Taino and Kalinago

draw from the book Crossroads of conglomerate The European-Caribbean Connection, 1492-1992, by Alan Gregor Cobely pgs 23-30 TAINO AND KALINAGO RESISTANCE TO EUROPEANS According to recent archaeological evidence, the Kalinago were the last migrant group to wane in the Caribbean prior to the arrival of the Europeans in 1492. The capital of Ohio mission tack together tercet native groups, of antithetic derivation and pagan attainments, however all of whom entered the Caribbean from the region of southeast America k promptlyn as the Guianas. These were the Ciboney, the Taino (Arawaks) and the Kalinago.The Ciboney had arrived most 300 B. C. , followed by the Taino, their ethnic relatives, well-nigh 500 years afterward and who by 650 A. D. had migrated northwards through the islands establishing large communities in the greater Antilles. Starting their migration into the islands from about kibibyte A. D. , Kalinagos were still arriving at the age of the Columbus landfall. They were also in the process of establishing dominate over territory and communities occupied by Tainos in the lesser antilles, and trim offs of the great Antilles.When the Spanish arrived in the northern Caribbean, therefore, they found the Tainos to slightly extent already on the defensive, but later encountered Kalinagos whom they describe as more(prenominal)(prenominal) brisk for aggression. Kalinagos, like their Taino cousins and predecessors, had been inhabiting the islands longsighted enough to perceive them as part of their natural, ancestral, survival purlieu. As a result, they prepared themselves to def wind up their homeland in a spirit of defiant patriotism, having wished that the Europeans had never set foot in their country. From the outset, however, European colonial forces were technologically more prepared for a violent struggle for space since in real terms, the Columbus mission equal in addition to the maritime courage and determination of Europe, the m obilisation of large outstrip finance capital, and of science and technology for imperialistic host ends. This process was also helped by the frenzied search for identity and orbicular ranking by Europeans through the triumph and cultural negation of new(prenominal) races.In the greater Antilles, Tainos offered a spirited but largely otiose military resistivity to the Spanish tear down though on occaision they were supported by the Kalinago. This was particularly clear in the former(a) sixteenth century in the grammatical case of the struggle for Puerto Rico in which Kalinagos from neighbouring St. Croix came to Taino assistance. In 1494, Columbus lead an armed party of 400 men into the interior of Hispaniola in search of food, gilt and slaves to which Taino caciques mobilised their armies for foeman.Guacanagari, a hint cacique, who had tried previously to negotiate an accomodating dependency with military commander Alonso de Ojeba, marched un no-hitly in 1494 with a few thousand me on the Spanish. In 1503, another forty caciques were captured at Hispaniola and burnt-out alive by governor Ovandos troops Anacaona, the principal cicique was hung publicly in Santo Domingo. In Puerto Rico, the Spanish settlement party, led by Ponce de Leon, was attacked frequently by Taino warriors many Spanish settlers were killed but Tainos and Kalinagos were defeated and crushed in the counter assault.In 1511, subway system in Cuba, led by cacique Hatuey, was put down he was captured and burnt alive another rising in 1529 was also crushed. In these struggles, Taino fatalities were high. Thousands were killed in competitiveness and publicly executed for the purpose of time out the spirit of bo take placed resistor some rebels fled to the mountains and forests where they established maroon settlements that go on intermittently the war against the Spanish.By the middle of the the sixteenth century, however, Taino and Kalinago subway system had been stro ngly crushed in the Greater Antilles their community structures smashed, and members reduced to various forms of immurement in Spanish agricultural and exploit enterprises. In the Lesser Antilles, however, the Kalinago were more successful in defying first the Spanish, and then(prenominal) later the English and cut, thereby preserving their political emancipation and maintaining control of their territory. As the labor run on Espanola declines, attention turned to the Confederate islands which from St. Croix, neighbouring Puerto Rico, to the Guianas were inhabited by the Kalinagos. Spanish kinglike edicts dated November 7, 1508 and July 3, 1512, authorised settlers to capture and subjugate Kalinagos on the island of Los Barbudos (Barbados), Dominica, Matinino (Martinique), Santa Lucia, San Vincente, La Asuncion (Grenada), and Tavaco (Tobago), because of their resistance to Christians. By the end of the sixteenth century, however, the Spanish had decided, having accepted as fact the absense of gold in the Lesser Antilles, and the inevitability of gigantic fatalities at the hands of Kalinago warriors, that it was wiser to adopt a hands off policy while concentrating their efforts