The Indians of the Antilles

THE INDIANS OF THE ANTILLES By Anna Musser Before the great ships of Hagoth were launched in the western sea, Lanianites as well as Nephites had undoubtedly been experiment- ing with sea-craft. The less civilized people at length began migrating to the islands of the Gulf of Mexico. They kept up practically no communication with the continent. Gold plates give us no account of this journey. Tradition con- cerning it has disappeared as have the log canoes. But there is a stone record of the lives of the migrants, a series of still undeciphered plates. In the burial caves, shell heaps, and kitchen middens of the West Indies have been found numerous stone mortars and pestels, amulets and idols, dishes, pottery stamps, axes, celts, and chisels, as well as a great variety of problematical objects. Pottery and wood, bone, and shell manufactures are scant and fragmentary. Dr. Walter J. Fewkes began an investigation of these antiquities about ten years ago and his report has since been published as a volume of the thirty- fourth annual report of the American Bureau of Ethnology. I have drawn most of my material from this work and from T. A. Joyce's Central American and West Indian Archaeology. There are no great buildings in the Indies and no metal work has been discovered, but the stone manufactures are skilfully wrought and some finely polished. Whether the migration occurred before or after the advent of Christ, the island-dwellers had forgotten the continent and developed a very distinct culture by the time of their discovery. Apparently before the time of Columbus there had been three nations in the West Indies. The oldest was a primitive cave-dweller type which had not wholly disappeared when the Spanish began exploring the islands. Then there was an agricultural people, the Tainans. These were peaceful and generous and "too timid to fight," according to Columbus. There was also a warrior people, the Caribs, who came from northern South America and moved steadily north- ward, invading island after island, reaching Porto Rico by the time the Spanish came. They killed the Tainan men and kept the women as slave-wives. Then these women of the vanquished race conquered their captors in a measure by teaching their children much of the Tainan culture. This is the testimony of the stone record. The cave-dwellers left very few clues to their civilization. Their stone manufactures and pottery are too scant to show any general type. Living on a meagre fortuitous food supply and unavailingly fortifying themselves against invading civilizations, these people re-

THE INDIANS OF THE ANTILLES 229 treated finally to the island caves of Cuba and other northerly islands. They buried their dead in these caves. After the coming of the Spanish they disappeared entirely. The Greater Antilles — Cuba, Jamaica, Haiti, and Porto Rico — are the typically Tainan islands. The Tainan stock may have come originally from South America as it seems to have been fundamentally like the Carib which was certainly from the Orinoco valley. Still Dr. Fewkes says that the antiquities of the Greater Antilles show a marked relationship to the civilization of Central America and none or very little to that of North or South America. The most important thing to the Tainan's life was the yucca plant from whose roots cassava bread was made. So Tainan phil- osophy was centered in the cultivation of this plant. The powerful gods were Mamona or Mother Earth, Yucayu, lord of winds and rain, Ma Boya, the great sun god, and Guabansex, a goddess to whom they prayed for rain. The welfare of the yucca crop must have been the fundamental motive in most of the religious ceremonies, and must have prompted the manufacture of many of the enigmatical stone objects. The yucca was a special gift from heaven, says a tradition found in the Dominican island and possibly once current in all the islands. Ac- cording to this legend the people were once poor savages and lived as beasts. "Whilst they were in this miserable condition an old man among them, extremely weary of that brutish kind of life, wept most bitterly, and, overwhelmed with despair, deplored his wretched condition, whereupon a man all in white appeared to him descending from heaven, and coming near, he comforted the disconsolate old man, telling him that he was come to assist him and his countrymen, and to shew them the way to lead a more pleasant life for the future; that if any of them had sooner made his complaint to heaven they had been the sooner relieved." The glorious personage then proceeded to teach the old man how to use the things heaven had provided for the people's welfare. He said: "That on the seashore there was an abundance of sharp stones, wherewith they might fell down trees to make houses for themselves; and that the palm and plantain trees bore leaves fit to cover the roofs of them, and t0 secure them against the injuries of the weather; that to assure them of the particular care he had of them and the great affection he bore their species, beyond those of other creatures, he had brought them an excellent root wherewith they might make bread, and that no beast should dare to touch it when it was once planted, and that he would have them thenceforth make that their ordinary sus- tenance." The resplendent visitor suggests Quetzalcoatl, the "Fair God" of Central America, Quetzalcoatl who brought the Aztecs to a knowl-

