Indigenous Labor Research Articles

Pro Pelle Cutem: Photographing Furs for the Hudson’s Bay Company’s 250th Anniversary Celebrations in Canada

In 1920, the Hudson’s Bay Company (HBC) celebrated its 250th anniversary through national and international events, as well as honours and benefits for its employees. The year 1920 was an important moment for the HBC, as it underwent institutional change to support the expansion of its department store operations through public relations and advertising strategies. Central to these strategies was an emphasis on the HBC’s central role in Canadian nation formation, and in particular its fur trade history. This article discusses the use of photography in the HBC’s 250th anniversary celebrations through an analysis of photographs of fur. I trace photographic representations of fur through three moments: in the process of extraction (as trapped animal or dead pelt); in the process of preparation (as Indigenous bush labour); and in the process of consumption (as fur goods in a department store window). While the fur trade was declining in significance at the time of the 250th anniversary celebrations, its symbolic status was essential to the Company’s burgeoning retail operations. In this article, I argue that the photograph of fur replaced the fur pelt as the central trade item of the HBC, and, further, that photography fused together nationalist and capitalist expansion in Canada.

“Making the Native a Useful Person”: Indigenous Labour in Twentieth-Century Australian Leprosaria

“Making the Native a Useful Person”: Indigenous Labour in Twentieth-Century Australian Leprosaria

Italian Colonialism through a Settler Colonial Studies Lens

When it comes to appraising Italy’s colonial experience one characteristic stands out: the Italian colonial traditions are defined probably more than any other by concerns about emigration. From the Risorgimento to the early Republican period, Italian colonialisms are primarily informed by concerns over an excess of labour. The colonial situation, however, is typically defined by a demand for labour—no wonder that Italian colonial traditions were and saw themselves as an outlier. In its imagination, this colonialism required no Indigenous labour (in practice, however, to make the colonial enterprise viable, it often did). The primary demand was for an outlet for Italian labour. In a sense, all Italian colonialisms are settler colonialisms.

Apontamentos sobre a economia da borracha e a exploração da mão de obra indígena em Rondônia

A virada do século XIX para o XX foi marcado pela expansão das atividades econômicas na região amazônica, causando profundos impactos socioespaciais. Impulsionado pelas demandadas internacionais da borracha ergueram-se barracões, portos e estradas. Sob a égide do discurso do progresso, milhares de trabalhadores foram cooptados para labutarem na extração do látex. Nos seringais as relações foram marcadas pela violência. Este ensaio apresenta apontamentos sobre a exploração da mão de obra indígena na formação dos seringais em Rondônia. Tratamos sobre as estratégias de cooptação do trabalhador, as condições de trabalho e o contato interétnico. Nosso objetivo foi de contribuir para o debate sobre a expansão das relações capitalistas na região amazônica e os impactos desse processo para as populações indígenas rondonienses.

Os oficiais índios e a mão de obra indígena livre na Amazônia colonial (1700-1798)

O presente artigo pretende entender o recrudescimento do oficialato indígena (principais, oficiais militares e oficiais das câmaras municipais) na capitania do Pará durante a segunda metade do século XVIII (1750-1798). Por meio da análise de documentação diversa, especialmente as cartas patentes dos oficiais e os requerimentos pela confirmação régia desses diplomas legais, pretendemos identificar os requisitos necessários à eleição de um oficial indígena. A partir dessas informações, verificaremos que a mediação entre as expectativas dos índios moradores das povoações pombalinas (antigos aldeamentos missionários) e as demandas coloniais (mão de obra indígena) eram elementos essenciais para a nomeação de um oficial. Em relação ao último aspecto, ao lado da mobilização de contingentes indígenas às guerras, o manejo da mão de obra indígena livre por parte das lideranças indígenas era item essencial para a sua nomeação como oficial.

