Arawak

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Arawak woman (John Gabriel Stedman)

The term Arawak (from aru, the Lokono 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 Suppoyo of Trinidad and the Igneri, who were supposed to have preceded the Caribs in the Lesser Antilles, together with related groups (including the Lokono) 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 people.

First Impressions

Columbus, in his log, noted:

"They brought us barrels 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...They would make fine servants... With fifty men we could subjugate them all and make them do whatever we want."

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 grew with minimal care in the tropical climate. The Taino also grew maize, unusual for Caribbean islanders. They used large, stable, slow boats for trade to the Mesoamerican civilizations and inter-island travel but used smaller, faster but less stable boats for intra-island shore travel. Taino women did all the agricultural and craft work at home, whereas the men were generally warriors.^{[citation needed]}

Culture

Since the agriculture and trade was so good, the Taíno had plenty of extra time to make crafts and play games. One of these games called Areyto, which included religious ceremonies as well as a game similar to soccer was played in the Batéy, a sort of arena-like field flanked by huge, standing stones depicting images of the Taino religion. With plenty of leisure, 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 jewelry made of gold, stone, bone, and shell. They also participated in informal feasts and dances. The Taíno drank alcohol made from fermented corn, and they used tobacco in cigars.

The Taino developed the hammock (the name derives from the Taíno term hamaca), which was first encountered by Europeans on Hispaniola.

Hammocks were readily adopted as a convenient means to increase the crew capacity of 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 and cramped crew quarters of sailing ships. Cotton cloth hammocks could be easily washed if they became soiled.

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 control 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 provinces ruled by chiefs known as caciques. The provinces were allocated into districts ruled by a sub-chief and each village was 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 years after contact.^[1] Attacks by Carib tribes and unrelenting harsh treatment by the Spaniards accelerated the process. Although Taino society was destroyed by European expansion, some of their bloodlines persist among the new settlers, primarily European and African peoples.

Survivors

Most scholars believe that of the Antillean populations of Ciboney, Taino, and Carib, only the Carib survive today.

The Arawak of mainland South America number 2,450 (1980 census^{[citation needed]}) in Venezuela, Guyana, Suriname, and French Guyana, with 2,051 Arawak living in Suriname alone^{[citation needed]}.

The Caribs of mainland South America number 10,225 (2000 WCD) in Venezuela, Guyana, Suriname, and French Guyana  .

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.^{[citation needed]}

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. Nowhere are there pure-blooded Arawaks in the Caribbean, but there are a few isolated communities in the Amazonian Basin of Brazil and Venezuela.^{[citation needed]}

See also

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Arawak

• Arawakan languages
• Carib
• Cariban languages
• Ciboney
• Garifuna
• Jean La Rose
• List of indigenous names of Eastern Caribbean islands
• Maipurean languages
• Taíno

References

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