Taino Reconnection with a Dash of Lateral Violence
by Julia Feliz
This is not an easy conversation. Addressing the ways in which oppressed communities are oppressive to one another is bound to trigger defensiveness and denial. However, if we are to heal and move forward as a community, we must address lateral violence and the ways in which Taíno reconnecting spaces uphold their own people’s oppression.
I invite you to have this pressing conversation with your community.
If you find yourself having learned a thing or two from this or any of my other work, I would appreciate your support if even just $1 or $5 via venmo @juliafeliz or buy me a coffee via www.ko-fi.com/juliafeliz
You can learn more about my me and my work via www.JuliaFeliz.com
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I didn’t set out to collect examples of lateral violence. It’s something that just happened because, sadly, it is that common within the Taíno reconnecting movement.
I had set out to join a tribe thinking that the main goal of those claiming Taino from Borikén would be to ensure Native status and reparations in order to stop the further colonization of our island and the further oppression of the 3.5+ millions of Boricuas on the island and those outside that have had to leave due to colonialism. I also understood these would be spaces to help further understand myself within my Indigenous ancestors’ traditions.
Sadly, I could not have been more wrong.
In the Taino reconnection community, what I found was a disorganization of people appointed as leaders fighting for the top of yet another hierarchy based on the “masters’ tools” (bell hooks).
The Chains We Were Given to Bind Ourselves
I first encountered a diasporic “Taino” community in 2019 during a trip to upstate New York. This was only my second time in the state but my first lesson in Indigenous-based lateral violence as someone born and raised on the island of Borikén actively decolonizing and unlearning while learning the reality of our past and how it connected to our (my) present.
At the time, I had been publicly documenting my identity journey and bringing up difficult interconnections between communities for several years at that point. My biggest endeavor had been going from solely understanding myself as simply “Puerto Rican” to a queer, two-spirit, Afro-Taino neurodivergent, disabled disruptor born and raised on Borikén to Boricua and Dominican parents. In essence, my upbringing, culture, traditions, and how I understood myself and my identities had been one outside of the direct grasp from the U.S. settler system on the mainland.
As I aged and found the strength to live as my authentic-self, my goal became to understand myself across lenses in order to help build bridges between the different communities I had found to be mine outside my Puerto Ricanness— ones that have been otherized and whose identities labeled as wrong under colonialism.
Most importantly, I wanted to disrupt my family’s inherited internalized anti-blackness and anti-indigeneity by shining a light to our roots and uncovering what exactly they meant beyond an obvious given as people tied to the Caribbean.
I began openly stating parts of me that had been drowned out and shamed due to things like colorism and classism.
During my trip to New York, I proudly openly identified myself as Black and Indigenous/Taino. I had no idea that Taino organized groups existed outside of the Caribbean. So, I was thrilled when I happened to come upon a Taino group at an Indigenous festival. After introducing myself to the Taino elder and building a relationship, I remembered receiving a phone call one day from the elder commenting that the Taino in that areas did not like that I openly claim our African ancestors and introduced myself as AfroTaino. Apparently, it upset people. I wasn’t surprised, however. I had been shamed my entire life for being part Dominican. I do remember being confused at the pushback, however, because as far as I could see, many of the Taino in the group, had even more stereotypically marked African features than I had, including rich dark skin and tight curls like my Black Dominican father. I quietly asked myself if they understood that those of us from the Caribbean were undeniably majority tri-racial people due to our colonial history.
Another one of the members private messaged accusing me of being a traitor for dating outside my “Indigenous community”. This was not as shocking as one might think, however, since I had grown up hearing similar sentiments from family members on the island dictating what gender and race I was allowed to date (remnants of a very present colonialist history that followed me as I aged). While I was more fluid in understanding that my identity was made up by several roots that had become intertwined as one, the members of this group seemed to be holding on to a single strand of our heritage in order to understand their identities.
I accepted these interactions as examples of how deep and far internalized colonialism extended beyond the island in the mainland. Unaddressed internalized anti-blackness and a defined authenticity were this group’s main source for identifying who was one of them despite also readily accepting support, funding, and decision-making within the community from white centered institutions.
