Word: arawak
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Pavón, the qualifying region’s top scorer, served as a fulcrum for the nation’s renewed sense of unity. Pavón is of Garifuna descent, an ethnic mix of Carib, Arawak, and West African peoples that has been marginalized and discriminated against in Honduran society...
Pritchard has done his most innovative work along the Atlantic coast in Guyana, a haven for sea turtles. By the 1960s, overhunting by local Arawak Indians--themselves an endangered group--had ravaged the turtle population. But Pritchard helped save both turtles and tribe: he has lobbied Guyana and private sources for grants that have weaned the Arawaks off turtle meat and into chicken farming. And he hires Arawaks to tag turtles for research and defend nesting grounds. The killing has largely stopped, he says, because turtle protection is now "a family discipline thing" among Arawaks, "rather than an outsider laying...
...with the first reliable count of the number of female sea turtles still alive in the world. And then, of course, there's the unusual. The Guyana government is negotiating with a Texas firm to build a commercial space port to launch communications satellites near Pritchard's primitive Arawak camp. Pritchard in turn is urging the company to show its good intentions toward the local ecosytem by creating a wildlife sanctuary beside the launching pad. That might widen the turtles' smiles...
...Columbus' first observations of the Arawak men and women who greeted him peacefully in the Caribbean was that "[t]hey would make fine servants....With fifty men we could subjugate them all and make them do whatever we want." He also believed that the Indians would be able to provide him with the immense quantities of gold he was seeking. When he returned to Spain, he promised the Spanish royals that he would return from his next vogage with "as much gold as they need...and as many slaves as they...
...Bartoleme de las Cases, a Spanish priest who witnessed the conquest firsthand. He wrote that the Spanish "thought nothing of knifing Indians by tens and twenties and of cutting slices off them to test the sharpness of their blades." He recorded a story of two Spaniards who met two Arawak boys carrying parrots; the parrots were seized and the boys were beheaded "for fun." He also wrote: "[O]ur work was to exasperate, ravaage, kill, mangle and destroy...[Columbus] was so anxious to please the King that he committed irreparable crimes against the Indians...