The Taíno

A Taíno leader who felt a link with a certain tree or stone called in a ritual specialist. The specialist breathed in cohoba, a powder made from a plant, to learn which spirit lived there, and artists then carved the wood or stone into its shape. The Taíno called such a sacred being or image a zemí (also spelled cemí), and leaders looked after these figures.

The Taíno lived on the islands of the Greater Antilles (Cuba, Jamaica, Hispaniola and Puerto Rico), in the Bahamas and on nearby islands. Their ancestors were Arawak-speaking people who came from South America more than two thousand years ago, bringing farming and pottery. On the islands they met peoples who already lived there and sometimes mixed with them. By about AD 1000 distinct Taíno communities had formed, and by 1100–1200 their villages were larger and planned, many with open plazas for ball games and ceremonies. People farmed on raised mounds of earth called conucos, growing manioc (cassava) and maize. Leaders called caciques competed for land and followers and ran trade by land and sea. English took several words from the Taíno language through Spanish, among them canoe, hammock, hurricane and barbecue.

No one knows how many Taíno lived on Hispaniola in 1492. Scholars' estimates run from about 60,000 to as many as 8 million; a narrower range often given is 100,000 to more than a million. Within about fifty years of Columbus's arrival, disease, war, forced labor and enslavement had killed most of them; by 1540 about 90 percent of the islands' Native people had died. Today a growing number of people in Puerto Rico, the Dominican Republic, New York and elsewhere call themselves Taíno and are reviving dances and language and keeping up crafts such as hammock weaving. One Smithsonian scholar notes that how much has passed down unbroken is not always clear.

Several texts in the library show the Taíno through Spanish eyes. Columbus's letter, News of the First Voyage, describes the first islands he reached and how he renamed them. In The Images in the Field, the friar Ramón Pané, who knew the Taíno language, tells how followers of the cacique Guarionex buried Christian images in a planted field. Oviedo's Maize and Cassava Bread describes Taíno farming, which the Spaniards copied. Las Casas's A Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies gives his own figures for the dead, the numbers of an advocate rather than a count.