What is the name of your organization?
Council of Native Caribbean Heritage (C.O.N.C.H)
What is the name of your solution?
Indigenous Archive of Boriken
Provide a one-line summary or tagline for your solution.
Unlocking Taíno history: A centralized online genealogy archive empowering the Nation of Borikén through accessible ancestral data.
In what city, town, or region is your solution team headquartered?
Ciales, 00638, Puerto Rico
In what country is your solution team headquartered?
USA
What type of organization is your solution team?
Nonprofit
Film your elevator pitch.
What specific problem are you solving?
Puerto Rico's indigenous people, the Taíno Nation of Borikén, face a major barrier to gaining access to their genealogies, spread among such disparate repositories as religious records, historical archives, and the civil registries. These scattered, physical, and digital sources prevent many from gaining access to their genealogy, validating their cultural identity, or legitimizing sovereignty claims. Despite centuries of purportedly propagating extinction myths, in the 2020 US Census more than 50,000 individuals claimed Taíno identity, of which nearly 8,000 reside in Puerto Rico. A ground breaking study in 2001 revealed through mitochondrial DNA analysis, over 61% of all Puerto Ricans carry indigenous maternal ancestry in direct opposition to claims of historical erasure. The separation from indigenous knowledge has very real effects—limiting community formation, cultural revitalization, and the assertion of Indigenous rights. Our project turns this around by building a centralized, web-based genealogy database for the Taíno community. It will collect, codify, and make searchable the foundational knowledge to allow individuals to reclaim their heritage. As a secondary effect, in the process, it lays the digital infrastructure necessary for indigenous data sovereignty to pave the way for a broader movement of cultural revitalization based on self-identification and historical fact.
What is your solution?
Our project is a centralized genealogy database that unites scattered historical records related to the Taíno Nation of Borikén (Puerto Rico) into an organized, searchable digital repository. With Airtable as the technological foundation, we organize information by family name, geography, and time to make genealogical records readily available to those looking to uncover their Native heritage.
The Spanish-handwriting composition of most of these records render optical character recognition and software irrelevant. Our team is requesting funding to hire workers who scan and transcribe relevant entries in historical, church, and civil records by hand. Specific care is given to identifiers such as Indio, Mestizo, Pardo, and Trigueño that identify Indigenous in Puerto Rican records. It's meticulous work that must be done culturally and linguistically sensitive in a method to correctly interpret.
Data entry work in Puerto Rico ranges from minimum wage to $15 an hour. The bulk of the money requested will be used to pay these workers, creating ethical, community-based work in the process of creating a product that promotes Indigenous identity, education, and sovereignty. Further development includes community access features and AI capabilities, but the first step is in the actual development of the archive.
Who does your solution serve, and in what ways will the solution impact their lives?
Our work is for members of the Taíno Nation of Borikén—Indigenous persons of Puerto Rico—on the island and in the diaspora. These are individuals reclaiming their ancestry, young people, the elderly, community leaders, and teachers participating in cultural revitalization efforts. These are the groups that tend to be underserved by the official archives and institutions with a non-Indigenous approach to gaining access to historical records.
Puerto Rico's colonial record system obfuscated indigenous identity by disrupting and destroying records or using racially coded labels. As a result, most face substantial barriers in tracing their ancestry, undermining cultural identity, access to the rights of entitlement, and social cohesiveness.
By making genealogical data available, organizing, and making it accessible, the project enables Taíno descendants to reclaim their roots in a direct way. It promotes Indigenous sovereignty by making lines of descent and territorial connection trackable and verifiable. Additionally, by utilizing locally based data entry workers, the project provides culturally salient economic opportunity, grounding the work in community roots. The archive will function as a living pedagogical tool for generations to come, informing a more sophisticated comprehension of Taíno resilience, presence, and self-determination.