For decades, most American Indians have lived in cities, not on reservations or in rural areas. Still, scholars, policymakers, and popular culture often regard Indians first as reservation peoples, living apart from non-Native Americans. In Reimagining Indian Country: Native American Migration and Identity in Twentieth-Century Los Angeles, Nicolas Rosenthal reorients our understanding of the experience of American Indians by tracing their migration to cities, exploring the formation of urban Indian communities, and delving into the shifting relationships between reservations and urban areas from the early twentieth century to the present.

In this guest post for our partners at the University of North Carolina Press, Rosenthal discusses American Indians’ involvement in the Hollywood film industry and their attempts to challenge inauthentic and stereotypical depictions of Indian history.

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Last January actress Drew Barrymore was photographed wearing an American Indian-style headdress while flashing a peace sign and exhibiting the smile that has captivated audiences since she was a child. The photo attracted many fans, but it also received criticism from other sectors of American society. Native Americans, for instance, read the image as an all too familiar display of ethnic stereotyping and cultural appropriation.

Indeed, Barrymore’s unabashed glee in “playing Indian” is nothing new. For hundreds of years Americans have claimed the right to don Indian dress and act out their fantasies—from the Boston Tea Party to the Boy Scouts of America to the sports mascots of the twenty-first century. American Indian people have long been conscious of such appropriation and ambivalent about their complicated relationship with American popular culture. In fact, American Indian actors and entertainers in the early twentieth century struggled to broker the American fascination with Indian culture through their participation in the Hollywood film industry.

From the 1910s through the 1930s, hundreds of American Indians settled in Los Angeles and worked in the motion picture industry as actors, extras, stunt performers, and technical advisers. Some were recruited from reservations to make films for a short period of time. They camped in the Santa Monica Mountains, shot films in its canyons during the day, and explored the city by night. Others, like Charles Bruner (Muscogee), moved to Los Angeles and became part of a group of Indian actors that worked steadily in western films.

Many American Indian actors were uncomfortable with Hollywood’s depictions of Indian history and culture and worked to change them. Most often the film studios were unsympathetic, but American Indian actors persisted and formed advocacy organizations like the Indian Actors Association that kept up the pressure for more authentic portrayals. Some especially prominent actors like Luther Standing Bear (Lakota Sioux) and Richard Davis Thunderbird (Northern Cheyenne) used their celebrity status to present their own versions of American Indian history and culture, through public appearances, performances, lectures, pamphlets, and books.

American Indian actors and their struggles in the early years of Hollywood are part of the history of the migration of American Indians to cities that I explore in Reimagining Indian Country: Native American Migration and Identity in Twentieth-Century Los Angeles. In later years, urban American Indians continued to fight cultural stereotypes and define Native American culture through their performances in places like Disneyland’s Indian Village and city-wide and regional powwows.

Clearly, as illustrated by Barrymore’s photograph, these struggles continue. Americans still have work to do to cast off stereotypes of the “primitive” and understand Native Americans as modern peoples. American Indian actors began trying to convince non-Indians of this almost a century ago.

Nicolas G. Rosenthal is assistant professor of history at Loyola Marymount University.

In her new book, Memories of Conquest: Becoming Mexicano in Colonial Guatemala, Laura E. Matthew sheds light on colonial alliances between Indigenous peoples and conquistadors that helped the Spanish gain a foothold in the Americas. Locating her research in Ciudad Vieja, Guatemala, she places the Nahua, Zapotec, and Mixtec conquistadors of Guatemala and their descendants within a deeply Mesoamerican historical context. She also sheds light on the ongoing legacies of this history, including the complexities surrounding race and identity in contemporary Guatemala. Here she discusses her research as well as new visual evidence of Indigenous conquistadors – the Lienzo de Quauhquechollan―and the historical importance of this discovery.

What are some of the kinds of evidence you found of Indigenous conquistadors and what did that evidence tell you about their motivations?

I didn’t originally intend to write about Mexicano “yndios conquistadores.” I ended up doing so because they left the biggest paper trail. The status of the Mexicanos — as the Nahua and Oaxacan conquistadors and their descendants came to be known in colonial Guatemala — was higher than that of the local Maya, and the Mexicanos also had a pretty exalted sense of themselves, so they asserted themselves more forcefully within the colonial bureaucracy.

Some of the records they left behind are unique — for instance, while most Maya were counseled by colonial advisors to write humble letters of petition to Spanish authorities, the Mexicanos adopted the Spanish probanza de méritos y servicios, which was the standard form that all conquistadors used to request recompense for their services. The Mexicanos considered themselves conquistadors, and expected to be treated as such.

Most of my documents, though, were typical of any study of community formation under colonial rule. The Catholic church oversaw Indigenous populations and produced important data especially on population and language use. Court records are great for the small details of everyday life embedded within all the legalese. Notarial records helped me track the Mexicanos’ bilingualism in their native Nahuatl and in Spanish.

These are all very traditional materials for a historian, but they dominate only the second half of the book. The first half relies much more on the work of archaeologists, linguists, epigraphers, and art historians. These disciplines have pieced together Mesoamerican history before the production of European-style written records. It was very important to me that my history of the Mexicanos not begin with the arrival of Europeans by default, simply because that is when the type of documentation with which historians are most comfortable also arrived.

In what ways does your research enhance contemporary understandings of Indigenous agency during the colonial period? Can that agency be seen in a positive light even though it entailed the killing, displacement, and slavery of other Indigenous peoples?

Certainly, the Mexicano “yndios conquistadores” displayed a lot of agency! This has always been a problem for European narratives of the conquest, which may sympathize with Indigenous people as victims or may treat Native allies as dupes but have a harder time understanding the ways they saw themselves, in this case as conquistadors.

Nahuas, Otomi, Zapotecs, K’iche’, and other Mesoamericans were fundamentally involved in planning conquest expeditions, raising troops and supplies, instigating alliances, and colonizing outlying regions alongside the Spanish. In many cases, they did this not because the Spanish forced them to, but because they were pursuing their own goals in ways that made sense to them, based on their previous experiences of warfare and imperialism.

Researching this book transformed my own sense of Mesoamerican history. As I got deeper into the project, it became impossible to ignore the fundamental imprint of Mesoamerican history, culture, and relationships on the conquest period and beyond. So I had to work much harder than I anticipated to weave that preconquest history into my narrative, not just as background but as something integral to my analysis.

Sixteenth-century conquest wasn’t a fundamental break with the past — it was an important moment along a very long, deep historical timeline. That to me is an incredibly empowering idea and one that applies equally well to people who might more properly be labeled victims of this particular historical moment.

