A new exhibit at Yale’s natural history museum is highlighting a culture with deep ties to many in the state.
It’s called “¡Taíno Vive!” which means “Taíno lives,” and it’s all about the native people of the Caribbean. It was a perfect way to connect with that living population here, said Kailen Rogers, the Peabody Museum’s associate director of exhibitions.
Rogers said the museum’s break from 2020 to 2024 was a time of reflection.
“During that renovation, we did realize that we have a large Puerto Rican population in New Haven, but we didn't have as many stories in the museum that really relate to those communities,” Rogers said.
Everything in the exhibition is fully bilingual in English and Spanish.
“The materials that are coming from the Smithsonian are a set of text panels that have all these beautiful graphics,” Rogers said. “We have a set of materials by contemporary artisans that are incredibly beautiful, that are also going to then complement the rest of the storytelling in the space.”
The traveling Smithsonian exhibit is also bolstered by archaeological items from Yale’s catalog, hand-selected by living Taínos.
Stephanie Bailey is the tribal chief of New York-based AraYeke Yukayek. For some, she said, this exhibit will feel like representation.
“They're going to walk in, and they're going to be able to identify pieces of things that they've grown up with or that they were told, that they've heard, and be able to compare that to those family stories and say, ‘You know what? Now, I'm interested,’” Bailey said.
Bailey knew her family, like many Puerto Ricans, were a mix of ethnicities and races that likely included Taíno. But it wasn’t until she took her grandmother, well into her 80s, to the Tibes Indigenous Ceremonial Center in Ponce that it clicked for the family.
“She was just like, ‘You know what? I can't deny it at this point anymore,’” Bailey said. “She's walking through the museum there, and she's just like, ‘Oh, I had a chair like this. Papi had one.’”
Then, a few years ago, there was an open forum regarding excavation work being done on Mona, one of the islands in Puerto Rico’s archipelago. Bailey decided to attend.
“I wanted to speak directly to the archeologist and see if they were including people of the culture to physically provide information regarding how those things that were there matched the information that they presently had, and to see how that was going to be culturally relevant to what we presently have going on within the movement of re-educating our people,” Bailey explained.
The archaeologist invited Bailey to the dig site.
“So I ended up going down there in February of the following year, and she convinced me to follow my dream of going into archeology,” she said. “I ended up enrolling in the University of Leicester and did this archeology program, finished it in a year.”
During that program, she reached out to Yale’s Peabody Museum about their indigenous Caribbean artifacts. So, they knew exactly who to call when they decided to take on an expanded version of the Smithsonian’s “Taíno Vive!” exhibit.
In addition to the traditional parts of the exhibit, there are three hands-on elements. One highlights Arawak loan words still present in English and Spanish. Another is a set of puzzles where museum goers can assemble clay pots. And the third is based on a children’s book Bailey published on the Taíno cemi’no, or ancestral spirits.
“So we have a set of spinning discs, and one side is an image of the Cemi, and on the other side, you learn what their name is and what they are responsible for taking care of,” Rogers explained.
Learn more
“Taíno Vive!” is on display Dec. 13 through June 21, 2026. Admission is free.
Afterward, the exhibit will move to the Mattatuck Museum in Waterbury as a joint program with the Afro Caribbean Cultural Center.
