancestor. Although my mother did not know the hicotea creation story, she unknowingly perpetuated the taboo while remembering that the turtle had nurturing qualities. Among the other Taíno women who have added im- mensely to my spiritual knowledge is Magda Martas, a friend from Puerto Rico. Magda reminded me that ananás (pine- apples), which are native to Puerto Rico, are sometimes left out to absorb malevolent spirits that might otherwise enter the home at night. Auyamas (squashes) and higueros (gourds) are used in this same fashion and then disposed of in rivers in the morning. Doña Angélica Vargas, who comes from Canóbanas, Puerto Rico, explained that when four or more guaraguao (hawks) fly together, it means that a baguada is coming—bagua is the Taíno word for the sea, and a baguada is a storm that originates out at sea. Doña Angélica’s daugh- ter, Valerie Nanaturey, says that certain people can “peel their skins” to achieve invisibility. She was taught that people who did this could also fly. Valerie told me a story about a sorcer- ess named Doña Sisa who spent her time feuding with her grandmother, Doña Juana. The grandmother, having powers of her own, could ward off Doña Sisa, but had to contend with her flying over her house at night and making quite a racket. Among my favorite stories as a child were those of cigua- pas, creatures with long hair down to their ankles, who live deep in the forest or under the rivers. They have inverted feet, which is why even the best hunters can’t track them. Some scholars believe that tales of these legendary creatures arose because of the Taíno runaways who so successfully avoided the Spanish patrols. The same creature exists in El Salvador, where it is known as ciguanamá, and in Venezuala, where it is known as currupia. Other fantastic creatures whose tales still fascinate Dominican children include galipotes, dogs with huge, long ears that drag behind them when they walk, and duendes, little people who tie your hair in knots while you sleep if you are bad or braid them if you are good. Many of our stories have been passed down orally and not only have different meanings today than they did to the Clas- sic Taínos but have changed in substance. Customary tradi- tions have undergone the same evolutionary processes. For example, yucca and the casabe bread made from it were very important to our Taíno ancestors. Casabe bread, their pre- ferred carbohydrate staple, was sacred and played an impor- tant role in many spiritual ceremonies. Perhaps that is why

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divisions. Botijas (visions), however, always involve “Indian” spirits, and they can show you where hidden gold is. Another Taíno practice that has survived in numerous forms is the tobacco ceremony. Disciples of Cuban and Puerto Rican Santería, of Dominican Misterios, and Vodou oungan (“priests”) in Haiti all use tobacco in their ceremonies for spiritual cleansing. Also, the smoke from tobacco can be blown over the body of a sick person to expel whatever is causing the illness. These practices come directly from our Taíno ancestors and are virtually identical to the way South American indigenous peoples use tobacco in their healing ceremonies. And dreams are very real for Taíno people, as they are for many other indigenous peoples. My mother tells me that if I have a bad dream or nightmare, I have to share this dream with as many people as possible in order to break its power. If I have a good dream, however, I must keep it to myself so that it may blossom. One very good dream I have—but it’s a waking, conscious dream—is to teach people all over the world the truth about my people, the Taínos. Most history books teach that Taí- nos became extinct about thirty to fifty years after contact with the Europeans. No two historians, however, can agree exactly when this occurred. Upon closer inspection of the historical record, one finds that there is evidence of Taínos in every century since 1492 and on all three of the Spanish- speaking islands. The Taíno influence—biological, cultural, linguistic, and spiritual—is felt everywhere today in the Spanish Caribbean and everywhere that Spanish Caribbean people have immigrated to. It is horribly wrong to say that the Taíno culture is extinct simply because it is not the same as it was in 1492. By that measure, the Spanish and African cultures would also be extinct, since people of Spanish and African descent do not live and speak the same way today as they did in 1492. Additionally, many people dismiss our beliefs because they are mixed with Christian and African beliefs. True, our modern beliefs are of mixed extraction— my mother, for example, considers herself a devout Catholic, yet practices curious things at night that would highly offend the average priest of the Roman Catholic Church—but that does not mean they are no longer Taíno beliefs. What would be strange, indeed, would be if Taíno culture and spirituality had not changed in more than five hundred years. Change and mixture are a natural part of cultural evo- lution everywhere, but especially in the Americas, where peoples of so many different continents came together. Sometimes errors of attribution are made because of the intermixture. For example, “zombies” and the practice of making them are not of African origin. The ingredients used for inducing a zombie- like state, such as the datura plant and the puffer fish that live off the coast of Haiti, are native to the Americas, not to Africa. In Maya Deren’s book Divine Horse- men: The Living Gods of Haiti there are many references to