While I still didn’t have the words to describe the experience (I would later learn this term from an Oneida tribe member as lateral violence), I understood it as validation for my continuing to openly carry my identities wherever I went. Making peace with my own identity conflicts according to how I was being perceived would eventually be what would heal me and bring me closet to my ancestors years later.
Identity Conflict as Lateral Violence
Identity conflict is internalized colonialism. How we identify and how we are identified is based on perceptions created by the colonizers themselves upon their arrival on our shores in 1492. To this very day, most of us are still classified according to racist perceptions and categories created by European eyes.
White versus Indigenous versus Black positioning everyone in between above Blackness but always below whiteness.
Splitting us up by features decided upon the Spanish-sent colonizers created racial and class hierarchies which gave birth to the goal of blanqueamiento (whitening) and competition between groups violently pinned against the other according to racialized stereotypes identified by proximity or non-proximity to white Europeans.
It’s no secret that resentment grew between marginalized groups due to benefits and status awarded to those above them. The resentment created gaps between people from the same communities simply because whiteness had decided that those with proximity to it and those who obeyed the new laws and lived as expected meant they were of higher standing in settler society.
Those below the top tier, unable to vent their fear, frustration, and anger, and in an attempt to climb higher in society began practicing lateral violence. Rather than oppression directed towards marginalized people by the white settlers that hold power across Turtle Island, lateral violence developed as a form of oppression that people who are marginalized/oppressed by a society in which those accepted as white hold power, began committing against one another.
Lateral violence is inherently internalized colonialism, and the idea behind it is that “No one wants to be the lowest on the chain.”
Colonialism introduced European hierarchical chains to Kiskeya (Dominican Republic) and Borikén (Puerto Rico), in 1492 and 1493, respectively. The chains were those based on otherization of indigeneity in order to begin normalizing hierarchies of power over others. These are the same hierarchies that descendants of the Taino and Africans brought to the Caribbean continue to embrace to this day, unknowingly as we separate and categorize ourselves according to colorism and specific features determined by those of European descent.
Following the racialized class system, further hierarchies and oppressive systems were also born on our continent based on physical and mental ability, cis-ness, straight-ness, binarism, and other forms of discriminatory violence people faced based on a European religion and standards. Oppressive people’s then used these tools themselves to oppress their own and create hierarchies of power over those deemed less worthy beyond just race.
Lateral violence is a way to uphold the hierarchy and reproduce colonialism within oppressed groups in the form of assigning less value to those who have even less privileges than we do. (More via Creative Spirits/J. Korffs 2020 & 2021)
This type of violence thrives through group bullying, ignoring, silencing, exclusion, and playing by other colonial rules and enforced standards rooted in the “-isms” and “-phobias” that we as a society have readily accepted in order to climb our own power ladders: classism, binarism, sexism, racism, homophobia, transphobia, neuroableism, ableism, etc…
Anti-Blackness Above Anti-Indigeneity
Without blackness, whiteness as an oppressive system would not exist. With the racial caste system, at the opposite of the whiteness we were taught to aspire to (blond hair, straightened hair, impossible slim frames, european features, etc.) was Blackness, lower on the hierarchy than Indigeneity. Our African was and is seen as shameful even more so than our Indigeneity.
Even so, both anti-blackness and anti-indigeneity are intrinsic on islands marked by racial hierarchies and both are vital in order for the system to continue to harm our communities who readily still accept racial hierarchies within the island and outside of it. For this reason, in order to knock them down along my own lineage, I purposely began to exclude the colonizer in us from my identity to decenter it and boldly centered the Africanness alongside our Taino ancestry.
Once I left the island, I witnessed and understood the ways in which Black and Indigenous people were and are further fragmented on the “mainland” through the same system our ancestors were forced to endure and through lateral violence. The system purposely created and creates confusion about our own identities within our own communities and in the way we are understood by those from other marginalized groups.
On Turtle Island, the British colonizers’ caste is one where you are either Black or white. We, Boricuas, were treated as others, until whiteness understood it could exploit our colonial past and further decenter our Blackness and Indigeneity in an attempt to entice Boricuas with the whiteness that will never understand or respect us— and yet, somehow have as exemplified by U.S. census forms through the last 100 years.
