I first met Roman Perez through a mutual friend, Juan Carlos Pinto, a local Brooklyn artist.
Juan Carlos invited me to the blessing ceremony of a mural he made in Newkirk Plaza. The mural decorates the inside of a tunnel connecting Newkirk Plaza to a pedestrian street.
“Come to my showing of the mural. And I want to introduce you to my friend, Roman; he’s a Taino Elder and Minister,” said Carlos. Pronounced TA EE NO.
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“What’s a Taino Minister?” I asked.
“He’s a Kacike (Chief) of a Taino tribe, the Maisiti Yukayeke Taino of the Indigenous people of the Caribbean.”
When I arrived at Newkirk Plaza, Roman, dressed in a colorful feathered headdress, was blowing smoke from a shell with hot coals on the mural walls of the tunnel and chanting. And although our neighborhood is remarkably diverse, you’re more likely to see Tibetan monks and Rastafarians in native garb than Indigenous people. But the magic of this part of Brooklyn is that everything happens here.
I didn’t get much of a chance to talk to Roman then. But I’d soon meet him again. This time at a ceremony to bless Carlos Pinto’s artist workspace on Coney Island Avenue in Brooklyn, OYE Studios. This was all before COVID. Life was “normal.”
This time, Roman stood up in front of the crowd and spoke.
“I invite the spirits of the Elders to bless this studio and this beautiful community of people that Carlos has brought together,” he said, stroking the feathers with his index finger and thumb as he spoke.
I watched Roman with awe, as he addressed the gathering of fifteen or so people. He spoke with such confidence and intention, like a true leader. After his prayerful invocation, he then led a chant. We all joined in. There were people associated with the OYE Studio community: artists and friends. People who are from Brooklyn, and people from all over the world, who now live in Brooklyn. Even my eight-year-old son, Travis, was at this event. I felt truly blessed to be among this gathering of people from so many different places.
When I talked to Roman after the blessing ceremony, what really struck me was how easy he was to approach. Roman was very down to earth, very real, like the guys from Brooklyn and Queens I had grown up with. Roman and I are from the same era in NYC when the boroughs were more tough than hip. I would later see a picture of him on Facebook when he was in his teens in the 1980s. Roman had the same dark black hair I did at that age. And like me, he wore the same Saturday Night Fever style platform shoes.
Roman Perez was born in the Dominican Republic and came to the United States, with his family, when he was five. He grew up in Sunset Park on 58th Street.
When I talked to him on the phone recently, we talked about his personal history and his practice.
“How did you first come into contact with your Taino heritage?” I asked.
“When I was a kid, I saw things at home with grandma, with the Elders. The tobacco preparation and rituals.” He paused for a minute. “But these things were hidden. Our people learned to conceal our culture. It could mean life or death. Tribal ways became very camouflaged and internalized.”
“Were you raised Taino?”
“Not really. I was raised Catholic. My parents went to church, so of course I did too.”
“How did you learn more about your Taino heritage?”
“It was a calling. I accumulated the hints from my grandparents, and they resurfaced as I encountered people throughout my life. Then, when I went to museums as a kid, I became fascinated by tribal peoples throughout the world. Tribal ways and knowledge captured my imagination.”
“Who were your teachers?” I asked.
“There was a man who worked in the museum who identified as a Taino. Jorge Estevez told me, ‘If you’re interested in finding tribal people, don’t look for headdresses or drumming. You’ll find our heritage in the culture: the planting, the basketry, the artwork, the language, and the food.’ Jorge lit my mind on fire. I kept reading, then started going to powwows, learning more from other people, like a sponge.”
Having heard Roman speak the language, I asked him how he learned it.
“You have no idea how hard it was,” said Roman. “In those days, there were extraordinarily little resources. I found a dictionary that listed the Tainei words in alphabetical order, alongside the Spanish words. You couldn’t look up the Spanish words; you had to learn the Tainei words and try to memorize them.”
The Tainei tongue is in the Arawak language family, spoken by Indigenous people in the Antilles, which includes the Dominican Republic, Puerto Rico, Cuba, and Haiti.
Ironically, it was the Spaniards who documented Tainei.
Tainei was an oral language, never written down by the Taino people. The Spaniards translated the Tainei language into Latin, then into Spanish. The subtle pronunciations and sounds could never completely survive translation backwards into Tainei. It was eventually collected by Jose Arrom, a professor at Yale University in the 1980s and 1990s. Arrom has since written numerous books on Taino culture and language.
There are other languages related to Tainei. One is called Lokono, another is called Careb (or Kalingo). Studying these languages helps us to piece together how Tainei may have been spoken. Many of the Tainei words documented towns, rivers, flowers, and plants. Even the names of chiefs. Many of these remain intact as the Spanish only changed the words of things important to them.
“Today,” Roman explained, “there are many young people doing amazing work in the field investigating the history, the archives, finding people who speak Tainei and cataloging their vocabularies. It’s genuinely exciting and inspiring.”
“Like other Indigenous people, the Taino are matrilineal, descent is traced through the mother. Can you tell me about that?” I asked.
“On a spiritual level, the male and female god begins with the Earth Mother, or Atabey. The mother is the maker. In the creation stories, the celestial god, Yaya, is considered both male and female. Then there is Yocahu Bagua Maricoti, the lord of the Yuca. The creation stories get extremely complicated. They might be hard to explain, as they come from an oral tradition. That discussion is for another day.”
“Can you tell me about your community?”
