For the Children of Hummingbirds
Or the descendants of those who first came in contact with Columbus.
It’s sunrise, and the birds are fighting outside our window. Surely it has something to do with the missing trees. Where there once stood three tall árboles, now is the site of grass and flowers and other green life emerging from the brown soil. Cut down due to safety––wind storms and showers having caused broken branches on fallen power lines––our miniature forest is now gone. Throughout the different tonalities in the birds’ dialogue, I sense frustration.
Annually, millions of birds use ancestral migration corridors to find more abundant food supplies, and to avoid overpopulation in their breeding grounds. In New York City, spring migration (March-June) hits its peak between mid-April and mid-May. (Fall migration, which lasts longer, begins as early as mid-June for some species, peaks between mid-August and mid-October, and even lasts through December for others.) Located directly in the Atlantic Flyway, one of the four major migration corridors in North America spanning from the Caribbean to Greenland, New York City and our parks allow for our winged relatives to rest and refuel on their journeys.
Eagles and red-tailed hawks. Common terns and red knots. Ducks and geese. Swallows and sparrows. Whoever landed outside our window was disoriented. And while we express our gratitude for the protection against broken windows and future fires, we also open our hearts to the birds who have lost a recognizable home. Birds who are increasingly displaced in a land whose politicians continue to green-light the construction of taller and taller buildings. Buildings that stretch so high into the sky that up to 230,000 birds meet untimely deaths throughout the five boroughs each year by colliding with glass. Across the country, the numbers are as high as 988 million.
While many birdwatchers, wildlife enthusiasts, and environmental advocates across the city do their part by educating residents on ways to help (like Lights Out programs), the rapid decline in bird populations are both concerning and preventible. Birds are instrumental in maintaining ecosystems. They are predators and prey, pollinators and engineers. Through their flight, they disperse seeds. Through their droppings (guano), they fertilize lands, spreading nutrients near and far. Birds are pillars in the community, maintaining life for our fauna kin, and for us who walk on two legs.
Albeit coming from a place of (what feels like) worry, the sweetness of the birds’ songs transport me to bygone times. Where we collectively lived more in harmony with our finned, winged, and four-legged relatives, more in tune with the nature that nurtures us, and more receptive to the wisdom of the natural world. I hear their chirps, and I’m reminded that we are the descendants of hummingbirds.
To remix the words of Fernando Villalona, Kiskeyana-Ayitiana soy. De mis raices yo no puedo olvidarme. Soy de una loma y lo llevo en la sangre, de unas tierras tan poderosas por la gracia de Dios. Like many from the island, my mother’s entire familial line (save a bisabuela, and her family, from Borikén) stems from north to south, east to west of the island we now call la República Dominicana and Haiti. Having roots as far back as we can trace, through both family oral histories and my own genealogical quests, I think about the weight of what it means to be from the island whose shores unknowingly would usher in a future no one could have foreseen. A land where a Genovese egomaniac with a superiority complex would wash up one solemn day in October 1492. Funded by the then-recently-united Crown of Castile, Columbus (Colón) and his henchmen would ravage not only my Kiskeyano-Ayitiano and Boricua ancestors, but our greater Arawakan, Karib, and Taíno relatives from islands nearby, like Guanahaní (the Bahamas) and Cairi (Trinidad).
Standardized versions of history are practices of violence through the silencing of those that history happens to. Of uplifting the supposed victors, and condemning the their lions to a future where they’re ignored, overlooked, and lost. Promoters of eurocentric world views, museums, textbooks, and institutions alike have historically done little to challenge what we accept as history, bringing the voices of all to the forefront. That schools still teach narratives that claim Black history begins with enslavement, or that all Indigenous and First Nations peoples no longer exist, is exemplary of the white supremacist model. In the case of Kiskeya-Ayiti, and the greater Caribbean, that the consensus claims our recorded history begins in 1492 with the arrival of Ikú (death, in Lucumí) is troublesome.
