Mapping the Geopolitics of Contact

Abstract

The power of the first chronicles that told the stories of exploration and colonization of the Americas is still intact. This chapter deals with the issue of how scholars and Indigenous peoples believe the Americas were populated, and since when. The main disagreement can be identified as the one that confronts, on the one hand, several Amerindian nations and, on the other, scholars who believe that Western disciplines can reveal the secrets of the distant past. The diversity of Indigenous peoples in what today is Latin America only grew with time. A word about the concept “civilization” when applied to an Indigenous culture: it is another form of saying that said culture resembles Western civilization in some way or another. It is necessary that as the Latin American Subaltern Studies Group suggested many years ago, scholars build a new kind of relationship with those who were considered an object of study.