Indigenous Language and Colonial Representation

Colonial representations of Indigenous language are constructions subject to power relations, being that they are recorded / transliterated / altered through conflicting webs of the motivations of their authors / publishers / audiences. These representations are presented in colonial books on the Americas, written for European audiences, and preserved for a variety of reasons with a variety of effects. Words recorded by Europeans in Indigenous languages often reflect colonial desires for legibility and control of the Americas and its peoples. In analyzing the histories of these processes, two colonial texts were mainly consulted, each from different time periods and recording data on different regions. Despite disparity in time and location, these texts nevertheless reveal important information about settler colonial logics and discourses.

In 1584, Sir Walter Raleigh traveled to the land that is now known as Virginia. There, he encountered the Indigenous peoples of the region, as well as the local flora and fauna. In the hopes of establishing a colony, he coerced two Algonquian men — Manteo and Wanchese — to return to England with him. During the winter of 1584-85, these men taught English astronomer, mathematician, ethnographer and translator Thomas Harriot the basics of Algonquian language. In the summer of 1585, Harriot returned to Virginia with Raleigh in the hopes of exploring, mapping, and cataloging the surrounding land, people, and wildlife. Harriot used a multitude of uncited Indigenous informants to perform this task, and the information he produced was published in A Briefe and True Report on The New Found Land of Virginia (Frankfurt am Main, 1590). John White, an artist who traveled with Harriot and the eventual governor of the Roanoke colony, mapped the territory and produced watercolor paintings that were later translated into woodblock engravings to lavishly decorate the publication. This publication, composed by the de Bry printhouse, mainly served to catalog the natural resources of Virginia in hopes of enticing settlers and investment to Raleigh’s colony on Roanoke island. As the first book published by English colonists who actually traveled to the Americas, it was heavily influential on future colonization efforts and discourse.

Almost two hundred years after Raleigh and Harriot’s expedition, the Historia antica del Messico, another book containing information about the Americas, was published in Cesena, Italy in 1780. This book’s author — Jesuit friar Francisco Clavigero — wrote about the landscape and peoples of Anahuac, a region in which the text identifies groups of Indigenous peoples and their culture along with various Nahuatl words. Clavigero wrote the manuscript for this text prior to the Jesuit expulsion from the Americas in 1767, after which he settled in Italy. There, Clavigero translated the book into Italian, and commissioned artists to produce some of the images he would be unable to lift from older colonial books (most notably the Nova plantarum, 1651) to accompany the text. Seven years after the Italian publication, the Third Earl of Bute requested an English translation be made. The book’s contents described the geography, flora/fauna, peoples, military history, political lineages, colonization, religion, and culture of Anahuac, primarily for the purposes of converting the Mixteca/Nahua peoples to Christianity, encouraging settlement, and displaying Clavigero’s own sentimentality towards the region. The book was an early example of a “modern” colonial history, and was influential in Thomas Jeffersons’ early theorizations of archaeological practice (Winterer, 96).

The misidentifications of various animals are exemplary of how colonial texts that aimed to catalog Indigenous languages often misrepresented or were unable to wholly comprehend the full meanings of Indigenous terms. These misidentifications make clear that transliteration — the changing of sounds into alphabetic script made for other languages — and author interpretation are not only insufficient for capturing the depths of Indigenous languages, but are actively used for colonial aims.

The construction of Indigenous languages in colonial books is influenced by many conflicting and interrelating motivations across the spectrum of production and reception, from authors and publishers to collectors and readers. Many words that were preserved in text describe marketable items and physical places in the American colonies because the authors hoped to be able to excite their European audience into settlement and trade. These are frequent descriptions of flora and fauna, from whom pelts, hides, and poultices could be made and sold, or place-names and geography that motivated cadastral distribution. The latter process is completed via cartography. In turn, terminology that does not directly reflect European interests or conceptions of value is, more often than not, notably absent. For example, in Mexico, Nahuatl vocabulary manuals were often employed by the Spanish to navigate through daily interactions with the Nahua peoples. The very existence of these manuals speaks to the responsibility of Nahuas to accommodate Spanish and later French speakers, while the colonists only required a base knowledge of Nahuatl phrases that may be useful to them.

