Looking for Indigenous Agency in the Archives

This week, I presented my MA portfolio for the Public History Program at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. The event, which has taken the place of the Department’s old comprehensive exams, was a great chance to talk about the work I’ve done in the program, including this blog, over the last two and a half years. It was also an opportunity to articulate how Kathryn Burns’ book, Into the Archives: Writing and Power in Colonial Peru has helped me think about some of my other work as a graduate student on nineteenth-century slave revolts.

As I noted in my presentation: 

Reading Into the Archive has provided me an example of scholarship which thinks really explicitly about the historical forces that influenced the creation of an archive. What's more, Burns, like scholar Ann Stoler before her, offers a model for what historians can do, once they accept the contingency and the constructed-ness of the archive. Burns' work has helped me to articulate a bit more clearly what I think is at the heart of the debate over Denmark Vesey's rebellion. Notaries, as Burns' title suggests, exercised tremendous power over the representations of colonial life that they produced. The white authorities who ultimately sentenced Denmark Vesey to death exercised similar power of representation as they prepared the official version of the trial documents. What some of the most interesting work in the debate over Vesey's rebellion offers is a reading of the trial documents that tries to uncover both the limits of the possible for black witnesses who testified, and expose the interests of white authorities who crafted the narrative of Vesey's rebellion.

Burns also addresses a question I’d half-formulated while reading her book and other works on colonial Latin America: if, as the historiography, seems to imply, the Indians were so litigious, why don’t we have more works of scholarship that get at indigenous agency through those legal documents? Burns’ final chapter answers this question on a couple of levels. First and foremost, there’s the scarcity of records that document of indigenous legal proceedings. Many of these records were not incorporated into the centralized, official archives that come down to us today, and the Spanish explicitly worked to limit the power of indigenous legal authorities by forbidding them from writing.

Burns also poses a methodological challenge to uncovering indigenous agency in legal documents, which gave me pause, and prompted me to think about my own interest in ferreting out an understanding of indigenous perspectives on the Andean colonial world. She writes: “If they [indigenous litigants] might ‘easily obtain’ effective legal writing from others, why risk putting it in their own words? We may deeply desire to see their unique, individual agency, but what they wanted was justice” (135).  I particularly like Burns here, because of the way she needles her reader to consider why we are so interested in that “unique, individual agency” of indigenous people. She helps us remember that the sources don’t necessarily fit our agenda, however much we may believe that our agenda as scholars is, if not identical, then at least parallel, to our indigenous subjects.

 

Here, Burns reminds me of some of Walter Johnson’s work, and the way he problematizes the notion of “restoring” agency to slaves in American history. Scholarship that restored the agency of slaves was politically meaningful in the 1960s, when the new social history of American slavery emerged, but has since become something of an empty trope. While Burns doesn’t make this point explicitly, I think she points to some of the limitations of looking too narrowly for indigenous agency, or focusing too hard on the justice we imagine we are doing when celebrate its appearance in the archives.