Why was the Lienzo de Quauhquechollan such an important discovery and how does it illustrate the arguments you make in the book?

Florine Asselberg’s identification of the Lienzo de Quauhquechollan while I was researching this book was serendipitous. I received an email one day from my friend and mentor Christopher Lutz. Had I heard, he asked, that a Dutch ethnohistorian had found a painted depiction of the conquest of Guatemala by the Indian conquistadors themselves, at a museum in Puebla, Mexico? My first thought showed no appreciation for the magnitude of the discovery. I was simply thrilled that there may have been contact between the Guatemalan Mexicanos and their homelands, something I had wondered about but for which I had no evidence.

A detail of the eagle warrior from the digital reproduction of the Lienzo de Quauhquechollan.

As it turned out, the Lienzo de Quauhquechollan was far more useful than that. On a painted cloth that covers an entire wall, it shows the Mexicanos’ view of themselves as conquistadors better than my linear prose ever could. In it we see the alliance with Hernán Cortés, the joint campaign with Jorge de Alvarado into Guatemala, various battles throughout the central and western highlands, and the foundation of Ciudad Vieja, all from the perspective of the Quauhquecholteca from central Mexico who later settled their own barrio in Ciudad Vieja. The Spaniards and Quauhquecholteca are portrayed as equals against the Maya. Indeed, the Spaniards are minor if important characters, while the Quauhquecholteca are clearly the main protagonists.

Collaborating with Florine was a real privilege, and the digital reproduction of the Lienzo by the Universidad Francisco Marroquin in Guatemala City brings the details to life in Memories of Conquest. My cover art — of a Mexicano reenacting the conquest in fancy costume circa 1835 — visually brings home how important the Lienzo is for helping us understand the Mexicanos’ preservation of their heritage in Guatemala. It is a very Europeanized costume. But the tall feathered backrack directly echoes warrior costumes we see in the Lienzo de Quauhquechollan from three hundred years earlier.

In the book, you address the colonial measures used to assign identity and distinguish between Ladinos and Indians. How does that colonial framework continue to influence understandings of identity in contemporary Guatemala?

The term “ladino” has an interesting history in Guatemala. It initially meant a hispanized “Indian,” but over the colonial period became racialized to indicate someone of mixed Indigenous, African, and/or European heritage. In the nineteenth-century, “ladino” lost some, though not all, of its racial associations, and came to mean anyone who was not Indigenous. Today, Guatemala’s population is split between these two, somewhat ill-defined groups.

The colonial-era Mexicanos actively associated with the Hispanic world. They earned a reputation as “yndios ladinos” early by speaking Spanish, celebrating their identity as conquistadors, and generally cooperating with colonialism. But they always insisted on their Indian identity as well. In part, this was because they received privileges based on their identity as Indian conquistadors. They also enjoyed self-government as Indians, so there were incentives not to abandon that identity.

In the nineteenth century, though, all those incentives disappeared. Ladinos were favored by national policy, and tended to be affiliated with state projects. In some ways, this paralleled the Mexicanos’ role under Spanish colonial rule. So the Mexicanos may have not seen any reason to continue as Indians and a Ladino identity may have naturally fit them better.

Today the Mexicanos of Ciudad Vieja consider themselves Ladinos, but some outsiders still see them as Indians. I find this intriguing, and wonder if it doesn’t speak to persistent ideas about rural versus urban development and the foundational organization of the “Indian town,” both derived from the colonial experience.

Laura E. Matthew is assistant professor of history at Marquette University. Her book, Memories of Conquest: Becoming Mexicano in Colonial Guatemala is now available from the University of North Carolina Press.

The book Songs of Power and Prayer in the Columbia Plateau: The Jesuit, the Medicine Man, and the Indian Hymn Singer by Chad Hamill explores the role of song as a transformative force in the lives of Indigenous peoples of the interior Northwest. In particular, it traces a cultural, spiritual, and musical encounter that began in the mid-nineteenth century when Catholic hymns introduced to Columbia Plateau tribes were reinterpreted and re-sung as expressions of an expanding Indigenous identity. Today we feature an excerpt from the new book, in which Hamill provides context for the twentieth century story of a Jesuit and his two Indian “grandfathers”—one a medicine man, the other a hymn singer—who together engaged in a collective search for the sacred through song.

Song and Identity
By Chad Hamill

The first official Catholic emissary to the Columbia Plateau was a young Jesuit by the name of Pierre-Jean DeSmet. His initial trip west from St. Louis in 1840 was a response to numerous entreaties made by Indigenous Plateau people, who sent four delegations to St. Louis throughout the 1830s in a perilous but determined effort to bring “Blackrobes” to the Plateau region. After erecting the first mission among the Salish in 1841, Father DeSmet and his Jesuit recruits built a string of missions in the interior Northwest, erecting missions for the Coeur d’Alene in 1842, the Kalispel in 1844, and the Colville in 1845. As part of his vision to establish an “empire of Christian Indians” (Peterson and Peers 1993:23), DeSmet and his fellow Jesuits set about translating Catholic hymns into Interior Salish, a method by which they sought to indoctrinate Indigenous Columbia Plateau people. Rather than Catholicizing Indians, however, the hymns were themselves indigenized—absorbed, reconstructed, and re-sung as expressions of Native identity.

In his landmark work, Putting a Song on Top of It: Expression and Identity on the San Carlos Reservation, David Samuels explores seemingly contradictory expressions of Apache identity enacted through rock, reggae, and country music, challenging popular notions of Native American culture as staunch and steadfastly anachronistic. Speaking to expressive forms of culture, Samuels finds that “the relationships between cultures and identities are not fixed. Rather, identities are emergent, produced out of the practices and expressive forms of everyday life. Traditions are not simply handed along from one generation to the next. Part of their enduring power comes from the possibility of their strategic reinvention in order to speak strongly in new social and political contexts” (2004:5). While leading Catholic Indian hymns, Mitch Michael was doing more than expressing Christian sentiments, he was invoking over one hundred years of collective Indigenous identity within which the strands of Catholicism were woven into the fabric of an Indigenous Coeur d’Alene worldview. The Coeur D’Alene became Catholics, this is true, but they were and would always be Indian.