Other words described cultural or religious aspects of Indigenous life, frequently preserved because the author wished to construct a teleological narrative regarding the abandonment of Indigenous worldviews in favor of “superior” Euro-colonial ones. This motivation is also responsible for comparisons between Indigenous ideas and practices, identified by their original names, with artifacts of colonial antiquity.

The institutions that preserve these texts also play an important role in their interpretation, both implicitly and explicitly. Digital projects create new challenges and opportunities for Indigenous communities and colonial archives to work together and separately to approach these texts, which were created and collected in a culture of violence, in new ways.

Harriot’s Text, A Briefe and True Report, primarily served as a catalog of natural resources native to Virginia. He wrote about produce of all kinds, emphasizing the bounty of food present and the taste, encouraging settlers to come to Virginia by painting it as a desirable place to live and make a profit. Harriot clearly used Indigenous informants to locate these marketable plants, as each entry begins with the Algonquian name for a plant transliterated into English, followed by comparisons to similar European plants, and, finally, a description of its appearance and taste. These descriptions served to familiarize European readers with the ecological landscape, enticing settlement and investment. Embracing a catalog style in this fashion, A Briefe and True Report emphasizes the economic opportunities for transnational trade that Harriot hypothesizes could arise from further investment.

Harriot places the people and landscape of Virginia squarely within the settler colonial imaginary as a conquerable space. While describing Algonquin culture and political structure, he estimates town size, political leader's hold, and potential military size; in doing so, Harriot implies that the Algonquin were an easily conquerable people should military action be necessary, providing valuable information for a potential English invasion of Virginia.

Clavigero's text also includes Nahuatl words that serve to engender commercial desires. Identifying a variety of medicinal plants and their uses, as well as depicting many different types of animals, Clavigero’s employment of select Nahuatl words serves a similar purpose to Harriots’ recordings. Additionally, many of the words were preserved because of perceived danger. Exemplary of this is the term used for sharks in English, Spanish, and Portuguese as they likely are derived from Nahuatl and Yucatec Maya; because the predators bore association with indigeneity and thus new resources, drawing from the Indigenous terms is likely.

The adoption of many of these words into colonial languages reveals the construction of a linguistic hierarchy designed to present Euro-colonial grammar and syntactical schema as superior to singular terms and phrases in Indigenous languages. Further, this linguistic hierarchy assumes that the former systems will be able to fully and accurately capture the breadth of the latters’ meaning. The co-opting of native terms also meant that their “new” meanings assigned by the colonial authority would be the definition most known to those under colonial “sovereignty.”

Colonial maps also use Indigenous languages to support the rhetoric of empire and extractive economies. Presently, many scholars conduct analysis of the intrinsic connections between mapping and settler colonialism, detailing how cartography incites the imaginary of the settler audience and carves up colonized land in the geometric and bureaucratic for control, sale, and exploitation.

Map making in early colonial documents, such as those found in these texts, required the active participation of Indigenous communities. These early maps preserve the Indigenous place-names (see page 8 of Historia Antigua de Megico), but are soon replaced by cadastral maps that break up the landscape into parcels for sale, and represent colonial dominance through renaming natural and man-made features. J.B. Harley and Jeff Oliver have both documented different aspects of these processes in colonial North America.

The usage of Indigenous language in the processes of map making is thus an exercise in appropriation — taken to represent the landscape of the “past” before it is teleologically seized and controlled by new names, peoples, and cultures.

