Abstract
Mythology has been traditionally concerned with accounts of origins, creation stories, the emergence of deities, the supernatural world, all of which provide meaning to a people and can justify the bases of societies. A myth is said to be “the sum of the development of historical tradition.”1 For indigenous peoples, the world is viewed holisti-cally, where everything is connected: “We are instructed to deal with the plants, animals, minerals, human beings and all life as if they were a part of ourselves.”2 Indigenous beliefs and myths often center around a connectedness, stewardship, and reverence for the earth, a responsibility to preserve for future generations. Male and female entities are also seen as dual, complementing each other and in balance. Indigenous Caribbean peoples believed in the Earth Mother—Sky Father duality between these energies. The Earth Mother, Atabei, Atabey, Atabex, or Attabeira, gave birth to Yúcahu Bagua Maórocoti, the Sky or Celestial Father. Yúcahu has no beginning, signifying the belief in a form of reincarnation and immorality. The male being is further not singular in Antillean tradition. This thought contradicts the European interpretation of the early chroniclers, who believed that Yúcahu was equivalent to a monotheistic paternal god in the Christian tradition. Caribbean cultural society and spiritual belief were matriarchal and polytheistic.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Notes
Jan Vansina, Oral Tradition as History (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1985), 167.
Linda Clarkson, Vern Morrissette, and Gabriela Regallet, “Our Responsibility to the Seventh Generation,” in The Post-Development Reader, ed. Majid Rahnema with Victoria Bawtree (Dhaka: University Press Ltd; Cape Town: David Philip; Halifax: Fernwood Publishing; and London and New Jersey: Zed Books, 1997), 41.
Eugenio Fernandez Méndez, Art and Mythology of the Taino Indians of the Greater West Indies (México City: Editorial Libros de México, 1972), 19.
Harry Levin, “Some Meanings of Myth,” in Myth and Mythmaking, ed. Henry A. Murray (Boston: Beacon Press, 1968), 106.
Julian Burger, in Cultural Survival, State of the Peoples: A Global Human Rights Report on Societies in Danger (Boston: Beacon Press, 1993), 6.
James Wilson, The Earth Shall Weep: A History of Native America (New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 1998), xxi.
Vine Deloria, Jr., Red Earth, White Lies: Native Americans and the Myth of Scientific Fact (Golden, CO: Fulcrum Publishing, 1997), 6.
David Stannard points out that among scholars today it is undoubtedly recognized that “numerous complex human communities existed in South America at least 13,000 years ago and in North America at least 6,000 years before that. These are absolute mini-mums. Very recent and compelling archaeological evidence puts the date for earliest human habitation in Chile at 32,000 B.C. or earlier and North American habitation at around 40,000 B.C., while some highly respected scholars contend that the actual first date of human entry into the hemisphere may have been closer to 70,000 B.C.,” in David E. Stannard, American Holocaust: The Conquest of the New World (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 10.
Gananath Obeyesekere, The Apotheosis of Captain Cook: European Mythmaking in the Pacific (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992), 8.
Christopher Columbus, in “The Letter of Columbus (1493),” Wild Majesty: Encounters with Caribs from Columbus to the Present Day, ed. Peter Hulme and Neil L. Whitehead (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), 112–13.
Christopher Columbus, quoted in Oliver Dunn and James E. Kelly, Jr., eds., trans., The Diario of Christopher Columbus’s First Voyage to America, 1492–1493, abstracted by Fray Bartolomé de Las Casas (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1989), 112–13.
Ronald D. Arroyo, “Da Borinkees: The Puerto Ricans of Hawaii” (PhD diss., Union Graduate School, 1977), 7.
For example, see Fray Ramón Pané, An Account of the Antiquities of the Indians (c. 1498), trans. Susan C. Griswold (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999), 31.
Jesse Walter Fewkes, The Aborigines of Porto Rico and Neighboring Islands, 25th Annual Report, B. A. E. (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution, 1907), 65–66.
Tzvetan Todorov, The Conquest of America: The Question of the Other, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Harper & Row, 1984), 97.
Gordon Brotherston, Book of the Fourth World: Reading the Native Americas through Their Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 45.
Vicente L. Rafael, Contracting Colonialism: Translation and Christian Conversion in Tagalog Society Under Early Spanish Rule (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1988), 27.
Walter D. Mignolo, The Darker Side of the Renaissance: Literacy, Territoriality, & Colonization (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1995), 199.
Arnos Kidder Fiske, The West Indies: A History of the Islands of the West Indian Archipelago, Together with an Account of Their Physical Characteristics, Natural Resources and Present Condition (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons; and London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1899), 24.
Luis N. Rivera, A Violent Evangelism: The Political and Religious Conquest of the Americas, trans. by Westminster/John Knox Press (Louisville: Westminster/John Knox Press, 1992), 38.
Lewis Hanke, Aristotle and the American Indians: A Study in Race Prejudice in the Modern World (London: Hollis & Carter, 1959), x.
Paul Gottschalk, ed., The Earliest Diplomatic Documents on America: The Papal Bulls of 1493 and the Treaty of Tordesillas Reproduced and Translated (Berlin: Paul Gottschalk, 1927), 15.
Robert A. Williams, Jr., The American Indian in Western Legal Thought: The Discourses of Conquest (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), 106–7.
Lewis Hanke, The Spanish Struggle for Justice in the Conquest of America (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1949), 151.