The world over, Indigeneity predates Western colonization. Whether Turtle Island, the Caribbean, the entirety of this hemisphere, or West Africa, it’s imperative that we push back on the idea that our histories begin with La Niña, La Pinta, y la Santa María. Neither do they begin with swords nor bibles, neither with genocide nor plantations. In the Caribbean, we recall our ancestors when we say Cuba (derived from cubao, “where fertile land is abundant” or coabana, “great place”), Ayti (“land of mountains”), Kiskeya (“mother of all lands”), Borikén (“the land of the brave lord”), Xaymaca (“the land of wood and water” and “the land of springs”). Our existences precede La Hispaniola or República Domincana or Puerto Rico. Despite our islands still proudly owning our pre-Columbian names in many towns, bodies of water, and provinces (Caguas, Cayey, Humacao, Guayama, Guaraguao, Utuado, Mayagüez; Azua, Baoruco, Samaná, Macorís, Maguana), how we name ourselves should not have to be so inextricably tied to our history of colonial conquest.
At the time of Colón’ first voyage, the island of Kiskeya-Ayiti was divided into five cacicazgos (chiefdoms): Marién (the northwest) ruled by Cacique Guacanagaríx, Maguá (central region) ruled by Cacique Guarionex, Maguana (the south) ruled by Cacique Caonabo, Jaragua (the west) ruled by Cacique Bohechío, and Higüey (the east) ruled by Cacique Cayacoa.
(It was Guacanagaríx who in 1492, saved Colón and his men from the wreckage of la Santa María. He allowed Colón and company––criminals released from prison by Queen Isabela––to establish the settlement of La Navidad near Guacanagaríx’s village. Siding with Spain, the cacique refused to ally himself with other noblemen, who tried to strategize warfare and call upon the gods for aid in expelling the Spaniards from the region. Betraying his people, Guacanagaríx often served as an informant and spy for Europeans. Until this day, the term complejo de Guacanagaríx has been used to describe a Kiskeyano who is more interested in foreign culture than in their own.)
Throughout the Caribbean, we numbered over one million Taíno, Kiskeya-Ayiti home to nearly 400,000 alone. In 1502, the Transatlantic slave trade made its first landfall on the island, and by 1510, hundreds of our African ancestors would start becoming subjected to one of the largest, and most violent, forced migrations in human history. By 1517, 25 years of imperialism and genocide drastically decreased the number of Taíno. Many leaders were brutality killed, choosing to stand up in the face of colonial violence than live in servitude, and many others lost their lives due to diseases unknown to them. Here is where the lie of history has become fact: that all our of Taíno ancestors succumbed. That, like insects, they were exterminated. That they cease to exist.
Textbooks don’t speak about the history of African and Taíno revolution, of the communities they created in the mountains in rebellion to colonial rule, or the many ways Taíno culture prevails today. We don’t learn that jamacas (hammocks), of Taíno origin, completely changed seafaring, or that the word for, and process of, barbecue (barbacoa) is a Taíno word. Or of the countless examples of Taíno words that have become part of the greater Spanish language, like canoes (canoas) and hurricanes (huracánes). Since the 1970s, inspired by the American Indian Movement and Young Lords Party, many groups of Native-descent relatives throughout the Caribbean have come together to not only celebrate, but revive Taíno culture, challenging dominant history through the reclamation and remembrance of ancestral heritage.
I come back to the hummingbirds.
For countless Indigenous peoples, hummingbirds hold great significance. Dahiitį́hí (hummingbirds) for Diné are symbol of beauty, love, and wisdom. Incas see hummingbirds as messengers from heaven; having won the title of ruler of the skies from the condor, hummingbirds are key to the next stage of development of human consciousness. Huītzilōpōchtli, the Aztec solar, war, sacrifice, and patron deity of Tenochtitlan, is represented either as a hummingbird, or as an anthropomorphic figure. Always wearing a blue-green hummingbird helmet, his name is often translated to “Left-Handed Hummingbird” or “Hummingbird of the South” (“huītzilin” meaning hummingbird, “ōpōchtli” meaning the left or south, since Aztec cosmology associates the south with the left side of the body). Fallen warriors and women who lose their lives during childbirth are transformed into hummingbirds and join Huītzilōpōchtli. Maya communities view the hummingbird, who goes by the name of Tzuunum in one story, as magical beings: the sun in disguise as a wonderful little bird as he tried to court the beautiful Moon.
