Celebrating Jamaica's 50th year of independence

This article was written to celebrate Jamaica's 50th Independence Anniversary in 2012. Without the contributions of the island's indigenous Yamaye Taíno, there would be no "Jamaica", a Taíno word derived from their Arawakan language. 
(Sculptures and installation by Michael Auld)

Taíno of Jamaica: A debt owed © Michael Auld

Noble People 

Although the Taíno were not Jamaica’s first inhabitants, we must honor their contributions to Jamaican culture. Writers often disagree on the name for the island’s earliest residents. Since there are differences of opinion on the name of Jamaica’s first or [1] "Archaic” people, let’s call the earliest humans who inhabited Jamaica (possibly over 6,000 years ago) the pre-Taíno. These first and later waves of humans to enter the Caribbean seemed to have originated in the mainland Americas (Belize - Central America; Venezuela - South America; Florida - North America). The earliest group may have traveled from a mainland to the island of Jamaica via cays or keys. These small islands were more abundant when the sea level was lowered by captured seawater in the Earth’s then larger, frozen poles.  From a European point of view, these “discoverers” were hunter gatherers who may have also practiced agriculture before the Arawakan-speaking, seafaring, agriculturalist Taíno arrived.

Who were the Taíno? What did they contribute to contemporary Jamaican culture? Are they extinct, as many writers often believe? Researchers are trying to answer these questions, yet many don’t agree on popularly held notions of the identity of Jamaica’s early people. Unfortunately, until Jamaica became independent in 1962, the island’s colonial education system taught us painfully little about our indigenous origins and its people, then mistakenly called Arawak. As an artist whose works rely heavily on the application of indigenous Caribbean aesthetics via the portrayal of three and two-dimensional works of art, my continuing research has led me to the following conclusions:

[The [2] Taíno] lacked an overall name in Columbus’s time. Its members referred to themselves by the name of the localities in which they lived: those living in what is now Puerto Rico called themselves Boriquen, their name for the island, and those in the Bahamian Archipelago called themselves [3]Lucayo (small islands).—The Tainos, Irving Rouse, 1992, 5

Yamaye [was] the possible Taíno name for the island [of Jamaica], based on Columbus’s journal. (D.J.R. Walker). Traditionally Jamaicans have been taught that Xaymaca was the Taíno name given to the island meaning “land abounding with springs” from which “Jamaica”— land of wood and water — was derived. — The Earliest Inhabitants: The Dynamics of Jamaican Taíno, Edited by Lesley-Gail Atkinson, 2006, 1

For the Taíno, it all started with Yaya the “Extreme Vital Principle, great creator of existence, ancestral agriculturalist and innominate spirit.” Not unlike our “Big Bang” theory or the various beliefs in Ancient Egyptian or later Judeo-Christian concepts, the Taíno also had the idea of an unfathomable Yaya, the originator of the Creation. Their stories were also explanations for natural occurrences caused by entities often visually embodied in spiritual sculptures called cemis, in petroglyphs and drawings. Cemis are similar to Christian or “pagan” iconography of saints or deities. The explanation for the creation of the first real humans, the Taíno, occurred in one of [4] twin womb-like caves of Cacibajagua and Amayauna. Iguanaboina, the source of life through agriculture, was visually represented as an [5] iguana lizard (sun) and boina, the black snake (raincloud).--See images below of both my metal and Plexiglass sculpture, as well as my wooden construction of the bohio (roundhouse) in which Anacaona sits on her mixed-media dujo--

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(Top-L.) Jamaican rock iguana, erroneously thought to be extinct. (Top- R) Sculpture of “Iguanaboina”. The Iguana (the yellow sun) and the Boina, the black raincloud snake. (Bottom)  Sculptural installation: “Anacaona” (Golden Flower). 15-16^th century cacique (ruler) of over 100 sub-caciques of Ayti (Haiti/Hispaniola) in her bohio (roundhouse) with carvings of iguana and boina centrally supported by the sacred ceiba (cottonwood) three. The gigantic ceiba features prominently in Taino and Jamaican lore (to some folk in Jamaica, duppys/spirits are also associated with ceiba/silk cotton trees). Like the Taino, some Jamaican fishermen still build dugout canoes from this tree.

 The Taíno were born from a union between one of four “twin” sons, Deminán Caracaracol the scaly one, and a caguama (Turtle Mother) through fertilization of [6] guanguayo discharged onto Deminán’s back by Bayamanaco, the irate Spirit of the Fire, also the fabricator of casabe (cassava bread) from the poisonous yuca tuber. This story of Deminán and Bayamanaco relate how tropical Amerindians came to learn to use the power of the sun and fire in cooking on a burén (a circular clay grill) to transform the poisonous yuca (bitter cassava) tuber into an edible bread they called casabe.

Some of the fruits and vegetables that Jamaicans enjoy and agriculturally profit from were brought to the island by these sets of ancestors. They either brought Mainland plants [7] (yuca, batata, maisi) or utilized endemic flora and fauna that abounded in Jamaica and which these ancients taught us how to exploit. Some of these products that we casually consider to be real Jamaican are cassava and bammy, corn (ground into meal for making turn-cornmeal, dumplings, pone, dukonoo, pudding, etc), pumpkin, chocho, beans, peppers (or ají as the Taíno called capsicum), sweet potato, yampie, [8] callaloo and Indian kale (for Taíno “pepperpot”), hog plumb, pawpaw (papaya), pineapple, sweetsop, soursop, custard apple, stinking toe (locust), guinep, guava, naseberry, starapple, [9] calabash for abortions/containers; woods like mahogany, mahoe, lignumvitae, and much more. The uses of many curative Jamaican bush medicines from endemic herbs are Taíno in origin. When Jamaicans have aphrodisiac Irish moss, medicinal strong back, sersee tea, cold bush, soursop leaf tea, sarsaparilla, chainey root, etc., for health reasons, they are using Taíno remedies. Jamaica’s Coat of Arms honors the Taíno people as the root of our diverse population of today.

