[Date Prev][Date Next][Thread Prev][Thread Next][Date Index][Thread Index]
29254: Simidor (adds) Re: 29236: lyall (reply) indigenes names (fwd)
From: Daniel Simidor <danielsimidor@yahoo.com>
jdlyall wrote:
... So, Indian revolutionary precedents were well
known and it seems that
Indians were symbolically honored in many ways.
Choosing a taino name for the
homeland seems to follow this perfectly.
Legrace wrote:
Why Dessalines appropriated the indigenous name
rather
than inventing a new name will probably never be
known, although there is
speculation that his mother may have been a Taino.
None of oldest maps I
have been able to see uses any variation of the
native name.
Jean Fouchard in an article ?Où, quand et par qui fut
choisi de redonner à notre patrie le nom indien
d?Ayti? (Where, when and who chose to give back to our
fatherland the Indian name of Ayti), in the first
issue of the Bulletin du Bureau National d?Ethnologie
(1984), responds thus to his own triple question:
?After the conquest of Mole St. Nicholas, on Dec. 4,
1803.
?The choice of the name was a unanimous decision of
the people themselves, now independent and free.?
He quotes Haitian historian Thomas Madiou (circa
1848): ?Oct. 1802: Dessalines was acclaimed by his
troops as paramount leader of the Indigenes (natives).
He chose Petite Rivière de l?Artibonite as the seat
of his government and gave the name Incas or Children
of the Sun to the populations under his command.?
Fouchard also refers to the publication in ?a recent
issue of Revue de la Société Haitienne d?Histoire? of
an unpublished letter of General Capois dated July 4,
1803, with ?Armée des Incas? as his letterhead. He
reminds his readers that ?Africans and Indians had
joined hands? as maroons at the very beginning of the
colony, and reveals that slaves and runaways
identified as Indians or Indian mulattoes were common
on plantation inventories as late as 1793.
Finally Fouchard mentions in a footnote that the name
Haiti in reference to the western part of the island
was used by the French envoy Roume as early as 1796.
He goes on to explain that the name ?Haiti-Toma?
refers to ?the Toma tribe in Guinea and suggests a
pure Haitian from Africa,? not a Creole or mixed
blood.
The same issue of the journal also carried a learned
and militant five-page message by president-for-life
Baby Doc, proclaiming Nov. 28 as ?Jour de l?Indien et
de la Culture.? Strange (insolite) to say the least.
__________________________________________________
Do You Yahoo!?
Tired of spam? Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around
http://mail.yahoo.com