Tracing the historical interactions between Russian Orthodox missionaries and the Tlingit people at the turn of the twentieth century, Sergei Kan found that a “growing body of ethnohistorical research shows that North American Indians have often reinterpreted Christian ideas, rituals, and institutions, and that their approach to Christianity has been selective, creative, and synthesizing. Christianity, as a result, frequently became indigenized” (1985:196 [original italics]). This perspective paints a picture contrary to the one with which we are most familiar, of Indigenous people as beleaguered and helpless in the face of inexorable Christian forces. Instead, it acknowledges individual and collective Indigenous agency within a process of cultural and religious negotiation, whereby Indigenous identity, or indigeneity, remains firmly intact.

It might be said that the first Jesuits in the Columbia Plateau region were unwitting partners in this process of Catholic indigenization. Although their efforts to cultivate communities of good Indian Christians were more accommodating than those of their Protestant and Methodist counterparts, cultural repression, whether direct or indirect, was employed as a tool of conversion. When intractable “Indian” characteristics or objects stood in the way, attempts were made to dispose of them. At the early missions, Indigenous ceremonies were discouraged or simply banned, and medicines used in non-Christian spiritual contexts, including medicine bundles, were buried or destroyed. Quoting Father Nicholas Point, his Jesuit compatriot in the Rocky Mountain mission enterprise, DeSmet writes that “from Christmas to Candlemas, the missionary’s fire was kept up with all that remained of the ancient ‘medicine.’ It was a beautiful sight to behold the principal supporters of it, with their own hands destroy the wretched instruments which hell had employed, to deceive their ignorance or give credit to their impostures. And in the long winter evenings, how many birds feathers, wolves’ tails, feet of hinds, hoofs of deers, bits of cloth, wooded images, and other superstitious objects were sacrificed!” (1985:32).

What the Jesuits perhaps failed to anticipate was the ingenuity and resilience of the cultures they encountered, comprising Indigenous identities both fluid and “emergent.” Despite Point’s assertion, much “remained” of the old medicine ways during the process of Catholic indigenization. The Salish hymns, freely sung in the light of day, and Indigenous ceremonies, driven into the recesses of a dark and muted underground, both contributed to a sense of collective indigeneity. Ultimately, this process of indigenization—of cultural integration, negotiation, and reinterpretation—could not be quelled. Nevertheless, the Jesuits found success. Unlike missionaries of other faiths who had abandoned their efforts, were driven from the Plateau, or were killed (Josephy 1965:252), the measured tolerance employed by the Jesuits ensured longevity and allowed for evolution and growth. What DeSmet could not have known as he set out west on the Oregon Trail in 1840 was that the path to Catholic indigenization had been laid a century before, when the Blackrobes first arrived within the vision of a Coeur d’Alene prophet. Unlike so many Native American peoples ambushed by Christian crusaders, the Coeur d’Alene were waiting for DeSmet and his religion, the answer to a promise borne through prophecy.

From Songs of Power and Prayer in the Columbia Plateau: The Jesuit, the Medicine Man, and the Indian Hymn Singer by Chad S. Hamill. © 2012 Chad S. Hamill. Reprinted by permission of Oregon State University Press.

Chad S. Hamill is an assistant professor of Ethnomusicology at Northern Arizona University, where he serves as Co-Chair for the Commission for Native Americans. Of Spokan and non-Indian descent, he has also served as Associate Director of the Plateau Center of American Indian Studies at Washington State University. Songs of Power and Prayer in the Columbia Plateau: The Jesuit, the Medicine Man, and the Indian Hymn Singer is now available from Oregon State University Press.

Last week the Organization of American Historians (OAH) and the National Council on Public History (NCPH) met in Milwaukee, Wisconsin for their annual meetings. The co-convened meeting drew more than 2,000 attendees that included university professors, museum professionals and other public historians, community college and high school instructors, as well as a good showing of both graduate and undergraduate students. The organization catered to the younger generations of scholars by hosting several networking and professionalization activities throughout the four-day conference. Thanks in part to the NCPH presence, a number of sessions dealt with how Native American histories can be more accurately and thoroughly presented to the public, an example being the “Toward a Reinterpretation of the Indian Wars at National Historic Sites and Parks” session.

The conference also featured a THATCamp Public History event that provided opportunities to learn about and discuss how to bring historical knowledge to the digital realm. THATCamp is a digital humanities unconference in which scholars and technology aficionados (or aspirants) come together to learn how to use digital tools to enhance or disseminate humanities research. This was the second THATCamp held at a NCPH meeting. The day’s conversations covered digital publishing, pedagogy, collections management, and social media, along with other critical issues.

Tom Scheinfeldt kicks off THATCamp Public History. Photo courtesy of Cathy Stanton writing for NCPH's History@Work blog.

An afternoon workshop on building Word Press sites led by co-editor of Writing History in the Digital Age, Jack Dougherty, demystified the process of building a Word Press blog (some basic instruction can be found here). Conversations that emerged from this session highlighted the value of building scholarly research blogs as a way for graduate students and other scholars to work through ideas, invite feedback throughout the research process, to manage data and ideas, and to help publicly affiliate yourself with your topic. The blog Sapping Attention was cited by several attendees as an excellent example of a graduate student blog that engages both digital humanities and public history. It also illustrates how digital humanities tools can be incorporated into historical analysis.

See the NCPH’s History@Work blog for more about the day’s events. For those interested in attending a THATCamp, there’s a listing of upcoming events on their website as well as information about how to host a THATCamp in conjunction with a conference or on your campus. We would love to see more Native American and Indigenous studies scholars involved in these workshops and exploring the benefits these digital tools could bring to our scholarly community.

A sunny meeting space outside the exhibit hall. OAH will meet next in San Francisco, April 11-13, 2013.

A diverse group of scholars, authors, students, and book lovers gathered last week on the University of New Mexico campus for the second Indigenous Book Festival, sponsored by the Institute for American Indian Research. The two-day festival was packed with readings, open-mics, performances, writing workshops, and book signings. The festival also featured cutting-edge scholarship in Indigenous studies with panels on critical Indigenous studies, erotics of sovereignty, settler colonialism, Indigenous intellectual history, among many other topics.

