THE CARIBBEAN IS ONE KIND OF PEOPLE: Afro-Latinos.

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ARAWAK: The term Arawak (from aru, the Lokono word for cassava flour), was used to designate the Amerindians encountered by the Spanish in the West Indies.

These include the Taíno, who occupied the Greater Antilles and the Bahamas (Lucayan) and Bimini Florida, 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.

On the islands of the Caribbean, the Taino very easily grew crops.

They grew them in a conuco, a large mound devised for farming.

They packed the conuco with leaves to prevent soil erosion and planted a large variety of crops to ensure that some of them would grow, whatever weather prevailed.

Yuca (cassava) was a staple food, and grew easily in a tropical climate.

They also grew maize.

They used large, stable, slow boats to take goods for trade to the Mesoamerican civilizations and inter-island travel but used smaller, faster but less stable boats for intra-island shore travel.

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 Batéy, was similar to soccer.

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.

They 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.

The cottoncloth hammocks could be easily washed if they became soiled.

The Taino 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 Taino'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 Taino used the Ciboney for slave labor.

The Taino treated the peaceful Ciboney as a subjected 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 Taino people, as the Caribs were known to torture and kill all non-Carib males, taking the females as slave-wives.

Columbus, in his log, noted:

"They brought us balls of cotton thread and parrots and darts 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."

The main catalyst for Taino society's drastic decline was due to smallpox.

Constant attacks by Carib tribes and harsh treatment by the Spaniards accelerated the process.

Taino society collapsed, but their bloodlines became woven in with those of new settlers, mainly Europeans and Africans.

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

On the mainland of South America there are some 2,450 (1980 census) Arawaks living in Venezuela, Guyana, Suriname, and French Guyana with 2,051 in Suriname.

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

The majority of the populations of Puerto Rico, Hispaniola (Now Dominican & Haitian Republic) and Aruba are descended in part from the Arawaks -- Taino in the case of the former.

The Cariban languages are an indigenous language family of South America.

Carib languages are widespread across northern South America, from the mouth of the Amazon River to the Colombian Andes and from Maracaibo (Venezuela) to Central Brazil.

Cariban languages are relatively close to each other; in some cases, it is difficult to decide whether different groups speak different languages or dialects of the same language.

Because of this, the exact number of Cariban languages is not known with certainty (current estimates range from 25 to 40, with 20 to 30 still spoken).

The Cariban family is well known in the linguistic world due to Hixkaryana, a language with Object-Verb-Subject sentences, previously thought not to exist in human language.

Some years prior to the arrival of the first Spanish explorers, Carib-speaking peoples had invaded and occupied the Lesser Antilles, killing, displacing or forcibly assimilating the Arawakan peoples who inhabited the islands.

They never reached the Greater Antilles or the Bahamas.

Curiously, the Carib language quickly died out while the Arawakan language was maintained over the generations.

This was the result of the invading Carib men usually killing the local men of the islands they conquered and taking Arawak wives who then passed on their own language to the children.

For a time, Arawak was spoken primarily or exclusively by women and children, while adult men spoke Carib.

Eventually, as the first generation of Carib-Arawak children reached adulthood, the more familiar Arawak became the only language used in the small island societies.

This language was called Island Carib, even though it is not part of the Carib linguistic family.

It is now extinct, but was spoken on the Lesser Antilles until the 1920's (primarily in Dominica, Saint Vincent, and Trinidad).

A linguistic descendant of Island Carib, Garífuna, continues to be spoken in Honduras, Guatemala, and Belize, and is also known as Caribe or Black Carib.The Arawakan languages (also Arahuacan, Arawakanas, Arahuacano, Maipurean, Maipuran, Maipureano, Maipúrean) are a hypothetical indigenous language family of South America and the Caribbean.

Originally the name Arawak was used exclusively for a powerful tribe in Guyana and Suriname.