in the Greater Antilles. As a result, the Greater and Lesser Antilles became politically separated at this time by what Troy Floyd described as a poison pointer curtain. The English and french initiating their colonizing missions during the early 17th century, therefore, had a clear choice. They could either gift the Spanish north of the poison arrow curtain or Kalinago forces south of it. Either way, they pass judgment to encounter considerable organized aremed resistance. They chose the latter, partially because of the perception that Kalinagos were the weaker, but also because of the sentiment that Kalinagos were the common enemy of all Europeans and that solidarity could be strived for collective military operations against them.Having secured some shift from the pressures of Spanish colonization by the end of the sixteenth century, then, Kalinagos were immediately confronted by the more economically aggressive and militarily laid English and French colonists. Once again, they began to excite their communities in preparation for counter strategies. This time, it would be a clear case of resistance on the retreat. B the 1630s, their rapidly decrease numbers were being consolidated close to a smaller group of especially chosen islands mostly in the Windwards but also in the against the winds.By this time, for instance, Barbados, identified in a Spanish document of 1511 as an island densely populated with Kalinagos, no womb-to-tomb had a native presence. Europeans understood the signification of this reorganization and resettlement of Kalinago communities, and established their babe colonies in peripheral parts of the Leeward Islands where their presence was less formidable, and in Barbados where it was now absent. The English and Frenc h then were sensitive that most of their settlement would have to tot to terms with Kalinago resistance. his expectation, however, did not deter them, and they continued to seek out island niches where an powerful basis could be gained until such time as Kalinago forces could be subdued and destroyed by their respective imperial forces. The English and French sought the passification of the Kalinago for two distinct, but associate reasons, and over time adopted different strategies and methods but maintained the ideologic prepare that they should be enslaved, driven out, or exterminated.First, lands occupied by the Kalinago were invited for large exceed commodity production inside the expansive, capitalist, northerly Atlantic agrarian complex. The effective consolidation of the Caribbean into this mercantile and productive system require the appropriation of land through the authorisation of the plantation enterprise Finance capital, then sought to revolutionize the mark et look on of Kalinago lands by making them available to European commerical interests.By resisting land confiscation Kalinagos were therefore confronting the full-of-the-moon ideological and economic force of Atlantic capitalism. Second, European economic activities in the CAribbean were base upon the enslavement of Indigenes and imported Africans. The principal power and relation assigned to these and other non-Europeans deep down the colonial formation was that of servitude. Europeans in the Lesser Antilles, however, were not successful in reduce an economic number of Kalinago to chattle slavery, or other forms of servitude.Unlike the Taino, their dig out could not be effectively commodified, simply because their communities proved impossible to subdue. It was not that the Kalinago were more militant than the Taino. Rather it was because the erratic nature of their small communities and their emphasis upon territorial acquisition, in part a retort to the geographical fea tures of the Lesser Antilles, enabled them to make more effective use fo the environment in a strike and sail resistance strategy.Kalinago, then, while not prepared to renounce either land or labour to Europeans, were better placed to implement effective counter-aggression. Primarily becuase of their irrepressible war of resistance, which frighten all Europeans in the region, Kalinago were targeted first for an ideological campaign in which they were established within the European mind, not as fearful savages, as was the case with the less effective Taino, but as vicious cannibals worthwhile of extermination within the context of genocidal military expeditions. Voluminous details were prepared by Spanish and later English and French colonial choroniclers on the political and ideological mentality of the Kalinago, most of whom called for holy wars against les sauvages as a principal way to achieve their subjugation.This literature, dating back to Columbus in 1494, in a contradic tory fashion, denied Kalinago mankind while at the same time outlined their general anti-colonial and anti-slavery consciournes and attitudes. In the books of many Europeans of the seventeenth century, the Kalinago are presented as a people who could prefer to die of hunger than live as a slave. Excerpt from the book Crossroads of Empire The European-Caribbean Connection, 1492-1992, by Alan Gregor Cobely pgs 23-30