votre histoire, conservez religieusement les traditions de la patrie.”^109 Two of Ardouin’s poems,
one about the Taino Indians of Hispaniola and another about the African slave trade, serve to
elaborate a national past rooted in pre-revolutionary events and peoples. Combining myth and
history, these poems resurrect easily forgotten elements which nonetheless contribute to building
a national identity. They provide an otherwise young nation with notions of antiquity, typically
sought, according to Benedict Anderson, in the creation of an imagined community.^110
If poets of this time are known as “indigenous” for their focus on local themes (de votrepays, as Emile Nau specified), it would seem that this label, in addition to an interest in African
culture and Haitian landscape, should also encompass texts inspired by Amerindian history.
Several articles in Le Républicain and in L’Union indeed indicate a curiosity about Haiti’s first
inhabitants. Emile Nau in particular contributes several articles in these journals about the
history of the Taino Indians, eventually developing his work in Histoire des caciques d’Haïti.^111
First published in Haiti in 1854, this text focused on the Taino chiefs and is the first Haitian work
to elaborate a history of Hispaniola’s pre-Columbian population. Although historian David
Geggus explains that there was probably little actual cultural transmission between the Indian
and African cultures in Hispaniola, as the island’s Amerindian population was largely decimated
by the time the slave trade began, Taino Indian culture and history held an important place in the
Haitian imaginary after independence.^112 The word “Haiti,” chosen by Dessalines to rename
colonial “Saint-Domingue” is the Taino Indian word for “high ground,” and in Haiti’s first
constitution, Dessalines guaranteed Haitian citizenship automatically to all people of both
(^109) E.Z Demiveux, Le Républicain le 15 août 1836.
(^110) Anderson 35.
(^111) Nau, Histoire des caciques d’Haïti.
(^112) Geggus, Haitian Revolutionary Studies 209-211. Geggus states that the Taino population probably accounted for
less than one percent of Haiti's inhabitants in the early nineteenth century.