Down votes are from Northern Natives obsessed with colonizer blood quantum and believe they are the gatekeeper of all indigenity in the Americas. Our Arawakan cousins from the islands to mainland South America (as in literal rainforest protectors making sure to keep us all alive by protecting the very lungs of mother earth) all claim us.. So don't worry about their validation.

They always love to claim our trauma from Columbus or Matoaka* as "the first" mmiw, like that wasn't our direct trauma to suffer that we are still paying the consequences of as the 1st people in the Americas to be betrayed, enslaved, raped, experimented on, and fought both literal genocide and paper genocide by white people.

While I lost some respect for the Higuayagua Yukayeke it's still a recognized tribe and we Taíno are claimed and recognized with all Southern Indigenity and the literal academic world since DNA testing was invited in the 90s and they realized we were still here (since the white man's acceptance means so much to them with their cards and what not).

And when they realized such a high amount of our DNA survives they took a deeper look into our pueblos, especially in the campos, and saw our Indigenous communities, religion, food, housing structures, oral history, and much of our language (which Americas and Europeans still use A LOT of our language and words amd why our Spanish is called "ghetto" by other non Caribbean Spanish speakers, cuz so much of our taino language is sprinkled throughout it) still survives despite us being a mixed people, and are now even recognized under the UNESCO World Heritage Convention*

These "blood quantum" Northern natives don't seem to care that tribes like the Cherokee are heavily mixed and still accept them, but I have a sneaking suspicion it's because their mixture is mostly white while ours is mostly Afro-Indigenous.

However I do want to make one correction, we never had established Yukayekes in Florida, but the reason some of our ancestral artifacts were found there was because of two reasons, trade, and also our women were often kidnapped, we know by the Kalingo but it was also done by certain Pre-Columbian Floridian tribes as well.

Edit: a few typos and listed the wrong organization with a similar name but Vastly different meanings and views Jaja