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The numbers vary by source, but according to Dupuy, the original population of over 200,000 Arawaks indigenous to Haiti was beaten, starved, and worked into numbers less than 500 by 1548 by Spanish slavers.

In 1492 Columbus colonized Haiti and called it Española (aka Hispaniola), and the Spanish promptly destroyed any possibility the Arawaks had of surviving into the future. The Arawak people (also known as Taino) were warm and welcoming, but the Spaniards were greedy and hungry for gold. It was not known at this time that no islands in the Caribbean harbored gold. Impatient and covetous, the Spanish began to take advantage of the Arawak’s benevolence; they ate all their food and demanded more, took and raped their women, and still demanded their help with navigating the island. The Arawak’s revolted against the Spanish and destroyed their settlement, killing them all.

Columbus came back with a new group of Spaniards for a second attempt at colonization, this time calling the island Isabella referring to Queen Isabella. Having never needed militaristic weapons or skills the Arawak people were at a steep disadvantage when the Spanish “forced [the] people into servility and enslavement […]” and the Haitian Arawaks were forced into unwilling slavery (Dupuy).

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12y ago

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