“Since 1992, marking the five-hundred-year quincentennial of Columbus, more and more Taino people have become aware of their heritage. In fact, in 1996, my family and I, in that same spirit, found a local Taino community which we call Maisiti Yukayeke Taino (people of the high corn village). Then, in 2006, I became the Chief (staff carrier) of the Maisiti Taino Tribal group. The community consists of about thirty to forty families.
“Then, about twelve years ago, we formed Hawksnest Quest Native Church, which is involved with different communities. We are a collective of people growing food together and helping people spiritually. For instance, many people, some from other tribal traditions, come to us who have lost their way. We help them, I help them, get back to their consciousness, their heritage. We run sweat lodges and vision quests. Our church, based in upstate New York, is called Blossom Dell Sanctuary. We have a garden, provide a safe place to be in nature, plant in nature, and cultivate the medicine plants on our 125 acres of land.”
“I’m interested to know more about the planting work you organize,” I said.
“We’ve worked with a few organizations, one called Permajam and another called Back to Nature, which have helped us to design a thriving garden. Using tribal ways, we plant vegetables that work together symbiotically. We call it the Three Sisters. You plant corn. When the corn rises six inches, you plant beans. When the beans start climbing on the corn, they pull nitrogen from the air and feed it to the soil. Then you plant squash. The big leaves of the squash plant act as a shade barrier and repels weeds and insects.”
As Robin Wall Kimmerer, scientist and member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation writes about the Three Sisters in her spectacular book Braiding Sweetgrass: “the corn stands eight feet tall; rippling green ribbons of leaf curl away from the stem in every direction to catch the sun. No leaf sits directly over the next, so that each can gather light without shading the others. The bean twines around the corn stalk, weaving itself between the leaves of corn, never interfering with their work.”
They also plant zucchini, radishes, melons, and other beans, using wires and ropes so the beans can grow. In addition, they grow herbs like parsley, peppers (jalapeno and others), potatoes, carrots, and root vegetables like beets. They also cultivate medicinal plants like sage, sweetgrass comfrey, peppermint, and lemon balm, tobacco, and others. And make compost for the gardens.
“Planting is a form of listening; the plants communicate to us in slow and subtle ways. But we have to listen to learn. After all, plants have been on the earth longer than all other beings. They’ve had time to figure things out,” said Roman. Interestingly, in some Native languages the term plant translates to “those who take care of us.” In the Apache language, the root word for land is the same as the word for mind.
Roman explained that Back to Nature helped his community to design and implement permaculture farming using the resources on the land to create self-sustainable growing. Back to Nature designed a garden that looks like a star using the four points, the four cardinal directions, which connects the garden symbolically to tribal mythology and tradition. The folks from Back to Nature then brought buckets of earth, worms, and mycelium that came from a healthy ground. They dug down into the earth about ten inches, filling it with branches of fallen Ash Trees, leaves, hay, compost, poop, and dirt.
“Before COVID, we started planting,” said Roman. “When COVID hit, we couldn’t make it back upstate. After several months of the garden not being watered and taken care of, we came back to find the garden now bursting with food. As of mid-October, we were still harvesting food.”
“What do you do with the food?” I asked.
“We share it among the community. And we sell it to markets. Our goal is to make enough food to sell to Co-Ops someday. We’ve only really just begun. But the real goal is to teach people, teach the children how to grow food and how to cultivate a relationship with the Earth. Recognizing that humans are a part of the web of existence that includes animals, plants, oceans, rivers and mountains is integral to tribal ways.”
“I’ve read that one of the first things the European invaders did was try to cut off food supplies of Indigenous people. This was part of the plan to commit genocide on Indigenous people,” I said.
“Sadly, this is true,” said Roman, pausing for a moment. “In addition, we want to eat healthy food, food that we’ve grown with our own hands. If you give to the earth, she gives back to you. This is part of our tribal tradition. And, let’s face it, with climate change impacting parts of the world, having a food supply may become an imperative. Perhaps we can be a source of food for more than just our community.”
“What’s your next big project,” I asked.
“We want to have a two-hundred feet long, twenty-foot-wide greenhouse,” said Roman, letting out a gentle laugh.
“We’ll be able to grow food all winter. Food for our people, food for the community and food for other people.”
As Marilyn Balana’ni Díaz, Puerto Rican Taino and principal abuela (grandmother) of another Taino community has said, “We are part of nature, we are not outside of it. We are part of the plants. We are part of the cosmos.”
Before we hung up our call, Roman invited me to come up to a sweat lodge. Of course, I will go. I know one thing for sure. My friendship with Roman has only just begun. And more than just his friend, I am now his student, eager to better understand tribal traditions of gratitude towards the Earth and all things, living and otherwise. If you ask me, Indigenous wisdom will prove essential in our efforts to survive on this planet together.
Postscript: Juan Carlos is now working on a series of Taino gold gilded zemi statues and portraits of Indigenous people.
This is the first installment in a series of articles to follow on Indigenous topics.
Hawksnest Quest Native Church: https://www.facebook.com/groups/337303722984556
Dell Blossom Sanctuary:
https://permajam.com/art-music
Back to Nature:
https://backtonature.earth
Or
https://www.facebook.com/backtonaturee/
(203) 998-1624
Permajam:
https://www.instagram.com/permajam/
OYE Studios
http://oyestudios.com/
834 Coney Island Avenue
Brooklyn, NY 11239
Mike Fiorito
