These two pictures pretty much tell the story. This week we return to Estevanico for his tale of how the first meeting between the White Man and the Native American happened, and the results of that fateful meeting.
My ancestors were doomed from the first day. They knew it, too. The Spanish colonists actually didn't at first, but after a while things really started to go South for the Taino natives. But I'm getting ahead of myself. Let me start from the beginning.
The day was December 25, 1492. My ancestors would call it "Armageddon", since it marked the beginning of the near extermination of their entire race. To give you an idea of what this day meant to them, I'll tell you some numbers. When the White men first came to Haiti on that day, nobody knows how many Taino people were on the island, but some say there were millions, even 8 million, Taino people living on Haiti. By 1508, most scholars agree that there were only about 60,000 Taino left (and many of them were miserable; they were either in hiding, in flight, or being otherwise screwed by the Spanish invaders).
Spanish-Taino relations were bad from the beginning. If some foreign country's representatives came to the U.S., renamed the country and claimed it as theirs, and enslaved, killed, and exploited 90 percent of all Americans (due to disease, direct slavery, or indirectly causing mass suicides ), I am sure that Americans would not be in love with that country or its representatives. Long story short, that is what happened between a country's ambassadors (Columbus and crew, Spain's ambassadors) and an island's population (Haiti and the Taino people).
The two groups never really understood one another. The Spanish camp had big misconceptions about the natives. They thought that the natives were welcoming them as gods and rulers over them. The truth was that the Taino had a prophecy that a foreign group would come over the ocean and wipe them out, and they realized that these white men were the ones the prophecy was talking about. Possibly, the Taino were trying to appease the Spanish men so they would leave. Another misconception of Columbus and his crew, and subsequently the Spanish colonists, was that the Taino had lots of gold. In reality, the Taino and the island itself had very little gold. This did not stop the Spanish from forcing the Taino to give them gold at the cost of death and torture, however. These are just a few examples of Taino-Spanish misconceptions.
Furthermore, the Spanish were never really interested in anything besides exploiting the resources of the island. They were basically interested in gold. Cultural interpretation meant nothing to them. This is one reason why they could so heartlessly enslave, kill, torture, and rape the Taino so easily; they didn't care.
So you see, the beginnings of Spanish rule meant the end of the Taino; very few Taino survived the mass death of their people (some did survive, though). The Spanish and the Taino never really understood or tried to communicate with each other; the Spaniards just eradicated most of the Taino in their search for gold. So to us Taino descendants, Columbus is a vile demon since his coming marked the beginning of great pain for us. He is no hero.
Thank you once again, Estevanico. Later next week we will hear tale of some of the great conflicts on this island.
Sources List
Livi-Bacci, Massimo. "Return to Hispaniola: Reassessing a Demographic Catastrophe." HAHR (2011): 4-16. PDF File.
Deagan, Kathleen. "Colonial Transformation: Euro-American Cultural Genesis in the Early Spanish-American Colonies." Journal of Anthropological Research 52.2 (1996): 135-138. JSTOR. PDF file.
Symcox, Geoffrey, and Blair Sullivan. Christopher Columbus and the Enterprise of the Indies: A Brief History with Documents. New York: St. Martins/Boston: Bedford. 2005. Print.
No comments:
Post a Comment