Our story has been conceived as a historical fiction account that reflects the chronicles of the conquest of The New World as told by the first Spanish colonizers, as well as, oral accounts as told by the indigenous people. As could be expected, this account is also part legend with hypothetical and circumstantial narratives. The story begins with a young female indigenous healer, rebel and warrior named Anah-ní, who battles the invading Spaniards from the mountains of Burekén (Land of Great Cassava Bread – modern day Puerto Rico). She was also a “seer” which was the term used by indigenous people all over the new world to describe those who could speak to the spirits and see the future. She was the descendant in a long line of “seers” we now call mediums. She was also an ambarrasment to the invading Spaniards who denied her existence and erased her from history. It could never be known that someone they considered to be an aborigine, stone age female had the intellect and talent to outsmart them. Her people also kept her existence a secret to protect her, for she was like a Robin Hood figure to them. Her name was only whispered and even today most people have never heard about her which includes some of  her descendants. Those that know the story still talk about her in a whisper. She had been born with a genetic anomaly, a mutation which made her a superhuman; cunning, smarter, faster, stronger and more agile than the average human being. She was not a super hero in the modern comic book sense, but a real life super-human that left a legendary mark on the history, the struggle and the many battles fought between the natives and the invading Spaniards. There is also a runaway female African slave named Abenia.

She was a young Yoruba healer and just like Anah-ní, she was a rebel and a warrior. She escapes when her slave master is engaged in a battle with the rebel natives and heads to the mountains along with a small band of slaves to seek refuge. There she meets Anah-ní and her band of mountain rebels and this marks the first time Anah-ní sees a black person.

Modern researchers have been making new discoveries in the many mountain caves of Puerto Rico. The larger cave systems are well known, but there are many smaller caves hidden in the mountains known only to the locals and most of them have never been explored and studied by qualified researchers. We have included excerpts from an article written by Tom Metcalfe below, Livescience.com, published November 01, 2023.

Tom Metcalfe is a freelance journalist and regular Livescience.com contributor who is based in London,  United Kingdom. Tom writes mainly about science, space, archeology, the Earth and the oceans. He has also written for the BBC, NBC News, National Geographic, Scientific American, Air & Space, and many others.

The photo included below, depicts cave art of what looks like a lion with a luscious mane, drawn deep in a cave in the mountains of the island of Puerto Rico. New research suggests that it may have been created by a runaway African slave. “We have an image that looks like a lion — but in Puerto Rico, we don’t have lions,” project researcher Angel Acosta-Colón, an adjunct professor of geophysics at the University of Puerto Rico at Arecibo and an expert on the island’s caves, said in a statement that “the drawing may have been made by someone who’d seen one in Africa before they were enslaved and taken to the island by the Spanish.” Acosta-Colón and Reniel Rodríguez Ramos; two archeologists at the University of Puerto Rico in Utuado, have radiocarbon-dated some of the drawings in Puerto Rico’s caves, to more than 2,000 years old. This particular drawing was dated to around A.D. 1500, putting it roughly at the time of the Spanish colonization and the introduction of slaves to the island. Although circumstantial evidence, this finding lends credence to the legend of Abenia, the runaway slave who heads to the central mountains of an island known today as Puerto Rico and there meets Anah-ni, “The Spirit of the Forest.”

Cuban archeological experts in lexicography that have studied the Arawakan language, have come up with the following hypothesis as to why this island was called Burekén by the indigenous population instead of Borikén or Borinquen as the Spaniards would later call it. They point out that the original phonetic version of the name Borikén was Burekén and that it referred to the Buren, a flat stone plate used to make cassava bread.

