Arawak people

Arawak woman (John Gabriel Stedman).

The term Arawak (from aru, the Lucayan word for cassava flour), was used to designate some of the peoples encountered by the Spanish in the West Indies in 1492 and thereafter. These include the Taíno, who occupied the Greater Antilles and the Bahamas (Lucayan), the Nepoya and Sapoyo of Trinidad and the Igneri, who were supposed to have preceded the Caribs in the Lesser Antilles, together with related groups (including the Lucayan) which lived along the eastern coast of South America, as far south as what is now Brazil. The group belongs to the Arawakan language family and they were the natives Christopher Columbus encountered when he first landed in the Americas. The Spanish described them as a peaceful primitive people.

Contents

First European encounter

It is now believed that the first tribe encountered by Christopher Columbus, when he arrived on the island he called Santa María de la Concepcion (known as Mamana by the Lucayan Indians and now called Rum Cay off the Bahamas), were Lucayan-Arawak Indians. Columbus noted in his log:

"Saturday, 13 October 1492: ...They brought us balls of cotton thread and parrots and other little things which it would be tedious to list, and exchanged everything for whatever we offered them. I kept my eyes open and tried to find out if there was any gold, and I saw that some of them had a little piece hanging from a hole in their nose. I gathered from their signs that if one goes south, or around the south side of the island, there is a king with great jars full of it, enormous amounts. I tried to persuade them to go there, but I saw that the idea was not to their liking... Sunday, 14 October 1492: ...These people have little knowledge of fighting, as Your Majesties will see from the seven I have had captured to take away with us so as to teach them our language and return them, unless Your Majesties' orders are that they all be taken to Spain or held captive on the island itself, for with fifty men one could keep the whole population in subjection and make them do whatever one wanted." [1]

On 17 February 1627, Captain Henry Powell of the ship "Olive Blossom" (who became first English Governor of the Isle of Barbados) landed to settle the island. Sometime after he brought about thirty Arawak from Guiana to work.[2]

By 1739 Diarium von Pilgerhut and his German (Moravian) pilgrim brothers arrived in Fort Nassau on the Berbice River and once there decided to teach their ways by example. In accounts by the pilgrim Heinrich Beutel we learn a little about the villiagers he encountered:

Used to heat of the rain forest, Arawak families lived without clothes. Arawak men had never done gardening or work around home. They only hunted, and let the women do the rest. Even women expecting babies, or with little ones in their care, worked in cassava patches while men sat in hammocks under the shade. When asked if they wanted to get married did not seem in a hurry. The Indians kept themselves cleaner than the Europeans. Believing that sweat weakens the body, they bathed frequently throughout the day. In their houses—thatched shelters without walls—they sat on clean sand, and they treated one another very politely. Young people called their parents and others of that age “honoured ones.” Older people called all young men “handsome ones” and it took them a while to learn the European titles for women, girls and children, and how to use them. Even though the Arawaks did not have an exact word for humility, they well knew the attitude. One should not look another person in the face while speaking “like a dog,” they believed. Rather, one should rise so that others might sit and count it a privilege to give. Arawak hospitality always involved eating and drinking together and even dranking of fermented cassava, held frequent love feasts, and fought at their festivals.

Assembley of Arawak's at Mahaiconi, from Indian Tribes of Guiana W. H. Brett (1844).

The villiagers showed interest in teaching and no sooner had two learned how to read then they began to hold classes for the rest and also began helping the pilgrims translate scriptures and songs from Germany. The Arawaks, however, had no concept of right and wrong in the European sence, and only dimly comprehended concepts such as worship and faith, but they knew what disobedience meant. They lived according to rigid ethics of their own, something the Europeans realised they could learn from the Arawaks. Soon the pilgrim's hut, with thier hour-a-day meetings (and monthly all-day meetings) soon attracted up to one hundred and fifty villiagers. Soon during the cassava harvest, or at great fish poisonings along the river, they sang German and Arawak songs. Rarely, during these evening meetings, the believers noticed new faces among the crowd—not Arawaks, but painted Caribs and Waraus, clutching tall spears. By 1748 the first Arawak European-style wedding was celebrated at Pilgerhut. [3][4]

