Caroline Dodds Pennock, Ned Blackhawk, and Esteban Mira Caballos published three paradigm-shifting works in 2023 that flip deeply ingrained narratives of Indigenous Americans’ presence at home in the hemispheric Americas and abroad in Europe. Pennock's book introduces scholarly shifts towards a global Indigenous presence and reframes Europe On Savage Shores where Indigenous travellers arrived on their own accord in largely forgotten encounters; Blackhawk reimagines official United States history which often omits Indigenous peoples by making them its moving force in The Rediscovery of America; and Mira Caballos conversely breaks down stereotypical attitudes toward Indigenous travellers in Spain by evincing their transatlantic journeys to Iberia in El Descubrimiento de Europa (The Discovery of Europe).
All three works are mutually reinforcing in their mission to dismantle popular beliefs rooted in imaginative, racist, and antiquated narratives rather than historically verified reality. The theme of popular Indigenous tropes runs through the core of each of these works. Pennock teases out this throughline and questions Euro-American presumptions that Indigenous peoples were marginal to the construction of the Early Modern world. Beginning with the first Taíno captives brought to Europe by Columbus in 1492 and extending to the deaths of Inuk travellers to London in 1577, she exposes “the vast network of global connections they [Indigenous Americans] inhabited… [that] sowed the seeds of our cosmopolitan view of the modern world more than a century before the Mayflower pilgrims supposedly set foot on Plymouth Rock” (Pennock, 2). With a similar approach centred around Indigenous peoples’ mobility in the first days of contact with Spaniards through the end of the sixteenth century (1598), Mira Caballos likewise sets out to “change this stereotyped image [of Indigenous people] and try to demonstrate the extraordinary diversity of the Indigenous universe and the active interactions that they experienced with the European world” (Mira Caballos, 15). Blackhawk's monograph reflects upon the global presence of North American Indians, such as the Algonquian and Iroquois diasporas in London and North Africa (Blackhawk, 52, 78), but he intentionally centres his work on American soil to demonstrate the often-elided power that Indigenous peoples possessed in shaping US domestic and international legislation in situ (Blackhawk, 19). As with the other two works, his history runs from the earliest Spanish exploration and settlements in mainland North America in the sixteenth century (1513 onwards), which he brings to the contemporary period with the swearing in of the first Indigenous Assistant Secretary of the Interior for Indian Affairs, Ada Deer, in 1993 (Blackhawk, 19-20, 444). Blackhawk's approach escapes trivializing assumptions that Indians were merely passive agents at the mercy of Euro-American “greatness” to communicate how their negotiations with colonial administrations quite literally “birthed America” (Blackhawk, 6, 3).
Pennock's subtitle, How Indigenous Americans Discovered Europe, clearly demonstrates her fresh take on colonial encounters from Amerindian perspectives. Her work furthers groundbreaking turns to Europe's diversity initiated by Onyeka Nubia, Imitaz Habib, Olivette Otele, Johny Pitts, and David Olusoga, as well as by scholars from the United States, including Jodi Byrd and David Truer.Footnote 1 She highlights encounters and journeys by Taíno, Tupi, Guaraní, Mexica (Aztec), Potowami, and Inuk (Inuit) travellers, (amongst others) to Europe in her effort to deconstruct the “Doctrine of Discovery,” a “legal fiction” that upholds European white supremacy and negates any ounce of power or pre-eminence to Indigenous peoples across the entire Western hemisphere (Pennock, 8). While Pennock is a specialist in the Mexica, her work's strength lies in its novel hemispheric approach. This approach avoids lump-categorizing culturally diverse “Indios.” She respectfully nuances the cultural contexts and individual circumstances of various Amerindian travellers through several case studies aimed to reveal how we can perceive these subjects as “ambassadors” who were “part of European society from the earliest days of empire” (Pennock, 1). She supports this argument with many interdisciplinary forms of evidence, in addition to historical documents. Pennock employs literary sources, such as Nahuatl poetry and especially early modern artistic representations of Indigenous travellers, to ameliorate the intentional erasure and distortion of these subjects by the one-sided nature of European imperial archives (Pennock, 7).
