I.
369 I Indigenous Religions Myth and the colonial encounter The religions of the indigenous peoples of the Caribbean can be loosely grouped in terms of the three basic culture areas that characterized the region when Europeans arrived: the Taíno, based on large-scale organized settlements to be found mainly in the Greater Antilles (Cuba, Jamaica, Hispaniola [see Dominican Republic; Haiti], and Puerto Rico) but also influencing the Bahamas and parts of the Leeward Islands; Arawakan- and Cariban-speaking peoples (see Arawak and Carib Religions), associated with smaller communal settlements stretching through the Lesser Antilles (including Antigua, Dominica, Martinique and Guadeloupe, Saint Vincent, Barbados, Grenada, Tobago, Trinidad, St. Martin, and Curaçao [see Netherlands Antilles]) to the South American mainland (Guyana, Guyane, and Suriname as well as parts of Brazil and Venezuela); and the Maya, a once highly developed, hierarchical culture that stretched from Mexico’s Yucatán through Belize and Central America. Each of these three culture areas had its own internal ethnic differentiations and tensions. Furthermore, although culturally and linguistically different, there was contact between the Taínos and the Kalinagos or Island Caribs in terms of both trade and conflict. It is also notable that the Taínos held ceremonial games in specially constructed ball courts or plazas (bateys), as did the Mayas and other Mesoamerican peoples. There is some linguistic and archaeological evidence to indicate that the Taínos shared aspects of an ancestral past in the Orinoco Valley with the Arawak and Carib group (Rouse 1992, 34–37, 40–42). However, Reid (2009, 59–68, 74) argues that the Taínos of Cuba and Hispaniola were more strongly influenced by a Casmiroid-Ostinoid ancestral past that emerged out of Central America. The Taínos of Puerto Rico may have had a more syncretic cultural influence, combining the Casmiroid-Ostinoid influence from Central America with the Saladoid culture of the eastern Caribbean, which has its origins in Venezuela. The Taínos, argues Reid, “did not migrate from South America but evolved indigenously in the Caribbean, emerging around A.d. 1200 as a product of distinct types of ancestral societies and multiple historical processes ” (74). More than ancestral and cultural connections, however, the indigenous cultures of the Caribbean shared a similar worldview. In the precolonial indigenous cultures of the Americas, religion was central to all aspects of life, and there was no divide between the sacred and the secular (Duran and Duran 1995, 15). Relationships between individual human beings and between human beings and nature were mediated by spiritual forces that represented the very possibility of existence. Despite varying social structures and power relations , an ethic of reciprocity linked human beings to each other, to nature, and to the spirit world (Stevens-Arroyo 2006, 135).Gender parallelism provided that women as well as men had access to leadership roles in the society, although they did not necessarily share the same roles (Stevens-Arroyo 2006, 153). Life was a continuous process that carried on after death; the dead simply moved into a different realm of existence from where they could influence the world of the living (Gustafson 1997, 31). Religious specialists had the responsibility of strengthening and sustaining the relationships between the spirit world and the human and natural worlds. In essence, human beings played a central role in ensuring that the natural, human, and spiritual worlds were in balance. If nature was unproductive or if human beings were in crisis, it was because the positive flow of relationships had broken down, the spirit world needed to be propitiated, and balance had to be restored. The problem for researchers today is that Western ontologies and epistemologies are not always compatible with indigenous ones. Conclusions are drawn from historical records, archaeological findings, and anthropological research , but community input is not always included. The problem of interpretation is all the more complex because of the decline or outright destruction of civilizations and cultures in the Americas, the divergent ways in which cultures reproduced themselves after contact with Europeans, and the continuing impact of the written word on the indigenous communities that are alive and vital today. Christopher Columbus may have been the first European to construct the central duality through which the indigenous peoples of the Caribbean would be misnamed and misunderstood. However , there would be many others to follow. The November 26 entry in the diary of Columbus’s first voyage (1492–93) states that the “cowardly” people Columbus had met (the Taínos) “have extreme fear of the...
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