Module 2 A Note on Tainos: Whither Progress?

This article originally came out in the Northeast Indian Quarterly, and provides a lengthy description of what the Tainos—the Indigenous peoples who lived on the Caribbean Islands before Columbus’s arrival.   The account of these people, as the author, Jose Barriero, points out, is a classic example of “the gaze” at work.  The description comes from observations made by Europeans.  These peoples are described, for instance as peaceably people, although curiously they are also described as cannibals, healthy, strong, muscular, closely connected the earth, and for whom working with the hands to till the soil was perhaps the greatest honor.  The commentators who made these observations then called these peoples primitive.  Unfortunately turning around these stereotypes proves difficult because entire populations of these peoples on some islands, for instance Jamaica, were wiped out within 200 years of Columbus’s arrival.

Barriero sums up the issue succinctly when he states

The history of the European contact with America and its subsequent conquest has been written and rewritten but seldom from an indigenous perspective and never from the continuity of an Indian survival over that history Western historians have had a tendency to disregard the Indian oral sources and many a fundamental lie about Indian culture has been carried from early written texts into the modern day.

References

Barreiro, J. (1990).  A Note on Taino:  Whither progress? Northeast Indian Quarterly, Fall.  Retrieved from http://www.hartford-hwp.com/archives/41/013.html#R2