This collection examines the Taino revival movement, a grassroots conglomeration of Puerto Ricans and other Latinos who promote or have adopted the culture and pedigree of the pre-Columbian Taino Indian population of Puerto Rico and the western Caribbean.

This seminal work was assembled by Dr. Richard Morrow Porrata, a retired professor from the University of Puerto Rico's Multilingual and Cultural Institute Division of Continuing Education. He is a Native American descendant of Taino ancestry. He is presently the administrator for the Taino Descendants of Puerto Rico with FamilyTreeDNA.com and the Chairman for Descendants of Puerto Rico's First Nation. Additionally, he was the national president for the Native American and Alaskan Native Coalition during the Clinton administration. He also served as an ambassador for the Taino people and was a former Taino chief in 1994, and a deputy chief under Paramount Chief Hilary Frederick of the Caribe Indian Nation in 1997. Moreover, he is a Doctorate Fellow of Walden University. Dr. Morrow has been fascinated with his Taino ancestry since childhood when his Puerto Rican mother told him that her mother's side of the family were Taino Indians. After moving to Puerto Rico in 1991 from the Continental United States he was surprised to find out that many Puerto Ricans believed that the Taino Indians had all dissapeared 500 years ago. This led Dr. Morrow on a quest to conduct genealogical research to prove his mother's words by acquiring documented evidence in the form of vital statistics that not only identified ancestors as indigenous but also a paper trail that led his native roots straight back to the Indiera, the last known Taino settlement in Puerto Rico written about by the famous historian Dr. Salvador Brau. Moreover, the age of DNA proved without a doubt that his mother's lineage was indeed Native American, which National Geographic stated went back some 30,000 years to some of the first people who enter the Americas. This intrigued Dr. Morrow so much that he continued digging deeper by not only using historic documents but studying Native American pottery for several years; not to become a potter but to learn the engineering process behind ceramics such as local materials and designs used in the construction of clay vessels. By using his maternal DNA results along with his knowledge of Native American pottery, he was able to trace an Ostionoid lineage out of Puerto Rico going back to the Mississippi River and Ohio River valleys. Not only did he trace a native lineage going back to the Mississippi and Hopewell cultures but he broaden his investigation by proving an indigenous presence on the island of Puerto Rico by going forward starting from the year 1797; a date that most historians thought was the last documented evidence of Indian people living on the island. He made several discoveries such as allocating an old 1817 militia roll from San German, Puerto Rico that identifies 382 Indian soldiers with their full names and ranks. Dr. Morrow devotes an entire chapter in honor of these soldiers. This is the first historic book about Puerto Rico that gives a written account about the existence of these Taino warriors. He discribes, beyond a shadow of a doubt, an American Indian existence in Puerto Rico into the 20th Century by presenting government documents of that era from both local and federal archives. Dr. Morrow's research took many years that has added up into thousands of hours. He includes all of his technics and discoveries into this book so that anyone who has an oral history of being Taino can learn how to validate their Taino lineage supported by documented evidence without having to spend decades researching as he has done. In his book he explains his research methods from acquiring documents, to DNA matching, and the use of ArcheoCeramic technology.. He explains in detail how to use direct and indirect evidence as tools for proving one's Taino lineage. This book is not only a valuable resource for the Taino descendant of Puerto Rican heritage but it can also benefit people from the Bahamas, Cuba, Dominican Republic, Haiti, and Jamaica who may also have a family oral history of being Taino.

This book debunks one of the greatest myths ever told in Caribbean history: that the indigenous peoples who encountered a very lost Christopher Columbus are 'extinct.' Through the uncovering of recent ethnographical data, the author reveals extensive narratives of Jíbaro Indian resistance and cultural continuity on the island of Borikén.

Elizabeth DeLoughrey invokes the cyclical model of the continual movement and rhythm of the ocean (‘tidalectics’) to destabilize the national, ethnic, and even regional frameworks that have been the mainstays of literary study. The result is a privileging of alter/native epistemologies whereby island cultures are positioned where they should have been all along—at the forefront of the world historical process of transoceanic migration and landfall. The research, determination, and intellectual dexterity that infuse this nuanced and meticulous reading of Pacific and Caribbean literature invigorate and deepen our interest in and appreciation of island literature. —Vilsoni Hereniko, University of Hawai‘i "Elizabeth DeLoughrey brings contemporary hybridity, diaspora, and globalization theory to bear on ideas of indigeneity to show the complexities of ‘native’ identities and rights and their grounded opposition as ‘indigenous regionalism’ to free-floating globalized cosmopolitanism. Her models are instructive for all postcolonial readers in an age of transnational migrations." —Paul Sharrad, University of Wollongong, Australia Routes and Roots is the first comparative study of Caribbean and Pacific Island literatures and the first work to bring indigenous and diaspora literary studies together in a sustained dialogue. Taking the "tidalectic" between land and sea as a dynamic starting point, Elizabeth DeLoughrey foregrounds geography and history in her exploration of how island writers inscribe the complex relation between routes and roots. The first section looks at the sea as history in literatures of the Atlantic middle passage and Pacific Island voyaging, theorizing the transoceanic imaginary. The second section turns to the land to examine indigenous epistemologies in nation-building literatures. Both sections are particularly attentive to the ways in which the metaphors of routes and roots are gendered, exploring how masculine travelers are naturalized through their voyages across feminized lands and seas. This methodology of charting transoceanic migration and landfall helps elucidate how theories and people travel, positioning island cultures in the world historical process. In fact, DeLoughrey demonstrates how these tropical island cultures helped constitute the very metropoles that deemed them peripheral to modernity. Fresh in its ideas, original in its approach, Routes and Roots engages broadly with history, anthropology, and feminist, postcolonial, Caribbean, and Pacific literary and cultural studies. It productively traverses diaspora and indigenous studies in a way that will facilitate broader discussion between these often segregated disciplines.

