This article is part of an ongoing series of stories by ICT examining the complicated issues of Indigenous identity.
José Barreiro
Special to ICT
Taino is an Indigeneity movement. It encompasses a broad range of people throughout the Greater Caribbean islands and their populations in the United States and Canada. As a movement, for some 50 years, family and individual identity has gathered Taino communities of people with ancestral Indigenous roots.
Caribbean Indigenous revitalization represents kinship and consciousness connections to Indio legacies that have persisted among a broad range of Caribbean populations. It has manifested consistently in the United States since the 1970s among people from Puerto Rico, Dominican Republic, Cuba, Jamaica, Haiti, and other places.
Linked with the islands and other places of origin in the vaivén, or the perpetual Caribbean–North America migration loop, Taíno identity revitalization has stimulated many threads of Indigeneity. Taino has gained persistent visibility, increasing in numbers, effect, and reach. Many families and individuals began to regroup and retribalize, forming in associations and yucayeques, or family-tribal groups.
Taino networks generate activities that range from culture and history gatherings and academic conferences to cultural recovery approaches in traditional music and dance, Taíno (insular Arawak) language appreciation and reconstruction, production of ceremonial instruments, featherwork, carving, basketry, and other arts and craft work. Among Dominicano tribes, Higuayawa hosts important scholarly and cultural gatherings.
The Taino movement directly challenged the dictum of “extinction” for Caribbean Indigenous people. This iron-clad assertion by scholars is even inscribed into law at various times and places. Beyond the decimation of the Native populations, the Spanish enforced a type of “whitening” of Indians, almost always linked to extinguishment of Native title to lands.
“Taino” emerged as a favorite term in the self-assertion of continuing Indigeneity. For more than 50 years it has become the favored term of self-ascription. It appears to best encompass the Indigenous descendant populations of the Caribbean, given the severe scattering of the Indigenous communities.
Coming just at a time when the countries of the Caribbean are confronted with massive cultural invasion, and with the intensifying destruction of their natural ecologies, the thrust of Indigenized identity has deepened and expanded. Particularly among Puerto Rican and Dominican groups, the Taíno movement emerges within a context of pronounced cultural identity revitalization and Indigenous rights.
A Taino organization, the United Confederation of Taino Peoples, fields delegates to United Nations gatherings, often representing the International Indian Treaty Council, which links many North American tribes in its United Nations work. Although less pronounced as a “movement” in the island countries of Haiti and Jamaica, various groups of extended families also assert Indigenous legacy and identify as Amerindian or as Taíno descendants.
In the five decades of increasingly active and public Caribbean Indigeneity, people with many backgrounds and nationalities have reconnected. Some as relocated or migrated kinship groups, others as intentional communities; many as projects organized to specific themes and activities. These have formed and re-formed, some into formidable communities, both land-based and electronic. Often they are identified as yucayeques, in the ancestral form.
Importantly, and most satisfying to me, in the late 1980s, our remote mountain communities of Eastern Cuba reached out to the inter-island Taino movement. Our historical, land-based, agricultural communities represent a documented continuity of large “indio” settlements — hiding places that became Indian territory, the Indian mountain. The present cacique, Francisco Ramirez, humbly carries his title in an actual line of hereditary caciques, traceable to the 1660s. Mountain communities such as La Rancheria and La Escondida, among many others that were relocated to the high ranges from the early 1800s, are increasingly recognized for their continuity of ancestral consciousness, and strong contemporary spiritual and economic culture.
Notwithstanding some academic rejection, numerous scholars of high standing have understood the continuing Caribbean ethnogenesis and have been re-energized by the Taino movement. This has spawned creative and intellectual as well as community-development collaborations on important new Caribbean Indigeneity themes.
There is a wide range of bases for tainage – some more cohesive and grounded than others. As with any cultural identity movement, there will be individuals who are given to racialist tendencies and bigoted behavior. Some people will attempt to reclaim a cultural identity as if it was a label to be worn on the forehead, one with which to deny other people their identities.
The subjugation of the ancestral Caribbean Indigenous (Taíno) identity and culture by Spanish imperial and colonial practice had long term impacts in denying people’s Indigeneity, particularly disassociating people from primary relationship with the land. The resurgence of Indigeneity digs beyond colonialist definitions and re-associates nationalism with living on the land — both symbolically and in actuality, an ecosystemic and/or agroecological practice.
Despite the academic controversies around it — as a movement, along with the thinking, research, discussions, and community — the Taíno resurgence has both deepened and expanded, even regaining and respawning numerous land-based communities. Parallel to the many hemispheric processes, a promising decoloniality is detectable in Taino Indigeneity. The assertion is nearly always made in challenge of the intents determined in the conquista mindset of European and other empires in the Americas, to diminish the Indigenous identity and culture.
While 500 hundred years of European and African, later global, infusion added waves of influence to the ethno-development of Caribbean peoples, nevertheless, in inherited Taino language terminologies in home architecture, in foods and agriculture, in herbal medicinal remedies (green medicine) and in the persistence of campesino and even urban people’s use of natural world knowledge, including in its spiritual or metaphysical connections, our Indigenous legacy persists. It continually reappears as a foundational, elemental layer in the national identities of all three Spanish-speaking countries, as well as Haiti and Jamaica.
The guajiro or indio or jibaro or maroon ethnogenesis all experienced the same blending process, the same palenque history of Indians — Taino communities — taking in runaway Iberian peasants and Black cimarrons escaped from slavery, all ethnias of people “going to the Indian” in the formative decades of the conquest, learning from a material culture model gifted by the Taino ancestors, particularly the matriline, one that has sustained throughout most of the colony, a discernable and significant amount of it even to the present day.
José Barreiro (Hatueyael) is a Taino author and Smithsonian Institution Scholar Emeritus. Barreiro’s most recent book, “CUBA: INDIGENEITY – The Cacique’s Orality and other Taino Trails,” was published by Guani Press, New York, in 2025.