This article examines how Wyandot communities preserved and transmitted Indigenous knowledge systems within and alongside colonial institutions of schooling and Christianity between 1820 and 1922. Drawing on missionary records, early ethnographic publications, and community-based case studies, the author argues that Wyandot individuals-particularly women-used formal education, acts of translation (of both linguistic and cultural knowledge), and ceremonial life to uphold relational and land-based epistemologies in the face of assimilationist pressures. While colonial missionaries sought to displace Indigenous teachings, their own accounts reveal the persistence of Wyandot practices such as oral narrative telling, rituals for spiritual well-being (soul desires), feasting, healing, and burial traditions. The author focuses on key figures including Mary McKee, Catherine Walker, and Peter D. Clarke, whose lives illustrate the dynamic coexistence of Wyandot and Christian knowledge systems. Drawing on contemporary research with the Wyandot of Anderdon Nation, this study foregrounds Indigenous agency and Wyandot intellectual continuity, contributing to the growing literature on Indigenous Christianity, education, and epistemological resilience.
In the mid-twentieth century, processes of translation remained central to Mexico's health education campaigns in rural Indigenous communities. In the multilingual state of Oaxaca, Indigenous co-translators collaborated with Protestant missionaries from the Instituto Ling & uuml;istico de Verano (ILV/SIL, Summer Institute of Linguistics) to produce health education materials for various federal institutions. Indigenous translators not only provided word-for-word translations but also translated concepts of health, disease, and body across different languages and cultures. This article argues that these co-translators produced new and locally intelligible understandings of health in translating concepts from Spanish to Mixtec (an Indigenous language). Using bilingual health pamphlets, the article underscores the centrality of uncredited Mixtec collaborators who contributed to state-sponsored development projects in the 1950s.
The Juan Santos Atahualpa rebellion has been lauded as one of the "precursors" to Peruvian Independence, especially those in the Peruvian Indigenista movement who strove to demonstrate Indigenous buy-in to the mainly creole-led independence movement. Some of the uprising's most important rebels, however, were neither Indigenous nor Creoles but Africans. This erasure of Africans from the rebellion's histories even by more modern academic historians is the result of the inconvenience of these Africans' presence to the centrality of Indigeneity in the rebellion's narratives. This article looks to rewrite Africans back into the narrative of the rebellion. Many Africans were key lieutenants to the mestizo rebel leader, Juan Santos. These Africans had arrived in the frontier missions in the central high jungle of Peru where the rebellion was fought decades before Juan Santos, looking for social advancement and as enslaved servants to the missionaries. Many of these Africans married into these communities, and when the rebellion broke out, they joined the mostly Indigenous rebels.
This article explores the varied experiences of Menominee warriors during the early and mid-eighteenth century-a formative period when violent conflicts and tenuous alliances with the colony of New France shaped much of the geopolitics of the Great Lakes Basin. While recent scholarship has focused on larger and more powerful Native polities in the region, renewed attention to the diversity of Native positions within the alliance systems assembled there can also allow us to better understand of how relatively small, though determined, groups like the Menominee were able to withstand the disruptions of the eighteenth century and maintain their sovereignty as a nation. They did so, this article argues, by agentively transforming their traditional approaches to regional kinship networks, trade, diplomacy, and, above all, warfare.
The historiography on Indigenous self-governance in Spanish America vis-& agrave;-vis the indio cabildo (town council) has advanced tremendously in recent years, but studies examining election methods as they relate to political culture have been limited due to a dearth of election records and assumptions about the values behind a given election method. Ideally, early modern Spaniards selected election methods in pursuit of political unanimity and violence-free decision-making, sometimes summarized by the phrase "common consent." But discourses of "common consent" could cover simmering political tensions. In the Guarani cabildo, a Spanish consensus-naming mechanism and ideals of unanimity conjoined with enduring Guarani values of mutuality, expressed in the Guarani word for the town council, & ntilde;omono'& otilde;ng & aacute;va (lit. "house of the place of mutual gathering"). Resurfaced election records from the indio pueblo Itati are the only Guarani-language records of their kind from any Guarani cabildo, and these texts reveal heretofore unknown Guarani nomenclature that expand our knowledge of the Guarani political lexicon. Itati's proximity to local Spanish society did not diminish a Guarani-language political discourse. By comparing Itati's Guarani-language records with the Spanish cabildo of Asunci & oacute;n and the Jesuit corpus, we demonstrate that consensus models appear to have been employed to sustain a petit nobility even as the discourse resonates with long-standing values of persuasion and broad decision-making. We include semi-diplomatic transcriptions and translations of three out of the twelve Guarani-language election records we identified from Itati's cabildo.