First Peoples and partner press authors were visible throughout the event and advisory board member Jennifer Denetdale was a key organizer of the event. Dr. Denetdale wrote this reflection of the festival and allowed us to share it here in its entirety:

The second Indigenous Book Festival was a success! Over twenty Indigenous authors and our allies were invited to share their work in Indigenous studies. My own work has been influenced by scholarship in Indigenous feminisms and queer Indigenous studies. One of our special guests was Dr. Mark Rifkin who gave a lecture, “When Did Indians Become Straight?”. Rifkin showed how Native nations have been recreated to mirror Western heterosexual patriarchies, which allow certain citizens to belong more fully to the nation than others. The panel, “The Erotics of Sovereignty” featured Qwo-Li Driskill and Mark Rifkin, with myself as moderator. The presenters shared their work on how queer Natives embrace their  identities through cultural mediums such as poetry, narratives, and songs. Other panels took up questions such as “What is critical Indigenous studies?”. Overall, the audience response was tremendous and many appreciated the opportunity to hear what the Native intellectuals were up to. They said it was inspiring to see such an active and vigorous scholarship coming from Native scholars and our allies.

The Institute for American Indian Research, directed by Beverly Singer, was the key host for the festival, which featured events packed with students from the University of New Mexico, the Institute of American Indian Arts, and other area schools. The combination of scholarship, creative work, and young leaders made this a unique and inspiring event that we were honored to have taken part in.

1. Lloyd Lee introduces the Critical Indigenous Studies panel to a packed room; 2. James Riding In and Jodi Byrd on the Critical Indigenous Studies panel; 3. From left to right: Qwo-Li Driskill, Mark Rifkin, and Jennifer Denetdale prior to the Erotics of Sovereignty panel; 4. Qwo-Li Driskill reads from his co-edited collection, Sovereign Erotics: A Collection of Two-Spirit Literature; 5. Michael Yellow Bird and Jennifer Denetdale during the Settler Colonization Past and Present panel; the Indigenous Book Festival poster on display at the University of New Mexico.

Jodi Byrd’s book The Transit of Empire: Indigenous Critiques of Colonialism was published last fall by the University of Minnesota Press. Today Byrd, an assistant professor of American Indian Studies and English at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, offers insightful advice for junior scholars revising their dissertations and illustrates the importance of writing and voice as a decolonial project.

By Jodi Byrd

Let’s be honest and upfront. For junior faculty, and especially for those of us in American Indian and Indigenous Studies, one of the most difficult challenges we face in the juggling of teaching and service commitments is how to prioritize our own writing and research. And yet, that is one of the most significant things we can do as scholars and it demands a large amount of flexibility, persistence, and no small number of obsessive-compulsive habits. Because—and this is another truth of academic writing—almost anything is preferable to overcoming that initial hurdle of staring once more into the yawning chasm of a bright, blank computer screen. Anything.

There is lots of advice out there on how to be a successful and prolific writer. Set aside time—minutes to hours—and set goals. Today I will write for fifteen minutes no matter what, even if I have to delete every other expletive on the way to that one sentence for the day. Once you fulfill that goal, you’re done until the next session and the reward is already built in with the sense of accomplishment for having finally sat down to write. Or, as other advice suggests, you might try stopping mid-sentence at the end of the session to Hansel and Gretel your way to a completed sentence, paragraph, page, article, chapter, and book. Have habits and create rituals. Wear your favorite sweatshirt, pour yourself a glass of water, listen to the same playlist over and over and over to condition your mind into the grooves of putting words on the page. Whatever it takes to enter the zone and stay there. It is, after all and as the conventional wisdom implies, a matter of priority and application.

I have tried almost every one of these suggestions at various stages as I stared down deadlines and writer’s block and just sheer exhaustion and boredom. And they work. To a point. For me, though, writing isn’t about the tricks and the rewards so much as it is about carving out stretches of time—usually in the early, early morning—to procrastinate, stare, scream, and finally, yes, write. My method, if you could call it that, is to beg and steal as much time as possible from the edges of other duties and shape it into workable hours. It sometimes means writing binges over the weekends and into breaks. I’m a writer that likes expanses of time.

Once you’ve found the time to draft and compose, the next hurdle is grappling with feedback and revisions. As academics, we often form writing circles and by the necessity of peer and blind review, not to mention copyediting, we are inundated with advice, expectations, and sometimes, deeply critical assessments of our work. It is all about the long game and staying in it, regardless of setbacks or the sheer daunting task of having to rewrite yet again an introduction to finally get it right. It’s about holding true to your own vision and learning to evaluate the feedback you receive. Sometimes it’s a matter of trying to read beyond the comments to figure out what the reader was really flagging in the work and then assessing the best way to revise the argument to maintain the coherency of your own idea. Words and grammar matter within Indigenous studies; language and structure affect meaning. Within the context of ongoing colonialism that reproduces itself discursively as well as militarily and juridically, how we write and argue our ideas is fundamentally a decolonial project that necessarily plays out in the words we choose and the sentences we write. How we shape the worlds of our arguments is worth all the time we can give it.

In her new book, Red Medicine: Traditional Indigenous Rites of Birthing and Healing, Patrisia Gonzales addresses “Red Medicine” as a system of healing that includes birthing practices, dreaming, and purification rites to re-establish personal and social equilibrium. The book explores Indigenous medicine with a special emphasis on how Indigenous knowledge has endured and persisted among peoples with a legacy to Mexico. Writer Leslie Marmon Silko says of Red Medicine, “Beautifully written and researched, Professor Gonzales’s book is enriched by her accounts of personal experience with Red Medicine and the resurgence of Indigenous women in the role of healers.”

Today Gonzales answers our questions about Indigenous knowledge, personal connections, and links to Mesoamerican codices:

What does the term “Red Medicine” mean, as both the title of your new book but also something more?
I created this concept of Red Medicine to reflect a wide swath of experience regarding traditional Indigenous medicine and traditional knowledge. As I say in the book, I realized that as I was learning traditional medicine, that I was learning it from different kinds of people, not only from people in my family who were from different tribal traditions and Indigenous traditions, but also from Macehual or Nahua elders and Zapotec and Mixtec midwives and Indigenous people who were not part of a particular Native nation. I realized there were some things that were similar in a lot of the things that I was learning. At the ground of it was Indigenous knowledge. I wanted to take it out of these concepts that sometimes separate who we think is Indigenous and create a concept that a lot of different people could relate to.

Red has so much meaning for many Indigenous cultures. It has a power. It has its own kind of meaning in ceremony. It’s the color of blood. It’s the color of so many vital things that are important to life so I called this concept “Red Medicine.” Red is also referring to the pre-Columbian knowledge that is painted in red and black. To paint red and black also has a certain signification in the Nahuatl language because it’s really referring to this very deep knowledge contained within the codices. This book is expansive in that I’m dealing with traditional medicine, symbols, the codices, and different kinds of medicines.

