Okay Hosein

You said that use of the term "Arawak" is incorrect modern usage; since the term Taino is only applied to Greater Antillean people, what term should be used for Taino+Lucayan+Trinidadian indigenous people who are believed to have spoken Arawakan languages? Guettarda 06:27, 8 Jan 2005 (UTC)

Arawak or Taino?

I have been told by separate sources --all whom seem to be reliable-- that 1) Taino is the correct reference to the group of Arawakan tribes of the Caribbean and that 2) Taino only refers to the Greater Antillean Arawaks. For those sources that use the term to refer to the Greater Antillean tribes only, some include the Bahamian tribe also while others exclude them.

After some heavy reading --obviously inadequate-- I have found that all usage of the term to be used by authorities in the field of research in this area. I get the impression that "Taino" replaces "Arawak" in the same way that Inuit --meaning "The People"-- replaces Eskimo --meaning "Raw Meat Eater". The problem with "Inuit" is that "Eskimo" refered to all races and tribes decended from the Thule* while many say that "Inuit" refers to only those that speak "Innuit" --The People's Language-- which would only encompase North America and Greenland. Others would limit this further to only Canada and Greenland and others yet more to Canada only.

It is a similar matter I have found among the academia regarding "Arwawk" and "Taino". For this reason I had stated --in the last sentence of the first paragraph-- that although the prefered term is Taino, some use that term in a more limited sense.

While we are on the topic, can anyone say what the words etomological dirivatives are of the terms "Arawak" and "Taino"?

*This entry in Wikipedia is related more to the "Thule Society" than the race of people known as Thule.
Although a minor link is made as the Thule Society thought of themselves as being descendants of the Thule.

1. Can you cite any of these sources? My reading suggests something very different - that Taino is specific to the Greater Antilles, or to the GA and the Bahamas. For example, in the introduction to Comparative Arawakan Histories (ed. Jonathan D. Hill and Fernando Santos-Granero, 2002, University of Illinois Press; ISBN 0-252-02758-2) they include the show the Taino of the Greater Antilles, the Karipuna of the Lesser Antilles, the Nepoya, Suppoya and Yao of Trinidad and the Lokono of the Guianas as Arawakan people, but the Kariña of the Orinoco valley and the Warao of the Orinoco delta as non-Arawaks (however, the Yao are later referred to as Carib-speaking). Taino is thus only a single entity among the many Arawak entities of the Caribbean

2. Santos-Granero (in the same volume, Chapter titled The Arawkan Matrix: Ethos, Language and History in Native South America) states:

The Spanish recognized two large groups in the Caribbean region: a number of highly sophisticated hierarchical chiefdoms sharing many cultural traits, which occupied most of the Greater Antilles, the Bahamas, the Virgin Islands, and the northern portion of the Lesser Antilles (Leeward Islands), which generally but not always welcomed the Spanish peacefully; and a number of smaller and less complex groups, which occupied the southern portion of the Lesser Antilles (Windward Islands), who shunned contact with foreigners or firmly opposed their presence.

and then

The diverse peoples belonging to the first category - the Boriqua, Lucayas, and other islanders - came to be known collectively as the Taíno in 1836 (Whitehead 1995a, 92). In 1871 Daniel G. Britton deonstrated that theirs was an Arawakan language - similar to that of the Lokono or mainland Arawaks - and for this reason decided to call them Island Arawaks (Rouse 1992, 5).

Santos-Granero describes the "classic Taino" (of Puerto Rico, Hispaniola and eastern Cuba; the most sophisticated group) and the "western Taino" (of Jamaica, the Bahamas and Cuba) as being more peaceful and developed than the "eastern Taino" (of the Virgin Islands and the northern Lesser Antilles) who had to contend with Carib raids; the eastern Taino as reported to have taken slaves, war captives and have practised cannibalism, as did the Lokono.

They and other sources go on to discuss the different theories of origin of the "Island Caribs" - it seems that the old theory of Carib replacement has been largely supplanted by theories of reticulate origins, in which Carib-speaking immigrants from South America either conquered the islands and killed the men but kept the women as wives, or that they simply immigrated in and intermingled with the previous Arawak-speakers of the Lesser Antilles (sometimes referred to as Igneri, to distingish them from the Arawak-speakers of the Greater Antilles and South America). The "Island Caribs" (Kalinago) appear to have spoken an Arawakan language among the women and children, but that the men spoke a Carib language or pidgin.

