History often celebrates Christopher Columbus as the man who “discovered” the Americas, but this narrative collapses under scrutiny. Long before Columbus’s ships reached the Caribbean in 1494, the island of Jamaica was already home to the Arawak, or Taíno, people, a thriving Indigenous civilization with its own language, agriculture, spirituality, and social structure.
To claim discovery of a land already inhabited by a peaceful and organized society is not exploration; it is erasure. The Arawak people were descendants of early migrants from South America who settled across the Caribbean islands centuries before Columbus’s arrival. They cultivated cassava, maize, and yams, built canoes for fishing, and lived in villages led by chiefs known as caciques.