Pennock's first chapter establishes the conditions of enslavement that brought about the first Indigenous diasporas to Europe and subsequently, occluded their agency. She reconsiders historical assumptions that these travellers never willingly departed their homelands through her analysis of prestige goods, including masks and a belt that Taíno captives presented to Columbus in 1492 from their leader, Guacanagarí, to broker diplomatic relations (Pennock, 38). Having demonstrated that some travellers may have been sent as envoys to explore these so-called European savages, her second chapter exemplifies ways that Indigenous translators were put into precarious positions of authority as “go-betweens.” She thus casts Christopher Columbus's Taíno interpreter, Diego Colón, as an intermediary bonded to the conquistador through a ritual form of tutelage known as guatiao (Pennock, 76). Likewise, two French-captured Stadaconan men, Taignoagny and Donacona, were baptized in a similar form of compadrazgo, or godparenthood, and endured several voyages between Canada and France in the late 1530s (Pennock, 80). These individuals give a concrete foundation to amend well-known and highly mythologized figures such as Pocahontas, Tisquantum (Squanto), and Malintzin, whose remembrance is distilled from over five hundred known travellers between the Americas and Europe in the century after Columbus's first encounter (Pennock, 86, 90, 135). Pennock avails herself of myths debunked by Matthew Restall and Camilla Townsend to further eliminate preconceptions of Indigenous figures that have been repeated in nationalistic discourse. The following chapters proceed with the established notion that Indigenous peoples were far from extraordinary sights or mythologized figures in sixteenth-century European cities. Chapter Three illustrates how effectively many Indigenous travellers acculturated to find their footing among the unfamiliar cultural terrain. For example, a Tupinambá ruler in present-day Brazil offered his daughter, Guaibimpará, in marriage to a marooned Portuguese sailor. Despite her assimilation into an elite Portuguese family, her life, like Pocahontas, became distorted and even confused with another person, effectively erasing her individuality (Pennock, 124). Guaibimpará became a national emblem that symbolized the “birth” of Brazil as a multicultural nation (Pennock, 126). Pennock reinscribes her lived identity and asks us to see her anew.
The remaining chapters focus on ways that Indigenous travellers changed European society to effectively show how they in part colonized Europe with their cultural traditions that were subsequently transformed into commodities. Chapter Four outlines how American products including cacao, cochineal, tobacco, and turkeys more than globalized European diets; Pennock argues that such cultural mainstays were presented to monarchs like Phillip II as a form of resistance and declaration of Indigenous political sovereignty (Pennock, 155, 159). Pennock's fifth chapter further drives the possibility of Indigenous diplomacy through its analysis of Inca nobles like Pedro de Henao who commissioned religious artworks, including statues of Christ, during the time they spent in Seville; their traces of Christian piety provide indelible material evidence of their longstanding presence in Europe and the endurance of their diplomatic missions (Pennock, 197). The last chapter confirms the extent of Indigenous presence in Europe with its focus on an artificial Tupi village composed of Tupinambá and Tabajara captives constructed outside the walls of Rouen to celebrate Henri II and Catherine de Medici's triumphal entrance into the city. (Pennock, 204). Pennock demonstrates that the village exceeded a mere theatrical performance for an elite spectacle; it reinforced the daily realities of exchange between the French and their South American colonies (Pennock, 206). Pennock is successful in reversing one-way notions of transatlantic trade. Her work thus aligns with similar approaches taken by scholars of global exchange, such as Benjamin Breen's The Age of Intoxication, Coll Thrush's Indigenous London, and many New Conquest histories, including Shawn Michael Austin's Colonial Kinship, all of which emphasize the bidirectional cultural change that Europeans and Indigenous peoples experienced in their mutual encounters.
Pennock's most compelling contribution entails visual analysis of portraits drawn of Inuk travellers to England by the well-known English ethnographer-artist John White. An Inuk woman named Arnaq boarded an English vessel on Baffin Island with her child after a conflict that resulted in her husband's death (Pennock, 228). She and a man named Kalicho became spectacles paraded into London where the artist captured their presence (Pennock, 230, 234). Pennock's book concludes with the tragic passing of Kalicho and Arnaq in 1577, the first known Indigenous Americans’ deaths recorded in English parish records. They were buried at the church of St. Stephen's, while Arnaq's daughter, Nutaaq, was put to rest at St. Olave's (Pennock, 236-7). Pennock thus opens a space for the collective memory of these Indigenous travellers to be revindicated in the European conscious—an unrealized goal that she claims as her scholarly contribution (Pennock, 9).
