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The Taino People of the Caribbean Are NOT Extinct

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Bianca
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« Reply #30 on: March 01, 2008, 06:43:23 am »









Whither progress?



Did the Spanish (read the West) represent progress to the Indian peoples? Did Indian people advance as a result of the great encounter? Or was there possibly something the West might have learned from the American indigenous peoples? The Indian populations had little opportunity to teach their culture to the newcomers. The encomienda system, which distributed whole tribes outright to conquistadores for working gold mines and tilling soil, destroyed the Tainos and surrounding peoples with genocidal tempo. Swept aside, the Indian populations retreated to remote areas as their civilization was truncated and their ancient communal patterns were destroyed. Five hundred years later, it might be appropriate to appreciate what more we might have now known, had their humanity been respected and their social-cultural knowledge intelligently understood.

That the Tainos (the term actually describes the sachem families from among the island Arawaks) could keep their quite numerous people strong and well fed, yet prescribe both agriculture and fisheries of a reduced scale, and using the softest of technologies, reaped sufficient yet sustainable yields of food, housing, and other resources, is a significant achievement. Labeled as "primitive" and "backward," even today, it has boen arguably not improved upon.

The label "primitive" is almost always a denigrating assignation. In academic historical thinking, the so-called "primitive peoples," whether in their "savage" and "barbaric" stages, were of a lesser time (the past) from which we (the humans) are thought to have progressed. however, in contemporary development theory, the most "advanced" thinking uniformly incorporates "scale" and the concept of "appropriate technologies." Such new fields as "sustainable agriculture" and "eco-systems management," and the theoretics of "no growth" are establishing themselves in colleges and universities. Their applicability and practicability in a world of fragile ecologies are increasingly accepted. Taino life, in fact, most of what heretofore has been branded as "primitive" and thus not worth emulating about indigenous cultures, is viewed in a totally different light as humankind enters the twenty-first century. "Primitiveness" which should only define a people's "primary" relationship with nature, might be seen as a positive human value and activity in these ecologically precarious times.
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