WI-Natives stay majority in Jamaica.

SpamBotSam

Banned
Do you think if the Native tribes (like Arawak) of Jamaica werent wiped out and were still a majority of the population (theres still a few descendants-but barely), the culture of Jamaica as it is today (created by black people living there) would still exist? Im not saying natives wouldnt have changed the culture to an extent, but with them not being such a barely-there minority as they are today, would that have prevented the current culture from existing?
 
Do you think if the Native tribes (like Arawak) of Jamaica werent wiped out and were still a majority of the population (theres still a few descendants-but barely), the culture of Jamaica as it is today (created by black people living there) would still exist? Im not saying natives wouldnt have changed the culture to an extent, but with them not being such a barely-there minority as they are today, would that have prevented the current culture from existing?

I'd presume it would be like the Dominican Republic but with more of a black-native admixture in the population. As for the possibilities of the natives retaining a majority on the island, it's almost impossible. The Taino on the island are presumably less than the population in Hispaniola and would be subsumed under the wave of African slave laborers.
 

SpamBotSam

Banned
I'd presume it would be like the Dominican Republic but with more of a black-native admixture in the population. As for the possibilities of the natives retaining a majority on the island, it's almost impossible. The Taino on the island are presumably less than the population in Hispaniola and would be subsumed under the wave of African slave laborers.

What makes you think their population wouldnt increase? The Mexican population (mostly either native or part native today) increased significantly after colonization.
 
What makes you think their population wouldnt increase? The Mexican population (mostly either native or part native today) increased significantly after colonization.

Gradually. It took almost four hundred years after the Spanish conquest for Mexico to regain and top its pre-Columbian population. It'd like increase a lot more had Mexico avoided Spanish colonization and still experienced the epidemics or had a relatively light Spanish presence meaning less sending natives to be killed working in the mines and plantations. Jamaica could retain its native population but you need to nerf colonization. It wasn't just the diseases but the abuse that the Spanish inflicted upon the Taino and other natives that caused their populations to decline.
 
What makes you think their population wouldnt increase? The Mexican population (mostly either native or part native today) increased significantly after colonization.
Mexico is also much larger than Jamaica. If colonization efforts are the same as they were in OTL, then it seems unlikely that the Jamaican natives will exist at all.
 
Mexico is also much larger than Jamaica. If colonization efforts are the same as they were in OTL, then it seems unlikely that the Jamaican natives will exist at all.

It's not the size of the country, but the size of the native population. Mexico had a much larger population of natives, had large parts of the country with high native populations that were outside of malarial zones (that helped survival rates) and did not have as much sugar cultivation. A lot of Natives-and blacks and IIRC even some indentured Europeans-were literally worked to death in the sugarcane fields.
 
As others have said its hard to accomplish this without altering colonization. More cultural survival is a better possibility, which is what I'm trying to accomplish in my TL for the Caribbean.
 
The Spaniards initially began colonisation of Hispaniola and there they enslaved the indigenous peoples to work on the gold mines and later the sugar cane plantations. The Arawak population there was virtually extinct within decades because of this. However, as early as the first decade of the 1500s the Spaniards began to depopulate the Bahamas as a source of slaves, along with Cuba and Jamaica. So this had a negative impact on all of these islands.
 
Hmm - a maroon group that speaks Taino and has held on to a few cemis. If you're interested in this kind of thing in an ASB alternate world kind of way, see my Voudu Nation vs Latter Day Incan Empire thread on the GURPS forum, which is about an alternate Caribbean and SA where minority cultures thrive.
 
It's not the size of the country, but the size of the native population. Mexico had a much larger population of natives, had large parts of the country with high native populations that were outside of malarial zones (that helped survival rates) and did not have as much sugar cultivation. A lot of Natives-and blacks and IIRC even some indentured Europeans-were literally worked to death in the sugarcane fields.
This
It's a pretty tough WI unless you're going to butterfly away the whole Spanish conquest of the Americas.

Also, this.
 
It's not the size of the country, but the size of the native population. Mexico had a much larger population of natives, had large parts of the country with high native populations that were outside of malarial zones (that helped survival rates) and did not have as much sugar cultivation. A lot of Natives-and blacks and IIRC even some indentured Europeans-were literally worked to death in the sugarcane fields.

As far as the first factor, as far as I'm aware the islands of the Greater Antilles did have dense populations in Pre-Columbian times on scale with Mesoamerica. The societies that lived there were complex, agrarian, chiefdom-based societies, not simple village cultures, horticulturalists, or hunter-gatherers.

I think geography is the bigger factor in the near-extinction of the Arawak peoples - The insular nature of their homelands left them with few places to hide when the Spanish showed up to enslave them and take their resources, and the mass importation of African slaves and European colonists gave the surviving natives too much competition in the re-population of the islands during the time in which they could have recovered. As a result, whatever natives were leftover were simply absorbed into the black or creole populations rather than maintaining a distinctive society to this day.
 
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