Indigenous Science and Technology

University of Arizona Press eBooks · 2024-01-01

Indigenous Science and Technology

University of Arizona Press eBooks · 2024-05-21 · 2 citations

An Ontological Approach for Unlocking the Colonial Archive

Journal on Computing and Cultural Heritage · 2023 · 10 citations

• Computer Science
• Political Science
• World Wide Web

Cultural Heritage institutions have been exploring new ways of making available their catalogues in digital format. Recently, new approaches have emerged as methods to reuse and make available the contents for computational purposes. This work introduces a methodology to transform digital collections into Linked Open Data following best practices. The framework has been applied to Indigenous and Spanish colonial archives based on the collection Relaciones Geográficas of Mexico and Guatemala provided by the LLILAS Benson Latin American Studies and Collections. The results of this work are publicly available. This work aims at encouraging Cultural Heritage institutions to publish and reuse their digital collections using advanced methods and techniques.

Technologies of Communication in Transition: Indigenous Orality and Writing in Colonial Mexico

Cambridge University Press eBooks · 2022-11-25

This essay centers on the dynamic and inherently complex interplay among pre-Hispanic and European languages and writing (in the broadest sense) in New Spain. It addresses the populations, spaces (geographic and institutional), and formats in which theories, policies, and practices of language use and inscription shifted through three centuries of colonial rule. Emphasis is placed on the strategic choices of indigenous subjects, primarily Nahuas, in their sonic and visual communication practices. It pays attention to the violent processes that went hand in hand with the imposition and acquisition of European communicative practices and tools. Through the analysis of a wide variety of textual genres produced by indigenous peoples and Spaniards, some of the questions treated in this essay are: how did the use of Nahuatl, Spanish, or Latin convey prestige, authenticity, and legitimacy in some circumstances, and in others not? In what ways did the Roman alphabet become a powerful tool wielded by native peoples? Why were indigenous painted amoxtli recreated by memory, then glossed with Spanish text, decades and even one hundred years after the zealous priests burned the originals?

NAIS Editorial Ethics, Principles, and Practices

Native American and Indigenous Studies · 2021-03-01

NAIS Editorial Ethics, Principles, and Practices K. Tsianina Lomawaima, Current NAIS Coeditor (bio), Kelly McDonough, Current NAIS Coeditor (bio), Jean O'Brien, Founding NAIS Coeditors (bio), and Robert Warrior, Founding NAIS Coeditor (bio) as we reach the conclusion of our first year as editors of NAIS, we (Kelly McDonough and K. Tsianina Lomawaima) would like to explicitly articulate editorial ethics, principles, and practices we believe are foundational to the integrity of the journal and introduce issue 8.1, which includes a new iteration of Intervention focused on the 2020 release of Land-Grab Universities, a special report, database, and website portal crafted by Robert Lee, Tristan Ahtone, and others.1 Some of the ethics, principles, and practices—such as the occasional section Intervention—we are carrying forward whole cloth from Jean O'Brien and Robert Warrior's term as founding editors (2013–19), some are slightly amended from the previous editors' legacies, and some are new introductions. The NAISA website (naisa.org/journal) is an important reference point for journal information, but we have come to realize over the years how distressingly ephemeral websites can be. We hope and trust the publication of comments here might provide a summary of the journal's history, an update for current readers, and a useful archival source for the future. History of the NAIS Journal Discussions about the viability of publishing an Indigenous studies journal began as early as the 2005 conversations about forming the organization now called the Native American and Indigenous Studies Association (NAISA). A rigorous process of research, consultation with other professional academic organizations, and negotiation with presses as potential publishers [End Page 6] ultimately stretched over nearly three years. The process gathered steam after NAISA was incorporated and gained nonprofit status in 2009. In February 2010 NAISA's governing council, under the leadership of president Robert Warrior and president-elect Jean O'Brien, distributed a call for proposals to publish the new journal to selected academic presses with journal divisions. By July of that year, the council had received proposals from Duke University Press, the University of North Carolina Press, the University of Nebraska Press, and the University of Minnesota Press. Throughout the lengthy process of press negotiations and journal planning, the council was committed to NAISA retaining ownership of the journal. In June 2011 the council voted unanimously to contract with the University of Minnesota Press, given the press's commitment to Indigenous studies, agreement to ownership being vested in NAISA, support of NAISA since its inception, and commitment to support editorial policies central to NAISA's mission and vision, such as publishing in languages beyond English. The contract to publish two issues per year stipulates that all issues are copyrighted in the name of NAISA and that NAISA has authority over editorial policy and the appointment of editors while agreeing to consult with the press on those appointments. The NAISA Council issued calls for editor(s) and members of the editorial board in June 2012. In the fall of 2012 the council discussed and approved a process for selecting NAIS editors and editorial board members. Editorial selection came first, on the assumption that the editors would be deeply involved in the selection of board members. Important responsibilities of editorial board members include offering peer reviews of submitted manuscripts and assisting the editors in identifying and recruiting peer reviewers. The board was capped at twenty members, although editors and the board can request the council to increase the size of the board. A call for applications to the editorial board is now issued each year, and candidates are reviewed by the editors, who select new board members; editors' recruitment of members to meet disciplinary and geographic coverage requires board approval. In November 2012 the council announced its appointment of Jean O'Brien and Robert Warrior as the inaugural editors of NAIS, the journal of the Native American and Indigenous Studies Association. The O'Brien and Warrior editorial team served two consecutive terms, from January 2013 through June 2019. In 2018 another call for editors was issued by the council, and the successful proposal came from the University of Texas at Austin. The journal editorial team operates independently of...

