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Course Syllabus
Before the Plantation: Indigenous Caribbean Societies and First Contact

Afro-Caribbean History · Unit 1

Before the Plantation: Indigenous Caribbean Societies and First Contact

The Taino and Kalinago peoples who lived in the Caribbean before it became a plantation economy, and what happened to them

Learning Objectives

  • •Students will be able to describe the distinct political and social structures of the Taino and Kalinago peoples prior to European contact.
  • •Students will analyze how the encomienda system, European disease, and armed resistance combined to produce the catastrophic Taino population collapse under Spanish rule.
  • •Students will explain why Spain had already introduced enslaved African labor to Jamaica roughly a century before the 1655 English takeover, and connect this to the island's later plantation economy.
  • •Students will evaluate evidence for Indigenous Caribbean survival, including linguistic, genetic, and community-based evidence, against the older narrative of total Taino extinction.

Unit 1 Knowledge Check

Score 70% or higher to complete this unit. Answers stay hidden until you submit.

1. What does the etymology of the word 'maroon' reveal about the relationship between Indigenous and African resistance in the Caribbean?

2. Why is Jamaica's Spanish colonial period (1494-1655) especially significant for understanding the later British plantation system there?

3. What combination of factors caused the catastrophic decline of the Taino population under Spanish rule?

4. How did the political structures of the Taino and Kalinago societies differ?

Challenging the Narrative of Taino Extinction

Document-Based Task · scored with the essay rubric

Analyze the tension between early colonial chronicles and contemporary historical interpretations regarding the fate of the Taino people. Using the provided documents, evaluate the evidence for the 'extinction' narrative versus the evidence for cultural and biological continuity in the Caribbean. In your response, explain how the framing of Indigenous history serves particular colonial or post-colonial political agendas.

Source Documents

Journal of the First Voyage of Christopher Columbus (October 1492)

Primary Source

The Taino: A Genetic and Cultural Persistence (Jorge Estevez, Smithsonian Institution)

Secondary Source

The Indigenous People of the Caribbean (Irvine Rouse, Yale University Press)

Secondary Source