Like Pennock's mission for social justice, the subtitle of Ned Blackhawk's work takes on the onerous task of prioritizing Native Peoples and the Unmaking of U.S. History in the American psyche. Blackhawk asserts that American history is incomplete until it “reckon[s] with the fact that Indigenous peoples, African Americans, and millions of other non-white citizens have not enjoyed the self-evident truths of equality, life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness proclaimed at the nation's founding as inalienable rights belonging to all” (Blackhawk, 2). Yet, Blackhawk does not simply gesture to Indigenous peoples’ “erasure” or displacement by settler colonialism. He believes such outlooks must be exchanged for theories emphasizing encounter and the demonstration of Indigenous sovereignty. His approach amends lingering views that Native Peoples were unable to respond to external forces (Blackhawk, 5).
Blackhawk's work successfully undoes American history through twelve chapters organized evenly into two parts that re-analyse threshold moments of European “greatness” alongside overlooked instances of Indigenous power that conditioned the success of colonial and neocolonial forces (Blackhawk, 6). Blackhawk's story extends the American “Genesis” back to the Spanish settlements in Florida and New Mexico in the sixteenth century to show how the field's Anglocentrism has clouded the authority of Indigenous peoples and overlooked their “fundamentally different” relationship with the earliest colonial power in North America, the Spanish Empire (Blackhawk, 21). Blackhawk distances his work from those focused solely on settler colonialism and Indigenous dispossession. He considers these issues, but builds upon the efforts of Susan Sleeper-Smith, Juliana Barr, Jean M. O'Brien, Nancy Shoemaker, and Scott Manning Stevens to centre Native Americans in US history.Footnote 2 He does so while incorporating in a North American context the legacy of classic texts by James Lockhart and Charles Gibson which explain the bureaucracy and reward system of the Spanish Empire that enabled its subjects a greater degree of freedom than they were typically allotted in other imperial contexts (mainly British and French).Footnote 3 Blackhawk thus opens the door for a new view of Native Americans by exemplifying the incomplete nature of settler colonialism in the American Southwest that afforded groups such as the Pueblo an astounding degree of “linguistic, cultural, economic, and political autonomy” (Blackhawk, 44).
Following the lead of John H. Elliott, Blackhawk's next three chapters employ a comparative empire approach and situate the following stages of North American colonization within their respective imperial conditions that permitted Native peoples’ autonomy.Footnote 4 Like Pennock, Blackhawk reevaluates an array of published monographs and chronicles to upend American folk history. He shows that in the Northeast, Tisquantum (“Squanto”) was a “go-between” enslaved and taken to London who returned after four transatlantic journeys to broker a peace agreement between the colony of Plymouth and the neighbouring Wampanoag Confederacy now known as Thanksgiving (Blackhawk, 58-59, 61). In the early eighteenth century Hudson River Valley, the Iroquois Confederacy similarly traded with Dutch colonizers to acquire firearms and other technology that enabled them to become a formidable sovereign force in the Great Lakes region against both Native and French powers (Blackhawk, 87). Likewise, Indigenous groups’ alliances with French forces in the Seven Years’ War safeguarded lands in the American interior through their continued loyalties that geographically facilitated colonists’ severance from Britain in the American Revolution (Blackhawk, 140). In the aftermath of the Revolution, Blackhawk shows that the limits of the Articles of Confederation caused Native peoples to remain sovereign without the formation of a strong centralized government to subdue them (Blackhawk, 200, 204). Blackhawk concludes the first section by addressing the issue of Native Peoples’ total exemption from the US Constitution and the precarious stance that this placed them in regarding international policy (Blackhawk, 205).