Before 1881, when Charles Daniel Dance wrote his Chapters from a Guianese log-book, he noticed "The children all talked a Dutch patois besides the Arawak Indian tongue; and with a Dutch teacher to instruct them, it is not difficult to conceive the manner in which they read their English lessons."[5]

Economy

On the islands of the Caribbean, the Taino very easily grew crops in conucos, large mounds of earth employed as planting beds for vegetable farming. They packed the conuco with leaves to provide nutrition and prevent soil erosion. They planted a large variety of crops to ensure that some of them would grow, and ripen regardless of the season. Yuca (cassava) was a staple food, and grows with minimal care in the tropical climate. The Taino also grew maize, unusual for Caribbean islanders. They used large, stable, slow rafts for trade to the Mesoamerican civilizations and inter-island travel but used smaller, faster but less stable canoes for intra-island shore travel. Taino women did all the agricultural and craft work at home, whereas the men were generally warriors.

Culture

The Taíno made crafts and played games. One of these games called Areyto, which included religious ceremonies as well as a game similar to soccer was played in the Batéy (an arena-like field flanked by huge standing stones depicting images of the Taino religion). The Taíno devoted their energy to creative activities such as pottery, basket weaving, cotton weaving, stone tools and even stone sculpture. Men and women painted their bodies and wore jewellery made of gold, stone, bone, and shell. They also participated in informal feasts and dances. The Taíno drank alcohol made from fermented corn, and used tobacco in religious ceremonies.

The Taino developed the hammock (the name derives from the Taíno term hamaca), which was first encountered by the Spaniards on the island they subsequently named Hispaniola. Hammocks were readily adopted as a convenient means to increase the crew capacity on ships and improved the sanitary conditions of the sleeping quarters; old straw — which was commonly used for bedding in earlier times, quickly became rotten and infested by parasites in the damp, cramped crew quarters of sailing ships. Cotton cloth hammocks could be washed easily if they became soiled, and were strong and durable.

Robert Gordon Latham, in his lectures of February 1851 on ethnology of the Indians of British Guiana writes:

"The Pe-i-man is the Arawak Shaman. He it is who names the children — for a consideration. Failing this, the progeny goes nameless; and to go nameless is to be obnoxious to all sorts of misfortunes. Imposture is hereditary; and as soon as the son of a conjuror enters his twentieth year, his right ear is pierced, he is required to wear a ring, and he is trusted with the secrets of the craft.".[6]

Religion, government, foreign affairs

The Arawak had organized systems of religion and government. They believed in good and evil spirits, which could inhabit human bodies and natural objects. They sought to influence these spirits through their priests or shamans.

The Arawak's political system was hierarchical, in which the islands were broken up into groups; each island in turn was divided into petty states ruled by tribal chiefs known as caciques. These states were in turn divided into districts ruled by a sub-chief, with each village ruled by a head-man.

Their socio-political rivals within the Caribbean were the Caribs and the Ciboneys. The Caribs were considered aggressive, while the Ciboneys were considered docile. The Arawak used the Ciboney for slave labor. The Arawak treated the peaceful Ciboney as a subject people, having already pushed them to the extreme fringes of their territory. The Carib were attempting to expand their territory in the Lesser Antilles, which entailed the ethnic cleansing of the Ciboney and Arawak people, as the Caribs were known to torture and kill all non-Carib males, taking the females as slave-wives.

Population decline

The virgin soil epidemic caused by the arrival of smallpox and other diseases from Europe, combined with Spain's harsh policies of enslavement, resettlement and the separation of families, the encomienda system, resulted in Taino society's drastic decline within a few decades after contact.[7] Attacks by Carib tribes and unrelenting harsh treatment by the Europeans accelerated the process. Although Taino society was destroyed by European expansion, some of their bloodlines persist among the new settlers, primarily Western and African peoples.

