What is Taino Day in Jamaica?

Jamaicans Celebrate Taino Day

The day honors the island’s earlier inhabitants.

05/05/2011

Today, Jamaicans mark Taino Day in honor of the Caribbean country’s indigenous peoples. The Tainos inhabited the island hundreds of years prior to the arrival of Europeans in 1494. Their rich culture, including food and language, can be observed in Jamaica’s way of life today.

The theme for this year’s celebration is “Tracing Our Taino Ancestry,” and the Jamaican National Heritage Trust will be hosting a public lecture at the Institute of Jamaica located in Kingston. In addition, there will be a public exhibition of Taino artifacts. The JNHT started celebrating Taino Day five years ago in hopes of educating citizens about their various contributions to society. The group is asking schools across the nation to take time out to remember the people, whose history is often pushed aside in other national celebrations.

http://www.bet.com/news/global/2011/05/05/jamaican...

Today, Wednesday, May 5, 2010, is being observed as Taino Day in Jamaica, a day to celebrate the lives of the Tainos as the first Jamaicans.

This day was initially observed as Encounter Day, to commemorate the meeting of the cultures that Columbus’ landing at Discovery Bay, St. Ann on Monday, May 5, 1494 represented. But not many people liked it as a day to remember or saw it romantically as a “meeting of the cultures.” Why should we commemorate the beginning of the extinction of a whole race of people by another? It’s tantamount to celebrating the war that was the Rwandan genocide not too long ago!

So initially Encounter Day was observed to commemorate the meeting of the Taino and Spanish cultures. Then there was a switch to Taino Day with the first Taino Day observed in 2007. What were the Reasons for the Switch from Encounter Day to Taino Day?

Prof. Verene Shepherd, professor of social history and once chairman of the board of directors of the Jamaica National Heritage Trust (JNHT), highlighted the following reasons for the switch in a paper titled “Why Taino Day?”

1. To publicly celebrate the lives of the early Jamaicans, who often get left out of annual cultural celebrations and who have no major monument to mark their presence.

2. To concretise in the minds of our young people the fact that Jamaica and the wider Caribbean was populated before Columbus’s arrival/invasion of the region, which is conservatively estimated to number 60,000 to 1 million people in 1494.

3. To teach students and the general public about the reasons for the disappearance of the Taino civilization as a result of the Spanish atrocities against them.

4. To celebrate the lives and experiences of the Tainos as they lived it before 1492. This came out of the concern that the “meeting of the cultures” emphasised by Encounter Day disregarded the fact that the Tainos existed before Columbus invaded the Caribbean. As Prof. Shepherd puts it: “…this emphasis on several cultures … did not allow for a proper focus on the rich culture [of the Tainos] – the lives and experiences of those who existed in that space before 1492.”

http://jamaicanechoes.wordpress.com/2010/05/05/tod...

What Is Taino