Neil Whitehead (same book, Chapter titled: Arawak Linguistic and Cultural Identity through Time: Contact, Colonialism and Creolization) states that Douglas Taylor (1946) "gives the orthgraphic form ni'tinao (formal friend [ws] or progenitor [ws/ms])" for Taino, while Raymond Breton (1665, 1666) "giv[es] the form ne'tegnon and nitino/neteno (husband's father, husband's mother, or daughter's husband [ws])" (ws = woman speaking, ms = man speaking). However, he states that guatiao is the older term - used by Columbus for the "tractable" natives; aruaca was first used for the Lokono - derived from the word aru, manioc flour, their primary item of trade. The word Taíno was coined by Constantine Rafinesque in 1836 in his book The American Nations; or, Outlines of Their General History, Ancient and Modern.

Additional info:

Shirley McGinnis (1997) in Ideographic Expression in the Precolumbian Caribbean (Ph.D. Dissertation, University of Texas at Austin) stated that:

On the 23rd of December...Columbus discovered that the name nitayno meant important person.

also, during the second voyage, Dr. Chanca of Seville wrote (about people when they landed in Gaudeloupe):

When a boat came to land to speak with them, they said to them tayno, tayno, which means good.

Guettarda 21:13, 12 Jan 2005 (UTC)

Sources? Oh-ooh.

Unfortunately, my research in this area ended in or about June of 1997. However, my research was done at the University of the West Indies, Mona, Jamaica, where there is an extensive West Indian reference section that not only contains published books, periodicals and journals but also unpublished research papers collections.

This does not lend creadence to my posts but it gives a source that, if one can find a contact at UWIMona or in Kingston, Jamaica to do further research in this area, we might resolve some issues. I beleive that I did state that my own research in this area was inadequate. I did a research paper on the Arawak culture and survival pre-1492, particularly in Jamaica. This is hardly a good lookk at the sub-cultures and their relationship.

However, having done West Indian, Jamaican and New World History for all my primary, secondary and teritiary education, my understanding is:

• by the time of the Spanish arrival, the Arawak were separated into two groups by the Carib. The Island Arawaks and the S. American Arawak. Due to the Caribs moving Northward through the Lesser Antilles, they wiped out/concoured/forced back the Arawaks whom had occupied the entire Caribbean basin from Brazil up to Venezuela, accross to Trinidad, up the Lesser Antilles to the Greater Antilles and onto the Bahamas and Florida to a much lesser extent. No great Arawak tribes actually occupied Florida but were mostly outposts for various trades with other Amerindians.
• the Arawaks in Cuba, Jamaica and The Bahamas did not often meet with the Carib who were often held at bay by the Arawaks in Hispaniola and Puerto Rico and to a lesser extent by those of the Leeward Islands who were often captured, liberated and capured again. This was the frontlines of the Carib-Arawak battlefield. The other Arawaks that occupied the Winward Islands were gone to Carib tribes by the time of the Spaniards.
• the Arawaks in S. America were able to establish boundaries and terittories in the vast lands that their was no need for the less environmentally concious Caribs to fight for greater natural resources. These battles only lay in the limited resource Islands. The Arawaks, being environmentally concious, was able to farm a particular region for hundreds of years without the need to hunt new resources. THe Caribs would exaust the resouce of an area and expand their teritory to gain more vital resources for survival.

This would explain the paragraph you quoted by Santos-Granero in Comparative Arawakan Histories (your second list point). It is also noted in history that Columbus was more welcomed in Jamaica, Cuba and hispaniola than in the other Arawak areas. Being used to conflicts with the Caribs, new commers were approached cautiously.

Taino, meaning "Good People" --I am told-- was coined, according to your research, in 1836 by Constantine Rafinesque. What we have not established is if he was refering to all Norther Arawaks, the Jamaican, and Cuban Arawaks or the Jamaican, Cuban and Bahamian Arawaks. Santos-Granero says that all the diverse people of the Northern Caribbean tribes became collectively known as Taino in 1836. He also states that Daniel G. Britton in 1871 establishes they are related to the Mainland Arawaks and only separated by geographic location: islanders.