Jamaica’s proud Taíno Coat of Arms.

Some of many Taíno retentions

When you bite into a piece of Jamaican [10] jerk meat, you are experiencing a Taíno gift that spans millennia. Unknowingly, your taste buds may shout a Jamaican style, “Bowy, dis food cris’!” What you have truly experienced is a gastronomic equivalent of our motto “Out of Many, One People”. You are literally eating a part of the antique history of Yamaye in an ancient and diverse pre-Columbian hemisphere, much later invariably called the “Indies”, the “Antilles”, the “New World” or the “Americas”. The primeval method of grilling that you experience through “jerk” is a Taíno based gift that they called barbecoa. In Jamaica, a barbecoa became “barbecue” a concrete platform on which cacao (chocolate) and coffee beans are sun dried. The Jamaican style of jerk was the Taíno method of spicing agouti/Indian “coney” (“rabbit”) or sacred iguana with Scotch Bonnet pepper and pimento/allspice. This method of preparing and preserving meat was later borrowed by the [11] Maroons who became masters of jerk pork. It predates the Caribbean’s Pristine Era when nomadic Asiatic humans breached the virginal shoreline past the first trees that the later arriving seafaring Taíno called mangle, the word from which we got mangrove. Taíno watercrafts that arrived onto our shores slithered through a translucent, fish-laden blue-green bagua (sea). It was ruled by, Yúcahu Bagua Máorocote, the life-sustaining deity of the yuca ( [12] cassava) and the sea. He was without grandfathers, being the son of the [13] virgin mother Attaberia, goddess of fresh water and of childbirth. 

The Myth of Extinction: Does DNA lie?

My training in portraiture and the intimate involvement in the Native American community in the USA for almost 50 years, lead me to the following conclusions. Examine the photographs below. The first two that were taken soon after 1865, exhibit, in my opinion, three distinct facial phenotypes in Jamaica. They are African, European and Amerindian bone structures present among the Maroons and the English officer. The subjects in the more recent photographs (A) & (B), also show evidence of Amerindian admixture.

Facial bone structures don’t lie (A): A photograph of Jamaican/Welsh BBC television personality and athlete [14] Colin Ray Jackson CBE, has 7% Jamaican Taíno DNA. The photograph (B) below is of a Jamaican woman, also with Taino bone structure.

(B) Shirley Genus from Treasure Beach (or *Savanna-la-Mar), 1993 by antiquarian Steve Solomon. She identified herself as an “Arawak”.  It would be interesting to discover if she also had "shovel teeth", an Amerindian dental trait.

[* The word Savanna is from a Taíno word "sabana" -- a flat land/plain.] 

             

In 1992, I received an investigative grant on indigenous retentions in the cultures of four Caribbean islands of Jamaica, Puerto Rico, Antigua and Dominica, whose people at that time, like the Jamaican iguana, were supposed to be extinct. I began at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, DC. That year’s Annual Smithsonian Folklife Festival theme was “Maroons of the Americas.” Maroon societies from Jamaica and Surinam, as well as descendants from Florida’s Seminoles who had fled to Mexico, assembled on the Mall to demonstrate their cultural retentions. Jamaica was represented by Accompong and Mooretown Maroons who demonstrated cooking jerk pork on a wooden grill called a [15] caban; cordage used for strong rope woven Taíno-style from the inner bark of the Trumpet tree (Cecropia peltata) and [16] hammock-making from the bark-cord. Its hollow branches were traditionally used to make flutes similar to the “trumpets” that Columbus recorded seeing the Taíno use in Bahía de la Vaca (“Cow Bay”) after his Second [17]1494 Voyage. Jamaicans learned how to make medicine for both a cold and sore throat from the leaf of the Trumpet tree. In the tradition of other indigenous Americans, the Taíno forest was used as a pharmacy in which one could find chew stick for cleaning the teeth and thirst-quenching [18] water wiss vine. This survivalist practice was also found among Amazonian Amerindians. The birds that we admire, the foodstuff we eat and our “bush medicine” from endemic plants, originated with the indigenous people who had used them locally for millennia. It is highly unlikely that new 1494 arrivals to Jamaica were instinctively capable of identifying the curative qualities of endemic herbal plants. We are what we eat, so the acquired knowledge of asthma bush, cold bush, bellyache bush and fever bush is part of a cornucopia of natural medicines that have made us more Yamaye than we may suspect. Without the Taíno, we could not celebrate 50 years of independence. This spirit of freedom, first exhibited by the cimarrones Taíno, was passed along to the welcomed runaways who acquired the title “hero” held by Nanny and Cudjoe. Yet, Jamaica has no sculptural monuments to the Taíno. It’s about time we correct this omission of our “First Jamaicans” from our national monuments.

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FOOTNOTES

[1] The names Igneri, Ciboney, Guanahacabibe (de Las Casas) were invariably used to denote an early people who occupied the islands within the Circum Caribbean.

[2] “Meaning 'good' or 'noble', because several of its members spoke that word to Columbus to indicate that they were not Island-Caribs (Alegria 1981)” — Rouse 1992, 5.
[3] Cayo, a small island, is the root word for cay or key.
[4] The Taíno believed in a balancing system of twin entities. As a Maya elder put it, “We live in a world of polarity — day and night, man and woman, positive and negative. Light and darkness need each other. They are a balance."

 [5] The Jamaican rock iguana with serrated back and sunned itself for acquiring body heat. It provided the Taíno a visual image for the sun. Liguanea from (La)-iguana is an area in St. Andrew, Jamaica.