In a way, this is why so many of us have lost our direct paths to our ancestors despite knowing we are African, Taino, and Iberian. This, however, did not occur out of shame but out of survival, especially upon becoming yet another colony under settler U.S. laws beginning in 1898. The reality was we had been handed over to yet another violent European enforced society where segregation, lynching, and other abuses were the norm they forced on us by ignoring our Indigeneity while deciding on our merit according to the one drop rule and paper bag test along descendants of enslaved Africans forced to the mainland by British Europeans. We had been poisoned by Spanish colonialism, and our new owners exercised the power they now had over us by ensuring even those on the mainland understood what our place was as they bombed our people, erased our fight for Independence, and made our flags illegal, and further emphasized that we, and everything about us, lacked worth as mixed-race people whose identity had merged into one influenced by both Blackness and Indigeneity.
I spent years understanding my internalized anti-Blackness as the child of a Black-skinned Dominican born on Borikén. It had taken me a long time to understand the rage of African Americans upon my stating my identity as proudly Boricua. The rage and wall between our communities I now clearly understand is due to the anti-blackness that so many Boricuas and Dominicans, particularly in the Taino reconnecting movement refuse to acknowledge and work on. They have witnessed how those of us with lighter skin privileges chose to forsake our African ancestors for a higher place on the hierarchy they have always been at the bottom of.
Unfortunately, anti-indigeneity within the African American community has also meant that settlers have been able to weaponize identity between us. We’re so busy committed to the system that we failed to acknowledge that our struggles are interconnected and against the same system.
As for our own people, the Spanish and other Europeans ensured they erased our traditions, ceremonies, and even our identities as non-gendered people. They made people like me, two spirit people, disappear from existence. The British successfully achieved the same. And through their own racialized hierarchies, attempted to uproot and silently genocide the Native out of anyone whose land they wanted across Turtle Island.
Indigenous communities on the mainland were also forced to abandon their traditions and were thrown into a disarray when blood quantum, or how Indigenous someone was according to white settlers rules, overtook their own community identities.
Before the arrival of Europeans, many Indigenous tribes used lineal descent and defined Native identity through social-cultural-territorial definitions. Native tribes also generally accepted mixed-race individuals into Native societies with few hesitations. In some tribes, people could gain tribal citizenship if they were born in, married or were adopted into, or had long-term residence within the tribal community, or if they assumed cultural norms such as religion and language. Colonization caused a shift to legal and race-based definitions.
Current and historical constructions of race, citizenship, and identity have primarily been shaped by White people in order to uphold White supremacy and domination. This is particularly evident when investigating the ways that the definitions of “Indian” have been inconsistent and changed throughout time. Whether by requiring a higher blood quantum for federal recognition and benefits, denying Indigenous people U.S. citizenship, or influencing tribes to adopt their own blood quantum requirements, White people have been the gatekeepers of Native American identity.
The years I spent on mainland Turtle Island taught me that I had to understand that the word Boricua, people made up of Black, Native, and Colonizer mixed through a 400 year old battle, meant something completely different outside the island. I had to understand my privileges even as a Brown skinned Boricua in order to understand my experiences as they intertwined with my own ancestry and how a double colonized history shaped us. This would all lead me to understand how this same conflict occurred in communities that identified under my same ethnicity across parts of Turtle Island I have never even been to.
A Trip Around Europe & Back
Life on the mainland U.S. somehow led me to spending over a decade in Europe. I can say I have felt colonialism at its roots in all its suffocating violence. Living amongst Europeans, experiencing culture across various countries, I finally understood them as inherently violent, individualistic, and empty, incapable of understanding nature or Spirit beyond materialism.
Europe was the very opposite of the warm, community-minded, friendly, welcoming people I grew up with and came from. These, my people, were descendants of the Taino. Suddenly, Columbus’ own words describing the Taino as kind, good people to take advantage of made sense from a people who do not seem to understand warmth, kindness, or community. Of course, the things they lacked would be the most notable they wrote back to home about and the ones that allowed them to pillage our lives for centuries.
While in Europe, I actively sought to understand myself in the context of a continent that was foreign to me and yet, whose blood somehow also ran through me. After all, how could I (or anyone) decolonize if we do not understand what we are decolonizing from? In the same way, how can we reconnect without understanding what it means to disconnect and from what?