Valerie Nanaturey have told me the same thing, but some information leaks out, little by little, to those of us who in- sistently seek it out. My mother explained to me that you can sobar (rub) a sickness away, and Doña Angélica says her mother used sobos (rubs) to heal as well. In fact, indigenous peoples throughout South America use this method of heal- ing. There is a bejuco (vine) that can be used to mend broken bones, but Valerie tells me that this vine can only be picked after the healer recites a specific chant. Doña Angélica has told me fascinating stories about the special powers of her family in Puerto Rico. Her mother, Doña Juana Medina, spe- cialized in healing children. She had the ability to blow in the ears of sick children and blast out the “bad wind” that inhab- ited the child. It was not a spirit her mother was casting out, just a bad wind, notes Doña Angélica, and she always chewed tobacco before beginning her healing. Doña Angélica says that her mother’s power derived from her eyes, and this helped her know the truth about all things. The eyes held a special magic for the Classic Taínos, too. They gilded the eyes of their sacred and decorative objects with gold or guanín, an alloy that shone more brilliantly than gold, and they forced the eyes of noble children to bulge out by compressing the in- fants’ foreheads. These prominent eyes were both physically and spiritually beautiful to the Taínos, though the Spaniards thought they were very peculiar. When the Spaniards arrived in the Caribbean more than five hundred years ago, they noticed that my ancestors had another peculiar habit—they bathed three and four times a day. To the Spaniards this was barbaric! They made laws pro- hibiting the Taínos from bathing, for they believed that it was harmful, that it washed away protective body oils and caused lustful thoughts. My Taíno ancestors, however, preceded most of their known ceremonies with ritual community bathing. They also believed that during the night bad spirits would brush up against a person and leave the recipient of these visitations with a bad body odor. The love of bathing— and an abhorrence of body odors—is still very much a part of our ways today. My friend Magda Martas reminded me of the various forms and intricacies of baños (baths). For us, ba- ños are not only for hygiene but also for spiritual cleansing, and they are often prepared with water mixed with colorful flowers and/or fruits. Do you know about the Misterios? They are a diverse but interrelated series of Taíno spiritual practices in the Domi- nican Republic. Practicing the Misterios requires in- depth knowledge of medicinal plants and involves divination, so many people see the Misterios as a kind of sorcery. Recently my friend Pedro Ferbel- Azcarate, an anthropologist who has done extensive studies on Taínos in the Dominican Repub- lic, told me he learned that in the teachings of the Misterios there are seven African powers that are prayed to (see Afri- can Caribbean Religions), along with twenty- one “Indian”

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Make no mistake. Our Taíno customs are still very much alive. As a people and as a cultural group we have changed, and continue to change, but change does not equal extinc- tion. Just the opposite is true. It means our people and our culture not only survived the arrival of the Spaniards but also continued to evolve, as only a living people and living culture can do. Today’s Taíno revival movement is growing rapidly. Taíno groups and organizations are flourishing all over the Ameri- cas. We are well aware that non- Taíno peoples have been neg- ligent in the telling of our story and in their investigations of our customs, traditions, language, and, above all, our spiri- tuality. Until recently we were not actively involved in the process of recording our history, but now we are. Too many questions have gone unanswered for too long. We have now taken it upon ourselves to investigate and to explain—in our own ways and with our own words—our own stories, beliefs, traditions, and language. We must pass our Taíno culture on to our children. It is up to us to challenge all the myths that have been written about us by others, to investigate our cus- toms and traditions, our culture, and language. Most impor- tant, it is our responsibility to explore our spirituality. This is the vehicle that we must use to reunite with our ancestors who now reside on that other plane, in that other existence. It is from there that they send us glimpses of who we once were. They send us songs that echo in the caves and mountains, rivers and valleys of our islands, reminding us to be proud of who we are, and above all, of who we can become.