[6] A “spittle” from inhaling the hallucinogenic, trance-producing cohoba dust was blown as snot on to the back of the intruding Deminán. It turned into a swelling from which Turtle Mother was born, not unlike Eve being created from Adam’s rib. Turtle Mother mated with the four brothers who fathered humankind. The Taíno told an arriving Spanish chronicler that an earlier cacique (ruler/chief) had seen the destruction of their civilization in a cohoba trance. They had then mistakenly believed that the destroyers were the Carib.

[7] Yuca became “cassava”, (sweet) batata is the origin of “potato”, and maisi is the source word for maize that translated into Old English “corn”, or the word for wheat. This is the origin of “Indian wheat/corn.”
[8] Callaloo from the indigenous amaranth family. Jamaicans religiously eat callaloo as a vegetable.

[9] Maraca is a Taíno implement from the womb-like higuera “calabash” with fertilizing seeds in a white membrane. Dried, it represents the duality of a food container and musical instrument used in both the areito (dance) and in sacred ceremonies by a bohuti (shaman).

[10] Jerk (North American “jerky”), is from a Maya word for drying and preserving meat over a fire.

[11] The best jerk pork still comes from Boston Bay on the eastern tip of Jamaica. The meat is barbecued on a green pimento branch rack over a pimento wood fire. Maroons clandestinely traded jerk/barbecue meat to passing ships belonging to England’s enemies.
[12] Cassava comes from cazabi, the Taíno large, flat, tropical mold-resistant tortilla-style bread made by grating the peeled root and squeezing out the cyanide based juice (used as a meat tenderizing casareep). It is then sun dried into a flour, sprinkled onto a burén, cooked to drive out any remaining cyanide, and placed on a thatch roof to sun-dry. The bread is sometimes stored for months without spoilage. According to the DICTIONARY OF JAMAICAN ENGLISH, Jamaicans call a thicker version of this pan bread, “bammy”, which is baked in a heavy iron mold. It may be the same as mbeiyú the Amerindian Tupi word for a flat manioc/yuca style cake. In the 1908 Maroon Medicine, a grill[ed] bammy with jerk pork was taken as provisions for a journey.

[13] Similar in concept to Jesus the Christ’s virgin birth from Mary and the seed of God/Yahweh.

[14] DNA tests for the BBC’s “Who do you think you are?” series revealed that “The Taíno mixed with [enslaved Africans] who had escaped from the Spanish and made their own ‘Maroon’ communities, so it's possible that Colin's remote ancestors were Maroons - or cimarrones (from the Spanish cima, or summit).” http://www.whodoyouthinkyouaremagazine.com/episode/colin-jackson.

[15] Mooretown Maroon informants used the word caban for the Taíno barbecoa grill made in the traditional indigenous American style platform for the meat supported by four “Y” shape legs driven into the ground over a fire. The grill made of green twigs could be lowered closer to the fire by circular strings that hung down from the 2 ½’ tall “Y”-shaped legs. Caban is Spanish for “cabin’, similar to barbecue that can also mean a platform.

[16] From the Taíno hamaca, a tropical American bed. One of the first Taíno space-saving technologies borrowed by Europeans for their ships. The English then made hammocks from canvas that seamen took with them on shore.

[17] Columbus met unfriendly Taíno in war canoas (Taíno canoe) on the North Coast on May 15, 1494 and later sailed around to its south coast where “There were many Indian villages near the Bay and where Columbus says he found the most intelligent and civilized aborigines of all he met in the Antilles. By means of an interpreter, he had the most interesting conversation with the cacique of a large village on a mountain slope, who together with his family and chief followers [nitaino], paid the Admiral a visit.” –The Story of Jamaica, Clinton V. Black, 26. Columbus’s description of the Taíno retinue, its regalia that included a feathered “Coat of Arms” is indicative of the traditional high level of Taíno governmental development. Jamaica, like that other large Caribbean islands, was divided into cacigazos or districts governed by caciques and a stratified collection of sub-cacique advisers, the Nitaino, or “Nobles” as the Spanish called them.

[18] Sir Hans Slone, 1707, “This vine growing on dry Hills in the Woods where no Water is to meet with, its trunk if cut into two or three Yard long, Pieces, and held by either End to the Mouth, there issues out of it so plentifully, a limpid, innocent and refreshing Water or Sap as gives new life to the droughthy Traveller.” JAMAICA TALK: Three Hundred Years of the English Language in Jamaica, R. B. Le Page, 374

Are "Indians" Indians?

1. Top left: “Indian on an Indian;” Silkscreen print of Pamunkey George Major Cook (a Virginia Powhatan tribe chief) advertising the popular early 1900s Indian Motorcycle. Silkscreen print by Rose Powhatan & Michael Auld
2. Top Center: Two Indian girls cooking rice in Jamaica. New immigrants from Northern India who came to Jamaica in the late 1800s as indentured workers after the emancipation of enslaved Africans.
3. Bottom Left: Evidence of pre-Columbian contact between India and the Americas? Disputed temple sculpture in Somnathpur, [India]. “We find two male and 63 female attendants to the deities holding the ‘maize ears.’", CARL JOHANNESSEN ON ANCIENT INDIAN MAIZE, (p. 170)
4. Bottom Center: Etching of Columbus landing on Kiskeia/Haiti Bohio (later to become Hispaniola)
5. Right: One of a variety of painted version of Lord Rama

Indian

Indio n, Spanish. "Indio" means Indian, as in Native American. The more politically correct word in Spanish is indígena, but indio is also used, just like Indian in English.

Hindú /hindoo/ n, via Urdu to mid 17^th century Persian (pronounced in-doo in Spanish) Indian from the country of India.