The second image below, though not tied directly to the texts discussed, is nonetheless an interesting connection to Brown University’s own colonial history. The Land Acknowledgment Working Group at Brown was charged with examining the historical context of the University’s relationship with Native and Indigenous peoples and lands (https://landacknowledgment.brown.edu/background/working-group). The group found that the original plots of land on which Brown University sits were purchased in 1770 and 1771 for a total of $750 from White colonists. These land deeds have a long record of ownership and sale between colonists, but no information about how they were acquired from Indigenous stakeholders. Through further exploration of how Roger Williams acquired the land that became Rhode Island from Indigenous peoples, we observe a similar pattern as described above: Indigenous participation in mapping, then replacement of Indigenous place names through cadastral maps, then sale of land parcels to individual owners. The image below showcases a step of this practice: a cadastral map of this region complete with colonial place names. Through this process, Brown University now owns a larger portion of Providence’s land. This example showcases how important it is that we remain cognizant of the violent colonial histories that surround us, but are often obscured in the archival record.

Clavigero, a Jesuit priest, writes an entire chapter on Aztec religious practices and worldviews in order to convert the Indigenous populations to Christianity, and to pathologize Indigenous religious practices for their European audience. This was partially done by drawing a link between the Mixteca peoples and antiquarian Greco-Roman social formation and religion to locate indigeneity in the “past” and colonialism and the Catholicism it brought to the region in the “modern present.”

He writes “in the character of the Mexicans... [idolatry] is easy to be corrected by a proper education” (Clavigero, 81-82). In this, Clavigero represents Mexica cosmology as a vestige of the primitive, pagan past that is easily rectified through Christian “civilizing” instruction. This instruction in Christian truth is evidenced in the Mexican Catholic Church’s attempts to move from using Nahuatl religious terminology. The continued use of Indigenous Mexican languages in religious connotations was, by clerics, viewed as of idolatry and paganism living on in the Indigenous population and to be looked down upon by the mainstream Church. Clavigero’s text gives various descriptions and depictions of “priests” and sacrificial devices (e.g. the sacrificial knife of “iztli” on page 121, meaning obsidian) yet makes no mention of the Nahuatl terms for rituals. Instead, the text presents the “barbarous” nature of the religious practitioners to emphasize the lack of civility paganism elicited in the Church.

Tribe names, which were preserved, represented not only diverse populations, but also possible divisions within Mixteca religious understandings. Clavigero’s description of the “inhuman sacrifice of a Colhuan girl” is one such example of this, as the elevation of the Colhuan girl by the community of Tenochtitlan is for the Colhuan people a vicious, barbaric deed (Clavigero, 124-125).

By limiting the use of Nahuatl terms solely to what describes the barbarity of Nahua religious ritual versus its values or cosmology, Indigenous religion, language, and by extension people are thereby placed into an implicit hierarchy that places them beneath existing or historical European forms of religion and social formation. Similarly, the attempted framing of Mixteca religion as existing within colonial Christianity, such as when Clavigero suggests that Quetzalcoatl is simply a misunderstanding of Saint Thomas, implies that the religious worldview of the Nahua people is collapsible into hegemonic colonial schema (Clavigero, 250).

See page 10 of 146 in Digital JCB Copy of a Briefe and True Report of the New Found Land of Virginia for more on the religious connotations of Harriot’s publication.

The politics of language preservation have implications not only for how Indigenous words were recorded, but also for where they appear in print. There is much research on the impact of colonial archives’ practices of collection — behaviors rooted in the logic of elimination. A fundamental mechanism of colonization involves the separation of Indigenous children from their families to rear them outside their communities and culture. This practice is exemplified by the Residential Schools prevalent in Canada and the United States, where Indigenous children were deliberately placed to “acculturate” them to the colonizer’s society and disrupt their ties to their own communities; similar methods were employed within colonial Mexico. Nahua children were frequently separated from their Nahuatl speaking parents and taken in by Spanish, and later French, families to serve as servant boys in exchange for education. In the context of mass language dispossession as a result of institutional violence such as at boarding schools for Indigenous children, these books, the words they choose to preserve over others, and their collecting histories, actively perpetuate colonial ideology.