Jorge Estevez BiBliogr aPhy Cook, Noble David. 1993. “Disease and the Depopulation of

Hispaniola, 1492–1518.” Colonial Latin American Review 2(1–2): 213–45.

Deagan, Kathleen. 1990. “Sixteenth- Century Spanish- American Colonization in the Southeast U.s. and the Caribbean.” In Columbian Consequences, edited by David Hurst Thomas, 225–50. Washington, Dc: Smithsonian Institution Press.

Deren, Maya. 1972. Divine Horsemen: The Living Gods of Haiti. New York: Delta.

Guitar, Lynne, Pedro Ferbel- Azcarate, and Jorge Estevez. 2006. “Ocama Daca Taíno (Hear Me, I Am Taíno): Taíno Survival on Hispaniola, Focusing on the Dominican Republic.” In Indigenous Resurgence in the Contemporary Caribbean: Amerindian Survival and Revival, edited by Maximilian C. Forte, 41–67. New York: Peter Lang.

Pané, Ramón. 1988. Relación acerca de la antigüedades de los Indios. Santo Domingo: Ediciones de la Fundación Corripio.

Stevens- Arroyo, Antonio M. 1988. Cave of the Jaguar: The Mythological World of the Taínos. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press.

Wilson, Samuel. 1990. Hispaniola: Caribbean Chiefdoms in the Age of Columbus. Tuscaloosa: The University of Alabama Press.

———, ed. 1997. The Indigenous People of the Caribbean. Gainesville: University Press of Florida.

Taíno practices found in Vodou. Vodou traditions are gener- ally considered to be African but are really a mixture of Taíno and African spiritual traditions. Recently I had the good for- tune to be invited by Maitreyi Villaman, a Taíno friend from the Dominican Republic, to a Festival of the Cross. It comes from a mixture of Taíno, African, and Christian traditions. When I entered the hall where the celebration was taking place, I saw a Christian cross on the stage with many colorful flowers around it. A band of palo (African Dominican) musi- cians were playing a song with a heavy African beat but with an “Indian” theme, and Maitreyi, her sister, and the rest of the guests were dancing with Taíno cemís in their hands. Slowly but surely, Taíno peoples, their traditions, and be- liefs are changing again. Here in the United States, there is another fusion of customs going on. For longer than most people realize, and especially since the early 1970s, Taíno peoples from the Caribbean have been involved with our Native American brothers and sisters of the North. During the takeover of Alcatraz Island, for example, Marie Helen La- raque, a Taíno woman from the Republic of Haiti (she passed away a few years ago, but was a great friend of mine), was involved in the relief effort, assisting the North American natives who took over the island. She often described to me how she learned the way indigenous people in North America do their tobacco ceremony, and how she showed the people she met about our similar ceremonies in Haiti. As more and more people from the Caribbean learn of our indigenous tra- ditions, they find they have a strong connection with both North and South American indigenous peoples. Just as our Taíno ancestors learned and accepted Span- ish and African customs, integrating them with their own, a similar thing is happening in North America, where the Caribbean diaspora has been the largest. In the United States, Taínos have had the opportunity to meet and share with other indigenous people. Many of us gradually began going to powwows and other gatherings. We noticed that many of our customs were similar to those of the indige- nous people here, especially our spirituality. Tobacco cere- monies, growing plants according to the cycles of the moon, herbal medicines, and a deep- rooted love for the land are just a few of the things we have in common with the North American natives. Today, Taínos go to Sun Dances and sweat lodges; some have become pipe carriers; others explore all forms of indigenous spirituality. This began in part because many of our people had not been back home for years, and many more were born here—both have felt the need to con- nect with other indigenous people. Another important factor is that, for many of us, classifications such as “Hispanic” or “Latino” never made sense. They don’t accurately describe who we are. We are Native Americans, we are Taínos. More and more our cultural and spiritual affinity lies with other Native Americans as we become more “Americanized.”

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