Taíno Culture: The Search for Indigenous Identity in Haïti

Before the world renamed it Hispaniola, the island already had a name that breathed through the mountains, Ayiti. Long before the galleons, before the cross and the whip, the Taíno people lived here, shaping rivers, songs, and spirits with their hands and dreams. Though colonization claimed to erase them, their essence endured in the wind that bends the plantain leaves, in the rhythm of the drum, and in the very name of the nation that rose from the ashes.

Taíno Culture and the Search for Indigenous Identity in Haïti is a poetic excavation of what history tried to bury. Through memory, myth, and modern scholarship, Jean-Jacques Stephen Alexis retraces the survival of the island’s first people within the body and spirit of today’s Haiti. Their presence whispers in Vodou cosmology, in peasant agriculture, in the soft syllables of Creole words, and in the sacredness of the land itself. This book journeys through caves and rivers, archives, and oral tales, to reveal how Taíno and African worlds fused to form a single soul that is resilient, creative, and defiant. It invites us to see Haitian identity not as a single inheritance, but as a living crossroads where the spirits of Africa and the ancestors of Ayiti walk together. In lyrical prose grounded in history and anthropology, Alexis restores the Taíno to their rightful place within the Caribbean imagination. His narrative bends time, letting the ancient and the modern speak in one voice. To rediscover the Taíno is not to look backward. It is to remember that the roots of our freedom, our art, and our endurance reach deeper than slavery, deeper than conquest, into the original heartbeat of this land called Ayiti.