Dravidian n, Possibly the first people who became “Indian”. According to a view put forward by geneticist Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza in the book The History and Geography of Human Genes, the Dravidians were preceded in the subcontinent [of India] by an Austro-Asiatic people, and were followed by Indo-European-speaking migrants sometime later.

Indian n, from Sanskrit sinduh, via Old Persian Hindu “Indus” [River]: 1. A native of the subcontinent of India. 2. Applied to the native inhabitants of the Americas from at least 1553, on the notion that America was the eastern end of Asia.

“India”n More accurately Bharat, Bharata, Bhārat, or Bhārata may be a transliteration of either Bharata (Sanskrit: भरत, lit. "to be maintained") or Bhārata भारत, lit. "descended from Bharata") and may refer to: “Originating from Bharata, brother of the god Lord Rama.”

Given the above explanation of the name “India”, the people from that subcontinent do not necessarily refer to themselves by the Persian word “Indian” from “people of the Indus River”. They use their own religiously associated Sanaskrit word, “Bhaarat” to refer to themselves.
 

Many of the popularly held notions about the Americas began in the Caribbean with the Columbian Encounter of 1492. The most basic retention after meeting the Taíno in the Bahamas was that they were Indians in an extension of Asia. To Columbus, they were, in color, like the Afro-European mixed people of the Canary Islands, a Spanish possession off the West Coast of Africa. The English, coined the use of “Red Indians”, a designation that differentiated this ethnic group from the “other” Indians of India.

• According to the British who colonized most of the Caribbean islands until 1962, people born on Caribbean islands and South America (British Guyana) were called West Indians.
• In the Caribbean and Guyana an East Indian is a person whose family originated in India. Does this make them an East Indian West Indian? Incidentally, some people from India are opposed to the term “East Indian”.
• Some Indians from the subcontinent (true Indians), do not think that American Indians should use the name “Indian”.
• To confuse matters worse, Native Americans often are misidentified as an Indian (from the country of India) by non-Indians and people from India and other South East Asian countries. “Columbus made the same mistake,” is often the reply by some Native Americans to the query, “What part of India are you from?”
• Pakistanis (pak= pure and stan= land) were Indians until they were partitioned from India, “which went into effect on Aug. 15, 1947”.

Growing up in the Caribbean, most people love to watch World Cup cricket played between, among others, India, Pakistan and the West Indies. Who then is the real Indian? In this hemisphere, this dilemma of cultural misidentification began with Columbus. The term became entrenched with the 16^th century Spanish who created “a Juzgado de Indias or judicial zone [of the Indians/Indies] that was established in the [Canary] islands in 1566” to control trade with the Americas. We tend to blame Columbus for this dilemma, yet come to think if it maybe he did run into “the eastern end of Asia” in 1492.

Asia Extended

Asia [from the Greek name for] “the world's largest and most populous continent, located primarily in the eastern and northern hemispheres. It covers 8.6% of the Earth's total surface area (or 29.9% of its land area) and with approximately 4 billion people, it hosts 60% of the world's current human population.” Wikipedia

Mix up the world’s population and every 3^rd human you meet would be Chinese. Every 5^th person would be from India. The rest of the continent includes millions more of other Asians in East Asia and the Pacific.

Added to these Asians, approximately 47,834,251,490 indigenous people who are genetically “Asiatic”, live in 16 countries in South and Central America. There are roughly 3,672,790 in the USA and Canada. These overall numbers do not include the indigenous Caribbean populations or the extremely large meztizo and other African, European and Asiatic populations with indigenous American genes in this hemisphere. Even Europe (and possibly other areas) had its mixing of indigenous Americans soon after Columbus brought some Taíno back to Spain. Some meztizos in the Americas obviously relocated to their father’s homelands in Europe and Africa (For example, Jamaican Maroons to Sierra Leone and African Americans to Liberia).

Is the vast Western Hemisphere of the Americas also a part of Asia? Some folks think so. However, not according to some writers. Yet, indigenous Americans, they contend, are believed to have come “from Asia over a land bridge that connected both Asia proper and the Americas.” Indigenous Americans, at the time of Columbus, were genetically, philosophically and religiously “Asiatic”. Columbus was on his way to Asia when he collided into the Caribbean homeland of these Asiatic peoples, the Taíno and Island Carib. To him, they appeared to be Indios. Sailing down from the Guanahani in the Bahamas, he arrived in Cuba. There he sent out an overland expedition to find the home of the Great Kahn of China. Until his dying day, maybe he was rightfully convinced that he had encountered, explored and temporarily governed Indians (Indios) from the outer reaches of Asia’s subcontinent.

Who are the real Indians?

“East Indian” is not seen as a positive term by some people indigenous to the subcontinent of India. A close family friend, who is from India, lamented that the word “Indian” should only apply to their people, is a frequent refrain heard among “true Indians”. “Native Americans are not Indians”. Some Indians, like members of the Goins family (from Goans) originated from Goa, India and married into Virginia’s Native American families as early as the 1700s.

The 1492 misnaming of peoples in an entire hemisphere is very confusing. They can be called “American Indian”, “Native American” “Amerindian”, or “Indigenous Americans”. Even the word “America” may be troubling since it was coined from an Italian named Amerigo Vespucci, an Italian man who never set foot in the Americas. The indigenous people of the Americas had as many names for themselves and their territories as they had languages. The people whom Columbus met in 1492, called themselves “Taíno”, which appropriately meant the “Good” or “Noble” people, a self-identifying concept that eluded both the Spanish and Columbus. The Island Caribs, another indigenous Caribbean group, were appropriately called the “Strong Men” by the Taíno.