On Turtle Island, Cherokee recount the race between the hummingbird and the crane, and also tell of a hummingbird whose speed and agility helped bring back tobacco to the people after it was stolen by the Dagul'ku goose. Amongst Hopi, Zuni, Acoma, and Laguna Pueblos nations, kachinas are spiritual beings or personifications of things in the real world. Local pantheon of kachinas vary from pueblo community to community, and can represent anything in the natural world or cosmos, from a revered ancestor to an element, a location to a natural phenomenon; the sun and stars, wind and corn. One kachina, called Tocha, is a hummingbird that appears during Kiva Dances in the winter, and during the Soyohim Dances in the spring. Hopi remember the hummingbird as intervening on behalf of their people to convince the gods to bring rain. In honor of this intervention, during traditional ceremonies, Hú dancers embody hummingbirds; their birdcalls are prayers for rain to wet freshly planted crops in the spring. A Mojave legend tells of an ancient time when people all lived underground in darkness. A hummingbird was sent to look for light and found a path to the upper world where we now live.
Hummingbirds are healers, messengers, and signs of good luck, joy, and prosperity. In Taíno tradition, the hummingbird is the symbol of the spreader of life on earth. Believed to have once been flies, they were transformed into little birds by the Sun Father. Hummingbirds are a symbol of peace, but are also fierce protectors of the homeland, with the heart of an eagle. Called the Guaní, Zumbador, Pájaro Mosca, and Guacariga or Guacaracigaba (meaning “Rays of the Sun” in certain Taíno idioms), hummingbirds are the disseminators of pollen, and thus all new life. For Taíno, hummingbirds are a symbol of rebirth.
Since 1492, the Caribbean has been a site where so much history has happened. Where forced and chosen migrations have contributed to the formation of new cultures, customs, languages, and entire ways of being. Where the first rebellions by enslaved Africans took place. Where the first free Black republic was won. Where the first African and Indigenous coalition against colonialism was formed by Hatüey and his warriors. Just as Black cultures have survived across nations, and are crucial to the social fabrics of every country within this hemisphere (music, food, dance, religion, spirituality, tonality, marketplace cultures), so are our Indigenous ones. Even though much was lost, and many of our Caribbean nations don’t have formal systems recognizing our Indigenous heritage, may we never forget that we are the descendants of hummingbirds.
We, of the diaspora and on the islands, who still honor our ancestral legacies and find ways to live in harmony with the teachings of our forbearers.
We, who still pray to the Sun and Moon, the Wind and Trees, who listen to and learn from our natural world.
We, who find ways despite living in concrete jungles, to carve out time to hike throughout the wilderness, work with plants and their essences to heal ourselves and our communities, and learn words from our once-fluent languages.
How important are our languages, “the collective memory bank of a people’s experience,” as proclaimed by Kenyan writer Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o. Citizen Potowatomi scholar and botanist Robin Wall-Kimmerer invites us to reflect that “When a language dies, so much more than words are lost. Language is the dwelling place of ideas that do not exist anywhere else. It is a prism through which to see the world.”
As an Afro-Native Kiskeyana––non-enrolled descendant of both my Indigenous nations in the Caribbean and Turtle Island––I, and so many relatives known and unknown across our Afro-Indigenous/Urban Native diaspora reach back to move forward. For Wall-Kimmerer once wrote, “the land knows you, even when you are lost.”
Restoration of the Earth also means restoration of our relationship to Earth, to the World, and to our pasts. It means learning to live in harmony. It means balance. It means toppling the hierarchy instilled by colonial forces that mistakenly teaches us that Human comes before all, when in reality, we are the youngest creatures on this Tierra.
So, I think back to the birds at our window, and their distress. As the children of hummingbirds who too have faced (cultural, physical, spiritual) displacement and disorientation, I remind us all that its never too late to re-member: remembering ourselves through reading, unlearning, and unearthing the historical silences that have become part of the dominant narrative, and re-membering ourselves, as in putting our fragmented pieces back together.
Engage in your communities, learn the Indigenous histories of your lands and those you reside in, be respectful to the nature that you share space with. Teach your children, and your children’s children the stories of our ancestors and our cultures, so that they may live for the next generations.
May we all return to the wisdom of trees, who don’t act as individuals, but are embodiments of the collective.
For the children of hummingbirds: may we all continue reorganizing our Selves to our knowledge, tradition, and ancestral technologies that fortify the mind-body-spirit, and remind of us who we are.