The Taíno were the Indigenous people of the Greater Antilles — Hispaniola, Cuba, Puerto Rico, Jamaica, and the Bahamas — and the first Americans Christopher Columbus met when he reached Guanahani in October 1492. Within roughly one generation, enslavement, the encomienda labor system, massacre, and European disease shattered their society and killed the vast majority of them, especially on Hispaniola, in one of the most extreme population collapses in recorded history. For centuries they were declared extinct, but Indigenous Caribbean ancestry closely related to ancient Taíno survives in many modern Caribbean people, Taíno words and foods endure worldwide, and a modern revival movement now asserts a living Indigenous Caribbean identity.
Hurricane, hammock, canoe, barbecue: the Taíno gave English all four before most of them were gone. They were the people who met Columbus on a Caribbean beach in 1492, and within a single generation enslavement and disease had killed the overwhelming majority — one of the swiftest collapses on record. Declared extinct for centuries, they were not: their descendants are overturning that colonial story now.