I stood at the very real steps of the original slave market that shipped our enslaved African ancestors from the Portuguese coast to the Caribbean. I shared space with Canarian people that sounded just like Boricuas on the island and watched their own colonization through garitas exactly like the ones in San Juan. I contained my inner rage as I strolled past the gold dipped castle that houses Spainish royalty still 500 years after they genocided us for that very gold that simply sits there watching them continue to thrive while barely remembering our exploited, impoverished existence. As I studied invasive species in Ireland for my Masters degree, I understood otherization and dehumanization of those like me and how my identity became whatever community they saw in my unusual features according to the racialized group they hated most. As I celebrated holidays for years in Germany, I understood my lack of worth as a two spirit being and understood the depth of sexism on the continent it came from. The same taught me what unashamed, emboldened murder inspired by Native genocide looked like as I walked through the gas chambers of Dachau. I witnessed the faux politeness and unspoken, expected order from the paper thin lips of British people, too in detached from reality to acknowledge the violence they have spread across the entire world. While I awaited my return back home from Switzerland, I learned individuality and bullying as the tactic used to climb ladders above those deemed weak. I learned what excess and uncaring power looks like and at what cost and to whom.
Europe taught me violence, rejection, and oppression at the source. It’s people taught me that, while pieces of their culture may taint my blood, my Indigeniety and Blackness won the battle. They are the ones that make up the people of Borikén still 500 years after Europeans polluted our ways of life. They are the flavor to our soul. They are the divine that allow the sun to kiss my skin without harm. They are the joy that naturally existed in my heart since birth. I came from good people that, despite all, were and are still good people. More than good people, we are descendants of survivors and warriors.
I returned home feeling confident enough to reject the forced Iberian/European, which has never and will never recognize me as an entire person, once and for good. I had come full circle in recognizing first-hand the system that exploited, destroyed, depleted, and erased my African and Indigenous ancestors. I had fully decolonized from the hierarchies and blanqueamiento still expected and tolerated on the island — and in U.S. settler society through the demonization of both my Blackness and Indigeneity.
Inside the Virtual Taino Community
I was grateful to finally settle back home, but I knew I still had a lot of work to do in my continual decolonization. I found myself looking to Natives I befriended and felt a special connection with. Through my travels and activism, I crossed passed with natives from Gadigal, Oneida, and Mi’kmaw tribes. In learning about them, their teachings, and community, I hoped I could reconnect with my own. I nervously asked my Mi’kmaw contact, the person that had taught me the word “two spirit”, what they thought would be expected in an introduction letter to a tribe I had looked into. Unfortunately, I received word from another Taino that the tribe no longer seemed to be active, so I turned to social media for Taino spaces.
It didn’t take long to encounter spaces more resembling of European communities than my own island and people. This was the last of what I expected:
Shaming, bullying, gossiping/spreading rumors of individuals, gatekeeping, silencing, exclusion, and exploiting power above other marginalized members deemed lower on the colonizer hierarchy (such as disabled people, two spirit people, people with mental health problems, etc). These forms of lateral violence (More via Creative Spirits/J. Korffs 2020 & 2021) greeted me from the moment I attempted to connect with others as I sought to learn about myself through the knowledge of those who unapologetically embraced our Taino ancestry.
What became quite clear was that I was experiencing spaces reproducing internalized colonialism in the name of decolonization and reconnection. The most blatant of these was the constant fight for power over authenticity — who and what “tribe” is the most Taíno of all.
“we’re the one true tribe”
“we’re the first and best”
“we’re the most authentic”
“you’re nobody in this community”
“just because you were born in Borikén, doesn’t make you Taíno”
Taino reconnecting spaces became a real-life lesson in the effects of blood quantum mixed with internalized colonialism as I watched reconnecting people either make believe ignoring blatant lateral violence is enlighten meant or the opposite, actively participate in lateral oppression unashamedly.
I sought safe spaces in which I could learn more about myself as a two spirit person and death healer and walked out of Taino reconnecting spaces feeling like I did when I felt trapped and suffocated by my experiences across the European continent.