Although Columbus was responsible for the first Caribbean misnomer, the other being Caribbean people as “cannibals”, he was highly overrated as a “discoverer”. Many have now come to believe that, for indigenous peoples of the Americas, Columbus’ “discovery” of a “New World” was dismissive. The Spanish now distinguish between the indigenous people of India and the Americas in the following way. Indu (in-doo) = the real Indian. Indio (in-di-oh) = Indigenous Americans. Today, when we call over the telephone for technical help with our computer, we often get a real Indian on the other end of the line. Maybe we are talking to people who are more “local” than we think. Remembering the invention of gunpowder, trigonometry, etc., etc., what makes it equally interesting is that both they and the Chinese are well on their way to dominating the known world…AGAIN!
 

NOTE: The Names They Call Us

Some tribal names that Indigenous Americans traditionally call themselves and what their rivals called then are:

• Taíno (the Caribbean's "Good"or "Noble People"), called "Arawak" (a South American people) by the British. 
• Diné means "the People". Called Navajo, from Spanish "Apache de Navajo".  Navajo is originally a Tewa (or Tano) word from the Diné neighbors. The Tewa are a linguistic group of Pueblo American Indians who speak the Tewa language and share the Pueblo culture.. 
• The Dakota, Lakota and Nakota were called Sioux ("snake") by their enemies.
• The Karifuna, called "Carib" (meaning "Strong Men") by the Taino, and Caribales/Canibales by Columbus.
• Mexica (me-she-ka) are the so-called "Aztec" ("people from Aztlan" ) named after Hernando Cortez and the Spanish in 1519. The Spanish allied themselves with Mexica subjects to defeated the Mexica's  "Aztec Triple Alliance" empire, which has also become known as the "Aztec Empire" that included the Acolhuas of Texcoco and the Tepanecs of Tlacopan).

THE MESOAMERICAN BALLGAME: History’s First Team Sport

Left
Above: (a) Taíno ball players as seen in the Caribbean (Hispaniola) and reported by the Venetian Ambassador to Spain at the Spanish court, Seville in 1493.
(b) Taíno stone belt worn by a player that counterbalanced the body during play. Carved belts like this found in Puerto Rico weighed between 15 to 57 pounds. Conquest of Eden by Michael Paiewonsky

Below: (a) Ancient Maya ballcourt ruin at Uxmal, near Merida, Mexico, 2008 (Photo by Michael Auld). Note the ballcourt ring protruding from wall above woman to the left.
(b) Ceramic effigy of Maya ballplayer.
(c) Ballcourt ring.
(d) Ballcourt illustration from an Aztec codex. The ballcourt rings in the middle of this illustration may represent the fateful movement of the sun across the sky centered between skulls at the four corners of the sacred cardinal directions. Two players representing their teams prepare to lob the ball into play.

History’s First Team Sport

Imagine that you are part of an ancient civilization of warriors. One fateful morning you calmly stand and prepare to pray to the four cardinal directions. You light the brazier and waft sacred smoke over your body. You then strap on protective gear over your elbows, knees and hip. You are preparing to join your unit in a battle against evil forces and this may be your last day in this existence. Your death will be swift and today will indeed be a good day to die. The ceremony in which you are about to engage with teammates will spill blood to seed the earth. You will fight to gain the honor of being the people’s emissary to a god. If you are fortunate, in admiration your family will bury you with a ceramic effigy or a stone sphere representing the vulcanized blood of the hule tree. For your rebirth, your family will lovingly place the glimmering feathered body of a hummingbird on your grave. These hopes pass through your mind as you enter the stone walled ball court. Its sides are teeming with shouting admirers, some of whom are gambling on your fate.

This ceremonial game began with the invention of rubber and by the Mesoamerica’s mother civilization, the Olmec. Some Amazonian peoples used the “blood” of the rubber tree to remove unwanted body hair. Mesoamericans used rubber to make toys, bungee straps, wrappings for cushioning tool handles and for waterproofing shoes and capes.

Because of its antiquity, the Mesoamerican rubber ball game is considered to be “History’s first team sport”. When the Italian adventurer Christopher Columbus and the Spanish first arrived in the Americas in the 15 th century, the Caribbean’s indigenous Taíno people played an Amerindian rubber ball game called batu. According to the National Park Service’s National Register of Historic Places Itinerary, “The first written description of the game, played with two teams and a rubber ball, appeared after Columbus' first voyage.” Unable to believe their eyes, the arriving Spanish thought that the miraculous bouncing of the rubber ball was a result of witchcraft. The Taínos played a non-fatal version of the ball game on a clay court called a batey. Many Taíno villages had a batey that was also a center for social gatherings.

In Puerto Rico, a major archeological site in Caguana, Utuado has over 30 ball courts (bateys) built in 1270 AD, estimated to be over 700 years old  ( http://www.nps.gov/history/nR/travel/prvi/pr25.htm ). The most impressive playing enclosure is a large clay court that resembles a soccer field bordered in one side by paved stones. At one side of the field are flat upright stone slabs with incised images of Ataberia, the virgin mother of the Supreme Being, Yucahú Bagua Marocotti. Some stone slabs bordering the field weigh over one ton. Women’s teams sometimes played the Caribbean version of the game, unlike its Mesoamerican ancestor. In Mesoamerica, the ball courts were often “I” shaped fields bordered on the east and west sides by sloping stone walls. Some walls had stone rings set in the side through which a player bounced the solid nine-pound ball off his hip, elbow or shoulder. In both versions of the game, the players could not use their hand hands although in one version of the game ballplayers struck the ball with a bat.
Today in the Americas, fans of soccer and basketball have redirected their fervor for this indigenous American rubber ball game to more modern versions of the sport.