The Economic Transformation of the Inca Heartland (Cuzco, Peru) in the Late Sixteenth Century

AbstractThis paper uses documents generated by the 1594–1595composiciones de tierrasin Cuzco, Peru, to discuss the economic transformation of the former heartland of the Inca Empire and the impact of Spanish administrative policies implemented in the early 1570s. The diverse social and environmental landscapes of rural areas lying to the west of Cuzco provide a range of local case studies that reveal how settlement and tribute policies of the viceroy Francisco de Toledo failed to produce sustainable colonial towns of Christian Indians. Detailed records of indigenous land repartition in the area show gender- and status-based patterns of individual allocations, as well as ecological differences in landholding between communities. The local records indicate the continuing importance of Inca-era community identities and local leadership for maintaining possession of community lands. By contrast, documents related to thecomposicionesamong private landowners reveal vast inequalities in land access, as well as the rapid growth in the demand for indigenous labor to produce important agrarian commodities. We argue that Spanish administrative policies accelerated the transformation of the means of production in rural Cuzco, creating peasants instead of Christian Indian subjects.

The Relación de Michoacán (1539–1541) and the Politics of Representation in Colonial Mexico

Rather than a dichotomous split between conqueror and conquered, interethnic relations in New Spain have increasingly been approached with nuance, recognizing the multiple identities and agendas at play. Afanador-Pujol’s meticulously researched book on the Relación de Michoacán (1539–41) sheds light on the careful crafting of history, both recent and ancient, on the part of two indigenous groups that made up the multiethnic Tarascan state: the migrant Uanacaze, and the isleños who originated on the islands of Lake Pátzcuaro. Commissioned by the Spanish viceroy, supervised by a Franciscan friar, and authored by indigenous nobles and artists, it is one of the earliest surviving manuscripts from colonial Mexico. The author reconstructs the history of the region as expressed in the manuscript with a particular eye for the political machinations of its authors.Using colonial archival documents, Afanador-Pujol teases through the motivations behind the various historical episodes chosen to illustrate the indigenous history of the region. Ultimately she finds that through both mimicry of Spanish forms and the sustained usage of pre-Columbian iconography, the Uanacaze present themselves as conquerors of the region with a Christian-like ethnic identity. Similarly, the indigenous governor Don Pedro Cuiniarangari, an isleño, presents himself as an intermediary between the Uanacaze and the Spanish colonial authorities. Despite their differing agendas, both ethnic groups had to present a united front in their efforts to combat the encroachment of power-hungry Spanish encomenderos (Spaniards granted indigenous labor in the form of an encomienda).Afanador-Pujol highlights the groups’ “selective and calculated effort to convey a particular meaning in the hopes of better communicating with their audience while conveying their knowledge of the pre-Colombian past.” The hybridity visible in the document was thus a conscious effort on the part of the indigenous nobles and artists to carefully craft their history and identity for a Spanish audience.The manuscript is full of emendations to the images as well as discrepancies between image and text, phenomena that Afanador-Pujol examines through visual analysis. The written content of the Relacíon de Michoacán, however, could have been highlighted more clearly by the author. The painted portions of the manuscript are cropped from the text and the reader is at times left wondering how the images discussed fit with the written text of the manuscript. The book would also have benefited from more in-depth discussion of the materiality of the manuscript and its history from creation to the present day. The author nevertheless succeeds in revealing the intricacies of the collaboration between the Spanish patrons and multiethnic native artists and narrators and is an excellent resource for specialists and a wider audience alike.

Drawn to Change: Graphic Histories of Working-Class Struggle ed. by Graphic History Collective

