Indigenous Knowledges in European Frameworks: Mediations and Discordances

This essay explores how five different books from different times and places within early modern Europe converged in the ways that they wrestled, or failed to wrestle, Indigenous American cultural knowledges into European frameworks of understanding, be they religious, historical, natural, or otherwise. All five books were written by European colonizers, or those aligned with the project of colonization, recording and illustrating Indigenous American cultural practices and natural entities based on information generated and kept by Indigenous experts. When confronted with the knowledge overload perpetuated by imperial, religious, political, and social entanglements in the Americas, first as Spain constructed its empire in Central and South America and later as Britain and France joined in on the project of empire, Europeans sought ways to manage the influx of human beings, goods, and information into their established systems of knowledge. These processes, sometimes of assimilating knowledge into familiar forms and other times of the inability to do so, were necessarily bound up in colonial violence. This violence is exacerbated by the fact that these knowledges, that colonizers often did not fully understand and certainly did not respect, were recorded in the authoritative European medium of print. In looking at how colonial depictions of Indigenous plants, animals, and people – and therefore the knowledge imbued in them – represented that knowledge, this essay will explore different ways that epistemological violence served to further European colonization.

One of the ways that European colonial books made sense of Indigenous knowledges was by mediating them through long-established lenses of European knowledge production, or finding ways to fit those knowledges and customs into frames that Europeans could comprehend. In doing so, they oversimplified, erased, and often destroyed Indigenous lifeways.

This process is visible in the Rerum medicarum Novae Hispaniae thesaurus, or Nova plantarum, animalium et mineralium Mexicanorum historia, by Francisco Hernández. Published in 1651 but based on a project carried out in the 1570s, the Spanish king Philip II had sent Hernández to Mexico to catalog its flora and fauna, ultimately intending to use that knowledge to exploit Mesoamerican nature in service of the Spanish empire. Hernández’s sources were largely Indigenous Nahuatl speakers, and he commissioned them to paint images of plants and animals that became the basis for the book’s woodcuts. Indigenous knowledge and (to some extent) collaboration was fundamental to the existence of this text and the others in this essay, but it is, of course, not accurately or carefully presented.

Faced with new-to-him plants like chili, corn, and tomatoes, and animals like the axolotl and the jaguar, Hernández wrestled these unfamiliar natural entities into the historic European form of the encyclopedia. The encyclopedia, only one of many ways of making sense of the world, has a long history in Europe that naturalists like Hernández used to their own colonial ends. Hernández’s editor, the Italian man of science Nardo Antonio Recchi, organized the Nova Plantarum into ten books, the first eight on plants and the last two on animals and minerals, respectively. This organization was not done with any concern for how Nahuatl speakers structured their understandings of the natural world. It was clinically created back in Europe by someone who had never seen Mexico, trying fit Indigenous natural knowledge into a pre-existing European system. Even the descriptions themselves, rooted in and reliant on the expert natural knowledge of Indigenous peoples of New Spain, attempted to make sense of that nature on European terms. See the annotation on his entry on the Ytziperequa tree (Nova plantarum p. 98) for an example of this.

Similarly, the Englishman Thomas Harriot’s Briefe and True Report of the New Found Land of Virginia (1590), about the expedition to Roanoke in 1585-6, was written concurrently with and functions similarly to the Nova plantarum. Rather than being an encyclopedia of plants and animals, it is an encyclopedia of people and practices. Its entries look like Hernández’s: both have a title, an image, and a brief description of the plant, animal, person, or cultural practice in question.

The European natural encyclopedia removes objects from their contexts, aiming to get at something universal or more “true” about the natural world. Therefore, transposing that form onto human beings and their cultures, reducing the Indigenous people of what is now Virginia to pages in an encyclopedia, was in itself an act of erasure.

As was the case with the Nova Plantarum, there is little sign or acknowledgement of the Briefe and True Report’s Algonquian sources anywhere in the text. The similarities between this encyclopedia of humans and Hernández’s encyclopedia of nature arguably reduce the Indigenous communities of Virginia to the level of the inhuman. While some cultures held and continue to hold the natural and human world as one, European colonizers largely believed in a hierarchy of beings, with animals far below the many “races” of humans.

Like A Briefe and True Report, the 1721 book Les Moeurs des Sauvages Americains Comparées aux Moeurs des Premiers Temps describes North American Native (particularly Iroquois/Haudenosaunee) practices and customs in the framework of familiar European cultures. However, the author, Joseph-François Lafitau, had a slightly different goal, affecting how he gathered and presented his information. As a French Jesuit, he voyaged to the Americas to convert the Iroquois to Christianity. In order to prove that it was possible to convert them in the first place, though, he claimed that Indigenous American peoples lived in primitive, “inferior” societies, akin to European cultures that existed before the spread of Christianity. In this teleological argument, the superior, enlightened Europeans saved and civilized Indigenous peoples through conversion. To Lafitau, this argument rested on finding similarities between Indigenous and ancient European peoples. To do this, he amassed a huge amount of data about Native practices, customs, and beliefs. Moeurs des Sauvages is therefore filled with considerable detail about various Indigenous customs from across the Americas. Of course, he did not not present this information merely for the sake of disseminating information or accurately depicting Indigenous cultures. It is profoundly colored by Lafitau’s attempt to compare Indigenous peoples to Europeans, thus often Westernizing their beliefs and practices. He picked and chose which culture to draw from in order to support his argument. In the process, Lafitau homogenized his subjects, characterizing a vast array of cultures as merely “primitive” Europeans.

