Vaughan, MehanaFisk, Jonathan James2022-07-052022-07-052022https://hdl.handle.net/10125/102261Puerto Rico’s food systems are dangerously precarious, with the islands importing about 90% of its food, a consequence of five centuries of colonialism prioritizing foreign profit over local welfare. Particularly in the aftermath of Hurricane Maria, though, there has been a swelling movement towards food sovereignty on the islands, often aligned with overlapping movements towards the resurgence of Taíno identity and culture. Bringing these movements together, this dissertation focuses on Taíno social-environmental systems, using the recorded Taíno language as the primary vantage point in order to understand the dynamics of pre-colonial social-environmental systems on the islands, the cultures that shaped such systems, and how that can guide us to food and material sovereignty on the islands. This dissertation is grounded in a decolonial research methodology, which I develop and provide as a generalized framework such that other researchers can make use of it as well. Delving into Taíno ecolinguistic ontologies – or the worldviews and relations revealed by the nexus between language and the environment – demonstrates a high degree of naming multiplicity in the Taíno lexicon, particularly for plants and animals with which there was greater intimacy in Taíno cultures. Additionally, redundancy was a prominent feature in pre-colonial Taíno bicultural systems, contributing to socioecological resilience, although there were several categories, especially related to spiritual functions, for which certain biota are simply irreplaceable. Although there are numerous critical barriers obstructing food and material sovereignty for Puerto Rico, the lessons gleaned from Taíno culture, particularly Taíno ecolinguistic ontologies and pre-colonial social-environmental systems, indicate several promising opportunities for cultivating sovereignty: research towards decolonization, mass (re)education, land reclamation, land cultivation & restoration, establishing constellations of care, and building a Pan-Caribbean coalition.Food sovereigntyTaino IndiansTraditional ecological knowledgeEcolinguisticsThesis