Talk:Taíno/Archive 1

From Wikipedia:Speedy deletions

• Taíno - cut & paste move. Need to delete in order to move Taino there. —John | Talk 21:32, 14 May 2004 (UTC)
  • Why no discussion on the Talk page about the move? How many people agree that it should be moved? I ask this because it was originally moved the other way in Dec 2002. (Also, I am restoring the redirect on Taíno instead of the cut-and-paste. Wait until the merge/move. Don't try to maintain two articles.) - Tεxτurε 21:38, 14 May 2004 (UTC)
    • The correct word is Taíno, with an acute on the 'i'. Have you noticed the convenience used in the Führer article? Taíno should be the main article, with Taino being a redirect to it. —John | Talk 23:11, 16 May 2004 (UTC)
      • That is a valid point. Since it has already been moved once in the opposite direction I think it best if you start a topic on the talk page regarding your suggested move. - Tεxτurε 23:54, 16 May 2004 (UTC)
        • Please leave this on the talk page for a week first. If there are no objections, then it can be moved, but currently most pages link to Taino, not Taíno, and there are far more Google hits for Taino than Taíno. Angela. 00:00, May 17, 2004 (UTC)

Article's introduction; cultural heritage

I am about to make a pretty severe edit of the introduction to this story. The simple truth of the matter, which no serious academic questions, is that the Taínos culture ceased to exist in the 16th century.

The problem is that there are a couple of small groups who insist that they are full-blooded "Taínos", mostly based in New Jersey, intent on gaining recognition as a tribal nation. This is simply ridiculous, given the historical record. Claims about DNA tests are irrelevant for two reasons: (a) there was a significant number of South and Central American Amerindians who immigrated to Puerto Rico throughout its time as a Spanish colony; (b) whatever the DNA of anybody in Puerto Rico, Taíno culture has been dead for 400-450 years.

The current introduction also has a glaring flaw of logic where it "proves" that supposedly 62% of the population of Puerto Rico has a significant amount of Taíno descent. -- 171.64.42.82 04:13, 30 May 2004 (UTC)

Hello, if you haven't registered your username so far please take a moment to do so. You can do so by visiting the register your loginname page. It takes only a few seconds. =)

While I may agree with you that the Taino culture can be considered as dead, others do not. That is why Dr. Juan Carlos Martínez Cruzado from the University of Puerto Rico at Mayaguez is currently investigating this on his research projects.

—John | Talk 05:26, 30 May 2004 (UTC)

Martínez Cruzado very clearly flubs Puerto Rican history by saying that the "Indians" in the 1777 and 1787 censuses were Taínos-- hell, he's citing Salvador Brau, a 19th century historian. It is well known that there was Amerindian immigration to the island from South America (a fact that can be picked up easily if your source is more recent than 1894!).

mtDNA is weird: it is transmitted almost exclusively through the maternal line. It is stereotypical of colonial situations that the colonists are predominantly male, and that they take native wives and/or concubines. One definitely expects a founder effect for mtDNA.

And anyway, the whole project is infused with a subtle racism that I don't know whether you can grasp. -- 171.64.42.82 09:55, 30 May 2004 (UTC)

I made an edit to your edits. First, the center of contemporary Taíno self-identification is New Jersey, not Puerto Rico. Second, I looked through the article about Taíno heritage in the Dominican Republic; the article's conclusion that "the roots of traditional Dominican culture are truly Taíno" is plain ridiculous. Just because the Dominicans have a folk ideology that attributes admirable qualities to the Taínos doesn't mean that their culture is Taíno. Very, very little of what the author mentions is any actual cultural transmission; and a lot of it is disguised racism (it's good to be "indio", bad to be "black").

Every place where you say the plural "scholars", you mean something like "two loonies with a weird agenda." Also, you reinserted the nonsense math averaging the averages of two samples, one of them admittedly nonrepresentative.

In short, I suspect this article is being hijacked for a political agenda, by prominently citing two utterly nonrepresentative sources of scholarship on this topic. -- 171.64.42.82 10:27, 30 May 2004 (UTC)

Beware hijacking

I just reviewed the history of this entry, and I must warn editors that it runs a terrible risk of being hijacked for political causes.

Taíno culture ceased to exist over 400 years ago. However, in recent decades, a small group of Puerto Ricans in the USA, based in New Jersey, have been agitating to be recognized as the true item by the US Government and gullible academics.

As such, this group of people endeavors to place their Taíno survival propaganda all over the web. The history of this entry shows this very clearly.

The people doing this are intellectually dishonest. The one truly interesting bit of information that they cite is mtDNA studies of the Puerto Rican population. They regularly fudge the math on these; for example, this article had the following statment: "In research, sample sets collected from people who claimed to have a maternal ancestor with Native American physiognomic traits showed a higher likelihood of possessing Native American mtDNAs (70%) than did unbiased sample sets (53%). Averaging between these two figures would suggest that 62% of the entire Puerto Rican population descend, at least in part, from the Taíno..." This is really, really bad math, averaging from two different, non-representative samples.

Another thing that jumps out is the fact that one of the references inserted by JohnCrawford's recent edit was from the e-"journal" Kacike. The name of this journal is cognate to the word "cacique", which is the word recorded by the Spaniards for Taíno chiefs. A quick examination of the journal's index reveals that a grand total of 12 people have published in it, and 7 of these are either in the Editorial Board or Editorial Staff ("peer review" my a**). It can't have had more than 3 or 4 issues. Also, browsing through the articles, they are clearly about pushing an agenda, and a number of them show very questionable scholarship; for example this article by P.J. Ferbel (who, incidentally, is Assistant Editor) reads like something an undergrad would write.

The biggest problem is that before long, the combination of fake New Jersey "We want affirmative action and casinos" "Taíno tribe", and the Dominican "I'm not Black like the Haitians, I'm Indian like the Taínos" racists, will again conspire to pass fantasy and questionable scholarship as fact, and set their aims at this entry again. -- 171.64.42.82 11:41, 30 May 2004 (UTC)

Relax dude. Then register up. —John | Talk 05:23, 31 May 2004 (UTC)

Zemi

I removed the proposal to merge Zemi in the main Taíno article after expanding the Zemi article enough that it can stand on its own. -Uyvsdi (talk) 19:49, 19 September 2009 (UTC)Uyvsdi

Semi-protected edit request on 17 May 2019

Godoffrye12 (talk) 03:48, 17 May 2019 (UTC)

Please read Wikipedia:Edit requests on how to use this template. There is nothing in your request to act on. - Donald Albury 14:06, 17 May 2019 (UTC)