Reviewed by: Drawn to Change: Graphic Histories of Working-Class Struggle ed. by Graphic History Collective Candida Rifkind Graphic History Collective, ed., Drawn to Change: Graphic Histories of Working-Class Struggle (Toronto: Between the Lines 2016) Comics and the labour movement have a long and entwined history that could begin with 18th-century satiric and editorial cartoons. Even if we take the definition of comics to be multi-panel sequences rather than single panel images, there is still a century of material for contemporary cartoonists to cite. One branch of this tradition is strip cartoons that poke fun at those who have not yet come to class consciousness, such as the 1910s Industrial Workers of the World Mr. Block series by Ernest Riebe in The Industrial Worker. Another branch is orientation comics produced to teach new workers about their unions and workplace issues. A third important type of labour comic is devoted to commemorating important moments in labour history. No less educational than satiric or orientation comics, contemporary labour history comics tend to also have close aesthetic ties to the radical traditions in alternative, underground, and indie comics pioneered by Art Spiegelman and Robert Crumb in the 1960s. They often eschew the regular panel grids and realistic styles of mainstream comics for more fluid, disruptive layouts and expression-istic caricatures that echo the woodcut tradition of early-20th century proletarian art, pamphlets, and posters. This is the context for the nine short Canadian labour history comics collected in the Graphic History Collective's (ghc) anthology, Drawn to Change: Graphic Histories of Working-Class Struggle. As the editorial collective explain in the Introduction, in the early 2000s the ghc received Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada funding to create accessible materials to raise awareness of Canadian working-class history. The first collaborative work they published was May Day: A Graphic History of Protest (Toronto: Between the Lines, 2012). Following its success, the ghc solicited proposals from new cartoonists for short comics for website and potentially print publication. To their credit, the ghc applied for all available funding to provide the artists with at least an honorarium, and there was clearly an effort to include female cartoonists in a field traditionally dominated by men. Guided by Paul Buhle's and Howard Zinn's commitments to popular history as a politically transformative tool, the ghc seeks to reclaim comics as a working-class art form that can inspire hope. The final product is this volume of Canadian labour history comics that tell inspiring, although not always politically successful, stories of 20th-century working-class organizing that includes Indigenous, feminist, and immigrant worker struggles. Brief introductions by labour historians and organizers precede each of the comics, and Acknowledgements and Notes appear at the end of each chapter to cite sources and suggest further reading. Members of the ghc contributed to the writing of many of the chapters. [End Page 255] Various combinations of Sean Carleton, Julia Smith, and Robin Folvik co-wrote five of the nine comics, two are illustrated and written by a single artist, and two are based on the words of historical figures themselves. There is quite a lot of variation between these black-and-white comics. The first chapter, "Dreaming of What Might Be: The Knights of Labor in Canada, 1880–1900," uses Sam Bradd's sketchy cartooning style and plenty of typed text by Carleton, Smith, and Folvik to tell this story of a movement that, while flawed, is still inspiring. The same team collaborated on Chapter 6, "Madeleine Parent: A Life of Struggle and Solidarity." This comic reveals how Parent's lifelong commitment to labour and feminist issues charted some of the most important struggles of the 20th century. One of the most visually interesting and lesser known stories appears in Chapter 2, "Working on the Water, Fighting for the Land: Indigenous Labour on Burrard Inlet." Illustrator Tania Willard (Secwapemc Nation) and co-writers Folvik and Carleton focus on the 1910s and 1920s struggles of Squamish longshoremen and the organization of Indigenous workers on Vancouver's waterfront, ending with today's fight by the Coast Salish to protect the land and sea. This sequence is...

The Other Slavery: The Uncovered Story of Indian Enslavement in America By Andrés Reséndez

