Words & Worlds Turned Around offers eleven essays, a forward, an introduction, and a conclusion that examine the introduction of Christianity into indigenous Latin America. Although scholarship has long acknowledged the challenges encountered by friars and secular religious in their conversion efforts, this volume articulates and develops the concept of indigenous Christianities, fromNew Spain to the

The first encounters between Nahuas and Spaniards from 1519 to 1521 resulted in widespread deaths in the indigenous communities of central Mexico. Although the first recorded disease epidemic is often acknowledged as a factor in the loss of rule to the invaders, Moteuczoma receives much of the blame. Historians contend that Moteuczoma’s cowardice facilitated the defeat of his people. Instead, this

Africans in the Americas were first visually recorded by tlacuiloque, or indigenous artist-scribes, in mid-sixteenth-century Central Mexican manuscripts such as Diego Durán’s History, the Codex Telleriano-Remensis, and the Codex Azcatitlan. These figures, while often peripheral to the central narrative and never mentioned specifically by name, are nevertheless rendered as active agents in the shaping

I admireEthnohistory’smany outstanding articles on Indigenous peoples of North America. But the articles that have influenced me most, perhaps naturally, tend to concern my own field of specialization, Mesoamerica. Nevertheless, I am remindedwith eachmeeting and journal issue that one of the American Society for Ethnohistory’s most valuable contributions to the field is that it brings together peoplewho

The author is grateful to the British Academy and the Leverhulme Trust for their financial support.

This is the author accepted manuscript. The final version is available from Duke University Press via the DOI in this record.

We are grateful to the British Academy and the Leverhulme Trust (RPG-2012-699 and SG132847 2014-2015) for funding.

This article argues that the red-ocher paintings (pictographs) in Coast Salish Tsleil-Waututh territory in Indian Arm, British Columbia, were made around the time of contact in specific response to demographic collapse caused by smallpox. Tsleil-Waututh people selected fifteen distinctive geological features along the shoreline of Indian Arm for marking. It is suggested that these locations were highly

This paper is an investigation of the treatment of surrenderers in King Philip's War (1675-1676) in New England, particularly with regard to enslavement. Fear of slavery was a tangible, deep concern for most New England natives involved in the war. Threats of enslavement influenced the involvement of native individuals and groups, driving some into deeper "rebellion" and others to surrender. Each colony

In the nineteenth century the Penobscot and Passamaquoddy Indian nations preserved considerable mobility across their traditional homeland. This case study uses petitions and other primary sources to show that many Native families maintained connections to places that their ancestors once inhabited. While the Penobscot reservation consisted of the river islands above the head of tide, families continued

To use “magisterial” and “compendious” about this book may understate the case. Vermeulen’s monograph on the “genesis” of ethnography and ethnology will sit as a large and imposing bookend on any history of anthropology shelf for many years to come. It is hard to give any kind of effective summary of a work involving such a vast cast of intellectuals and such wide historical and geographical range

Histories of colonial Latin American mining have cemented the image of a scientifically backward society whose pursuit of easy wealth sacrificed the lives of indigenous and African miners in places like Potosí. By examining a midseventeenth-century mine dispute between an Andean woman and a Spanish man, this article suggests how legal archives can reveal indigenous women’s contributions to the history

Philippine indios served in the Spanish armies in the thousands in expeditions of conquest and defense across Spain’s Pacific possessions, often significantly outnumbering their Spanish counterparts. Based on detailed archival evidence presented for the first time, this article extends the previously limited nature of our understanding of indigenous soldiers in the Spanish Pacific, focusing in particular