Abstract This article explores the representations of two Native leaders, Billy Caldwell and Shab-eh-nay, in the evolution of Chicago’s early historical narrative. By blood, Caldwell was Mohawk and Shab-eh-nay was Odawa, but they both achieved leadership roles in northern Illinois Potawatomi society through marriage and by distinguishing themselves both as war leaders and intercultural brokers. These two men were frequently mythologized as “friends to the white man” as a way for frontier Illinois’s settler society to claim a sense of legitimacy to the lands taken from Indigenous peoples throughout the first half of the nineteenth century. In the writing of Chicago’s early historical narratives, antiquarian historians frequently contrasted friendly Natives like Caldwell and Shab-eh-nay as an exception to the more typical depictions of Native peoples as “savage” enemies who constantly sought to destroy frontier settlers. These depictions were utilized to justify violence against and the dispossession of Indigenous peoples. Commemorations of Caldwell and Shab-eh-nay throughout antiquarian histories from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries illustrate the power wielded by those who write what the public deems official history.
In the middle decades of the nineteenth century, Indigenous Venezuelans in the eastern province of Barcelona (the modern-day state of Anzoategui) used the legal tools available and other creative strategies to attempt to legally define Indigeneity and to protect resguardo land. In the process, Indigenous Venezuelans in the oriente created their own version of citizenship. This article uses documentation available in the Registro Principal de Barcelona, a state public registry office, that is not digitized, indexed, or part of the national archives system. In addition to enhancing understanding of Indigeneity and citizenship, study of these cases furthers understanding of state formation, the centrality of communal land in Indigenous identity, state-elite-Indigenous relations, and the evolution and application of law in mid-nineteenth-century Venezuela.
Cuauhtemoc is one of the heroes of Mexican history due to the valor and obstinacy with which he defended the island of Mexico against the Spanish advances. This article is an homage in his memory as this past year, 2025, we commemorate his death, which took place in 1525. Much has been written about Cuauhtemoc, but the fascination he instills has caused his history to be peppered with myths that have to be reconsidered and banished. As such, it is necessary to apply a critical revision of the texts that deal with his life, as this is the only way in which we can better understand the past and consider what may have happened.
This article analyzes two versions of the Jesuit Jos & eacute; Garcia's diary narrating an exploration and evangelization voyage to the Western Patagonian archipelagoes during the austral summer of 1766-67. This article argues that recently converted Indigenous canoeing groups resettled in the Jesuit mission at Cailin, in the Chilo & eacute; Archipelago, were crucial auxiliaries and intermediaries whose labor made possible missional expeditions to the Patagonian archipelagoes during the mid-eighteenth century. Spanish dependence on Indigenous auxiliaries for navigating the Patagonian archipelagoes, intermediation with unconverted groups, and general translation duties, moreover, lays a blanket of doubt over a variety of ethnographic information presented in contemporary sources as self-evident. In this sense, Jesuits such as Jos & eacute; Garcia only understood the material and social layout of the Patagonian archipelagoes inasmuch as their Indigenous auxiliaries provided them with usually incomplete information under significant friction imposed by physical and cultural distance. Ultimately, this article shows how Indigenous groups in the Patagonian archipelagoes leveraged their spatial mobility, interpersonal networks, and knowledge of different languages as bargaining chips with a colonial system whose possibilities of exerting coercion and projecting power were very limited.
In the 1860s, the Republic of Bolivia was consolidating its institutions and defining its southern border on the Chaco plains. The Republics of Argentina and Paraguay had territorial claims to the same area, for the most part still under control of the Indigenous Peoples. In 1863, aiming at preventing the advance of Argentine ranchers and to expand cattle ranching for the Bolivian fronterizos, the state and residents of Tarija financed the construction of Fort Bella Esperanza on the right margin of Pilcomayo River, on the territory of Toba Peoples. A Franciscan mission-station for Weenhayek Peoples was built near the fort. Indigenous laborers worked in construction of the fort and mission. In 1867, a coalition of Toba warriors allied with two disgruntled soldiers destroyed the fort and soon after burned the mission. The article describes the events of the history of the early Republican period, arguing that Toba men and women pursued their own agenda. Their alliance with the discontented soldiers empowered the Toba and delayed the fronterizos' occupation of valuable pastureland for more than a decade. The argument offers a nuanced interpretation of an understudied nineteenth-century incident in the context of settler colonialism and international geopolitical disputes.
This essay joins a wave of innovative studies about the reducci & oacute;n general de los indios, a watershed moment in the history of Spanish colonialism in the Andes, by bringing the Jauja Valley into the conversation. Using a combined methodology of deep archival research and intensive field-walking archaeological surveys associated with the early reducciones, the article shows that, within a single valley and in response to local conditions, historical actors gradually applied two different solutions to the problem of resettlement and concentration, generating two distinct reducci & oacute;n landscapes. One required reusing previous settlements, the other, building in unoccupied spaces that nevertheless were linked to roads, bridges, way stations, and Indigenous forms of social organization. Thus, reducciones were both an old and a new phenomenon in the valley. In the central and southern portions, planned settlements stemmed from older pueblos, thus showing that most reducciones there were not created completely ex nihilo, as is often assumed. In the northern portion, ayllus were forced to resettle into novel emplacements. However, the two main ethnic groups in that area largely shaped how the reducci & oacute;n was carried out in their territory, managing to preserve critical ethnic boundaries and a degree of control over the Inka and early colonial vial infrastructure.
