Taino Creation Story
ART THAT INFORMS
Our Yamaye Story: What we may not know...
Top: The early Taíno were excellent artists. Here Guabancex as the Taíno Hurakan or hurricane with their example of her ceramic image on the sculpture's hands. (Wall sculpture by the author).
We have changed Columbus Day to Indigenous Peoples Day on the second Monday of October. And November is National Native American Heritage Month. But is this enough?
Question: What do you know about Amerindian History and Culture?
This should be the burning question especially answered during National Native American Heritage Month… and beyond!
So here through art, is an overview of the first people of the Encounter period whose culture had the greatest impact worldwide beginning in the 15th century. We still enjoy many of their gifts.
Just think “barbecue”, “jerk”, “pineapple”, “sweet potato”, “peppers”, “allspice”, laying down in a “hammock “, visiting a key/cay or cayo, eating sweet “tapioca” or crunchy “yuca” chips, playing or watching any bouncy rubber ball game or a team sport live or on television. These are just a few of over 60 items we enjoy from our Caribbean Amerindian relatives both Taino and Kalinago. Many of these items originated in tropical Central and South America, while others like the guava berry below, are only found in their original homelands and Latin America stores. Guava or guayaba, named for the God of the Afterlife, is considered a Super Fruit with more vitamin C than an orange.
So, what did the Taino believe? What was the source of life itself?
Above: The TAINO'S SOURCE OF LIFE. This sculpture of the Iguana-Boina visually represents the Taino concept of human survival. The images are reflected in the natural world which surrounds us. Take the Golden Iguana for example. Iguana-el or, “Son of the Iguana, represents the sun since the large lizard must sun its cold-blooded body to absorb the sun's life-giving UV rays. The same is true of most plants on which we survive. They saw the dorsal "spikes" on the reptile’s back as a sun design, reaching up to the celestial body, as it appears at the top of this sculpture, The Boina is the dark raincloud that represents life-giving water. Symbolically, the Black Raincloud unfolds like the body of a large Anaconda-like tree serpent.
The Sculpture: This artwork was styled in a geometric Indigenous American design aesthetic from welded metal, carved, and inlaid Plexiglass, using two of the sacred colors, red for the East, where the sun rises, black where it sets in the West, and yellow for the warm South. (It is 10 feet tall). Made in 1972.
Along with art and history, one of my passions is rooted in the concern about how little we know and are still formally untaught about where we live in this planet's Western Hemisphere. In the Americas, even after 500+ years of the European Encounter’s invasion beginning in 1492, most of us who were born here, and almost all of those people who weren't, have no clue that we actually live in an "Amerindian Americas".
The Eurocentric brainwashing has not abated since 1493 when Cristoforo Columbo, a.k.a. Colon, and Columbus, brought 17-19 ships of mostly Spanish invaders, euphemistically called “settlers” of an ancient "New World", whose very presence initiated a germ-induced Amerindian Holocaust. COVID was as virile. To his dying day, the Admiral of the Seas believed that he had arrived and fleetingly governed over a part of China. Most of the hemisphere which was genetically Amerindian, became "Hispanic", a so-called "race" defined by a foreign language of Spanish.
If you doubt this concept of geographic ignorance, ask the person next to you,
"Where do you think that we in the Americas are geographically?"
Then, possibly with their hesitation, you can clarify the question with,
"Are we in Africa, Europe, or Asia?"
Since those are the continents about where are dogmatically taught, this is the information they will regurgitate. Added to the misinformation, according to a large wall sign at Virginia's Jamestown Settlement Park "Where America Began", the wall sign shouts, "America is a Suburb of Europe". And this is still the mindset about an Eastern Hemisphere which is 3,784 miles away from the America’s Western Hemisphere!! Our poor miseducated kids!
This distorted view should be the burning issue, especially answered during National Native American Heritage Month.
When I taught classes to elementary school, middle school, high school, undergraduate, and postgraduate students, I would try to break the ice at our introductory meeting. So, during my first classroom session, the dominant answer to my question of our geographic location was reflected by a DC elementary student whose answer to where we were, was, "America!"
"Yes. But where is America?" I prompted.
Silence. As the young students seem to wonder, "Has he lost his mind? This is an art class!"
Yes, but if I was going to teach them about art history, I had to first include the history of where we were. In my chronology, Egypt, Greece, and Rome would come later. After all, there were ancient pyramids snd mound-builders here in the Americas. Teotihuacan, anyone?