A big part of your book is examining and exploring these codices. How did you come to those connections?
I started dreaming symbols at a very young age. I would dream in different languages—the Kickapoo language, the Comanche language, the Nahuatl language—those are all my peoples. And then I was part of Kalpulli Izkalli, which had a women’s group. We had a medicine project and a Nahuatl language project. We brought in traditional teachers from Mexico to teach us the Nahuatl language to learn to pray in this language and within our group we had people who spoke the language. We would study the calendars on our own so I learned the calendar from within the community—not from a book. Although when I was in college as part of studying Chicano studies they would teach us about the codices. At Kalpulli Izkalli, we would meet and study the Nahuatl language, and we lived by the calendar. We would plant by them. We would do ceremonies by them. I learned to do treatments by them from elders in Mexico. As I was going to Nahuatl University, which I mention in the book, we were learning how to read the calendars and how they related to birth and healing. When I was given the opportunity to get my masters, I started to look at the codices and ask what do they tell us about birth and traditional medicine? We know that they are telling us about the environment because many of the surviving codices are symbol systems that are talking about processes in nature. A lot of the codices that survived the book burnings by Spanish priests and conquerors are almanacs or cosmological bundles of symbols that are important for ceremony, planting, or recording rulerships. At this time, I was already practicing traditional medicine as a promotora, or community health worker. So it all came together, contextualizing what I already knew from the elders within the academic setting. Dreaming, which was part of my medicinal knowledge, was also part of my method of understanding the symbols. Dreams that I had up to to five years prior to finding a citation helped me understand and recast the scholarly archive from my vantage point as an Indigenous thinker.

What started you in this work?
In 1992 there was a kind of shift that happened with Native people coming together across the continent. I was part of five key gatherings that really had an impact on my life in 1991, 1992 and 1993. So as people started to make these connections across the continent, what we call the coming together of the Eagle and the Condor, the North and the South parts of the continent, there was all this knowledge shared. The thing that kept coming up is that we needed to have knowledge to survive. What human beings were doing to the earth could have catastrophic consequences and that we needed to be prepared. We needed to be praying to strengthen the earth and to change how we treat this being that gives us life that we stand on. I was already learning how to use herbs and it was at that point I said, I have to catch babies, and I need to know about the plants wherever I live. I had a Kellogg fellowship that allowed me to learn alternative medicine so I could take classes that would be considered more like alternative medicine or holistic medicine, but underneath all that was this relationship I had with elders that was from my own childhood and with Nahua elders in the state of Morelos. I’ve been going to Morelos since 1990. I have been fortunate to be around these elders and receive their teachings. I talk about my learning as being a 20-year cycle. I started in 1990 and I pretty much finished the manuscript in 2010. It really was this beginning of working with Indigenous knowledge in a very planted way. I felt like I needed to know these things to take care of the future.

Throughout your work you acknowledge the elders who have shared their teaching with you. Why is this important?
I go every summer for up to a month to Mexico because I am apprenticing as a midwife, a traditional birth attendant. But in the 1990s, I lived in Mexico for two years and I interviewed many elders about social change when I was writing The Mud People. Social change wasn’t divorced from Nahua philosophy and Mesoamerican thought. So there are a lot of different elders, but there are a couple of key elders who are in Red Medicine that are named, and they and their communities are recognized as being the guardians of the knowledge. As I was writing, I would call them, or some of them don’t have phones or mail services, so I would get back every year and talk with them about what I was doing. Or if they had a phone, I would call them up and say, “Are you sure this is ok?” And they would tell me how to phrase things. And then in writing my acknowledgements, I thought, the first thing is to acknowledge that they have the right to their own ideas and words.

The other people that are in my book that are not named per se include my grandparents and great-grandparents. After my grandparents died, my aunts and my mom would share with me things to do, like how to pray the way my great- grandfather would do before a healing ceremony. I write about how I learned as a child the ways my grandfather and grandmother would pray with the four directions as I was by their side. All of these elders are authorities of Red Medicine.

What do you hope comes out of this work?
I wrote this book for the sake of people in the future who know that there’s something that their family did or does that they maybe don’t understand or for the people who want to reclaim that and don’t know where to start. And I’m thinking of people from Indigenous origin populations, and I say that because we say Mexican origin but what does that mean? Indigenous origin whether they’re from Bolivia or Mexico, Indigenous knowledge has prevailed so much but where do they begin? This is not a how-to book, but it is a book that presents Indigenous philosophies that can help them connect to the visible and unseen processes of life and maybe it will change their dreams. Maybe they’re going to read something and then they’ll talk to their grandma and she’ll start telling them things. And some original knowledge may unearth itself to help them understand another way for how life works.

One of the experiences that I had was that I would be reading a citation in graduate school about a ceremonial site where women had left ceremonial objects as offerings and I realized that I had been there three years before with Nahua women and Macehual or Nahua elders. Or I’d see them talking about a limpia or plant knowledge and I’d be like, “Oh yeah, I know that remedy because I learned it from my mom…Or I know that type of limpia.” Part of my method is that I wanted to show that my lived experience—a contemporary experience—reflects what can be found in archives. It was continuing in my own life and experienced in my own life. Unless scholars go back to a community—and the community decides to what extent to reveal the knowledge—they may not know to what extent traditional practices exist because of the dramatic changes happening in numerous Indigenous populations. It may seem lost but it may be hidden. Many of the things I talk about in the book I experienced or I’d heard the elders talk about.

One of the arguments in the book is that Indigenous knowledge prevails even among people who are not identified with very specific kinds of markers. I think Indigenous knowledge is far more resilient in many of these populations. We’re going to start to see a whole new level of analysis on that experience. I grew up in an era when many of us knew that our grandparents were Native or where our parents or some of our kin would insist on our Indianess. Yet some of our family, because of the pressures of the 1940s and 1950s, some of us might identify as Native and Mexican or some tribal affiliation and Mexican or some as Mexican, Mexican American or Hispanic. I think that’s a whole new area of scholarship that is wide open. Traditional medicine provides a concrete way of looking at indigeneity. It’s not abstract theorizing about indigeniety. You can hold it and you can see it and it has implications because when some healing occurs in traditional medicine, then my argument is, that you undo time. You undo the effects of time.

Patrisia Gonzales is an assistant professor in the Department of Mexican American Studies and is an affiliated faculty member in the American Indian Studies Programs and the Native American Research and Training Center at the University of Arizona. Red Medicine: Traditional Indigenous Rites of Birthing and Healing is now available from the University of Arizona Press.