Early in the history of the Americas, this organized team sport, like maize, had travelled from Mesoamerica to Arizona and into the Caribbean. In some cultures, the ballgame represented the movement of the sun across the sky and the ominous outcome of this astrological phenomenon. In other places it was a source of communal gatherings where betting was the norm. Supposedly, sometimes either the winner or the loser’s head was decapitated as an honorable sacrificial offering “sending him directly to heaven”. The following are wall copy from a ball court in Uxmal, Merida (in Mexico’s Yucatan state) at the Museum of Anthropology in Mexico City. For one of the “Unforgettable Places to See Before You Die”, a visit to this impressive museum is necessary for anyone interested in learning the history of our hemisphere, the Americas.

Wall Copy from the Museum of Anthropology, Mexico City
(1) The ballgame is one of the defining characteristics of Mesoamerica. First found on the Central Highland Plateau [of Mexico], dates back to before 1200 BC when social and religious organization in these cultures reached complex levels. From time to time, the ballgame formed part of a cult, given finding of objects related to ballplayer’s attires. These included small yokes that symbolically represented the protectors used on hands and knees, and stone balls, symbolizing the original rubber ones. These balls were used in funerary and visual contexts. The stone balls, approximately three to four inches in diameter, were a little larger than a softball.
(2) The ballgame developed as a characteristic of Mesoamerica cultures; importance can be appreciated by the presence of buildings devoted to the execution of this ceremony.
The Ball Game Among the Mexicans
(1) All the people of ancient Mesoamerica practiced the ballgame, a ritual sport that determined the dangers faced by the sun on its daily journey across the heavens, thus predicting its fate.
(2) For the Mexicans the sacred ballgame was ullamaliztli (from “rubbery” used to make the ball). Characteristics of the ballgame were:
• Precise bounce which surprised the Europeans.
• The court was called tlaxico in Nahuat (a patio in the shape of an “I” or double “T”.
• On either side—slopes;
• Walls rings called “tlaxtemalcatl”, one to the south and one to the north. Balls go through them when struck with hip or forearm.
• Ends of court were west and east.
When a play was made that went against the movement of the sun, a decapitation was carried out. The blood vitalized the earth and the sun. Secular betting was one feature of the game.
The Ball
•Made from a tree named “hule”- the material is also called the same name of the tree. Hule came from the area near the Gulf of Mexico.
•The tree sap became rubber through a vulcanized process using diverse plants.
•The solid, heavy ball was the size of volleyball.
•The wall ring through which the ball had to pass was approximately one foot across.

Today
Amerindians from the Mexican state of Sinaloa play a version of the game, called hulama.

The Conquest

(1) Taíno maraca, Dominican Republic

(2) Powhatan dancers with rattles, John White, Virginia, 1585

conquest /kón kwèst/ n. (Vulgar Latin) 1. taking control of a place or people by force of arms. –Encarta World English Dictionary

conquistador /kon keésta dawr/ n. (Mid-19^th C via Spanish) 1. a Spanish conqueror or adventurer, especially one of those who conquered Mexico, Peru, and Central America in the 16^th century –ibid.

Writers often make statements about the conquest of the Americas by foreign powers as if the episode in the history of this hemisphere was a deed in finality. They make the occurrence seem as if everything Native came to an abrupt end after dates like Columbus’ 1492 Taíno Caribbean encounter, Cortez’s 1519 entry into the Aztec capital and Pizsrro’s 1532 Inca Empire capture.

The word conquest implies many things. It is especially used in the Americas to mean the total takeover of many indigenous American societies and peoples. Does conquest mean that all cultural and genetic traces of the conquered are obliterated? Do conquered people ever totally submit to the oppressor’s will? How long does a conquest last? The Spanish who themselves had been conquered by Moors from Africa who had ruled over most of their peninsula for nearly 800 years, became the major oppressive force in the Americas for almost 400 years. In psychological terms, in the Americas, the Moorish “abused Spanish” became “abusers” of the indigenous Americans. By January of 1492, the Christian Spanish had just thrown off the yoke of the Islamic Moorish empire via the Reconquista (reconquest) when they began their own wars of terror against the populations in the Americas. Columbus had initiated the move in the Caribbean in October of the same year. Ironically, Spanish control over the Americas also ended at their starting point in the Caribbean’s Cuba and Puerto Rico at the hands of the Americans in the1898 Spanish-American War. Spain’s domination in the Americas had ended where it had begun.

“Whether it is the Normans in England, the Chinese in Tibet, the Germans in Poland, the Indonesians in West Papua [New Guinea], the British and Americans in North America, the claiming of other people’s land and supplanting of one people by another has shaped the history of societies from the ancient past to the present day.”— Conquest: How Societies Overwhelm Others by David Day

Since the Romans conquered Britain, are the English still Romans? The English threw off the Roman yoke and re-established their cultural continuum, albeit retaining many Roman influences. A notable example was the desire to do the same and to travel the world in attempts to overwhelm other societies. The “abused” became the “abuser”. What became “Britain” may have been biological amalgamation, yet the indigenous people of those small isles retained their Anglo identity, culturally and genetically. Although we would not dare to challenge an Englishman about his heritage, contemporary writers dismiss a similar notion of Indigenous American identity. Are the Caribbean, South, Central and North American populations Spanish or British?

It is often parroted that “the Taíno disappeared soon after” the conquistadors followed Columbus into the Caribbean after 1492. The same notion is commonly ascribed to other indigenous American civilizations. These societies, like the Aztec and others have been psychologically relegated to the “disappeared”. Yet how complete is this notion of total evaporation?

After Conquest, then what?

The series of events after a conquest have differed around the world. In the Americas, conquest was followed by colonialism, then independence from the European powers. However, according to David Day, the move to supplant the Native populations continued under the newly freed governments. “From the [Indian’s] perspective, the nature of the American colonists had not changed. Europeans came to North America to establish themselves on territory owned by Indians and they continued, after independence, to pursue that aim clear across the continent.” This approach to obliteration of Native culture and replacing it with a foreign one continues at present in this hemisphere. Today, there is a struggle by indigenous Americans to maintain and renew their heritages, in spite of an educational system that has worked to promote “dead” Indians over living descendants. Throughout the Americas the resurgence of Native pride is one weapon against an apathetic educational system.

