The word carried a wide and shifting range in a Massachusetts court of the period, and the clerks who used it were not making an ethnographic determination. The reconstruction of an Arawak origin by way of Barbados rests on that word plus indirect household and shipping records, and no direct evidence of her birth or passage has been found.
What would resolve this A study of how colonial Massachusetts clerks used the term across a large corpus of records in the same decades, set against any direct documentary trace of her arrival.
OpenColonial American archival history; historical linguistics of legal and administrative usageElaine G. Breslaw, Tituba, Reluctant Witch of Salem: Devilish Indians and Puritan Fantasies