Seeing their confusion, I'd say, "What if I told you that we live in Asia Extended?"
Asia Extended
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| Amerindian Gene Flow Map-- Wikipedia |
Check out the above map that shows the flow of the First Inhabitants of the Western Hemisphere, when human beings were spreading out from Africa and Asia. This "Asia Extended" concept was shared with me by my Native American wife, whose Indigenous ancestors suffered under the first English Invasion of the North American Continent, beginning in Jamestown, Virginia in 1607. The thesis is simply, "since Indigenous people of the Americas are genetically and philosophically Asiatic, and historians say that they came from that gigantic continent, then the Americas is an extension of Asia, not a suburb of Europe.” Incidentally. Asians are the world’s majority.
The question then, by the folks who met Colon/Columbo/Columbus on the Lucayan island of Guanahani on October 12, 1492, is ...
How were we created?
The Taino Creation Storybook
The Northern Caribbean is the ancestral home of both the people we call the Taíno and those who call themselves Kalinago, at one time known by the Taíno name "Carib", meaning "Strong Men". Although European clerics at the time of the Encounter entertained the belief that the Caribbean was the location of the biblical Garden of Eden, or as they called it, the Terrestrial Paradice. The Taino had a different Creation concept than that of the Jewish story of Adam and Eve. However, like the Catholic Christians who arrived in Taíno territory, there was also a belief in the Virgin Birth exemplified by the birth of Yucahu, the God of the Sea, and the life-giving yuca or cassava tuber (from which tapioca is also made). Interestingly, the yuca, which has one of the highest amount of carbohydrates, seemed to have caused populations (as it did in Tropical Americas) and had done the same when introduced to Africa and Asia by the Portuguese.
Let's start with the Creation Story of the first people of The Encounter.
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Above: Click on YouTube for The Taino Creation StoryBook
 Above: Karaya the moon hides in the cave in which she and the sun were created. At dawn, she hides in the cave from Guey, the dominant sun. |
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Above: This segment of the Creation Story in this wall sculpture is not the concept of the First Man & Woman, neither is it Adam and Eve. It represents the successors of the women who abandoned their children and husbands to go off to the Island of Women called Matinino, or No Fathers. (See the illustration below). The First Taino Woman, although created in the Origin Cave of the Jagua (Ha-gwa) or the womb of the Earth. The second set of women was created later from beings without genitalia but was given female parts by a woodpecker. |
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An Illustration of Guahayona, the First Shamam, leaving the women on Matinino. His name means "Our Pride" and his story is about seducing the first Taíno women, taking them away from their husbands and children to an island without men or "Without Fathers". Then he went on to its twin 14k Island of Gold called Guanin. When the Spanish heard this story, they began to look for a collection of Amazons since they would be next door to gold. Once the Taíno story reached Spain, a local writer created the story of La California, an Island of Amazons ruled by the black Queen Kalifia. In 1619, Hernan Cortez, while in what became Baja California, saw tall mountains in the distance, which he named the Island of "La California".
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Above: Two different Jobo (among the First People) versions of the Conservation Story where the belief is that trees are our relatives. At the top are images from the "Taino Creation StoryBook".
Below: Is the image titled, Jobo Tree Spirit (by the author) and is a wall sculpture that represents those First People who disobeyed the order to remain inside the Creation Cave. Since, then, Guey, the Sun, was so powerful that a tragedy would befall anyone who left the cave and ventured outside. Those that did, were turned into stone, and animals, who are all our relatives. So, while the Watchman, Aracoel, had fallen asleep, some people went out to fish and were caught by the sun and turned into trees or Jobos. So, when a person wanted to cut off a tree limb or make a canoe from a ceiba or cottonwood tree they had to first ask the tree spirit's permission to do so. The tree-cutter would promise the spirit to make a cemi icon for the tree's spirit and tend to it from then on. This foresight averted what became the threat of Global Warming when those European invaders who disrespected trees, cut them down for monetary profit.
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Above: (a) This is Guabancex the Angry Woman, Rider of the Wind who is the hurricane in her "S" shape design. Below her are twin accomplices, GuatauBA the lightning and thunder Herald on the left, who announces her pending arrival. To the right is his twin, Coatrisque the Deluge who is the storm's surge that follows.
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| An illustration of Guayaba Maketeurie from my book, Ticky-Ticky's Quest where the young hero visits him in search of the young heroe's missing father, Anansi the Spider-Man. |
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