Finalist for the PEN/Robert Bingham Fellowship for Writers It is the mid-1800s. Fela, taken from Africa, is working at her second sugar plantation in colonial Puerto Rico, where her mistress is only too happy to benefit from her impressive embroidery skills. But Fela has a secret. Before she and her husband were separated and sold into slavery, they performed a tribal ceremony in which they poured the essence of their unborn child into a very special stone. Fela keeps the stone with her, waiting for the chance to finish what she started. When the plantation owner approaches her, Fela sees a better opportunity for her child, and allows the man to act out his desire. Such is the beginning of a line of daughters connected by their intense love for one another, and the stories of a lost land. Mati, a powerful healer and noted craftswoman, is grounded in a life that is disappearing in a quickly changing world. Concha, unsure of her place, doesn't realize the price she will pay for rejecting her past. Elena, modern and educated, tries to navigate between two cultures, moving to the United States, where she will struggle to keep her family together. Carisa turns to the past for wisdom and strength when her life in New York falls apart. The stone becomes meaningful to each of the women, pulling them through times of crisis and ultimately connecting them to one another. Dahlma Llanos-Figueroa shows great skill and warmth in the telling of this heartbreaking, inspirational story about mothers and daughters, and the ways in which they hurt and save one another.

For four hundred years--from the first Spanish assaults against the Arawak people of Hispaniola in the 1490s to the U.S. Army's massacre of Sioux Indians at Wounded Knee in the 1890s--the indigenous inhabitants of North and South America endured an unending firestorm of violence. During that time the native population of the Western Hemisphere declined by as many as 100 million people. Indeed, as historian David E. Stannard argues in this stunning new book, the European and white American destruction of the native peoples of the Americas was the most massive act of genocide in the history of the world. Stannard begins with a portrait of the enormous richness and diversity of life in the Americas prior to Columbus's fateful voyage in 1492. He then follows the path of genocide from the Indies to Mexico and Central and South America, then north to Florida, Virginia, and New England, and finally out across the Great Plains and Southwest to California and the North Pacific Coast. Stannard reveals that wherever Europeans or white Americans went, the native people were caught between imported plagues and barbarous atrocities, typically resulting in the annihilation of 95 percent of their populations. What kind of people, he asks, do such horrendous things to others? His highly provocative answer: Christians. Digging deeply into ancient European and Christian attitudes toward sex, race, and war, he finds the cultural ground well prepared by the end of the Middle Ages for the centuries-long genocide campaign that Europeans and their descendants launched--and in places continue to wage--against the New World's original inhabitants. Advancing a thesis that is sure to create much controversy, Stannard contends that the perpetrators of the American Holocaust drew on the same ideological wellspring as did the later architects of the Nazi Holocaust. It is an ideology that remains dangerously alive today, he adds, and one that in recent years has surfaced in American justifications for large-scale military intervention in Southeast Asia and the Middle East. At once sweeping in scope and meticulously detailed, American Holocaust is a work of impassioned scholarship that is certain to ignite intense historical and moral debate.

Decolonizing the Caribbean Record: An Archives Reader is a compendium of forty essays by archivists and academics within and outside of the Caribbean region that address challenges of collecting, representing and preserving the records and cultural expressions of former colonial societies, exploring the contribution of these records to nation-building. How the power of the archives can be subverted to serve the oppressed rather than the oppressors, the colonized rather than the colonizers, is the central theme of this Reader. This collection seeks to disrupt traditional notions of archives, instead re-imagining records within the context of Caribbean cultures and identities where the oral may be privileged over the written, the creative design over text, the marginal over the mainstream. Envisioned initially as a foundational text that supports the archives education program at the University of the West Indies and documents the history and development of archives and records in the Caribbean, this volume addresses such issues as oral traditions, records repatriation, community archives, cultural forms and format and diasporic collections. Although focused on the Caribbean region, the essays, ranging from the theoretical to the practice-based to the personal are applicable to the global archival concerns of all decolonized societies.