Daily Doodle: Taino Lineage
In the interest of education and family history, I’d like to talk a bit about this side of my Taino heritage. At a minimum, there are two point three million people whose genetic make-up is predominantly Taino. Over five thousand people still identify as such from a cultural perspective. In the Dominican Republic, the Taino and Caribs still have recognition. In spite of common misconception, neither Cristoforo Colombo nor, small pox exterminated us.
There were rapes; a sad tragedy that happens when a monarchy blindly sends a ship full of hardened criminals to a place full of women and whose men didn’t have the same firepower. The intermarriages vastly outnumbered these chilling acts of violence. The Taino were blighted by smallpox, but there were survivors, and that’s a lot different than extinction. The Spaniards did impose slavery, but the Taino were too strong-willed to submit to it and chose mass suicide, when violence failed. This is why the Spaniards ended up shipping Lucayan and African slaves instead. Yes, the Spaniards imposed their monarchic culture on the Taino. How was that anything different than what the crown did to the Moors and the Spaniards themselves? Isn’t subjugation what monarchies do to anyone who isn’t royal? Ultimately, It was because of the Spanish census of 1790, that the Taino disappeared in Puerto Rico. It was too hard for the Spanish to tell who was black, Spanish, Taino or mixed anymore, so they streamlined the ethnic categories.
I wish people would stop buying uninformed myths about Columbus’s discovery of anything and of the complete destruction of the Taino by his hand. Neither one of these fantasies ever happened. Claims to the contrary are just propaganda for someone’s political agenda.
Want to learn more about modern Taino culture from actual Taino people? Check out these resources:
- http://www.taino-tribe.org/
- http://www.uctp.org/
- http://losttainotribe.ning.com/
- http://www.indio.net/taino/