This may be why they are sometimes all refered to as Taino. One thing is clear, though: the Arawaks of Jamaica, Cuba, Bahamas, Hispaniola, Puerto Rico and the Leeward Islands, although different tribes of Arawaks, were all called Taino by Britton and Santos-Granero. It is also established the the Island Arawaks and the Mainland Arawaks were one race so if Taino refers to the race and not the tribe, then taino and Arawak is interchangeable.

I was told by a history proffessor at UWI that Taino is now prefered over Arawak. What I was not told is why nor what is the derivative of Arawak ...or Taino --until now, thank you. Still waiting for that answer on Arawak.

It must be noted that you are well read in this area so feel free to edit the entry for what you know. I still believe that the academia has not necessarily reached a concensus on the proper use of Taino and to what group/groups it refers.

I asked about sources out of curiosity, not to undermine what you said. In a Jamaican context what you say is true - from what I cited (and some other reading) I would say that "Taino" is preferable to Arawak for the Greater Antilles because it is more specific in that context. Taino is used specifically for the Arawakan people of the northern Caribbean - so it is a subset of the Arawakan people (and thus not interchangeable). Taino could be considered a single "tribe" within the Arawakan language family. The Island Caribs were another, as were the Lokono of the mainland. The Arawakan language family is one of the largest in South America - Brazil, Peru, Bolivia and throughout the Caribbean. The term Taino is not, to my knowledge, used for groups outside of the northern Caribbean.

The Arawakan people of Hispaniola and Puerto Rico had the most sophisticated cultures, the most powerful chiefdoms. As far as I can tell, it is to these groups (the "classic Taino") plus their related neighbours (the "eastern Taino" and the "western Taino") that they name Taino applied. The point is not the word as such, since it was probably not a word that they used for themselves except to proclaim themselves "friendlies" to the Spanish. There was a distinct culture of the northern Caribbean...before I looked it up I though the Lucayans of the Bahamas were not part of that group, but I was wrong. Words only work if they can be fit to real meaningful concepts.

The term "Igneri" has been used for the "Island Arawaks" who preceded the Island Caribs in the Lesser Antilles. This group probably made up the basic substratum of the Island Carib population, and gave rise to the "Kalinago" (or women's language) of the Island Caribs. The men spoke either a Carib language or a Carib-based pidgin, but apparently it had a lot of Arawak words.

The "traditional" view of the Island Caribs as interlopers has been severely questioned in recent times. One source separated out three theories of their origin. The traditional one (and the one I got in school, etc.) was the "Carib replacement" model - that the Caribs invaded and displaced the original Arawak population of the Lesser Antilles, and were spreading northward at the time of Spanish contact. Another one is the "Arawak continuity" model which says that the Arawaks of the Lesser Antilles acquired a Carib pidgin through trading with the Mainland Caribs. The third is a reticulate model in which Mainland Caribs moved into the Lesser Antilles and merged with the Arawak population in a model comparable to the Norman conquest of England. I got the impression that modern scholars leaned that way. One source cited seventeenth century documents that refer to two groups of "Caribs" in Grenada, the Galini (probably Kaliña/Karinya, or Mainland Caribs) and the Caraïbes (Island Caribs). In addition, contemporary sources refer to the Taino of the Greater Antilles fleeing Spanish massacres and joining the Island Caribs. In the Spanish period the Island Caribs changed from being enemies of the Puerto Rican Tainos to being their allies against the Spanish. (Main source: Raiders and Traders: Caraïbe Social and Political Networks at the Time of European Contact and Colonization in the Eastern Caribbean - Ann Cody Holdren, 1998, Ph.D. dissertation, UCLA; McGinnis's dissertation - cited above - has a lot of quotes from Columbus's journals and from other contemporary sources).

Arawak (or aruaca), as I mentioned, comes from aru which was the Lokono word for cassava flour.

I am not a historian, just trying to do my best to see what the primary literature says. The use of the word Taino is standard for the Greater Antilles, but whether it is "accurate" is another matter altogether. McGinnis points out that Columbus was very selective in how he interpreted data - if you were hostile, then human limbs were proof you were Carib, but if you were friendly, then the heads he found in the village was funerary. Of course the whole idea of the origin of the Caribs is controvertial. But the traditional view is by no means accepted without question. That's what makes history so exciting these days. Guettarda 23:40, 12 Jan 2005 (UTC)