Taíno

The Taíno were the Indigenous peoples of the Greater Antilles and surrounding islands. At the time of European contact in the late 15th century, they were the principal inhabitants of most of what is now The Bahamas, Cuba, the Dominican Republic, Haiti, Jamaica, Puerto Rico, and the northern Lesser Antilles. The Lucayan branch of the Taíno were the first New World people encountered by Christopher Columbus, in the Bahama Archipelago on October 12, 1492. The Taíno historically spoke an Arawakan language. Granberry and Vescelius (2004) recognized two varieties of the Taino language: "Classical Taino", spoken in Puerto Rico and most of Hispaniola, and "Ciboney Taino", spoken in the Bahamas, most of Cuba, western Hispaniola, and Jamaica. They lived in agricultural societies ruled by caciques with fixed settlements and a matrilineal system of kinship and inheritance. Taíno religion centered on the worship of zemis. The Taíno are sometimes also referred to as Island Arawaks or Antillean Arawaks. Indigenous people in the Greater Antilles did not refer to themselves originally as Taíno; the term was first explicitly used in this sense by Constantine Samuel Rafinesque in 1836.

Historically, anthropologists and historians believed that the Taíno were no longer extant centuries ago, or that they gradually merged into a common identity with African and Hispanic cultures. Scholarly attitudes to Taíno survival and resurgence began to change around the year 2000. Many people today identify as Taíno and many more have Taíno descent, most notably in Puerto Rico, Cuba, and Dominica. A substantial number of Puerto Ricans, Cubans, and Dominicans have Indigenous mitochondrial DNA, which may suggest Taíno descent through the direct female line, especially in Puerto Rico. While some communities describe an unbroken cultural heritage passed down through the generations, often in secret, others are revivalist communities who seek to incorporate Taíno culture into their lives.

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. The people who inhabited most of the Greater Antilles when Europeans arrived were first called Taínos by Constantine Samuel Rafinesque in 1836.

In 1871, early ethnohistorian Daniel Garrison Brinton referred to the Taíno people as the Island Arawak, due to their connections with the Arawaks of the mainland and because the Taíno language was thought to be part of the Arawak language family present throughout the Caribbean, and much of Central and South America at that time. Scholars and writers continued to refer to the Indigenous group as Arawaks, Island Arawaks, or Antillean Arawaks until the 1990s.

Contemporary scholars such as Irving Rouse and Basil Reid have concluded the Taíno developed a distinct language and culture from the Arawak of South America. As such, many modern historians, linguists, and anthropologists now use the term Taíno to refer to all the formerly Island Arawak nations except the Island Caribs, who are not seen as belonging to the same people.

Rouse classifies all inhabitants of the Greater Antilles as Taíno (except those from the western tip of Cuba and small pockets of Hispaniola), as well as those of the Lucayan Archipelago and the northern Lesser Antilles. Modern groups with Caribbean-Indigenous heritage have also reclaimed the exonym Taíno as a self-descriptor, although terms such as Neo-Taino or Indio are also used.

Rouse also subdivides the historic Taíno into three main groups:

Taíno derives from the term nitaino or nitayno, which referred to an elite social class, not an ethnic group. According to José Barreiro, the word Taíno directly translates as "men of the good". 16th-century Spanish documents did not use the 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 Borinquén, 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.