Editors' Introduction: Reflections on the Land-Grab Universities Project

Native American and Indigenous Studies · 2021 · 7 citations

• Political Science
• Sociology
• Library science

Editors' Introduction:Reflections on the Land-Grab Universities Project K. Tsianina Lomawaima (bio), Kelly McDonough (bio), Jean M. O'Brien (bio), and Robert Warrior (bio) on march 30, 2020, the self-described "independent, nonprofit 501(c)3 media organization" High Country News (HCN) published under their Education section "Land-Grab Universities: Expropriated Indigenous Land Is the Foundation of the University System" by Robert Lee and Tristan Ahtone (https://www.hcn.org/issues/52.4/indigenous-affairs-education-land-grab-universities), "How We Investigated the Land-Grant University System" by Robert Lee (https://www.hcn.org/articles/indigenous-affairs-education-how-we-investigated-the-land-grant-university-system), and "Lost and Found: The Story of Land-Grant Universities" by Tristan Ahtone under Editor's Note (https://www.hcn.org/issues/52.4/editors-note-lost-and-found-the-story-of-land-grant-universities). Ahtone (Kiowa) was at the time of publication Indigenous affairs editor at HCN; as this issue goes to press he is the editor in chief at the Texas Observer. Lee is a lecturer in American history at the University of Cambridge and a fellow of Selwyn College. With stunning photographs by journalist and photographer Kalen Goodluck (Diné, Mandan, Hidatsa, and Tsimshian) and compelling maps by cartographer Margaret Pearce (Citizen Band Potawatomi), Land-Grab Universities (LGU) sets a new bar for investigative journalism and innovative scholarship in Indigenous lands. In addition to these articles, the project's web portal with interactive maps (by Robert Lee, Tristan Ahtone, Margaret Pearce, Kalen Goodluck, Geoff McGhee, Cody Leff, Katherine Lanpher, and Taryn Salinas) is available at https://www.landgrabu.org/, and the database is accessible at https://github.com/HCN-Digital-Projects/landgrabu-data. Within days, Native scholars across the country were abuzz, sharing the LGU project links with one another and with presidents, chancellors, [End Page 89] provosts, and deans at their academic institutions (whether land-grant universities or not). Impressed with the project's scope, impact on institutions of higher education in the United States, and import for Indigenous studies scholars around the world, editors in the NAIS review collective agreed that LGU warranted extensive evaluation in an Intervention and quickly moved to recruit essays from scholars across the interdisciplinary arenas of critical Indigenous studies, American studies, geography, cartography, economics, digital humanities, history, and higher education. The Intervention includes twelve commentaries and concludes with the transcript of an interview with Lee and Ahtone, who comment on the project, answer questions from the editors, and respond to the multidisciplinary perspectives on their work gathered in this issue. As of October 2020, as this issue is being prepared for our publisher, the University of Minnesota Press, university administrators, faculty, staff, and students are responding to or mobilizing in support of the LGU call for acknowledgment of the massive Indigenous land dispossession and the subsequent enrichment of university endowments documented by the project and for responsibility to the Indigenous caretakers and stewards whose lands and resources have underwritten so much of the U.S. higher education system (including lands dispossessed through means other than the Morrill Act). At Cornell University, the beneficiary of the greatest endowment wealth by far from Indigenous lands and/or scrip distributed by the Morrill Act, the American Indian and Indigenous Studies Program has formed a faculty committee to examine the issue and publish a blog (https://blogs.cornell.edu/cornelluniversityindigenousdispossession/). At the University of California, Berkeley, the Centers for Educational Justice & Community Engagement organized webinars in September and October 2020 entitled "The UC Land Grab: A Legacy of Profit from Indigenous Lands" (https://cejce.berkeley.edu/uc-land-grab). The LGU project has also generated significant media attention, such as Scalawag magazine's indictment of the University of North Carolina (https://scalawagmagazine.org/2020/09/indian-land-university-profit/). We are confident that LGU will continue to generate interest, controversy, self-reflection, and hopefully self-improvement within higher education institutions and, most importantly, further research into the tangible realities and consequences of Indigenous land dispossession, the enduring character of Indigenous sovereignty, and the remarkable resilience of Indigenous peoples. [End Page 90] K. Tsianina Lomawaima k. tsianina lomawaima, coeditor of NAIS, is retired from the School of Social Transformation...