230 IMPROVEMENT ERA edge of peace and civilized art, which has been supposed to be tradi- tion's counterpart of Christ. Further relationship to Central America is shown in the venera- tion of the serpent. Representations of serpents are very markedly frequent in Central American art and Quetzalcoatl means literally Feathered Serpent. Ma Boya, the great sky god of the West Indies, means Great Serpent. Bonael, Son of the Serpent, was an important god in the Indies. But the Tainan's gods were not merely these of tradition com- mon among the Lamanites. Failing, as his fathers had failed to know the Christ of Nephi's preaching, he studied out his own version of God as he tended the yucca fields and patiently ground stones into tools. In addition to the mortars and pestles, the celts for digging and scraping and other household necessaries, the people made stone amulets which warriors bound to their foreheads, "zemis," "collars," "elbow stones," and "three-pointed idols." Stone zemis were queer ltitle figures representing natural forces, guardian deities of clans, families, or individuals, deified ancestors, or other influential entities. Zemis were also made of wood, cotton, and bones. Joyce gives this account from an early writer: "Sometimes when an Indian is traveling at night he sees a tree which appears to move in an uncanny manner. In fear he will stop and ask it who it is. The tree tells him to call a priest to whom to give directions. The priest comes and makes offerings, and then formally asks its name and whether it desired to be cut and trimmed to form a zemi. It is then carved in accordance with its instructions, and installed in a special hut where ceremonies are performed in its honor several times in the year." Stone collars are rings, massive or slender, apparently patterned after a hoop made of a forked branch. They may have been used for some kind of tree worship or for inclosing and holding captive a spirit. The elbow stones look something like fragments of collars, but they show distinctive type features in their design. According to early historians, the three-pointed stone idols represent agricultural deities, little rain gods, spirits of various kinds who were interested in corn and cassava. These types of stones seem to have been purely for decoration or ceremony, and their abundance, together with their symbolic carvings, attest the prominence of religious life among the Tainans. At length, in a land far to the sunrise, a land of sword-makers and city-dwellers, "the Spirit of God," according to Nephi's vision, "came down and wrought upon" a certain man that he crossed the sea and found the new Old World. Then the Tainan villages were opened up to a gold-hungry race of godlike fairness, and that was the end c^ Tainan civilization.

THE INDIANS OF THE ANTILLES 231 But the peace of the Indies had been broken into some time before the Spanish came. "And it came to pass that they came down upon the north of the land of Shilom, with their numerous host, men armed with bows and with arrows, and with swords, and with cimeters, and with stones and with slings; and they had their heads shaved that they were naked; and they were girded with a leathern girdle about their loins." Descendants of such as these warriors bore down upon the Tainans. They were the Caribs, a nomad nation from whose name cannibal is said to have been derived. They had much better weapons than did their victims, but fewer mortars are found in Carib islands. Also, the Tainan types of ceremonial stones are lacking. However, there is a great variety of problematical stone objects — a strange little owl with bulging frog's eyes and stubby wings; a ray-fish, very much like the owl, with the mouth of an octopus or a thick-lipped wine jar wreathed in yarn roses; an impressionistic rabbit, legless and tailless, bounding over a cubified hay- wagon; and besides these, countless knobbed, grooved, spiraled bits of stone. What symbolism these fantasies hold is of immense importance in revealing the mind and hand that fashioned them. Although they fought fiercely against the Spanish, Caribs as well as Tainans were finally all but exterminated. Today they are represented by a few little colonies in the interior of Dominica Island. These have lost the ferocity of their fathers in acquiring peaceful arts, but their language is thought to approximate closely the ancient Carib tongue. » Nine-tenths of the population of the Indies is now negro, but many Carib folk-tales, and place names, survive in some form, while Voodoo priests and Obia men use in their ceremonies the old stone celts of the vanished race. Inspiration of Zion National Park Oh, Zion, sublime, immortal; We have entered thy portals, Thy portals made sacred By thy godliness; For thy soul speaks Of Him who made thee, And fashioned thee In infinite grandeur; So — with heads bared in reverence, And eyes wet with tears of penitence, We gaze upon thy face In sweet humility; And the still small Voice Within us speaks, saying, "God help us to live a better life." La Verkin, Utah. CAMILLA W. JUDD.