Decolonizing Native Histories

Decolonizing Native Histories is an interdisciplinary collection that grapples with the racial and ethnic politics of knowledge production and indigenous activism in the Americas. It analyzes the relationship of language to power and empowerment, and advocates for collaborations between community members, scholars, and activists that prioritize the rights of Native peoples to decide how their knowledge is used. The contributors—academics and activists, indigenous and nonindigenous, from disciplines including history, anthropology, linguistics, and political science—explore the challenges of decolonization. These wide-ranging case studies consider how language, the law, and the archive have historically served as instruments of colonialism and how they can be creatively transformed in constructing autonomy. The collection highlights points of commonality and solidarity across geographical, cultural, and linguistic boundaries and also reflects deep distinctions between North and South. Decolonizing Native Histories looks at Native histories and narratives in an internationally comparative context, with the hope that international collaboration and understanding of local histories will foster new possibilities for indigenous mobilization and an increasingly decolonized future.

"Decolonizing Native Histories is a stunning collection of essays from places and authors not often seen in each others' company: they range from Bolivia to Rapa Nui, from Louisiana to Hawai'i. To read of the predicaments and possibilities of a Quechua-language newspaper, racism in a Native American community, and indigenous political resurgence in Rapa Nui in the same volume presents a rare opportunity to compare strategies and gain inspiration, and to transcend seemingly impassable geographic and linguistic differences, to achieve commonality in treasuring our indigenous languages, cultures, and lands. Invaluable for anyone interested in global indigenous histories and politics."—Noenoe K. Silva, author of Aloha Betrayed: Native Hawaiian Resistance to American Colonialism, “This fine volume highlights ways of writing indigenous history beyond the usual frameworks supplied by academia….This volume urges us out of our safe spaces to push the boundaries of what indigenous history can mean.", “[S]cholars and students will benefit immensely from these explorations of the ways Indigenous people have transformed their relationship to the past, the state, and their interlocutors.”, “Overall, this ambitiously edited volume is able to deliver thoughtful essays, crossing geographic and political boundaries, which encourage the reader to examine Indigenous histories and narratives through the multi-faceted lens of decolonization in an international forum.” , “This is a high-quality contribution for understanding the impacts of colonial empires on the native peoples of the Americas and related island areas in the Pacific….The book is recommended for academic courses and professionals with common research interests.”

Florencia E. Mallon is the Julieta Kirkwood Professor of History and Latin American Studies and Chair of the History Department at the University of Wisconsin. She is the author of numerous books, including Courage Tastes of Blood: The Mapuche Indigenous Community of Nicolás Ailío and the Chilean State, 1906–2000 and the editor and translator of Rosa Isolde Reuque Paillalef’s When a Flower is Reborn: The Life and Times of a Mapuche Feminist, both published by Duke University Press.