Survivors
While only the Carib remain among the original Antillean populations of Ciboney, Taino, and Carib, the Orinoco Arawak tribes, who served as the root of all the before-mentioned groups of island people, have also survived on mainland South America. Several hundred thousand reside in Venezuela, Guyana, Suriname, St. Vincent, and French Guiana, an example being approximately 300,000 Wayuu Arawak living in Colombia, with 150,000 Wayuu in the neighbouring area of Venezuela. There is also a significant population of approximately 1,600 Lokono/Arawak living at St. Cuthbert's Mission (Arawak: Pakuri) in Guyana. Taíno/Arawakan language is still spoken by a tiny minority in Cuba to the present day.
Recent DNA studies indicate that the majority of people in Puerto Rico are descended maternally in part from Taíno/Arawakan ancestors. This study, under the Taino genome project started in 1999 through a grant from the National Science Foundation, tested mitochondrial DNA throughout the island, identifying that 62 percent of Puerto Ricans today are of Amerindian descent.
Read more about this topic: Arawak
Famous quotes containing the word survivors:
“I believe that all the survivors are mad. One time or another their madness will explode. You cannot absorb that much madness and not be influenced by it. That is why the children of survivors are so tragic. I see them in school. They don’t know how to handle their parents. They see that their parents are traumatized: they scream and don’t react normally.”
—Elie Wiesel (b. 1928)
“I want to celebrate these elms which have been spared by the plague, these survivors of a once flourishing tribe commemorated by all the Elm Streets in America. But to celebrate them is to be silent about the people who sit and sleep underneath them, the homeless poor who are hauled away by the city like trash, except it has no place to dump them. To speak of one thing is to suppress another.”
—Lisel Mueller (b. 1924)