"The Taíno people met Christopher Columbus and his fleet upon initial arrival to the Caribbean Islands in 1492; and, soon after contact, the Taíno endured slavery and genocide at the hand of the Spanish. As a result of Spanish brutalization, the Taíno population declined, and at a certain point it became beneficial to European colonizers to deny any Indigenous survival in the Islands as a means to bolster the terra nullius justification of conquest. The denial of Indigenous survival in European accounts became the basis for the extinction narrative that has persisted through the present day; however, over the last several decades, there has been a rise in the reclamation of the Taíno identity by Indigenous descendants in the Caribbean and the United States. The rise in reclamation, termed “The Taíno Movement,” is evidence of the need for more historical scholarship on the Indigenous Caribbean, as is the general disciplinary trend away from dominant narratives and toward resistant readings of archives alongside interdisciplinary methodologies, such as archaeology and ethnography. The current research on the Indigenous Caribbean during early Spanish colonization is largely limited to studies of Indigenous slavery as a precursor to African slavery in the Americas. My research emphasizes the life of Taíno people in the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Greater Antilles outside the context of slavery and, instead, concerns questions of Indigenous ontology, resistance, and survivance."
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