Indigenous Music Traditions Never Ended: Take the Maracas

maracas /mə ráaka/ (Tupi) n. a percussion instrument usually shaken in pairs as an accompaniment to Latin American music and consisting of a hollow rattle filled with small pebbles or beans–Encarta World English Dictionary.

Many cultural practices that we observe among the peoples of the Americas are part of an ancient indigenous continuum that is often misidentified. For example, in the article : New Notes about Taíno Music and its Influence on Contemporary Dominican Life by Lynn Guitar, the author suggests that the Dominicans on that Caribbean island half of Hispaniola shared with Haiti, “have a passion for music and dance since the Colonial Era when you could dance in the churches streets and public plazas”. Many of these Dominicans are the descendants of the indigenous peoples of Haiti Bohio (meaning “high ground home”) or Quisqueya (meaning “mother of the earth”) that was the center of the Caribbean’s Taíno civilization. They were the first to be conquered by the Spanish arriving in the Americas.

“Music played a highly significant role in both the daily and ritual lives of the Taíno, as we call the indigenous peoples of Hispaniola and the other islands of the Greater Antilles, although there were actually several different groups of indigenous peoples living here when Christopher Columbus arrived and dramatically changed not only their names, but the course of their history. The Taíno used music to help make mundane work more bearable, to help them remember and recount their history, to celebrate special occasions, and to communicate with their spiritual guides, their cemíes, to gain their help in healing, for protection against destructive natural forces such as hurricanes and earthquakes, to ensure rain when needed, good harvests, hunts, and fishing expeditions, and other necessities of life. In fact, music and song were so important, that one of the most valuable gifts one Taíno could give another was a song.

Maracas are rattles, most frequently today made out of small hollowed-out gourds (higüeros) with stick handles attached, but sometimes carved out of wood. The main difference between original Taíno maracas and modern ones is that the original ones, at least those used by the behique [shaman] for religious rituals, appear to have had one large ball of wood inside—in fact, the maraca was carved out of one piece of wood, handle and all, with the ball of wood that produces the clicking sound carved out of the inner core of that one piece of wood, through open slits that allow the sound to come out. Today’s maracas have no slits; they are left enclosed, with many small stones or seeds sealed inside the empty gourd before the handle is attached. The maracas used by Taíno musicians may have been more like the modern ones, and they appear to have used two at a time, like most modern percussionists. The behique used only one maraca, not two, and he played not by shaking it, but by hitting it against his other hand.” -- Lynn Guitar

Recognizing and Appreciating Indigenous Cultural Retentions

Using music as an example, recognizing and understanding Native American Cultural retentions had been difficult for the conquerors. For example, Lyn Guitar stated that “Like the music of most Asian cultures, Amerindian music is also typically pentatonic, meaning based on five notes, instead of the typical 8-note base of most European music. ‘What [really] makes the Native American scales sound so alien [to European ears] is that the pitches of the five notes are seemingly chosen at random.’ The pitch patterns appear to have varied from tribe to tribe, village to village, family to family, even from person to person, so they were no doubt understood by the Amerindians as a means of kinship or geographic identification, just as indigenous peoples used specific designs for ceramics, textiles, and other decorated objects as identifiers of artists, families, and nations from particular regions.”

It is not surprising that even in today’s societies in the Americas we find it difficult to recognize and appreciate the very strong cultural retentions that derived from our indigenous American heritage. We in the Americas may be more “indigenous” than we think. The key to this realization is through continued education about those things that we have retained from our Native sisters and brothers.

New Notes about Taíno Music and its Influence on Contemporary Dominican Life (http://www.centrelink.org/GuitarTainoMusicEN.html)

Cannibals in the Caribbean?

Images: (Top) Early Print of a Carib Family.

(Middle) Maligned heritage: 1992 photograph by Michael Auld of an Island-Carib girl from the Carib Reserve in the Eastern Caribbean Island of Dominica. Both Walt Disney Pictures and Columbus defamed her people. The Carib Reserve is the only Indigenous American reservation in the Caribbean. Jamaica has two historic African (Maroon) “reservations”.

(Bottom Left) Imaginary cannibalism: Early European illustration of an imaginary scene of Carib “cannibalism”. (Bottom Right) Real cannibalism: Pot polished and beveled human bones. Human bones from Mancos Canyon, Utah showing evidence of actual cannibalistic cooking.

Cannibalism

cannibal, /kánnib’l/ n. From Mid 16^th century Spanish canibales. 1. Somebody who eats human flesh, whether for food or as part of a religious ritual. 2. An animal that eats the flesh of other animals of the same specie.

Cannibalism is historically one of the most feared and reviled human practice. Yet the glorification of one of the forms of cannibalism, human blood drinking, is now a popular HBO Television series called “True Blood”. Cannibalism is deeply embedded in our psyche. For example, Christians perform a form of ritual cannibalism by drinking wine or grape juice that symbolizes the “blood of Christ” and eating bread that represents his body. Cannibalism occurred in all areas of the planet and is still an isolated phenomenon within some contemporary “Developed World” societies. In many of these countries there are no laws against cannibalism. It is as ancient as the Neanderthal and as recent as America’s Jeffery Daumer and Germany’s 41-year-old computer technician Armin Meiwes.