In the last year, author Paul M. Liffman has provided comments about the Wixarika (Huichol) people’s fight for cultural rights and a ban on large-scale silver mining near their principal sacred sites to the southwest of the historic town of Real de Catorce in the state of San Luis Potosí, Mexico. He provides a timely update on the situation, which has precipitated a march in Mexico City, a massive gathering of ceremonial protest on their sacred mountain, and widespread media coverage.

By Paul Liffman

Press conference on Cerro Quemado, February 7, 2012. Journalists, filmmakers and activists listen to Huichol (Wixarika) ceremonial and political leaders announce the accords forged during the previous night’s divination by shamans from numerous ceremonial centers.

One year ago, just as Huichol Territory and the Mexican Nation was going to press, I added a few bits of late-breaking information on silver mining as a new dimension of the struggle over sacred territoriality. That issue has now become front-page news. This is because Mexico’s Mining Directorate (Dirección de Minas, a division of the Secretaría de Economía or Secretary of the Economy) has provisionally granted 22 contiguous sub-surface concessions covering over 6,000 hectares (15,000 acres) that the Huichols consider sacred land in the state of San Luis Potosí to Vancouver-based First Majestic Silver Corporation via its Mexican subsidiary, Real Bonanza, S.A. Many of these concessions lie inside state ecological and cultural reserves and all of them are directly adjacent to Cerro Quemado (Reu’unaxi), the mountain of solar emergence, and the 1,400 square kilometer (540 square mile) ancestral pilgrimage territory called Wirikuta that lies below it. Wirikuta is an array of sacred springs, outcroppings, and footpaths set in an ancient Chihuahuan desert ecosystem that is home to some of the last major concentrations of peyote, a Huichol sacrament. It is where sacrificial exchanges that renew the sun and the rains must be carried out without disruptive mining activities threatening the health of the mountain and the underground “veins” of water from which the rain emerges each summer and which connect the entire Huichol cosmos, or kiekari.

Sunset from the slopes of Cerro Quemado, looking down over Wirikuta and back toward the Huichols’ home communities 400 kilometers to the southwest.

The First Majestic project and desert clearcutting by commercial tomato growers—both businesses reliant on fragile desert aquifers—and the even more apocalyptic prospect of an open pit gold mine in the heart of Wirikuta (now being surveyed by another Canadian company, Revolution Resources, Inc.) have generated widespread disgust, alarm, and the beginnings of a nationalist backlash in the Mexican public. An unprecedented alliance of ceremonial and political authorities, activists, lawyers, reporters, anthropologists, neo-indigenous religious groups, and elements of the cultural wing of the government itself—the Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia (INAH) and the Consejo Nacional de Cultura y las Artes (CONACULTA), among others—have formed a highly publicized protest movement against the final approval of mineral extraction by the Secretaría de Economía and the Secretaría de Medio Ambiente y Recursos Naturales (Secretary of the Environment and Natural Resources).

Political leaders on the morning of February 7, following the reading of the Declaración de Wirikuta, as ritual authorities, the press and public look on.

Following an October 27 mass march down Mexico City’s La Reforma boulevard, the movement again showed its wide appeal on the night of February 6 in a united demonstration of normally reclusive, highly autonomous Huichol ceremonial groups that converged at Cerro Quemado. Breaking with their pattern of separate treks, representatives of over 20 pilgrimage groups (each one based in one of the imposing native temples called tukipa or smaller ranchería or extended family shrines known as xirikite) held a joint all-night ceremony at the rock spiral found at the very emergence point of the sun, a place normally only visited briefly at midday for leaving offerings on the windswept (and on that night, freezing) 3,000 meter peak. Hundreds more Huichols remained camped in the cloud-shrouded desert thousands of feet below, but the dramatically moonlit scene of shamans chanting and sacrificing a bull to propitiate the ancestors and receive counsel from them was also witnessed by dozens of the aforementioned members of the press, academia, and the public invited by the Huichols and their non-governmental legal and political allies in the Frente en Defensa de Wirikuta. Their declarations and footage of the Cerro Quemado event are online here and here.

You can survey how this surge of concern and outrage has been represented in the mainstream national press (one good article of the last few days came out in El Universal), the Facebook sites Venado Mestizo en la Sierra de Catorce, Huichol Cultural Survival, Frente en Defensa de Wirikuta Tamatsima Wahaa, and associated links, the website of the Red Mexicana de Afectados por la Minería and international venues as diverse as the Washington Post, Canadian Broadcasting Company, and Al-Jazeera.

For now the project has only been stalled, in anticipation perhaps of the outcome of the July presidential elections, but the legal process has been ongoing. One of the steps now being pursued by the Frente is to seek an injunction (amparo) in the San Luis Potosí courts, based on the project’s environmental impact and in part on my testimony regarding the centrality of Wirikuta to the integrated system of place and space described in Huichol Territory and the Mexican Nation.

Of course, this is only one case. With the spike in commodities prices—particularly of gold and silver—that has accompanied the global financial crisis, 56 million hectares—a quarter of Mexico’s entire territory—has now been concessioned for mineral extraction. Many of these concessions affect Indigenous and other peasant populations—oftentimes dividing factions, ethnicities or social classes over the doubled-edged sword of employment and environmental destruction. Still, the Wirikuta case represents an acid test for mining companies’ mantra of “sustainability” and respect to justify extraction but also for Native peoples who invoke the “sacred” to resist what after centuries of technological progress remains a risk-filled transformative activity for landscapes across the world. Will the Mexican government carve out an honorable exception to the mining boom for one of its most emblematic Indigenous peoples? By doing so, could it regain enough trust to calm growing public unease over the concession of control over dozens of other territories across the country to foreign corporations?

Paul Liffman is a professor at the Center for Anthropological Studies at the Colegio de Michoacán and a member of the National Research System of Mexico. He has worked as a consultant and translator for the Wixarika exhibit at the National Museum of the American Indian in Washington, D.C., and is currently a Research Associate attached to the Department of Anthropology at Rice University working on a new book about indigenous people and mining. His book Huichol Territory and the Mexican Nation: Indigenous Ritual, Land Conflict, and Sovereignty Claims is available from the University of Arizona Press.

Author Enrique Salmón

In his new book, Eating the Landscape: American Indian Stories of Food, Identity, and Resilience (University of Arizona Press 2012), ethnobotanist Enrique Salmón artfully weaves personal narrative with stories of people maintaining and revitalizing traditional agricultural practices. Despite the cultural and geographic diversity of the region he explores, Salmón reveals common themes: the importance of participation in a reciprocal relationship with the land, the connection between each group’s cultural identity and their ecosystems, and the indispensable correlation of land consciousness and food consciousness. Here, he talks about the ways in which traditional foodways can strengthen community, foster a sense of place, and perpetuate family stories.

