Igneri Erotic

The Igneri were the Arawakan-speaking island people who lived across the Lesser Antilles before the Kalinago, the so-called Island Caribs, came to dominate the chain in the last centuries before European contact. Some of their ancestry survives among the Kalinago of Dominica and the Garifuna of Central America, and their speech survives in the Garifuna language. Nobody knows what they called themselves. The name comes from the Kalinago, who told seventeenth-century French missionaries and chroniclers that their own ancestors had come up from the South American mainland, killed the Igneri men and married the women.

That story was meant to explain something the French found odd: Kalinago men and women seemed to speak different languages. Later study of the language showed that both men and women spoke an Arawakan language day to day, and that men also used a layer of Cariban words. So the conquest tale may be a shortened memory of something slower, a mix of raiding, marriage, trade and people switching languages, rather than one massacre. Either way, the women's language is the one that lasted.

Archaeologists usually attach the name to the descendants of farmers who left the Orinoco basin, in what is now Venezuela, and reached the islands around 500 BC. Their pottery, painted white on red, is called Saladoid after the Venezuelan site of Saladero, and it turns up from Trinidad to Puerto Rico. They grew manioc and baked cassava bread on flat clay griddles, fished the reefs, and carved carnelian, amethyst and other stones into beads and small frog-shaped charms that traveled from island to island by canoe. Small three-pointed stones found at their sites look like early forms of the zemí, the spirit object later central to Taíno religion. A name written down in the 1600s is a loose fit for pottery made more than a thousand years earlier, so careful writers treat it as a handy label, not a proven identity. In Puerto Rico, popular history uses Igneri for the pottery makers who came before the Taíno.

Their legacy has outlasted the name. On Dominica, a few thousand people in the Kalinago Territory trace their descent to the people who lived on the island before Columbus. On St. Vincent, Kalinago and Africans who had escaped slavery or survived shipwrecks became the Garifuna, whom the British deported to Roatán in 1797. Their towns now line the Caribbean coast of Honduras, Belize, Guatemala and Nicaragua. Garifuna is still an Arawakan language, which makes it, at some remove, the closest living link to the people the Kalinago called Igneri.