Sunspirit project

The Arawak and Karib people settled in different areas of the Caribbean. They used dugout canoes to travel between islands. They lived peacefully, but feared the fierce Karibs and the god Huracan. Their world was always spring or summer. Then, in 1492, Christopher Columbus and his crew arrived, clad in armor and with weapons of iron. They enslaved the Arawaks and forced them to work. There was a gulf between the two groups that was never bridged due to the greed of the Europeans. A reading from West Indian folktales as retold by Philip Sherlock. A time came when the Arawak people and their cousins the Karibs wandered far from the shadow of Mount Roraima. Some settled in the broad land we now call Guyana. Others moved north to the banks of the Orinoco River and the shores of the Gulf of Paria. From the mainland the Arawaks who lived by the Gulf of Paria and the mouth of the Orinoco could see, penciled against the sky, the shapes of the mountains. The old men were content to stay where they were but the young men longed to cross the Gulf to the distant mountains. From the giant trees of the forest they made dugout canoes, each so large that it required 50 or 60 men to drive it through the heaving waters with their oars. In these dugout canoes they crossed from the mainland to the islands to Trinidad and Tobago, which still bears the Arawak name for Tobago and Barbados and Grenada. As the generations passed the Arawaks and the Karibs at a later time moved from island to island in their dugout canoes, settling even in those islands that lay farthest north. Jamaica and Cuba and Haiti, the land of mountains, and in the islands that we now call the Bahamas. In these islands of the Caribbean the Arawaks and Karibs made their homes. They lived in villages near the sea, searched the shores for chip chip and mussels, fished with hooks of bone or shell, hunted in the woods for the iguana and coney, and cultivated maize, cassava, and sweet potatoes. Not knowing the use of irons they made tools from stone, bone, and shells. For weapons they had spears and arrows tipped with bone, shell, or sharp flint. From generation to generation they passed on stories that their fathers had told. Tales of the ancient one who lived in the heights and of the sun spirit Arawidi, who sometimes fished in the rivers of Ghana, and of the kookmaka tree that grew till its branches touched the sky. For many centuries these Arawaks and Karibs of the islands lived as their fathers had done in a world in which there was little change. The Arawaks, who were quiet peaceful people, feared the fierce warlike Karibs. They feared also the god Huracan who brought storms in the summer, ripping the trees and tearing the branches from the forest trees in his anger. But they feared little else. They knew the changes of the year, the dry summer months, and the wet rainy months, the seasons when the sapodillas and sweet saps ripened in the woods, and the best times for planting maize and cassava. In their world it was always spring or summer. The trees were always green, the air gentle and warm. Year followed year, century followed century with little change. The old men and the old women fell asleep, and the young men and young women lived in the way their fathers had lived. Then a strange thing happened. On the morning of Friday October 12th in the year 1492, some Arawaks living in the little island of Gwanasahani in the Bahamas, saw three canoes lying offshore, larger than any canoes they had ever seen. Each moved not by oars, but by white winds. Men came ashore from the strange ships, but men such as they had never seen, with white and pink faces, bearded, their bodies covered with thick garments of cloth, and with hard bright metal. Once ashore, the strangers fell on their knees, lifted their hands to the sky, kissed the ground, shouted for joy, and gathered round their leader Christopher Columbus. This was the first meeting between the old world of America and the old world of Europe. The two groups faced each other on the sandy beach. Naked brown-skinned men with weapons of stone and shells, and white men from Europe clad in armor with weapons of iron. The Arawaks, whose fathers had crossed the gulf that lay between the mainland and the islands in their double canoes, faced Spanish seamen who had crossed in their sailing ships the wide gulf of the Atlantic that lay between Europe and the islands of the Caribbean. The man of the Iron Age made the man of the Stone Age his servant, forcing him to labor like a slave, driving him to mine the earth for gold and silver, making him give up the way of life to which he had been born. Each had crossed the wide gulf of the seas, but there was another gulf that lay between them, a gulf that only pity and understanding could bridge. But the greed of the Iron Age man drove out pity, and the gulf was never bridged.