The tribe became allies of the Spanish because they traditionally were enemies of the Carib groups with whom the Spanish were at war.[citation needed] Forms of the Arawak language are still spoken in Suriname.The term Arawakan has been used in two senses.

In one usage Arawakan is synonymous to what has recently been called the Maipurean or Maipuran family, a core family of undoubtedly related languages.

In other words, Arawakan and Maipurean are interchangeable.

However, in recent years, the two terms are no longer synonymous where Maipurean refers to the core family of undoubtedly related languages and Arawakan refers to a larger and hypothetical phylum at a level above Maipurean.

In this sense, Maipurean is a sub-grouping under a (macro-)Arawakan stock along with Guajiboan, Arauan, Candoshi, Harákmbut, and the extinct Puquina.

Kaufman (1990: 40) relates the following:

[The Arawakan] name is the one normally applied to what is here called Maipurean.

Maipurean used to be thought to be a major subgroup of Arawakan, but all the living Arawakan languages, at least, seem to need to be subgrouped with languages already found within Maipurean as commonly defined.

The sorting out of the labels Maipurean and Arawkan will have to await a more sophisticated classification of the languages in question than is possible at the present state of comparative studies.The languages called Arawakan or Maipuran were originally recognized as a separate group in the late nineteenth century.

Almost all the languages now called Arawakan share a first-person singular prefix nu-, but Arawak proper has ta-.

Other commonalities include a second-person singular pi-, relative ka-, and negative ma-.

The Arawakan languages are spoken over a large swath of territory, from the eastern slopes of the central Andes Mountains in Peru and Bolivia, across the Amazon basin of Brazil, southward into Paraguay and northward into to Suriname, Guyana, Venezuela, and Colombia on the northern coast of South America.

It is the largest family in the Americas with the respect to number of languages (also including much internal branching) and covers the widest geographical area of any language group in Latin America.

Taíno, commonly called Island Arawak, was spoken on the Caribbean islands of Cuba, Hispaniola, Puerto Rico, Jamaica, and the Bahamas.

Many of the Taino descendants today speak English, Spanish peppered with a few Taino words along with the various combined dialects from African slaves and French Europeans known today as Creole.

The Taíno language has been very poorly preserved, yet it is undergoing a process of restoration by its community members, and its membership in the Arawakan family is generally accepted.

Its closest relative among the better attested Arawakan languages seems to be the Goajiro language, spoken in Colombia.

It has been suggested that the Goajiro are descended from Taíno refugees, but the theory seems impossible to prove or disprove.

The Carib people (after whom the Caribbean was named) formerly lived throughout the Lesser Antilles.

In the seventeenth century, the language of the Island Carib was described by European missionaries as two separate unrelated languages -- one spoken by the men of the society and the other by the women.

The language spoken by the men was a language of the Carib family very similar to the Galibi language spoken in what later became French Guyana.

The language spoken by the woman belonged to the Arawakan language family.

One might conclude, though there is a minimum of supporting evidence, that the Carib language was first spoken in eastern Venezuela and the Guyanas.

Also, because this peculiar dual gender-specific language arrangement was unstable and dynamic and cannot have been very old, the Carib speakers had only recently migrated north into the Lesser Antilles at the time of European contact, displacing or assimilating the Arawaks in the process.

The Island Carib language is now extinct, although Caribs still live on Dominica, Trinidad, St. Lucia and St. Vincent.

Despite its name, Island Carib was an Arawak language, as is its derived modern language Garífuna (or Black Carib), which is thought to have about 190,000 speakers in Honduras, Nicaragua, Guatemala and Belize.

The Garifuna are the descendants of Caribs and black escaped slaves of African origin, transferred by the British from Saint Vincent to islands in the Bay of Honduras in 1796. The Garifuna language continues the women's Arawak-based Island Carib language and only a few traces remain of the men's Carib speech.

Rosenberg Wilgeens, February 23 2008, 5:09 PM

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