Indigenous Archives and Knowledge

Abstract

The history of indigenous citizenship in California began to be obscured in 1849, when it was revoked in the California constitution. But the process of obscuring this past began in the Spanish documents and politics of conquest. To narrate this history of indigenous politics and colonial communities, native sources proved essential. In each chapter, analyzing native sources made it possible to develop important new interpretations. They gave insight into the missions as sites of indigenous memory, where native authorities had access to rectify conditions. Indian painters produced a visual world replete with indigenous ways of seeing. Chumash histories of the 1824 war suggested forms of power the Chumash community attributed to their leaders. Emancipation documents defined indigenous political visions in the early national era. They show indigenous citizens negotiating their rights under restricted conditions. Some of this is known because indigenous communities preserved their archives. Other written and visual records and objects became alienated from the communities that produced them and part of repositories of world civilization in European capitals. In recovering archives, histories, and forms of knowing, this history is interested in redressing wounds produced by the historical erasures undertaken during these years.