The second section's remaining six chapters deal with the issue of Native sovereignty over Indigenous lands amidst the United States’ western expansion between 1819-1890, and beyond. Blackhawk shows the fall of European empires and the instillment of the 1823 Monroe Doctrine to be detrimental to Native sovereignty (Blackhawk, 285). His most noteworthy contribution is reconceiving the American Civil War (1861-1865) along an east-west rather than north-south axis (Blackhawk, 295). Blackhawk demonstrates that Indian lands acquired by the Louisiana Purchase (1803) and those ceded to the federal government like Florida (1819) and California (1848) maintained the careful balance between slave and non-slave states that set the conditions leading to the American Civil War (Blackhawk, 253, 268). Native Americans then were subjected to forced migration and acculturation through the formation of federal institutions such as boarding schools intended for their eradication (Blackhawk, 335). Still, amidst their violent displacement, Blackhawk states that “Indian land transfers and economic challenges…were recorded, translated into legal documents” that created an “archive of…a process established by Native and non-Native participants alike” (Blackhawk, 388). This legislation, namely the 1941 supreme court ruling in United States v. Santa Fe Pacific Railroad Co., set the precedent for Native American land rights to be modelled across the nation and even internationally following the Second World War (Blackhawk, 405). For example, after the American verdict, Canada's Supreme Court then overturned a seventy-five year precedent in its 1973 ruling that the Nisga'a of Northern British Columbia held the rights to their land (Blackhawk, 406). This legislation gave Native Americans an overlooked degree of power within a system designed for their suppression and displacement at a time when European conflicts overshadowed their landmark achievements (Blackhawk, 406). Blackhawk concludes with Native Americans’ direct and indirect part in shaping the Second World War through Navajo occupation of land rich in uranium, to the Red Power organization's occupation of Alcatraz and forceful removal by the United States Coast Guard that gained international attention (Blackhawk, 409, 436). In all cases, Blackhawk is adamant that even in the lack of independence, Indians could and did exercise their sovereignty over immemorial land through their legal battles (Blackhawk, 440).
Esteban Mira Caballos's work differs from Blackhawk's but is parallel to Pennock's by its centring of the presence of Indigenous and Mestizos in the Old World.Footnote 5 The book's title, The Discovery of Europe,Footnote 6 closely resembles the subtitle of Pennock's book, How Indigenous Americans Discovered Europe, and indeed it shares the same mission to clear away stereotypes of Native Americans in the Spanish popular conscious (Mira Caballos, 15). Mira Caballos notes this stereotype of Indigenous people is synonymous with bellicose, plumed savages, popularly visualized through Plains Indian feather headdresses which resemble the Lakota eagle staff that proudly adorns the jacket of Blackhawk's book (Mira Caballos, 15). However, Mira Caballos takes a methodologically distinct approach to break down this stereotype. He focuses exclusively on Indigenous travellers from Latin America to Iberia in the sixteenth century and largely avoids Pennock's frequent comparisons to contemporary injustices toward Indigenous cultural heritage (Pennock, 221-225).Footnote 7 In keeping with Iberian academia's grounding in ample archival evidence, his narrative rests upon the sheer volume of cases he located in eighteen archives in Spain. Conveniently charted in twenty-six appendices, these cases statistically prove the frequent interaction of Indigenous peoples and Castilians in the sixteenth century. His work counters popular perspectives that reverse the Black Legend and in so doing downplay the remarkable contributions of Indigenous peoples who managed to prosper within the Spanish colonial system.
Mira Caballos's first five chapters provide the necessary cultural context to understand the social standing of Indigenous peoples in Iberia and the unique legislation of the Spanish empire, previously emphasized by Blackhawk and Pennock, which enabled their voluntary transatlantic travels. Mira Caballos first establishes the prejudicial attitudes that tinted Castilians’ views of cultural “others” through Columbus's remarks about his first Taíno captives (Mira Caballos, 20). He nuances these prejudices with a detailed analysis of papal and royal legislation issued by the Catholic Monarchs, Ferdinand and Isabela, in the years leading up to the New Laws of 1542 that prohibited the enslavement of Indios apart from the circumstances of just war or suspected cannibalism (Mira Caballos, 23). Mira Caballos demonstrates through his astute analysis of licenses issued by Seville's House of Trade that Indigenous peoples were still enslaved, despite reasonings of Indigenous slavery's immorality by theologians like Bartolomé de las Casas (Mira Caballos, 41).
