# Taíno genocide

The Taíno genocide was committed against the Taíno Indigenous people by the Spanish during their colonization of the Caribbean during the 16th century. The population of the Taíno before the arrival of the Spanish Empire on the island of Hispaniola in 1492 (which Christopher Columbus baptized as Hispaniola), is estimated at between 10,000 and 1,000,000. The Spanish subjected them to slavery, massacres and other violent treatment after the last Taíno chief was deposed in 1504. By 1514, the population had reportedly been reduced to just 32,000 Taíno, by 1565, the number was reported at 200, and by 1802, they were declared extinct by the Spanish colonial authorities. However, descendants of the Taíno continue to live and their disappearance from records was part of a fictional story created by the Spanish Empire with the intention of erasing them from history.

## History

The Taíno people were the descendants of the Arawak people who arrived in the Caribbean approximately 4000 years before the conquest, and they lived in the Bahamas, the Greater Antilles and the Lesser Antilles. Christopher Columbus was looking for gold. However, when he did not find it, he focused on the slavery. Upon arriving on the island, a confrontation occurred between the crew of the Santa María and the Taíno after the crew sexually abused Taíno women. In 1503 most of the caciques were captured and burned alive in the Jaragua massacre. Fray Bartolomé de las Casas wrote that in that massacre the Spanish also attacked the other inhabitants, cutting off the children's legs as they ran.
For several months after the massacre, Nicolás de Ovando continued a campaign of persecution against the Taíno until their numbers became very small, according to historian Samuel M. Wilson in his book Hispaniola. Caribbean Chiefdoms in the Age of Columbus. The Taíno suffered physical abuse in the gold mines and sugar cane fields, as well as religious persecution during the Spanish Inquisition, along with the exposure to diseases that arrived with the colonizers. Others were captured and taken to Spain to be traded as slaves, which resulted in numerous deaths due to poor human conditions during the journey.
In thirty years, between 80% and 90% of the Taíno population died. Because of the increased number of people (Spanish) on the island, there was a higher demand for food. Taíno cultivation was converted to Spanish methods. In hopes of frustrating the Spanish, some Taínos refused to plant or harvest their crops. The supply of food became so low in 1495 and 1496 that some 50,000 died from famine. Some historians have determined that the massive decline was due more to infectious disease outbreaks than any warfare or direct attacks. By 1507, their numbers had shrunk to 60,000. Scholars believe that epidemic disease (smallpox, influenza, measles, and typhus) was an overwhelming cause of the population decline of the Indigenous people, and also attributed a "large number of Taíno deaths...to the continuing bondage systems" that existed.

## Academic discourse

Academics, such as historian Andrés Reséndez of the University of California, Davis, assert that disease alone does not explain the destruction of Indigenous populations of Hispaniola. While the populations of Europe rebounded following the devastating population decline associated with the Black Death, there was no such rebound for the Indigenous populations of the Caribbean. He concludes that, even though the Spanish were aware of deadly diseases such as smallpox, there is no mention of them in the New World until 1519, meaning perhaps they did not spread as fast as initially believed, and that, unlike Europeans, the Indigenous populations were subjected to enslavement, exploitation, and forced labor in gold and silver mines on an enormous scale. Reséndez says that "slavery has emerged as a major killer" of the Indigenous people of the Caribbean. Anthropologist Jason Hickel estimates that the lethal forced labor in these mines killed a third of the Indigenous people there every six months.
Subsequently, in the United States, Yale University classified the atrocities which the Spanish Empire committed against the Taíno as a "genocide" and it also included the Taíno genocide in its Genocide Studies Program.
Raphael Lemkin considered Spain's abuses of the native population of the Americas to constitute cultural and even outright genocide including the abuses of the encomienda system. University of Hawaii historian David Stannard describes the encomienda as a genocidal system which "had driven many millions of native peoples in Central and South America to early and agonizing deaths." Scholars Bridget Conley and Alex de Waal highlight the weaponisation of starvation employed by conquistadors against the Taíno as being a contributing factor to the genocide, and historian Harald E. Braun highlight Jaragua massacre in 1503 as a case of genocidal massacre.