What inspired the phrase “eating the landscape” in the title of your book?

The title came to me when I was deeply engaged in one of my many meditations over how to best translate an American Indian mental space regarding food into terms that might be understood by modern industrialized people. The land is a central component of American Indian worldview. It is constant and is the embodiment of our language, spirituality, identity, and history.  The land, therefore, is a reflection of us. We are the land and it is we. It is also a living entity from which we emerged and is the living being that provides all our traditional foods. When we eat our foods we are not only eating our origins, but also our history, our identity, and everything that we hold dear.

In the introduction to the book you talk about how your family and early life experiences shaped your interest in Indigenous foodways. Please share a bit about some of those early life experiences and how they drove you to do the work you do.

The opening chapter of the book explains this well, but I would add that each time I prepare and eat one of those dishes from my younger days, every time I catch a whiff of a tamale or a pot of beans cooking on a stove my mind becomes flooded with a sea of delightful memories all related to my family and our recipes. I recall parties, celebrations, and all sorts of events that called for special foods. But I also recall many uneventful moments colored by simple foods such as a rolled up warm corn tortilla dripping with real butter. These are positive enduring memories and they are based in community and in a fondness for place. Both of these things, community and a sense a place are becoming increasingly absent from the lives of modern humans and lead, I believe, to a lack of empathy for each other and for all other living things. A big part of my work, I hope, will help people to peer into what is possible between humanity and the natural world, and perhaps alter their lives so that they might re-experience or newly experience some of that as well.

You mention the Vandana Shiva dictum that eating is a political act and you add that eating is also a cultural act that reaffirms identity. Will you expand on both those thoughts and explain how the simple act of eating can carry so much cultural and political weight?

We all choose to eat and to not eat certain foods. And each one of those choices is a reflection of the complexity of things that people believe in and how they are trying to carry on their lives. However, most of us do not have the time or do not bother to consider the processes that our foods have undergone before they arrive before us in a bowl or on a plate. It is important to think about who raised this food. Under what conditions did they grow this? Do the people who grew and harvested this food love what they do? Next, it is important to consider how the food was prepared. Whose recipe was followed? What additional ingredients went into this dish? Finally, and most importantly I believe, it is crucial for people to ask, is there a story that the food I am choosing to eat can tell me or is there a story that, by eating this food, I am perpetuating? It is at this moment when we as food consumers must decide if we will continue to perpetuate a story that commits additional harm to our natural world and to ourselves, or if we will embark on a story that not only nourishes us and our families, but also nourishes our landscapes.

Would you talk more about the idea of food as story?

Story is all that we are. All people are living various forms of a story that they tell themselves or are told to them by others. Either way, our daily choices impact our ongoing stories. When family recipes are followed that is a way of continuing the story of the family and a cultural way of interacting with a landscape. A recipe can embody everything that is important to a family and even a culture. Just recently a friend and her husband had come over for dinner. My wife and I prepared among many things, some guacamole. Our friend was overwhelmed by how good the guacamole was and asked for the recipe. I realized at that moment that I really never followed any recipes when I prepared dishes such as guacamole. What I normally do is retell myself stories from family events of the past. In those stories I single out how particular family members prepared their versions of the dish. In this process I am performing a sort of cultural and familial re-membering. This re-membering is a form of re-living my own, my family’s, and my culture’s legacy of story.

There has been recent media coverage of an epidemic of starvation among the Raramuri, which seems to be an incredibly bitter irony for a culture so rich with knowledge of the land and food. What historical and contemporary circumstances have brought this about and is there hope for reclaiming the foodways that have sustained them for centuries?

The Raramuri have been able to lead a resilient lifestyle on their landscape in the Sierra Madres of Chihuahua, Mexico for centuries. That resilience has been marked largely by their ability to absorb, learn from, and then adapt to the many shocks to their way of life. In the past, however, those shocks were temporally singular. There was the Spanish Entrada they were able to retreat from as a result of the rugged mountains and canyons of the Sierra Madre. Due to their isolation the Raramuri were able to withstand the disease episodes of the 17^th and 18^th centuries. They permitted only those European food plants that were adaptable to their agricultural system and ignored the ones that were not.  In a similar fashion my people survived the Mexican revolution, increased colonization, the ejido system, and even modern tourism. However, recently there have been too many shocks arriving at once and they are proving to be insurmountable. Ongoing drought coupled with over-deforestation on the part of lumber companies is making it increasingly difficult to grow food. Then there is the additional threat of narco-traffickers who are forcing Raramuri off their agricultural areas and milpas that they have husbanded for centuries in order to make way for marijuana and opium growing. Under these conditions not even the most knowledgeable and experienced farmer can survive. If given the opportunity to return to their fields and milpas and to have time to understand the situation, I imagine the many Raramuri families would be able to survive. Unfortunately, this will not happen until the narco-traffickers and loggers have a reason to abandon the Sierra. And even then the damage to the land might be too much to overcome.

Who are some of the people you’ve met or organizations you’ve encountered over the years that make you feel hopeful about the resurgence of traditional agricultural and culinary practices?

Pretty much each individual and every organization that I mention in the book offers a story of hope. If they are given the opportunity to reach out and affect someone with their story that hope will multiply adding to the resurgence in traditional and decolonized foods that we are experiencing today. Of course, in my work I have had opportunities to come in contact with like-minded peoples in various parts of the world. I have met tribal people in Ethiopia working hard to hang onto and revitalize traditional foods such as teff. They do this in the face of economic hardship and government efforts to stifle their ancestral foodways. I am encouraged by the Maori educational program in New Zealand where a child can move from preschool all the way through a four year college degree all in their Maori language, customs, and food traditions. In northern California the Yurok and Kurok are embarking on a revitalization of their ancestral fishing practices as a result of changing water regulations that finally recognize the importance of free flowing rivers and salmon runs. I am encouraged by The Christensen Fund’s grant making practices that assume that what is good for Indigenous people who are maintaining centuries-old land management practices is good for the land. The Indigenous Peoples Restoration Network (IPRN) is working in conjunction with the Society for Ecological Restoration to maintain a dialogue between Indigenous and western scientific ecologists. I could continue, as there are myriad projects, organizations, community gardens, CSAs, co-ops, and individual food providers who have decided that chemicals and GMOS are not the answer and that we need to rediscover sustainable agricultural methods. These people are only a small part of a larger collection of activists, dreamers, and change makers who together are rebelling against corporate foodways and are offering new ways to eat.

