a Taíno person sitting for a portrait

Meet the survivors of a ‘paper genocide’

A leader of the indigenous Caribbeans known as the Taíno describes how his people’s history was erased—and what they’re doing to get it back.

For centuries, the indigenous people of the Caribbean, known as Taíno, were said to be extinct. But recently, historians and DNA testing have confirmed what many modern, self-identifying Taíno already believed: that a genocide was carried out on paper, after the census stopped counting them, but their identity persisted. Jorge Baracutei Estevez (above), who leads a Taíno community group in New York, worked with photographer Haruka Sakaguchi to depict modern-day Taíno and their reimagined census entries.

Photograph by Haruka Sakaguchi

The people we now call Taíno discovered Christopher Columbus and the Spaniards. He did not discover us, as we were home and they were lost at sea when they landed on our shores. That’s how we look at it—but we go down in history as being discovered. The Taíno are the Arawakan-speaking peoples of the Caribbean who had arrived from South America over the course of 4,000 years. The Spanish had hoped to find gold and exotic spices when they landed in the Caribbean in 1492, but there was little gold and the spices were unfamiliar. Columbus then turned his attention to the next best commodity: the trafficking of slaves.

Due to harsh treatment in the gold mines, sugarcane fields, and

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