Iroqua Μολών Λaβέ

We as Taino people we are not dead we are still here. The government wants you to believe that there are no Taino left. But I hate to say to the government we are still here And we are still living. They will tell you this is not true. That you are not native, that you are just mix. No you are native, you are Taino. Back in the 1900 they send Puerto Rican to Carlisle Indian School's in Pennsylvania. Why, Pratt’s founding principle for the Carlisle Indian Industrial School was to “Kill the Indian and save the man.” Pratt believed that the Native Americans should be totally uprooted from their tribal past in order to “achieve full participation.” In practice, this meant erasing, as much as possible, any trace of Native American customs, culture, language and religion from the children at the school. "They told us that Indian ways were bad. They said we must get ‘civilized’….It means ‘be like the white man’… And the books told how bad the Indians had been to the white men—burning their towns and killing their women and children. But I had seen white men do that to Indians. We all wore white man's clothes and ate white man's food and went to white man's churches and spoke white man's talk. And so after a while we also began to say Indians were bad. We laughed at our own people…” Quaker and missionary reformers explored new methods to 'civilize' the Indians. They were uncomfortable with extermination policies and began to formulate ideas of assimilation. These methods appealed to Pratt, who was already experimenting with his Ft. Marion charges. He agreed that to 'civilize' the Indian would be to turn him into a copy of his God-fearing, soil-tilling, white brother. Why will they send Puerto Rican to this school if we was not Indian, also DNA test was done to many Puerto Rican and found to have native blood, more native blood then any thing. Look it up and see that I am not lying. The story of Taíno extinction was created as a colonial strategy to disempower the Native people and as a way to legitimate the importation of slaves from Africa. Ironically, the Taíno culture that survives may be considered the strongest and most deeply planted “roots”