Enrique Salmón is an assistant professor in California State University East Bay’s Department of Ethnic Studies. His book, Eating the Landscape: American Indian Stories of Food, Identity, and Resilience, is now available from the University of Arizona Press.

Author Miguel La Serna

From the 1980s through the first decade of the twenty-first century, the Shining Path — a Maoist guerrilla group in Peru — promoted its radical political agenda through a bloody insurgency. During the peak of the violence, from 1980 through 2000, 69,000 people, many of them Indigenous peasants, lost their lives. Between 2005 and 2008, Miguel La Serna, author of The Corner of the Living: Ayacucho on the Eve of the Shining Path Insurgency (UNC Press 2012), conducted ethnographic and archival research in Peru, concentrating on the Andean communities of Chuschi and Huaychao. His research highlights the vastly different responses that Quechua-speaking villagers had to the insurgency and contributes to a deeper understanding of the long-term internal dynamics that shaped the civil war histories of these communities. Moving beyond traditional theories of social movements, La Serna weds individual voices, local histories, and cultural understandings. Here, he discusses state and local responses to the insurgency and its aftermath and also reflects on the dynamics of conducting fieldwork in the highly politicized context of very recent conflict.

Your book introduces a twist to the common narrative about the Shining Path insurgency and why people chose to support or resist it. Could you briefly explain some of the community responses you uncovered through your research?

The Peruvian highland department of Ayacucho has gained a good deal of notoriety in recent years as the wellspring of the Shining Path guerrilla insurgency. Yet, not all Ayacuchanos walked the Shining Path, and in fact many formed counterinsurgency militias to combat the rebels. I entered this project trying to understand how it was that people from similar racial, social, and geographic backgrounds could have such divergent responses to the Shining Path insurgency. With this in mind, I compared the long-term histories of two Ayacuchano communities—Chuschi, whose local populace initially supported the Shining Path guerrillas, and Huaychao, whose peasants mobilized against the rebels. Chuschi and Huaychao played an important role in the history of the armed conflict. It was in Chuschi in May of 1980 that the rebels launched their national guerrilla campaign. Not three years later, the Indigenous peasants of Huaychao were the first villagers to take up arms against the insurgents. It turns out that the local experiences—both historical and cultural—of these two Indigenous communities had a profound impact on their responses to the insurgency.

You write that many Peruvians were originally convinced that Indigenous peasants couldn’t have acted alone in the counterinsurgency against the Shining Path. Why do you think it was so difficult for people to believe that Indigenous communities could have actively supported the counterinsurgency against the Shining Path group?

I think it’s important to consider the historical context in which the Shining Path and the counterinsurgency militias emerged. In the early 1980s, Peru was on the heels of a 12-year military dictatorship. The political future of the country was still uncertain. The economy was spiraling out of control, and conditions for many Quechua-speaking highlanders were deplorable. These circumstances set the stage for the emergence of an armed insurgency like the one carried out by the Shining Path in Ayacucho. Peruvians and non-Peruvians alike had trouble believing that Indigenous peasants would take up arms against a guerrilla group that was ostensibly fighting on their behalf. At the time, people didn’t quite understand the kind of threat that the Shining Path posed in some communities. This threat was as much cultural as it was physical, and some Andean peasants risked life and limb to defend their way of life.

Your presence and research so close on the heels of the period you were studying must have meant that your research itself became a part of how the events were remembered and talked about within the communities. What are some of the ethical considerations of a researcher becoming part of the historical moment itself – especially when that period was highly political and violent?

Any kind of research dealing with living human subjects is sensitive, even more so when it involves recent political violence. One thing I was reminded of constantly was that my very presence in the field stirred up a host of issues and anxieties that villagers had either suppressed or were still dealing with. I never asked anyone to disclose information that they weren’t comfortable sharing.  Even so, I had my share of doors slammed in my face, interviews cut short, and appointments broken. This is why I find ethnographic research so valuable. People are simply more comfortable sharing intimate information with those whom they know and trust. At the same time, a researcher is more inclined to respect the privacy and character of people with whom she has established intimate personal bonds. Ethnographic field work enables researchers to earn the trust of the people in their host communities while also producing more culturally sensitive scholarship. This isn’t exactly a news flash for anthropologists, but it’s something that historians and other researchers can learn from.

In research on a multi-dimensional history of conflict, I imagine you encountered various and sometimes competing narratives. How did you handle different versions of the story in the book and still manage a cohesive and comprehensible narrative?

Having the ability to dialogue with the people one writes about is a luxury that most historians simply do not have. I was lucky in this regard, and it allowed me to collect a wide variety of perspectives on the period leading up to and including the Shining Path insurgency. At the same time, this variation in perspective provided challenges when it came to constructing a smooth narrative about any given historical event. This is where prolonged archival research came in handy. I typically brought photocopies of archival documents with me to my field sites. These documents not only helped me to jog my informants’ memory, but the texts also prompted them to address any discrepancies between the written record and their own recollection. Even so, there were still some cases of contradictory narratives, either between different informants or between them and the written sources. In the book, I try to acknowledge these instances and discuss their implications for local memory and culture rather than offer an authoritative narrative voice.

What are your thoughts on how the conflict is being commemorated in Peru today and what the state is doing to help its citizens recover from trauma, specifically through either the Truth and Reconciliation Commission or the Museo de la Memoria?

To its credit, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission made the recording of Indigenous voices a top priority for the national healing process, as thousands of Indigenous peoples testified before the commission in their native language. To this effect, the Truth Commission sought to open up a fruitful conversation between Indigenous peoples, the state, and civil society in Peru. Still, this process has been incomplete and there remains much work to be done. As anthropologist Caroline Yezer notes, some Quechua-speaking highlanders greeted the Truth Commission with suspicion, keeping their most haunting secrets to themselves[i]. Given the Peruvian state’s track record of deception, corruption, human rights violations, and incomplete reforms, this reaction is understandable. The problem here is one of trust. A citizenry cannot enter into any kind of meaningful dialogue with a state that it cannot trust. In order to earn that trust, the Peruvian state must address the economic, political, educational, and racial injustices that gave rise to the political violence.

Miguel La Serna is an assistant professor of history at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. His book, The Corner of the Living: Ayacucho on the Eve of the Shining Path Insurgency, is now available from the University of North Carolina Press.