Frederick Albion Ober, after his trip in July 1898 of the West Indies, notes:

"... a barbarous fact. When the ancient Caribs came here from the south, they came as conquerors, and killed every adult male Arawak who fell into their hands. But they preserved the women and children,..."[8]

Survivors

While only the Carib remain among the original Antillean populations of Ciboney, Taino, and Carib, the Arawak have survived on mainland South America. Several hundred thousand reside in Venezuela, Guyana, Suriname, and French Guyana, an example being approximately 300,000 Wayuu Arawak living in Colombia, with 150,000 Wayuu in the neighbouring area of Venezuela.

The majority of the populations of Aruba, Puerto Rico, and Dominican Republic, and part of the Haitian population, are descended in part from the Arawaks — Taino in the case of the Dominican Republic and Puerto Rico and to a much smaller degree the Ciboneys in the case of Haiti. The Ciboneys represent an earlier pre-Arawakan group that was found throughout the Caribbean. They were pushed out of the smaller islands of the Lesser Antilles and to the far west of the island of Hispaniola by the Tainos. The remaining Hispaniolan population was Arawakanized in speech. Taíno/Arawakan Language is spoken in Jamaica, Haiti, the Dominican Republic, Cuba, the Bahamas, Saint Lucia, Grenada by a few people in the present.

Recent DNA studies[9] indicate that the majority of people in Puerto Rico are descended in part from Taíno/Arawakan ancestors. This study, under the Taino genome project started in 1999 through a grant from the National Science Foundation, tested mitochondrial throughout the island, identifying a 62 percent of Puerto Ricans today are of Amerindian descent.

In Cuba, however, the Guanajabateys (the original name of the Ciboneys) continued speaking their original tongue. Columbus' interpreter (who was a Taino) couldn't understand them when Columbus landed in Cuba. The name "Ciboney" was given to these people by the Tainos in Hispaniola. The Tainos used the remnant Ciboney populations for slave labour. There are also Arawak survivor populations in Saint Lucia and a few other areas of the Caribbean. There are a few full-blooded Arawaks in Cuba, the Dominican Republic, Trinidad, Haiti , Jamaica, Puerto Rico, the Bahamas and Grenada. Also there are a few isolated communities in the Amazonian Basin of Guyana, Brazil and Venezuela.

See also

References

  1. ↑ Cummins, John (1992). The Voyage of Christopher Columbus (restored and translated). New York: St. Martin's Press. p. 94-96. ISBN 0312078803. http://www.archive.org/stream/voyageofchristop005194mbp/voyageofchristop005194mbp_djvu.txt. 
  2. ↑ JBMHS (May 1970). "Petition of Captain Henry Powell". The Journal of the Barbados Museum and Historical Society. 1 (Barbados: Museum and Historical Society) 33: 111-136. 
  3. ↑ The Christian Observer (Jan 1833), Vol 3 No.1. Piccadilly, London: J. Hatchard and Sons. p.145
  4. ↑ The German, Theophilus Schumann, employed much time in learning the Arawak language to translate portions of religious scriptures into it. He wrote describing the Arawak villagers to Ludwig von Zinzendorf, 27 December 1748. (See Hoover, Peter (1990). Behold The Lamb: The Story of the Moravian Church. Unknown. p. 177-178. 
  5. ↑ Dance, C. D., (1881). Chapters from a Guianese log-book, Royal Gazette.
  6. ↑ Latham, Robert Gordon,(1851). The ethnology of the British colonies and dependencies - Indians of British Guiana, London: John van Voorst, pp.259
  7. ↑ Sauer, Carl Ortwin (1966). The Early Spanish Main. Berkeley: University of California Press. 
  8. ↑ Ober, F. A., (1900). The storied West Indies, D. Appleton and Company, pp.68
  9. ↑ Veran, Cristina (22 September 2003). "Born Puerto Rican, born (again) Taino?...". Colorlines Magazine. Huntingdon Valley, PA: The Free Library. http://www.thefreelibrary.com/Born+Puerto+Rican,+born+(again)+Taino%3F+A+resurgence+of+indigenous...-a0108693833. Retrieved 22 September 2003. 

Bibliography

caribbean, Florida, Gainesville: University Press.