The gruesome European illustration above shows brown skinned “natives” dismembering white victims while their women cook body parts in pots and on a spit. Three heads are placed on spikes in the custom of a 16^th century European practice. This early propaganda illustration depicted the unfounded Euro-centric fear that was pervasive in Europe after Columbus arrived in the Caribbean in 1492. Although he had not seen cannibalism during his many years in the Caribbean, he instigated a myth that served the goal of Spanish expansionism in the Americas. His exploits enriched Spain and ultimately Western Europe. Unfortunately the contemporary descendants of the Island-Carib on the Eastern Caribbean Island of Dominica still continue to suffer humiliation from Columbus’ 500-year-old lie. In 1992 an aid to the Carib Council on Dominica’s Carib Reserve related to me her continued plight. She spoke of how she had to defend herself against an African-Dominican assertion that her ancestors were cannibals. The elected chief then also related how non-Carib Dominicans would cross the road so as not to walk on the same side as a Carib. His preferred name for his people was Karifuna. Today they are also called Kalinago.

Disney added to this dilemma when it made the most recent sequel of Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest by portraying Dominica’s Island-Caribs as cannibals. Prior to filming, despite protests from Native American groups, Disney continued with its project. The sequel was a commercial success. These misleading movie images may be forever burned into the minds of future generations. The National Garifuna Council of Dominica criticized the movie for “portraying the Carib people as cannibals”. How did this Caribbean myth begin?

Dr. Basil A. Reid a Jamaican anthropologist who teaches at the University of the West Indies in Agustine, Trinidad and Tobago has published evidence that refutes the notion of Caribbean cannibalism. In his 2009 book Myths and Realities of Caribbean History he attributed this myth to Christopher Columbus. According to a November 4 [1492] quote in Columbus’ diary, “He [Columbus] understood also that, far from there [the Bahamas?], there were one eyed men, and others, with snouts of dogs, who ate men, and as soon as one was taken they cut his throat and drink his blood.” Today it may not be difficult to accept that 15^th century Europeans who thought that the world was flat also believed in fairies, mermaids and gigantic sea serpents. Dr. Reid suggested that the source of Columbus’ “New World” propaganda is contained in the following.

Cannibals: Natives who refused to submit to the Spanish were called cannibals. They were characterized as idolaters and consumers of human flesh who could not be converted into Christianity and were therefore suitable for enslaving.

Caribes: The Spanish understood Caribes [pronounced ka-rib-hes] to be real people when in fact they were creatures who existed only in Taíno mythology.

Caniba: Columbus sought an audience with the Grand Khan of Cathay (China). Caniba is the name Columbus gave to denote the Grand Khan’s subjects.

Greek mythology also had Cyclops and cannibals. It should be remembered that until his death Columbus insisted that he had indeed arrived, explored, ruled over and lived among these Chinese or Indian Asians in the Caribbean Islands. When he first arrived in Cubanacan (Taíno word for Cuba) he sent out an inland exploratory party to find the Grand Kahn’s kingdom. Ironically, Cuban-a-kan did sound like “Kahn”.

“At the same time that Europeans were condemning various native peoples as cannibals, however, they were practicing a form of cannibalism themselves. Use of medicines made from blood and other human body parts was widespread in Europe through the 17th century. Europeans of the period consumed fresh blood as a cure for epilepsy and substances from various body parts to treat a variety of diseases, including arthritis, reproductive difficulties, sciatica, warts and skin blemishes. A primary source for this material was the bodies of executed criminals. Pieces of mummified human flesh imported from Egypt were considered a general panacea and were widely prescribed by the physicians of the day”, Brief history of cannibal controversies”, http://exploration.vanderbilt.edu/news/news_cannibalism_pt2.htm

Were the people of Cuba and Haiti cannibals?

If my child wanted to get a precise meaning of the word “cannibal”, the explanations below would probably engender lifelong misconceptions. In various dictionaries the origin of the English word cannibal is noted as follows:

• [Mid-16^thC. From Canibales, a variant (used by the explorer Columbus) of Caribes, the name of the cannibalistic people of Cuba and Haiti (see Carib).], Encarta World English Dictionary
• [Spanish Canibal “Carib”, of American Indian origin], Webster’s New Encyclopedic Dictionary
• [1545-55, cannibal, variant of caríbal, equivalent to canib-, carib- (Arawak) + -al –QAL; from their belief that the Caribs of the West Indies ate human flesh]. Webster’s Encyclopedic Unabridged Dictionary of the English Language

In 1492, the indigenous people of Cuba and Haiti belonged to the extensive Taíno civilization, rivals of the Eastern Caribbean’s Island-Carib. The more diplomatic Taíno cacicazgos (chiefdoms) were not the warrior society of the Island-Carib.

Recommended reading: Myths and Realities of Caribbean History, by Basil A. Reid, the University of Alabama Press, 2009.(The book can be obtained at: Amazon.com)

Chapters in this publication refute the following myths:

1. Caribbean History Started with the Arrival of Christopher Columbus in 1492

2. The Arawaks and Caribs Were the Two Major Groups in the Precolonial Caribbean

3. Columbus Met Arawaks in the Northern Caribbean

4. The Natives Encountered by Christopher Columbus in the Northern Caribbean Migrated from South America

5. The Arawak Were the First Potters and Farmers to Have Settled in the Caribbean

6. The Ciboneys Lived in Western Cuba at the Time of the Spanish Conquest

7. The Island-Caribs were Cannibals

8. All Amerindians Migrating from South America to the Caribbean Island-Hopped from Continent to the Lesser and Greater Antilles

9. The Spanish Introduced Syphilis into the Caribbean and the New World

10. Christopher Columbus Wrote His Diario (Diary) That We Use Today

11. The Spanish Colonists Brought “Civilization” to Native Societies in the Caribbean

Click for a page on Dominica's "Carib" the Kalinago: http://www.avirtualdominica.com/caribs.htm

Click for a page an interview with a Carib chief of Dominica: http://powhatanmuseum.com/Carib.html