They say that the indigenous people of the island produced a cassava bread of such high quality that their island became known as Burekén (the land of great cassava). This name was also confirmed by physician Diego Álvarez Chanca, who traveled with Columbus on his second voyage. He writes that they encountered belligerent  native women and captured one during a skirmish on the Caribbean Island they renamed Guadalupe. The natives had no idea the Spanish muskets could fire an accurate projectile farther than their arrows could reach. Nonetheless, one Spanish sailor was killed and several were injured. To their astonishment, the Spanish witnessed female warriors swimming close to their ships in deep ocean and strong waves and then, firing their arrows. This was proof that these were highly skilled, ferocious and very talented natives. They could swim like fish, then dive and disappear. The Spanish fleet of 17 ships with 1,500 men aboard was dangerously low on water. Unfortunately, Guadalupe has no surface water, it’s quite possible these natives were there to fish or to trade cassava bread with other natives from the south and that Guadalupe was simply a staging area used to barter. The Spanish accounts tell of enormous schools of fish that were miles wide and stretched as far as the eye could see.

The Spaniards kept demanding that the captured natives take them to their source of water. These kept pointing to the east and repeating the name Burekén, “the land of great cassava bread” which as it turned out, had more than one thousand rivers and freshwater springs. They also knew its location and guided the Spanish fleet towards the island. Diego wrote down the name Burekén in his diary. Columbus noted the coordinates in his log and what happened next is a bit fuzzy in historical records.  Some historians believe Columbus and his fleet landed somewhere near the modern Puerto Rican town of Guánica, others think he may have landed near the town of Aguada to resupply his ships with water from one of the rivers in the area. Afterward, they continued sailing towards the island he renamed Española.

 He had left 39 men the year before when the Santa Maria, one of the original vessels, hit a reef and was damaged beyond repair. Columbus later called all these indigenous people Tainos. We believe these ancient people did not refer to themselves as Tainos; their first encounter with Columbus and his crew happened in Bahamá (today called the Bahamas). According to Columbus’s own diary, they called themselves Lucayans, he later writes that he called them Tainos when they repeated the word Taino and he understood that to be what they called themselves. That’s an inconsistency in his account; if they were Lucayans, they would have repeated the word Lucayan and not Taino. Therefore, where did this name Taino come from? Columbus and his men could not understand, much less pronounce, the language that these ancient people were speaking and because the word Taino does not seem to exist in the modern Arawak language, some historians believe that they uttered a different word. Nitaino was supposedly a word they used to describe their noble class but again, even that was the Spanish phonetic equivalent. We don’t really know if that was precisely what they said. Columbus, nonetheless, assigned a European phonetic sound that sounded like Taino or something similar. Some historians use the term Boricua to refer to these ancient people, but that is a Spanish-coined term. Others use Borinqueños or Boriqueños. However, the ñ phonetic sound does not exist in the Arawak dialect spoken by these people. Therefore, we prefer the term Burekenian. Anah-ní  predicted the arrival of the Spanish conquistadors in greater numbers than any indigenous leaders of the time thought was possible, she was fearless, cunning, and brilliant. She knew the plants that could heal…but also those that could kill! The superstitious Spanish conquistadors thought she was a witch possessed by demons and could not die. Stories told by descendants say that her gaze alone was enough to paralize an enemy. Her people called her “The Spirit of the Forest” because she waged a guerrilla-style warfare against the invading Spaniards, using the mist of the forest we now call a rainforest, to hide and strike again and again.

The new science of genetics has taught us that some people can be born with genetic anomalies that make them, in fact, SUPER HUMAN! This was the case of a little indigenous baby girl born on an Island known as Puerto Rico today.  She developed into a very creative and cunning warrior. Under her leadership, rebel  warriors stole Spanish weapons, burned ships and terrorized the first colonizers. She used  a guerrilla style of mountain warfare that was very similar to the one used by the Diné (also renamed Apaches by Spaniards who could not pronounce their name) in the Southwestern mountains and hills of the U.S.  She learned how to combine hallucinogenic compounds with medicinal plants to achieve a mind-body healing process we now call “Holistic Healing”. We don’t really know what she looked like, but the Spanish left us a hint when they wrote that the women of this island were among the most beautiful they had ever seen. This is her story, the first in a series of Mystic Healer Stories along with descriptions of some of the plants she used to heal and others, to poison and wage war! thank you, we appreciate your support!