Infrastructures of Race: Concentration and Biopolitics in Colonial Mexico by Daniel Nemser

Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies · 2020 · 1 citations

• Sociology
• Political Science
• Sociology

Reviewed by: Infrastructures of Race: Concentration and Biopolitics in Colonial Mexico by Daniel Nemser Kelly S. McDonough (bio) Review of Daniel Nemser. Infrastructures of Race: Concentration and Biopolitics in Colonial Mexico. University of Texas Press, 2017. viii + 221 pages. $90.00 (hardcover); $29.95 (paperback). Daniel Nemser’s groundbreaking and beautifully written monograph centers on how racialized social orders in colonial Mexico were inherently linked to spatial order. The study is a powerful intervention into the “coloniality of power” literature. Aníbal Quijano rightly emphasized that a racialized labor schema became naturalized in the colonial world, but this reading tends to suggest that race was a static, pinpointable “thing” that was the starting point of colonial order. In Infrastructures of Race, race is the endpoint of a process always poised to begin anew. Yes, we know that race is linked to power, but how did ideas and experiences of race come to be, Nemser asks, and through what mechanisms and for what reasons did they change? Infrastructures of Race answers these questions by taking the reader down a road little explored in studies of colonial race: through the analysis of material systems—infrastructures—that would have made such ascriptions possible, namely the “roads, walls, ditches, buildings, boundaries and towns, into which both human and nonhuman subjects were concentrated” (5). Instead of viewing race primarily as an attribute (as does most of the literature), Nemser insists that race is also “an effect of the material practices of power” (9); that is, the focus here is less on how ideas of difference played out and more about how materiality created the means of domination. Infrastructures of Race is divided into four chapters, each of which tracks shifts in ongoing processes of racialization and the material regimes upon which they depend. The first and second chapters address how the Spanish Crown and Catholic church physically removed and resettled bodies—collected them—as a strategy of governance during the sixteenth century. Both chapters deftly demonstrate how subjectivities were produced vis-à-vis [End Page 113] infrastructures, in this case the figures of the “Indian” and the “Mestizo.” The first chapter, “Congregation: Urbanization and the Construction of the Indian,” looks at how the spatial organization of certain peoples was a hinderance to evangelization and tribute/labor extraction, and how Euro-criollos deemed resettlement into centralized, manageable, and monitorable spaces the appropriate solution. The violent dispossession of Indigenous lands and the forced removal and resettlement of Indigenous peoples (often with peoples of different ethno-spatial origins) in colonial Mexico has received surprisingly little attention. In this chapter, Nemser provides the most thorough and nuanced analysis of congregation to date, arguing that the very category of “Indian” and related “qualities, capacities, and obligations” (2) was articulated and solidified through the process of congregation. Having established that the figure of the “Indian” was born of a slippery bundle of ideological premises and spatial and institutional practices, the second chapter, “Enclosure: The Architecture of Mestizo Conversion,” shows how the “Mestizo” came to be in similar fashion. This chapter addresses the practices of recogimiento, literally rounding up and enclosing young mestizo bodies and minds within the walls of the Colegio de San Juan Letrán in order to produce a new creature that could successfully mimic hispanidad while retaining enough “Indio” to be able to assist in the evangelization project. The third chapter, “Segregation: Sovereignty, Economy, and the Problem with Mixture,” moves to the end of the seventeenth century to show how European criollos understood the 1692 riot in Mexico City as the failure of earlier practices of concentration. Yet they still turned to segregation, in the form of a Spanish-only traza, as a protectionary measure that would safely cocoon them from a terrifying, undifferentiated, and undesirable mass of bodies that were becoming more populous than the elite. The fourth chapter, “Collection: Imperial Botany and Racialized Life,” rounds out the book’s focus on the role of concentration in ongoing processes of colonial racialization. This chapter seems at first out of sync with the others as it discusses the collection and organization of plant life, not people. But imperial botany of the eighteenth century is actually the ideal case study...