As I write, Taino reconnecting spaces are not community spaces. They are drenched with colonial reproductions attempting to dictate who is worthy and who is not worthy of recognizing their Taino ancestors while ignoring all the intricacies that make Caribbean people who they are and the influences that have shaped those born and raised on the islands and those living one, two, or even three generations in the diaspora.
Some of the worst experiences I have had in Taino spaces relate to the constant ableism/neuroableism in Taino spaces. The insistence in upholding binarism, misgendering, and filing two spirit people under “women” despite the common knowledge that Taino communities did not follow European gender binaries is also all too common. Even worse is the patriarchal insistence that two spirit assigned males under settler society would be the determiners of how the rest of us should identify — as women. Both are forms of lateral violence that the majority of groups I have been in seem completely unaware of.
In addition, while language is an important way communities can be brought together, even this is being used as one of the most toxic forms of lateral violence polluting the Taino reconnection movement. Those in the diaspora are somehow deciding the one true language for all of us. Even Columbus affirmed that, “…from Bahama to Cuba, Boriken to Jamaica, the same language was spoken in various slight dialects, but understood by all.” Therefore, especially for a language that has had to be reconstructed (some choosing to do so based on white interpretations that apparently hold more weight because “scholars” and others through languages unconnected through centuries upon centuries while both look down on the Taino already integrated as part of reconnection in Borikén), the idea that one can only be Taino if embracing the same exact path as everyone else, is not only privileged, ableist, and classist but is also actually erases our ancestors. The arrogance of claiming to be the “one”, true, only, first, is nothing more than internalized colonialism and lateral violence.
During an introductory meeting for a tribe I wanted to familiarize myself with, a cacique claimed that one cannot decolonize if one does not learn to think in their native language. This statement, however, cannot be further from the reality of what is means to decolonize. One can learn any language they choose, but if they do not understand decolonization through a consistent anti-oppressive, multi-faceted lens willing to begin the journey within the individual, then they will simply continue to uphold colonialism while failing to detach from the very system they claim to want to in their native language.
Native language within communities that reproduce and allow unchecked ableism, neuroableism, sexism, binarism, homophobia, transphobia, classism, anti-blackness, etc. is still colonialism.
A native that maliciously excludes, bullies, shames, and silences is still colonialism.
Leaders who allow lateral violence to continue are modern soldiers of colonialism.
The only ones that benefit from our fragmentation, in-fighting, competition, self-oppression, and inability to build community outside of these are the descendants of the settlers that attempted to extinguish us.
It is imperative that the Taino reconnecting movement understand that silence and not addressing lateral violence is literally a tool of colonialism that oppressed people reproduce in order to ensure they too control those they deem beneath them.
Lateral violence is a tool of colonialism.
Community IS Decolonization
What isn’t lateral violence? I can affirm that asking questions, openly challenging oppression, addressing issues and disagreements openly, making an effort to build communities together without hierarchies, excluding settlers while rebuilding, accepting language as dialects rather as one true one, sharing knowledge openly, educating rather than shaming, accepting our differences, making a point to address micro-oppressive systems (ableism, binarism, anti-blackness, etc.) is to oppose lateral violence as a start.
Decolonization without community is colonialism.
Community cannot exist as it once did by reproducing the same violence that we have been forced to live under for 500 years.
Questions to the Taino Reconnecting Movement
- How exactly does a community decolonize if they do not understand the system that oppresses them?
2. Why is language being touted as the sole way decolonization happens?
3. Why are the different tribes so disconnected to the point that they do not have any awareness of previous and already established language reconstruction projects?
4. How is one person more Taino than another if both have Taino blood in their veins? Who decided this?
5. What exactly IS the common goal of the Taino community?
6. Do you understand the difference between open communication/the unwillingness to follow unquestionably and disrespect?
7. When do we talk about this all as a community?
8. Do you understand that gatekeeping is paper genocide and only serves settlers to benefit from exclusion?
So many more questions but these are a good place to start working to eradicate the masters’ tools once and for all.
-Copyright Julia Feliz 2022-
I invite you to have this conversation here and with your community.
If you have learned from this labor of love, I would appreciate your support if even just $1 or $5 via venmo @juliafeliz
You can learn more about my me and my work via www.JuliaFeliz.com
