Arawak

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 Arawak woman (John Gabriel Stedman)
The term Arawak (from aru, the Lokono word for cassava flour), was used to
designate some of the peoples encountered by the Spanish in the West Indies in
1492 and thereafter. These include the Taíno, who occupied the Greater Antilles
and the Bahamas (Lucayan), the Nepoya and Suppoyo of Trinidad and the Igneri, who
were supposed to have preceded the Caribs in the Lesser Antilles, together with
related groups (including the Lokono) which lived along the eastern coast of South
America, as far south as what is now Brazil. The group belongs to the Arawakan
language family and they were the natives Christopher Columbus encountered when
he first landed in the Americas. The Spanish described them as a peaceful primitive
people.

First European encounter

Columbus, in his log
http://www.archive.org/stream/voyageofchristop005194mbp/voyageofchristop0051
94mbp_djvu.txt, noted:
"They brought us barrels of cotton thread and parrots and other little things which it
would be tedious to list, and exchanged everything for whatever we offered them...
I kept my eyes open and tried to find out if there was any gold, and I saw that
some of them had a little piece hanging from a hole in their nose. I gathered from
their signs that if one goes south, or around the south side of the island, there is a
king with great jars full of it, enormous amounts. I tried to persuade them to go
there, but I saw that the idea was not to their liking... They would make fine
servants... With fifty men we could subjugate them all and make them do whatever
we want."

Economy
On the islands of the Caribbean, the Taino very easily grew crops in conucos,
large mounds of earth employed as planting beds for vegetable farming. They
packed the conuco with leaves to provide nutrition and prevent soil erosion. They
planted a large variety of crops to ensure that some of them would grow, and ripen
regardless of the season. Yuca (cassava) was a staple food, and grows with
minimal care in the tropical climate. The Taino also grew maize, unusual for
Caribbean islanders. They used large, stable, slow rafts for trade to the
Mesoamerican civilizations and inter-island travel but used smaller, faster but less
stable canoes for intra-island shore travel. Taino women did all the agricultural and
craft work at home, whereas the men were generally warriors.

Culture
Since the agriculture and trade was so good, the Taíno had plenty of extra time to
make crafts and play games. One of these games called Areyto, which included
religious ceremonies as well as a game similar to soccer was played in the Batéy,
a sort of arena-like field flanked by huge, standing stones depicting images of the
Taino religion. With plenty of leisure, the Taíno devoted their energy to creative
activities such as pottery, basket weaving, cotton weaving, stone tools and even
stone sculpture. Men and women painted their bodies and wore jewelry made of
gold, stone, bone, and shell. They also participated in informal feasts and dances.
The Taíno drank alcohol made from fermented corn, and used tobacco in religious
ceremonies.

The Taino developed the hammock (the name derives from the Taíno term
hamaca), which was first encountered by the Spaniards on Hispaniola.

Hammocks were readily adopted as a convenient means to increase the crew

capacity of ships and improved the sanitary conditions of the sleeping quarters; old
straw — which was commonly used for bedding in earlier times, quickly became
rotten and infested by parasites in the damp, cramped crew quarters of sailing
ships. Cotton cloth hammocks could be easily washed if they became soiled and
were strong and durable.

Religion, government, foreign affairs

The Arawak had organized systems of religion and government. They believed in
good and evil spirits, which could inhabit human bodies and natural objects. They
sought to influence these spirits through their priests or shamans.

The Arawak's political system was hierarchical, in which the islands were broken
up into groups; each island in turn was divided into petty states ruled by tribal
chiefs known as caciques. These states were in turn divided into districts ruled by
a sub-chief, with each village ruled by a head-man.
 Their socio-political rivals within the Caribbean were the Caribs and the Ciboneys.
The Caribs were considered aggressive, while the Ciboneys were considered
docile. The Arawak used the Ciboney for slave labor. The Arawak treated the
peaceful Ciboney as a subject people, having already pushed them to the extreme
fringes of their territory. The Carib were attempting to expand their territory in the
Lesser Antilles, which entailed the ethnic cleansing of the Ciboney and Arawak
people, as the Caribs were known to torture and kill all non-Carib males, taking the
females as slave-wives.

Population decline
The virgin soil epidemic caused by the arrival of smallpox and other diseases from
Europe, combined with Spain's harsh policies of enslavement, resettlement and
the separation of families, the encomienda system, resulted in Taino society's drastic
decline within a few decades after contact. Attacks by Carib tribes and unrelenting
harsh treatment by the Europeans accelerated the process. Although Taino society
was destroyed by European expansion, some of their bloodlines persist among the
new settlers, primarily Western and African peoples.

Recent DNA studies indicate that the majority of people in Puerto Rico are
descended in part from Taino/Arawakan ancestors.

Survivors
While only the Carib remain among the original Antillean populations of Ciboney,
Taino, and Carib, the Arawak have survived on mainland South America. Some
2,450 (1980 census) reside in Venezuela, Guyana, Suriname, and French
Guyana, with 2,051 living in Suriname alone .

The majority of the populations of Aruba, Puerto Rico, and Dominican Republic, and
part of the Haitian population, are descended in part from the Arawaks — Taino in
the case of the Dominican Republic and Puerto Rico and to a much smaller degree
the Ciboneys in the case of Haiti. The Ciboneys represent an earlier pre-Arawakan
group that was found throughout the Caribbean. They were pushed out of the
smaller islands of the Lesser Antilles and to the far west of the island of Hispaniola
by the Tainos. The remaining Hispaniolan population was Arawakanized in
speech. Taíno/Arawakan Language is spoken in Jamaica, Haiti, the Dominican
 Republic, Cuba, the Bahamas, Saint Lucia, Grenada by a few people in the
present.

In Cuba, however, the Guanajabateys (the original name of the Ciboneys)

continued speaking their original tongue. Columbus' interpreter (who was a Taino)
couldn't understand them when Columbus landed in Cuba. The name "Ciboney"
was given to these people by the Tainos in Hispaniola. The Tainos used the
remnant Ciboney populations for slave labour. There are also Arawak survivor
populations in Saint Lucia and a few other areas of the Caribbean. There are a few
full-blooded Arawaks in Cuba, the Dominican Republic, Haiti , Jamaica, Puerto
Rico, the Bahamas and Grenada. Also there are a few isolated communities in the
Amazonian Basin of Guyana, Brazil, Bolivia and Venezuela. The Arawaks also
loved their homes and kept them clean and in good repair.

See also
 Arawakan languages
 Carib
 Cariban languages
 Ciboney
 Garifuna
 Jean La Rose
 List of indigenous names of Eastern Caribbean islands
 Maipurean languages
 Taíno