Mapping is also implicated in this process of dispossession, as many original place-names were concealed through institutional means. The maps that contain them are in archives like the John Carter Brown Library, and making them open-access through platforms like Americana can draw attention to these discursive elements of settler colonialism.

As can be seen through A Brief and True Report on the New-Found Land of Virginia and Historia antica del Messico, representations of Indigenous language within colonial texts are subject to power relations in a multitude of different ways, and are recorded / transliterated / altered through the conflicting webs of motivations of their authors / publishers / audiences.

The ways in which economies of settler colonialism influence linguistic information in these books can be seen in what is recorded. The flora, fauna, and place names in Indigenous languages are kept because they allow settler colonial structures to facilitate exploitation of natural resources while rendering the colonized land as foreign and conquerable. The cartographic practices that go hand-in-hand with collecting Indigenous place-names are deeply integrated into land appropriation and commercialization.

Religious conversion is another motivation, found more explicitly in the latter text, for preserving words, titles, rituals, and ethnoreligious group names. Conversion of the Indigenous population was one facet of this force, and information about practices, knowledge, and peoples as well as regional variation was invaluable in those efforts. The collecting and preservation of such books within settler colonial structures adds yet another dimension to these histories. Along with linguistic knowledge, colonial academic authority claims “enunciatory authority” as protectors of knowledge.

Though words may be missing from these accounts, the texts discussed above nevertheless reveal important information about settler colonial logics and discourses through what they do and do not give terminology for.

Harley, J. “New England Cartography and Native Americans.” In American Beginnings: Exploration, Culture, and Cartography in Land of Norumbega (1994).

Harriot, Thomas. A Briefe and True Report of the New Found Land of Virginia. England, Theodor DeBry, 1590.

Horn, James. A Land As God Made It: Jamestown and the Birth of America. Annotated, Basic Books, 2006.

Kusukawa, Sachiko. “Techniques and Craftsmen.” Picturing the Book of Nature: Image, Text, and Argument in Sixteenth-Century Human Anatomy and Medical Botany, 1st ed., University of Chicago Press, 2012, pp. 29–47.

Oliver, Jeff. “On Mapping and its Afterlife: Unfolding Landscapes in Northwestern North America.” World Archaeology . 43, no. 1 (Sep 2021).

Sistrom, Michael. “Summary of A Briefe and True Report of the New Found Land of Virginia: Of the Commodities and of the Nature and Manners of the Naturall Inhabitants : Discouered Bÿ the English Colonÿ There Seated by Sir Richard Greinuile Knight In the Ÿeere 1585 : Which Remained Vnder the Gouerenment of Twelue Monethes, At the Speciall Charge and Direction of the Honourable Sir Walter Raleigh Knight Lord Warden of the Stanneries Who Therein Hath Beene Fauoured and Authorised Bÿ Her Maiestie and Her Letters Patents / This Fore Booke Is Made in English by Thomas Hariot Seruant to the Aboue-Named Sir Walter, a Member of the Colonÿ, and There Imploÿed in Discouering.” Documenting the American South, docsouth.unc.edu/nc/hariot/summary.html. Accessed 25 Feb. 2022.

van Groesen, Michiel. “The De Bry Collection of Voyages (1590-1634): Early America reconsidered.” Journal of Early Modern History 12.1 (2008): 1-24. https://doi.org/10.1163/138537808X297135 Web.

Winterer, Caroline. American Enlightenments.

Zacek, Natalie. “A Briefe and True Report of the New Found Land of Virginia (1588) – Encyclopedia Virginia.” Encyclopedia Virginia, encyclopediavirginia.org/entries/a-briefe-and-true-report-of-the-new-found-land-of-virginia-1588. Accessed 25 Feb. 2022.

Edited and Adapted for Americana by Rachel Moss.

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/