Reviewed by: The Other Slavery: The Uncovered Story of Indian Enslavement in America By Andrés Reséndez Kevin Waite (bio) The Other Slavery: The Uncovered Story of Indian Enslavement in America. By Andrés Reséndez. ( Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2016. Pp. 431. Cloth, $30.00; paper, $15.99.) For all of its unfathomable brutality, the history of black chattel slavery in the United States comes to a decisive conclusion: the emancipation of nearly 4 million African Americans by 1865. By contrast, the history of Indian enslavement in the Americas reaches no clearly defined close, as Andrés Reséndez argues in his ambitious new work on the subject. It ends [End Page 473] rather indeterminately in the late nineteenth century, not with a bang, but with a whimper. But not for lack of effort. First the Spanish Empire, then the Mexican government, and finally the United States all made concerted efforts to stamp out practices of Native American enslavement within their domains. Despite these well-intentioned campaigns, Indian slavery persisted in various guises for roughly four centuries and across much of the Americas. The other slavery's resilience, Reséndez argues, is largely attributable to its variability and adaptability. Native American slaves could be found in the goldfields of the Caribbean, the silver mines of Mexico, the nomadic societies of the Great Plains, the Mormon households of Utah, and numerous other settings. In most of these cases, Indian slavery had no formal, legal basis. And consequently, these practices were largely insulated from the sorts of legal pronouncements and legislative campaigns that liberated black slaves across the Western Hemisphere by the late nineteenth century. Indian slaves could be hard to spot, by both contemporary critics and later historians. A majority were women and children, often laboring individually or in small groups in sparsely populated frontier settings—sometimes literally behind closed doors. But this does not mean they were few in number. Reséndez estimates that, between Columbus's arrival in the Caribbean and the end of the nineteenth century, somewhere between 2.5 and 5 million Native Americans were forced into servitude of some sort. Partly because of this other slavery, the indigenous population of the Americas ultimately suffered a greater demographic decline than the African continent, despite the latter having lost roughly 12.5 million individuals to the transatlantic slave trade. As Reséndez acknowledges, there is no simple way to tell this story. Indian slavery was simply too variable, too long-lived, and too geographically expansive to be contained in a single, comprehensive volume. What he offers instead is a collection of snapshots that together capture the breadth and durability of Native American unfreedom. As Reséndez reminds us, indigenous American societies had practiced slavery long before the first Europeans landed on their shores. But with the arrival of white colonists, Indian slavery "became commodified, expanded in unexpected ways, and came to resemble the kinds of human trafficking that are recognizable to us today" (3). Reséndez begins with the first Europeans to arrive in the New World. Christopher Columbus himself effectively inaugurated the Middle Passage, he argues, when he shipped 550 Indian captives to the slave markets of the Mediterranean. Subsequent generations of colonists and conquistadors found further uses for Native American slaves. For centuries, the [End Page 474] silver mines of Mexico fed off the brutal exploitation of coerced indigenous labor. Of course, Indians were hardly passive victims, and they occasionally struck back, most notably in the Pueblo Revolt of 1680—what Reséndez provocatively dubs "the greatest insurrection against the other slavery" in the title of his sixth chapter. The perpetrators of the other slavery were not always European colonists, however. With the rise of powerful Indian tribes in what is now the American Southwest—notably the Comanche by the early eighteenth century—indigenous people themselves came to control much of the traffic in Native American slaves. The arrival of American settlers in the West by the early nineteenth century only accelerated this trade, Reséndez argues. Although this is as much a history of the Spanish Empire as of the United States, The Other Slavery should have a place on every serious Civil...

Transporting Concepts of ‘Native’ Land as Birthright between Fiji and Australia’s North

This article focuses on the experiences at two Methodist communities in the Pacific and their assertions of sovereignty from the 1920s to the 1960s. It explores the connections between two nodes of the Methodist Mission – Fiji and Australia’s Northern Territory – through one missionary, Kolinio Saukuru. While there were moments of great political mobilisation at each site, efforts to assert Indigenous land ownership and autonomy were hampered by persistent racialized views of the ‘native’ amongst missionaries and the colonial state. This article engages with questions emerging from the histories of colonial missions, particularly whether missions aligned with colonial administrations on strategies of governance. However, it also points to the need to think beyond national boundaries when studying mission histories. An examination of the Methodist Overseas Mission using a transnational framework illuminates a network of Indigenous people who worked to protect what some missionaries and anthropologists considered an Indigenous ‘birthright’: the land. This study therefore expands on the existing historiography of colonial missions, of Indigenous labour, and of land rights activism in Fiji and Australia’s north.

Key to the Indies: Port Towns in the Spanish Caribbean: 1493–1550

Seaborne commerce, communication, and transportation to a great extent defined and enabled the Spanish enterprise in the Caribbean from the time Europeans first arrived in the islands. With the exception of a minority of towns such as Concepción de la Vega in Española that were established in the interiors of the islands to provide access to gold mines and the indigenous labor to exploit them, the majority of new towns and cities were located on the coasts. Although Santo Domingo, San Juan, and eventually Havana emerged as the principal ports and administrative capitals of the large islands of the northern Caribbean in the first half of the sixteenth century, many secondary and small port towns played essential roles in the rapid development of systems of local and regional exchange, indigenous slave raiding, and transatlantic commerce that linked the islands to Seville, the Canaries and other islands of the Atlantic and the southern Caribbean. Allowing island residents to take advantage of waterborne transportation often via indigenous-built canoes, linking the islands to one another and the circum-Caribbean mainland, and serving as staging grounds for slave-raiding and other expeditions that radiated out from the islands, these towns helped to forge a diverse and dynamic region that was closely tied both to Spain and later to the developing societies of Spanish America.