Indigenous Technologies in the 1577 <i>Relaciones geográficas</i> of New Spain: Collective Land Memory, Natural Resources, and Herbal Medicine

Ethnohistory · 2019-07-01 · 4 citations

Abstract This essay applies the analytic category of technologies proposed by historian Marcy Norton as complex systems of knowledges, practices, and products generated in specific social contexts to a study of the sixteenth-century bureaucratic surveys known as the Relaciones geográficas (RG) manuscripts. As a methodological intervention, the principal aim is to draw out the relatively understudied Indigenous knowledges and practices found throughout the corpus. The first section of the essay outlines the conceptual framework of technologies and contextualizes the RG survey and response processes. The remainder of the essay discusses Indigenous technologies including collective land memory, natural resources, and herbal medicines recorded in the Archdiocese of Mexico corpus of RGs (appendix), thirty-one manuscripts in total.

Indigenous Rememberings and Forgettings: Sixteenth-Century Nahua Letters and Petitions to the Spanish Crown

Native American and Indigenous Studies · 2018-03-01

Indigenous Rememberings and Forgettings:Sixteenth-Century Nahua Letters and Petitions to the Spanish Crown Kelly McDonough (bio) INDIGENOUS PEOPLE have always used the technologies available to them, old and new, to survive and thrive. It is not surprising, then, that the People took to alphabetic writing as soon as it was available to them, adopting and adapting it as best suited their own circumstances. While alphabetic writing isn't the only technology they have learned, practiced, and exercised well, it has served specific purposes in specific times and places. From the earliest days of the introduction/imposition of alphabetic writing Indigenous peoples wrote in their own languages and those of the colonizers, which they had made their own. In the Common Pot and far beyond, perhaps with Kānaka Maoli steel-tipped pens or Chamorro discursive flourish, the People have written letters, sermons, hymns, childhood recollections, personal memoirs, plays, testimony, poems, operas, fiction, nonfiction, and the list could go on and on.1 They wrote to challenge stereotypes and misrepresentations, to evangelize, to demand sovereignty, and for an innumerable range of additional reasons. While some wrote with delight, others did so with anger and perhaps even desperation. Until rather recently, the now-untenable storyline that would have Indigenous people exist only in the realm of the oral and Europeans and their descendants in the world of letters has overshadowed, if not silenced, Indigenous intellectual legacies in the written sphere. Across the globe, however, scholars and community members continue to uncover rich examples of Indigenous writing in national and local archives and in the once-stuck drawers of our great-grandfather's rickety old desk.2 Our only-just-begun task of the recovery of these materials gains traction as each new Indigenous voice presents itself; Indigenous writing can no longer be thought of as anomalous or "unexpected."3 What started as intermittent whispers from the archive has transformed into a steady and sometimes raucous conversation. In this essay, Nahuas (Mexica) of sixteenth-century colonial Mexico add their voices to those of Indigenous people around the world and across time who have picked up the pen. [End Page 69] During the first several decades after the Spanish conquest of Mexico-Tenochtitlan in 1521, Nahua nobles of the Central Valley of Mexico maintained their privileged positions in the social order by embracing Catholicism and swearing fealty to the Spanish monarchy.4 The nobles ensured social stability, facilitated tribute collection, and served as models to the rest of Indigenous society of the "proper" Christian attitudes and behaviors. By the mid-sixteenth century, however, Native elites were losing social, political, and economic power.5 Large portions of their landholdings had been redistributed among Spanish newcomers, and they would soon no longer enjoy complete exemption from tribute to the Crown. Add to this that severe demographic decline meant there were fewer commoners to pay tribute to the nobles in goods and labor. Together, these posed great challenges to the prospect of the noble class maintaining any semblance of their former wealth or privilege.6 To shape and respond to these developments, Nahua nobles wrote numerous letters and petitions, mostly in Spanish but also in Latin and Nahuatl, to the Spanish Crown.7 These texts contain, in varying combinations, six main requests: 1. recognition and/or restoration of their right to govern; 2. restitution of lands; 3. exemption from tribute; 4. pensions in perpetuity; 5. an award of a coat of arms; and 6. other privileges reserved for Spaniards, such as the right to ride on horseback and carry a sword or other weapons. The Crown would not have approved these requests indiscriminately; claims were more than likely met with skepticism, since, as historian José Carlos de la Puente Luna has pointed out, the Crown held a negative view of Native lords, whom the Spaniards found to be overly litigious and disturbingly adept at learning and applying the tricks of the Spanish courts.8 While the demands enumerated were mostly unsuccessful, the letters provide evidence of how Nahua elites used the written word in attempts to defend and improve their position in colonial society.9 In the pages that follow I identify productive "rememberings" and "forgettings...

Indigenous Rememberings and Forgettings: Sixteenth-Century Nahua Letters and Petitions to the Spanish Crown

Native American and Indigenous Studies · 2018-01-01 · 1 citations

Kelly McDonough, Indigenous Rememberings and Forgettings: Sixteenth-Century Nahua Letters and Petitions to the Spanish Crown, Native American and Indigenous Studies, Vol. 5, No. 1 (Spring 2018), pp. 69-99