At other times, though, Indigenous ways of being and knowing were so opposed to Western epistemology that colonizers struggled to assimilate Indigenous knowledge into their own frameworks. This phenomenon has been studied in the context of Andean quipus – knotted strings used to record and communicate information. Compared to Mexican objects of memory, such as illustrated codices, quipus did not immediately become targets of early campaigns to destroy or assimilate Indigenous record-keeping systems because of the incommensurability between European knowledge and quipus. In other words, because Europeans could not understand the quipu knowledge-keeping system, the system itself escaped the erasure inflicted by the colonial mediations of the previous section, at least at first. In A Voyage to the South Sea (1717), the author Amédée François Frézier supports this argument. Frézier described quipus as “a Science and a Secret,” unable to identify any particular characteristics other than that they rely on a “Variety of Colours and Knitting.” He claimed that few people in communities that used quipus could “comprehend the Mystery” of the devices – which is unlikely, given their widespread usage. Rather, Frézier may have been projecting his own inability to understand quipus, unable to further explain their format to his audience.

Also in A Voyage to the South Sea is an attempt to represent Native South American music through Western music theory, transcribing it into sheet music. This is a fascinating example of the lengths to which Europeans went in order to assimilate Indigenous knowledge and practices into their own worldviews and cultural frameworks. Frézier, apparently, found the transcription an easy task, writing that the people sing “all of them together; but in so unartificial a Tone, that three Notes would suffice to express the Whole.” However, he could not record the words to their song, only its melody. This is because the song did not have one set of lyrics, as most Western songs do. Instead, the subject of the song was in constant flux, adapting to whatever was most relevant. Frézier wrote that they sing about “whatsoever occurs to their Fancy: Sometimes they recount the History of their Ancestors; sometimes they speak of their Family, and sometimes they say what they think fit of the Festival, and of the Occasion of celebrating it.” Clearly, there was an intricate cultural practice for deciding which lyrics to sing – it could not have been decided on a whim, as Frézier implies, if they were also singing in synchrony. However, Frézier did not include this information due to the incompatibility between Indigenous song and Western music theory.

Another instance of European inability to comprehend an Indigenous cultural object arises in La Storia Antica del Messico (1780) by Francisco Clavigero, printed in Italian, translated by Charles Cullen and published in English in 1787. Clavigero, a Jesuit born in Mexico to a creole mother and Spanish father, was a fluent speaker of both Nahuatl and Spanish, writing a retroactive history and ethnography of Mexico from before Columbus up to the death of the last Aztec emperor, Cuauhtémoc, in 1520. Though the book is more sympathetic to the Indigenous peoples of what is now Mexico than many other contemporary colonial productions, Clavigero, as a Jesuit, worked within European Catholic knowledge frameworks, and came up against Indigenous worldviews so divergent from Spanish ones that he struggled to understand them.

For one, Clavigero tried to describe the Aztec calendar. According to Clavigero, Indigenous Mexicans did not have a way to mark the end of one century from the start of another, though he was “persuaded, that they must have made use of some characters” to make this distinction. Perhaps most confusing to him, though, was that they had two different ways of tracking the months, a “religious” month and an “astronomical” month. The religious month was a solar month like the Gregorian one he knew. However, he acknowledged that he understood nothing about the astronomical month but that it was divided into “the period of the watching, and... that of the sleep of the moon,” an idea he did not explain further. In his efforts to make sense of Indigenous Mexican time-keeping, Clavigero recognized that it was a careful and intentional system. However, it was so incompatible with the European calendar he knew that he could not force it into a colonial mode of understanding. This is a form of loss as, in his inability to understand it, the program of Aztec time-keeping has not been preserved, nor was it allowed to continue side-by-side with the Spanish calendar. However, it is also a moment of resistance, perhaps unintentional on the part of Clavigero’s Aztec informants, in which the Spanish could not swallow an Indigenous epistemology the way they may have initially hoped to, and resigned themselves to describing it as best they could.

No record of Indigenous knowledge can exist entirely unaltered within European literature. However, the changes that such knowledge assimilation can inflict upon the presentation of Indigenous knowledge might be substantially different depending on the context. In this essay, we have explored an array of such circumstances. In each one, the type of information, the motivations of the colonists, and the final printed form varied dramatically. This breadth demonstrates the lengths to which Europeans went in order to exploit and assimilate Indigenous knowledge. Though we have divided this essay into two sections, the influence of colonization on representations of Indigenous knowledge cannot be divided so neatly. Every source is mediated, and every transaction of knowledge is at least somewhat discordant. However, in refusing to take European sources at face value and instead adjudicating them based on whether it was even possible for the authors to honestly represent Indigenous practices, we can arrive at a clearer picture of Indigenous American history.

Barrera-Osorio, Antonio. Experiencing Nature : The Spanish American Empire and the Early Scientific Revolution. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2006

Cummins, Tom. "Representation in the Sixteenth Century and the Colonial Image of the Inca." In Writing Without Words: Alternative Literacies in Mesoamerica and the Andes,. Edited by Elizabeth Hill Boone and Walter Mignolo, 188-219. Durham: Duke University Press, 1994.

Murphy, Trevor Morgan. "The Encyclopedia as Artifact." In Pliny the Elder's Natural History: The Empire in the Encyclopedia, 1-25. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004.

Ogilvie, Brian. "Visions of Ancient Natural History." In Worlds of Natural History. Edited by Helen Curry, Emma Spary, James Secord and Nick Jardine, 11-32. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018.

Edited and Adapted for Americana by Michal Loren.

This essay and the related annotations belong to the student-led project Illustrating Knowledge of the Americas in European Print, 1590–1781. Learn more at the project homepage: https://americana.jcblibrary.org/Illustrating_Knowledge/