New European tricksters: Polish jokes in the context of European Union labour migration

In the context of contemporary European labour migration, where the most publicised pattern of labour migration sees Eastern European migrants move West, the dominant scholarly interpretation of Polish jokes is not applicable for the analysis of much of the joking by or about the Poles. Humour scholars frequently categorise jokes about ethnic groups into stupid or canny categories, and the Poles have been the butt of stupidity (‘Polack’) jokes in Europe and the United States. Today, in the European Union, Polish stupidity stereotyping in humour is less active and the Polish immigrant is hard working and a threat to indigenous labour, yet joking does not depict this threat in a canny Pole. The article applies the liminal concept of the trickster – an ambiguous border crosser or traveller – to elaborate some of the characteristics of jokes told by and about Polish migrants in the EU, mainly in the British context. A more robust explanatory framework is thus offered than is currently available in humour studies.

Colonial andean silver, the global economy, and indigenous labour in Peru’s Huancavelica Mercury Mines of Death

Silver from Potosí and other colonial Spanish American mines made possible the rise of a global economy, based in significant ways on the trade by Europe of American silver for silks, spices and other Asian goods. Nowhere was the human cost of that commercial network higher, however, than at the Huancavelica mercury mines, where the colonial government forced indigenous workers to toil in conditions so poisonous and dangerous that some officials referred to the site as the “mine of death” and a “public slaughterhouse.” Officials justified the coercion on the grounds that because refiners used mercury to process their silver ores through amalgamation and that the empire and its economy depended on American silver. By 1650 improved ventilation in the Huancavelica mines and better refining techniques had lowered the workers’ death rates, but labour there still may have killed as many as a third of the male population.

Lazy Labor, Modernization, and Coloniality

This article examines two distinct yet overlapping cultures of mobility in turn-of-the-century Ecuador. On the one hand, there was a modernizing culture that sought to implement utopian modes of transportation between the Andes and the Amazon. On the other hand, there were indigenous porters and pilots, who had nonhegemonic ideas about mobility and labor. This article argues that (1) indigenous labor was based on the performance of colonial habits, which I refer to as coloniality; (2) within this framework of spatial practice, native bodily rhythms could be interpreted as successful tactics of everyday resistance; and (3) the conflict between Indians and non-Indians reveals a universal, modern tension between machine and humanlike mobilities.

Mapping the genomic mosaic of two 'Afro-Bolivians' from the isolated Yungas valleys.

BackgroundUnraveling the ancestry of ‘Afro-American’ communities is hampered by the complex demographic processes that took place during the Transatlantic Slave Trade (TAST) and the (post-)colonization periods. ‘Afro-Bolivians’ from the subtropical Yungas valleys constitute small and isolated communities that live surrounded by the predominant Native American community of Bolivia. By genotyping >580,000 SNPs in two ‘Afro-Bolivians’, and comparing these genomic profiles with data compiled from more than 57 African groups and other reference ancestral populations (n = 1,161 in total), we aimed to disentangle the complex admixture processes undergone by ‘Afro-Bolivians’.ResultsThe data indicate that these two genomes constitute a complex mosaic of ancestries that is approximately 80 % of recent African origin; the remaining ~20 % being European and Native American. West-Central Africa contributed most of the African ancestry to ‘Afro-Bolivians’, and this component is related to populations living along the Atlantic coast (i.e. Senegal, Ghana, Nigeria). Using tract length distribution of genomic segments attributable to distinct ancestries, we could date the time of admixture in about 400 years ago. This time coincides with the maximum importation of slaves to Bolivia to compensate the diminishing indigenous labor force needed for the development of the National Mint of Potosí.ConclusionsOverall, the data indicate that the genome of ‘Afro-Bolivians’ was shaped by a complex process of admixture occurring in America among individuals originating in different West-Central African populations; their genomic mosaics received additional contributions of Europeans and local Native Americans (e.g. Aymaras).Electronic supplementary materialThe online version of this article (doi:10.1186/s12864-016-2520-x) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.

