Presidential Address

Rock, Paper, Scissors-Ethnohistory and an Indigenous Archive

Bibliographic Data

ID3335869
AuthorsBarbara E Mundy (0009-0000-1990-8316, Tulane University, corresponding author)
Year2025
Volume72
Issue3
Pages365-399
Publication date2025-07-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueEthnohistory (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0014-1801 • E-ISSN: 1527-5477
PublisherDuke University Press (PUBLISHER • US)
DOI10.1215/00141801-11768392
OpenAlexW4414318946
LanguageEN
References cited26

The archive, broadly construed, plays a central role in the construction of histories of an Indigenous past. Offering a reflection on its limits and omissions, this essay uses two case studies. One centers on In'zhúje'waxóbe, a massive rock sacred to the Kanza and other peoples of the present-day Kansas region. The other considers a Nahuatl book of sermons written on Native paper whose creation was overseen by the Franciscan Bernardino de Sahagún around 1564 in present-day Mexico City. I argue that these objects are essential to understand an Indigenous past, yet each resist typical archiving processes that would render them into the raw material of history. With both, paradoxically, the processes of inscription, that is, alphabetic writing, that have allowed their archival presence have also proved to be a technology of Indigenous effacement. While the sections "Rock" and "Paper" treat objects that are rocks and paper, I use "Scissors" metaphorically, to gather together the kind of procedures that excise or exclude things from an archive, and to suggest the perdurance of Indigenous practices that might serve to expand the archive and lead to more capacious histories

Frontier · Indigenous · Nahuatl · Native american · Presidential system · Variety (cybernetics) · Anthropological Studies and Insights · Indigenous Health, Education, and Rights · Latin American history and culture

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