Indian comment quoted in A. Garcia, History of the West Indies (London: George G. Harrap & Co., 1965), 23.
Kirkpatrick Sale, The Conquest of Paradise: Christopher Columbus and the Columbian Legacy (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1990), 69.
Edmundo O’Gorman, The Invention of America: An Inquiry into the Historical Nature of the New World and the Meaning of Its History (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1961), 17.
Loida Figueroa Mercado, History of Puerto Rico: From the Beginning to 1892 (New York: L. A. Publishing Company, 1978), 59–60.
Glenn T. Morris, “Vine Deloria, Jr., and the Development of a Decolonizing Critique of Indigenous Peoples and International Relations,” in Native Voices: American Indian Identity and Resistance, ed. Richard A. Grounds, George E. Tinker, and David E. Wilkins (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2003), 108.
Peter Hulme, Colonial Encounters: Europe and the native Caribbean, 1492–1797 (London: Methuen, 1986), 47.
W. Arens, The Man-Eating Myth: Anthropology & Anthropophagy (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979), 51.
Bartolomé de Las Casas, Historia de las Indias, in S. Lyman Tyler, Two Worlds: The Indian Encounter with the European, 1492–1509 (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1988), 124–25.
José Barreiro, The Indian Chronicles (Houston: Arte Público Press, 1993), 36.
Bartolomé de Las Casas, “Historia de las Indias,”‘ in Two Worlds: The Indian Encounter with the European, 1492–1509, ed. S. Lyman Tyler (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1988), 124–25.
Irvince Auguiste, quoted in José Barreiro, “Carib Gallery,” Northeast Indian Quarterly 7, no. 3 (Fall 1990): 50–51.
Roberto Fernández Retamar, Caliban and Other Essays, trans. Edward Baker (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989), 7.
Bernhard Lothar Hörmann, “Extinction and Survival: A Study of the Reaction of Aboriginal Populations to European Expansion” (PhD diss., University of Chicago, 1949), 2–3.
Carl Ortwin Sauer, The Early Spanish Main (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1966), 39.
Bartolomé de Las Casas, The Devastation of the Indies: A Brief Account (1552), trans. Herma Biffault (Baltimore: The John Hopkins University Press, 1992), 43.
Sven Lovén, Origins of the Tainan Culture, West Indies (Göteborg, Sweden: Elanders Bokfryckeri Akfiebolag, 1935), 657.
Manuel Maldonado-Denis, Puerto Rico: A Socio-Historic Interpretation, trans. Elena Vialo (New York: Random House, 1972), 15.
Federico Ribes Tovar, A Chronological History of Puerto Rico (New York: Plus Ultra Educational Publishers, 1973), 16.
Irving Rouse, The Tainos: Rise & Decline of the People Who Greeted Columbus (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1992), 30.
Lynne Guitar, Pedro Ferbel-Azcarate, and Jorge Estevez, “Ocama-Daca Taíno (Hear Me, I Am Taíno): Taíno Survival on Hispaniola, Focusing on the Dominican Republic,” in Indigenous Resurgence in the Contemporary Caribbean: Amerindian Survival and Revival, ed. Maximilian C. Forte (New York: Peter Lang Publishing, 2006), 60.
Lynne A. Guitar, “Cultural Genesis: Relationships among Indians, Africans and Spaniards in Rural Hispaniola, First Half of the Sixteenth Century” (PhD diss., Vanderbilt University, 1998), xv.
Juan González de Mendoza, Historia de las cosas más notables, ritos y costumbres del gran Reyno de la China (1586), quoted in Guitar, Cultural Genesis, 411.
Panchito Ramirez, quoted in Valerie Taliman, “Defying the Myth of Extinction,” American Indian 2, no. 2 (Spring 2001): 19.
Thomas King noted this comment that was once made to him in The Truth About Stories: A Native Narrative (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003), 48.
See Charles Darwin, “On the Extinction of the Races of Man,” The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex (New York: D. Appleton and Co., 1897), 181–92.
George Henry Lane-Fox Pitt-Rivers, The Clash of Culture and the Contact of Races (1927), (New York: Negro Universities Press, 1969), 18.
Woodrow Borah, “The Historical Demography of Aboriginal and Colonial America: An Attempt at Perspective,” in The Native Population of the Americas in 1492, ed. William M. Denevan (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1976), 16.
H. J. Spinden, “The Population of Ancient America,” The Geographical Review 18 (1928): 642–43.
Stephen Cornell and Douglas Hartman, Ethnicity and Race: Making Identities in a Changing World (Thousand Oaks, CA: Pine Forge Press, 2007), 46–47.
Puerto Rico Reconstruction Administration in Co-operation with the Writers’ Program of the Work Projects Administration, Puerto Rico: A Guide to the Island of Boriquén (New York: The University Society, Inc., 1940), 102.
Bishop Diego de Salamanca, in Stan Steiner, The Islands: The Worlds of the Puerto Ricans (New York: Harper & Row, 1974), 16.
Copyright information
© 2011 Tony Castanha
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Castanha, T. (2011). Mythmaking in the Caribbean. In: The Myth of Indigenous Caribbean Extinction. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230116405_2
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230116405_2
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, New York
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-38265-1
Online ISBN: 978-0-230-11640-5
eBook Packages: Palgrave Social Sciences CollectionSocial Sciences (R0)