Talk:Indigenous peoples of the Caribbean

Latest comment: 1 year ago by Donald Albury in topic Use of "sovereign tribal"

Requires help, articles, references, and the term Quisqueya edit

To a large extent, this article is an overview and not the final site for each of the Indigenous Caribbean People. It is a hub that introduce the general topic and directs readers to the individual main articles. The problem is that many of this ethnic groups do not have their own pages yet. So, for them, this is the only place they have in Wikipedia. I suggest we start working on individual groups but not before we clean up and improve this article.

  • The way the article stands now, it lacks vital sources, and most of the text is written in an ESL prose. So, we need copy-editors to help with the text, and researchers to help with the data and sources.
  • This is mostly a history page with historical topics, and thus we should use as many primary sources as possible. Secondary sources should be used only to refer to debates or if the primary source cannot be cited for lack of reference data. Since most of the historical sources for the topics in this page are already available on the Internet, I suggest we add a link to the source itself for a quick step into the reference.
  • As I have mentioned in my summaries, the term Quisqueya is not an indigenous name of Haiti or Hispaniola. It is a term that Pedro Martir (page 384) thought he heard used among the returnees from the Indies, but it is not verified by any of the cronistas (none). European writers who never put a foot on the island began using it as an indigenous term in the 16th century, borrowing it from Martir. The most used indigenous term, however, was Haiti. In the mid of the 19th century, Dominican patriots began using Quisqueya in order to differentiate their country from Haiti, which had a negative international connotation. After Professor David Patrick Geggus wrote an article/chapter about the indigenous terms for the island, there has been a consensus among historians: See, Geggus:

"Las Casas's firsthand experience of the island dated from nearly a decade later, but his knowledge of the Taino was probably unrivaled among his European contemporaries. Neither he nor the chronicler Oviedo used the term "Quizquella," which some modern scholars consider bogus.' Nevertheless, from the sixteenth to the early eighteenth century, European writers tended to record "Quisqueya" and "Haiti" as alternative aboriginal names for Hispaniola.'y In the course of the eighteenth century, however, "Haiti" began to emerge as the preferred of the two terms. Raynal did not mention "Quisqueya" at all in the three editions of his Histoire des deux Indes.80 Nor did Antonio Alcedo in his Diccionario of 1786. Moreau de Saint-Wry and Sanchez Valverde, also writing in the 1780s, mentioned the two alternatives but tended to privilege 'Haiti.'" David Patrick Geggus

David Patrick Geggus. Haitian Revolutionary Studies (Kindle Locations 3420-3423). Kindle Edition.

Ginetta Calendario supports Geggus claims and to cement the case further, provides more sources from Dominican scholars like Emiliano Tejera: See, See Ginetta Calendario's, Black Behind the Ear, page 281, Note 125. Historian (talk) 21:11, 16 November 2015 (UTC)Reply


For Tejera's source see, Emiliano Tejera, Palabras indijenas de la isla de Santo Domingo, ed., Pedro Henríquez Ureña (Ciudad Trujillo: Ed. del Caribe, 1951), 140.

Comments edit

Taino Ti Donald: You might find it appropriate to keep in mind that I wrote most of that page, I will insert the appropriate references (which already are in the extensive bibliography of that page) after I submit sample chapters of my next book to the publishers today.

One of my ancestors used to sing (notice the spelling of Siboney):

  • Siboney con orgullo me llamo
  • Y soy hijo del sol del del agua
  • Con mi arco y mi linda piragua
  • Soy feliz y no espero otro bien
  • Yo sufro, yo sufro, yo sufire
  • Por volver a mi Cuba querida
  • A Cuba, a Cuba done donde yo naci.

see also:

Ripan S. Malhi,1 Jason A. Eshleman,2 Jonathan A. Greenberg,3 Deborah A. Weiss,2 Beth A. Schultz Shook,2 Frederika A. Kaestle,5 Joseph G. Lorenz,6 Brian M. Kemp,2 John R. Johnson,7 and David Glenn Smith2,4 2002 (accessed 2-2-07) The Structure of Diversity within New World Mitochondrial DNA Haplogroups: Implications for the Prehistory of North America Am J Hum Genet. 2002 April; 70(4): 905–919 [1]


El Jigue 2-20-06-7208.65.188.149 17:42, 20 February 2007 (UTC)Reply

Haplotype study edit

The study cited for the first paragraph in the article, http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/articlerender.fcgi?artid=379119, is based solely on samples from peoples of North America north of Mexico, and thus does not have anything to say about the origins of the peoples of Central or South America or the Caribbean. -- Donald Albury 03:11, 22 February 2007 (UTC)Reply


Este articulo sobre las naciones Neo-Tainas carece de rigor academico y debe ser revisado por especialistas en la materia. Yuri Valdes Alvarez,RPA.----

CLEAN THIS UP edit

After reading this entire article, I noticed that several lines were repeated verbatim in different sections. Also, the article needs to be organized into more useful sections. As it stands now, I don't think even a well educated person would have much of a clue as to what's written. There's a whole lot of people and place names without too much information in between. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 167.7.17.3 (talk) 19:47, 23 June 2008 (UTC)Reply

Seconded, I'll add a clean-up tag. Jalwikip (talk) 08:52, 27 September 2010 (UTC)Reply

One of the worst pages in Wikipedia edit

Everything is repeated in the article once or twice, and this article includes speculation and irrelevant information.99.137.172.32 (talk) 23:11, 15 July 2009 (UTC)Reply

Archaic Age people edit

This new section depends on a National Geographic article. Access to the article requires entering an email address, which I am not yet ready to do (I already receive way too much email). While I believe it is quite plausible that recent DNA evidence supports the presence in the Greater Antilles of hunter-gather people who did not speak an Arawakan language prior to the arrival of Arawakan speakers, such presence has been discussed by archaeologists and linguists for a number of years, and the statement that the DNA evidence "changed some of the traditional beliefs about pre-Columbian indigenous history" does not fairly represent the state of recent scholarly research on the question. Unfortunately, it will be difficult for me at this time to again access the books I read that discuss the pre-Arawakan presence in the Greater Antilles. I will search for on-line reliable sources on the subject, but not today. - Donald Albury 14:45, 4 January 2021 (UTC)Reply

Use of "sovereign tribal" edit

I reverted the replacement of "indigenous" with "sovereign tribal" in two places in the article. Tribal sovereignty is a legal concept applying to the relationship of tribes in the United States with the US federal and state governments. It is undefined outside of that context, i.e., outside of the U.S., or prior to the institution of formal treaties between various indigenous peoples in the U.S. and the U.S. government and its predecessors. The political organization of the indigenous peoples of the Americas took many forms, from small nomadic bands to the Aztec and Incan empires that were invaded by the Spanish. I avoid using "tribe" (which has a limited, but imprecise, definition in anthropological literature) to describe any of those peoples, unless it is part of the official name of the political entity representing them (a phenomenum largely restricted to the U.S.). "Sovereignty" is a modern, Western, concept that I think does not fit well with the political entities of pre-conquest indigenous peoples in the Americas. Donald Albury 13:14, 16 September 2022 (UTC)Reply