Between 1825 and 1832, the Anishinaabe missionary Kahkewaquonaby Peter Jones produced the first published translations of the Christian Gospels into the Anishinaabe language. These publications, particularly the two different versions of the Gospel of Matthew published in 1829 and 1832, present an opportunity to compare opposing approaches to Bible translation. Jones's 1829 translation of Matthew, published essentially independently, adopted the approach that this article calls radical vernacularization. This translation sought to fully indigenize the Christian message by framing it in preexisting Anishinaabe vocabulary, including terms already used to describe important Anishinaabe spiritual and social practices. The 1832 translation, on the other hand, underwent heavy editorial oversight and instead illustrates the approach that this article calls limited vernacularization. The two English-born editors appointed to revise Jones's work repudiated his original vision by excising many Anishinaabe terms and replacing them with simple English borrowings, thus rejecting the idea that Christianity could be communicated within a principally Anishinaabe framework. Long overlooked as historical sources, these translations effectively illustrate the struggles surrounding translation, evangelization, "civilization," and Indigenous survival in nineteenth-century North America.
When Spaniards led by Pedro de Alvarado attacked Tenochca Mexicas during the Feast of Toxcatl in May 1520, they dismembered and killed many celebrants. The attack marked an extreme aggression against Nahua lives and bodies, and especially their hands and arms. But though the attack inhabited the Nahuas' memory for generations, it did nothing to diminish their strong cultural affinities with their hands and arms. Nahuas instead cultivated a heightened awareness of these limbs and expressed this by performing many creative activities and by transmitting vocational skills through them. Nahuas, moreover, attributed their hands' many abilities to tonalli, a force that helped instantiate different practical capacities. This endowment manifested with the hands' potential to be ritually activated. Crucially, Nahuas linked their hands' creative proclivities to their Toltec forebears and upheld the memory of this birthright. Nahuas continued identifying tenaciously with their hands after 1520, despite continued Spanish hostilities toward these.
For the Algonquian peoples of the Northeast, deer hunting was political, a fundamental expression of territorial sovereignty long before colonization. One of the primary ways in which sachems (political leaders) expressed territorial rights over land was by hunting deer. Sachems continued to use deer hunting as a method of enacting their sovereignty in the 1600s and early 1700s, even as colonists sought to impose an English system of property ownership. By maintaining deer hunting as a sontimmoowonk (sachem's right), sachems forced colonists to acknowledge Algonquian political culture. Some sachems, such as the Mohegan leader Uncas, even used deer hunting to expand their territories, dispatching hunters onto Indigenous and English neighboring lands to establish their authority. Ultimately, this article asserts that to understand the struggle over land between Algonquians and New English colonists, scholars need to view events through the lens of Algonquian political culture.
The archive, broadly construed, plays a central role in the construction of histories of an Indigenous past. Offering a reflection on its limits and omissions, this essay uses two case studies. One centers on In'zh & uacute;je'wax & oacute;be, a massive rock sacred to the Kanza and other peoples of the present-day Kansas region. The other considers a Nahuatl book of sermons written on Native paper whose creation was overseen by the Franciscan Bernardino de Sahag & uacute;n around 1564 in present-day Mexico City. I argue that these objects are essential to understand an Indigenous past, yet each resist typical archiving processes that would render them into the raw material of history. With both, paradoxically, the processes of inscription, that is, alphabetic writing, that have allowed their archival presence have also proved to be a technology of Indigenous effacement. While the sections "Rock" and "Paper" treat objects that are rocks and paper, I use "Scissors" metaphorically, to gather together the kind of procedures that excise or exclude things from an archive, and to suggest the perdurance of Indigenous practices that might serve to expand the archive and lead to more capacious histories.
Exogamous marriage among Northwest Amazonian peoples structured exchange networks, interethnic relations, and settlement patterns during eighteenth-century European imperial expansion. Exchange and reciprocity offered a path to social stability within a highly conflictive environment characterized by warfare and slaving. Arawakan, Cariban, and Tukanoan leaders and outsiders, among them men from Bel & eacute;m, the Portuguese capital of the State of Maranh & atilde;o and Gr & atilde;o-Par & aacute;, exchanged gifts and people. The leaders presented their female relatives to make alliances and extend their social networks. Those who accepted the women and became integrated into Indigenous communities were known as cunhamenas, or in-laws. New evidence from Inquisition files in Lisbon details these exchanges and the relationships that developed between individuals and groups. This long-held Indigenous social practice also shaped residential patterns in the downriver missions and contributed to the formation and consolidation of a highly diverse population. After the mid-eighteenth century, however, Portuguese authorities imposed Catholic norms to break up multiple marriages, which diminished Indigenous leaders' social prestige, separated women from their co-wives, and disrupted alliances. Instead, the Crown encouraged monogamous marriages between Indigenous women and Portuguese soldiers. Rebellion erupted in the Rio Negro missions. This article presents an overview of regional interethnic alliances through marriage and contends that Indigenous exogamous practices were key to historical interaction, exchange, and social development in the Brazilian North.
