There are any number of places within this article to raise questions; but to keep it simple, let's look at one.
From the cited article:
Each October, my students reviewed what they learned in third grade about Christopher Columbus. Then I would read “Encounter” to provide them with a different point of view. The children’s book is told through the eyes of a young Taino boy recounting the Italian explorer’s arrival, and the ensuing enslavement and brutality he unleashed on the native people. My students were simultaneously fascinated and shocked, leading most to write essays about why Columbus Day should no longer be celebrated.
"Encounter" is a book written by Jane Yolen. An excerpt from her
wikipedia entry:
Jane Hyatt Yolen was born on February 11, 1939, at Beth Israel Medical Center in Manhattan. She is the first child of Isabell Berlin Yolen, a psychiatric social worker who became a full-time mother and homemaker upon Yolen's birth, and Will Hyatt Yolen, a journalist who wrote columns at the time for New York newspapers,[6] and whose family emigrated from the Ukraine to the United States.[1] Isabell also did volunteer work, and wrote short stories in her spare time. However, she was not able to sell them. Because the Hyatts, the family of Yolen's grandmother, Mina Hyatt Yolen, only had girls, a number of the children of Yolen's generation were given their last name as a middle name in order to perpetuate it.[6]
So, Jane Yolen wrote a book told through the eyes of a young Taino boy? Fascinating. I wonder where she acquired the eyes of a young Taino boy.
From the
wikipedia article on Taino:
Various scholars have addressed the question of who were the native inhabitants of the Caribbean islands to which Columbus voyaged in 1492. The assumption that European accounts can be read as objective evidence of a native Caribbean social reality is unjustified.[8] The people who inhabited most of the Greater Antilles when Europeans arrived in the New World have been denominated as Taínos, a term coined by Constantine Samuel Rafinesque in 1836.[2] Taíno is not a universally accepted denomination—it was not the name this people called themselves originally, and there is still uncertainty about their attributes and the boundaries of the territory they occupied.[9]
The term nitaino or nitayno, from which "Taíno" derived, referred to an elite social class, not to an ethnic group. No 16th-century Spanish documents use this word to refer to the tribal affiliation or ethnicity of the natives of the Greater Antilles. The word tayno or taíno, with the meaning "good" or "prudent", was mentioned twice in an account of Columbus's second voyage by his physician, Diego Álvarez Chanca, while in Guadeloupe. José R. Oliver writes that the natives of Boriquén, who had been captured by the Caribs of Guadeloupe, and who wanted to escape on Spanish ships to return home to Puerto Rico, used the term to indicate that they were the "good men", as opposed to the Caribs.[2]
Contrarily, according to Peter Hulme, most translators appear to agree that the word taino was used by Columbus's sailors, not by the islanders who greeted them, although there is room for interpretation. The sailors may have been saying the only word they knew in a native Caribbean tongue, or perhaps they were indicating to the "commoners" on the shore that they were taíno, i.e., important people, from elsewhere and thus entitled to deference. If taíno was being used here to denote ethnicity, then it was used by the Spanish sailors to indicate that they were "not Carib", and gives no evidence of self-identification by the native people.[9]
According to José Barreiro, a direct translation of the word "Taíno" signified "men of the good".[10] The Taíno people, or Taíno culture, has been classified by some authorities as belonging to the Arawak. Their language is considered to have belonged to the Arawak language family, the languages of which were historically present throughout the Caribbean, and much of Central and South America.
So after reading the
Taino account of Columbus' voyage to the
New World, most of the students wrote essays about why Columbus Day should no longer be celebrated? Eye-opening.
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