Deminán's Journey: Exploring the Indigenous Caribbean...one island at a time
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Although it took some time to procure a copy and finally read the complete translation, The General History of Peru : Book 1 by Martín de Murúa is a must-read. Written and featuring useful footnotes and commentaries by Bauer, Gamarra, and Gonzales Lombardi, the text features a very useful introduction contextualizing the history of the manuscript and its relationship with an earlier text by Murúa.…
The island on the Axis Mundi with San Juan de la Maguana as the center of the world (in Valmé, Atabey, Yucayequey, Caney : 6000 ans d'amenagement territorial prehispanique sur l'ile d'Ayiti / Haiti/ Republique Dominicaine ). Exploring the history of the cacicazgo of Maguana is exceedingly difficult. Caonabo, its leader at the time of Columbus's arrival in Hispaniola is one of the few figures from…
Eastern part of Hispaniola (including Caizcimu and Higuey) from the 1517 Morales Map . Higüey, or Caizcimu, the eastern part of Hispaniola, represents another region that hosted a major cacicazgo in the time of Columbus. But when one examines surviving documentary evidence, the theory of a paramount chiefdom in eastern Hispaniola becomes much weaker or ambiguous. Instead, as Alice Samson has…
Although we are not usually interested in neo-Tainos, we do find them occasionally interesting. Here, in part of a travel Youtuber's video, one can see a group meeting at the important site of Caguana to engage in an areito . And they clearly did some research. One who has read Las Casas and Oviedo can immediately detect their influence in how this group imagines the areito dance. Indeed, there's…
Something we have been thinking about lately is the so-called kuisa . An important part of the cohoba ritual since participants had to purge themselves before the ceremony, we have never heard this word kuisa before. It would be interesting to know where the Museo del Barrio found this word since we have not encountered any Spanish sources from the early colonial period using it. Was it taken from…
From Oral to Written Expression: Native Andean Chronicles of the Early Colonial Period is a dense collection of short essays on indigenous chroniclers or history writers of colonial Peru. Some essays require familiarity with Quechua linguistics and oral literatures since the essayists seek to explore how indigenous worldviews, languages, and ideas shaped the production of chronicles or relations…
What follows below are reading reflections and thoughts on various chronicles or texts written in the 1500s and 1600s on the Incas, written over the course of the last few years. Included also in the compilation are a singular play composed in Quechua, supposedly dating from the Inca period, as well as a treatise on idolatry in colonial Peru. As of now, we have yet to procure a physical copy of…
Although not immediately useful for our primary interests, we found the maps of the insular Caribbean in Alonso de Santa Cruz's Islario general de todas las islas del mundo fascinating. We are primarily interested in indigenous toponyms in the Greater Antilles, for which the map of of Hispaniola is perhaps the most detailed or useful.
We really enjoyed this lecture by Lawrence Waldron on indigenous Caribbean art. Besides Arrom and Eugenio Fernandez Mendez, the only other author whose works we've read on "Taino" art and material culture is Ostapkowicz. We don't count Osvaldo García-Goyco's work here since his speculative attempt to link Taino art and symbolism with Mesoamerica was even less successful than Fernandez Mendez's…
El cacique Guariones defendió con patriotismo, luchando con heroísmo aunque falleció más tarde. Borinquen vencida es decía con aflicción y con desesperación; clamó nobles traidores no caben vuestras labores del árbol del corazón. The final part of a décima from Puerto Rico referring to a cacique named Guarionex and his resistance to the Spanish conquest. Unfortunately, J. Alden Mason and Aurelio…