Mira Caballos critically interprets royal certificates to convincingly argue that even though the notaries who produced these documents claimed the Indigenous travellers were voluntary visitors, they simply reiterated the words of the enslavers who were disguising their engagement in the illicit practice (Mira Caballos, 28). His work thus raises a major theme throughout all three of these books regarding the filter of enslavement so fundamental to our understandings of early Indigenous travellers that authors such as Andrés Reséndez and Nancy Van Deusen have shown to be skewed by its theoretical prohibition (Pennock, 43; Blackhawk, 22; Mira Caballos, 21).Footnote 8 Pennock and Blackhawk employ indirect evidence to infer Indigenous agency within the circumstances of their travels (including diplomatic gifts like wampum and honorific portraits rendered abroad), (Pennock, 38; Blackhawk, 78). Both authors emphasize the concurrent enslavement of Indigenous travellers, but they mainly theorize how enslaved people self-governed or travelled to Europe voluntarily. For example, Pennock interprets voluntary action through petitions in which Nahuas declared their freedom once in Spain (Pennock, 45). The petitions demonstrate Mexicas opportunistically leveraged their legal position in society as Indio vassals, but not necessarily that they journeyed to Spain by their own volition. Mira Caballos rather suggests that the earliest Indigenous travellers purported to be free vassals in royal certificates did not voluntary come to Spain (Mira Caballos, 28), adding an interpretive layer to Spanish historical traditions. His stance parallels Pennock's objective to view Indigenous vassals as agents in their travels, even though the two differ on the technicalities of Indigenous enslavement. However, Mira Caballos does not share Blackhawk's emphasis of Indigenous sovereignty over the condition of enslavement in the Spanish empire. Like Pennock, Blackhawk frames his narrative around Indigenous (re-)discovery to directly challenge popular misperceptions of the Indigenous past in a Euro-American context. Mira Caballos distinctly uses an overload of archival proof to discretely challenge the myth of the vanishing “noble savage” disseminated throughout Spain via fictive artistic representations of Indigenous peoples (Mira Caballos, 235).
Mira Caballos's remaining five chapters each analyse different demographics of Indigenous travellers, including the first generation of Castilian and Indigenous “go-betweens” (visitantes entre dos mundos) and elites, and the subsequent generations of mestizos. Of the latter group, he focuses on individual case studies of unknown and several well-known figures such as Inca Garcilaso, Francisca Pizarro, and Don Melchor Inca. The chapters highlight the accumulation of litigants who took advantage of their lump-categorized, protected legal identities as Indios to demand rewards for their royal genealogies that were exempt from “contaminated” blood unlike other Spanish imperial subjects (Mira Caballos, 149). Mira Caballos agrees with previous insights by José Carlos de la Puente Luna to show that an undisclosed number of Indigenous travellers ventured to Spain at the royal treasury's expense. They came with such frequency that by 1653, Castilian officials attempted to round them up and force their hosts to finance their return voyages, though the royal treasury often had to foot the bill (Mira Caballos, 240, 111).Footnote 9 Mira Caballos interprets this attempted removal as an effort to expunge the remaining power that Mexica and Inca elites especially maintained with their incorporation into the Spanish monarchy (Mira Caballos, 156). Finally, Mira Caballos demonstrates how the singular Indio identity was codified through Europeans monarchs’ collection of Indigenous cultural heritage and artistic synthesis of cultural diversity into images of “noble savages” (Mira Caballos, 230-232).
Though the contributions of all three books outweigh any amount of criticism levied against them, some minor points should be raised. Of the three, Mira Caballos's title is the least connected to its content. His refrain from making the bold claims that Pennock drives regarding Indigenous discovery as communicated in his book's subtitle will leave the reader questioning why his title does not instead emphasize Indigenous presence in Spain. Pennock's title garners interest for its perceived exaggeration. Yet she provides adequate evidence—particularly in the case of Inuk captives’ voluntary suicide to escape the English, who they suspected were cannibals—to support that Europeans were feared savages by Indigenous travellers (Pennock, 232). Finally, Blackhawk's work lives up to its title, but ends abruptly, with no conclusion. The reader could interpret this as an intentional indication that Indigenous American history never concludes, and remains pervasive and ever relevant; however, without the author's confirmation, this is merely speculation. His book would further overhaul the popular imagination of Native Americans by drawing more overt connections to the reader's present moment.
Each of these books is critical for both the academic and public transformation of the history of Indigenous peoples in Northern Europe, Iberia, and the United States. They propose a necessary and well-founded revision of their respective historiographic traditions, all originating from models predicated upon the paradigm of European discovery which these authors successfully turn on its head. However, to do so, they will need a broad readership that extends far beyond the confines of academia, which all are accessibly written to accomplish. Their interventions in popular mindsets make them of great benefit to scholars working in Spanish, Portuguese, British, French, and Dutch imperial contexts across disciplines, as well as newcomers to these historical topics. They will be of particular interest to scholars in Indigenous studies with specializations in Native North America, Latin America, and the Caribbean, separate fields of study that each author successfully navigates despite their divergent historiographies and theoretical approaches. Ultimately, these works show the benefit of engaging across these fields and in various languages through hemispheric, comparative, and global frameworks that make the sheer diversity of Amerindians a ubiquitous, dynamic force of the Early Modern world.
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