Spatial Variability in the Distribution of Migrants and Indigenous Labour Force among Oil Companies in Ogba/Ndoni/Egbema Local Government Area of Rivers State

Labour migration is generally seen as a cross-border movement of people for the purpose of employment in another geographical area. It is a decision by individuals that impacts on the welfare of the household, the home community, and in the end the whole economy in various ways. The objective of this study was to determine the spatial variability in the distribution of labour migrants among oil companies in Ogba/Ndoni/Egbema Local Government Area of River State. There are a total of nine oil companies operating in the study area, out of which six were selected for study because of their accessibility to information. The locations of the oil companies are Obrikom (Agip), Obagi (Ponticelli Nig. Ltd), Ogbogu (Saipem), Idu (Agip), Obite (Total) and Omoku (Agip). Six hundred copies of questionnaire were distributed to the oil companies with each having one hundred copies. The content of the questionnaire bothers on demographic characteristics of the respondents, place of origin of migrants, employment structure and the distribution of migrants among the six oil companies. The study adopted both descriptive and inferential statistics for data analysis. Descriptive statistical method such as tables, charts, standard deviation, means frequencies and percentages were used whereas the inferential statistical tool i.e. the independent ‘t’ test was used to test for the variability in labour migration and the differences in population of indigenes and labour migrants in the oil companies. The result of the study generally indicated that 332 (68%) of the migrants come from Imo, Delta and Akwa Ibom State; 42% of the workforce in the oil companies are semi-skilled; 1415 of the total number of labour force of 2358 are migrants while 943 are indigenes. The result of the test statistics analysis indicated that the number of labour migrants in the study area was highly variable with the mean of 236 and the computed variance of 284.83. The standard deviation was 11.44. The result of the hypothesis, showed that the calculated value of 2.0 was greater than the table value of 1.96, which led to the rejection of the null hypothesis meaning that there is a significant difference between the number of indigenes and migrant workforce in the oil companies in Onelga. This study finally recommended for more employment of indigenes than migrants so as to avert certain conflicts by the indigenes arising from marginalization.

El cultivo del trigo en Nueva Galicia durante el siglo XVII

<span>Este artículo estudia los factores que determinaron el desarrollo y consolidación del cultivo del trigo en varias comarcas del reino de Nueva Galicia durante el siglo xvii tomando como referencia la última fundación de Guadalajara. Destaca lo vital que fue para esta industria la mano de obra indígena a través del sistema de repartimiento forzado y la vigencia de este hasta el siglo xviii en contraste con Nueva España donde fue suprimido desde 1633. La hipótesis aquí planteada es que la escasez de trigo y harina que constantemente sufrieron los habitantes de la ciudad de Guadalajara se debió a la confabulación de las autoridades del Cabildo con los comerciantes y productores para acapararlos, esconderlos y luego venderlos a precios elevados. La política que los regidores implementaron de no instalar una alhóndiga que concentrara y regulara la venta de esos productos confirma el anterior aserto.</span>

Whose business is it to employ Indigenous workers?

AbstractResearch about the demand for Indigenous labour and the relationship of Indigenous workers to their employers is relatively scarce. Even less is known about Indigenous businesses. Supply Nation defines an Indigenous business as those where Indigenous stakeholders hold majority equity, but some researchers have argued that this definition could be relaxed to include businesses in which Indigenous people hold only half the equity in the enterprise. This article uses data from the Industry Capability Network Queensland, which has collected basic business information on a large number of businesses operating in Queensland. The findings reveal that Indigenous businesses have substantially better outcomes for Indigenous employment than non-Indigenous businesses – a result that holds even when the definition of Indigenous business is relaxed. The article also documents how Indigenous employment is concentrated in larger businesses, in particular industry sectors. Non-Indigenous micro-businesses employ relatively few Indigenous workers, and future research can usefully explore why this is the case. To understand the issues involved, it will be necessary to collect multi-level data that link detailed information on employers and employees (including a substantial sample of Indigenous workers).

Industrial relations in New Caledonia: context and focus on the Kanak Indigenous people’s labour struggle in the background of the politics of reconciliation and decolonisation

This article examines industrial relations in New Caledonia with a focus on Indigenous labour. Caledonian industrial relations are absent from English speaking industrial relations literature. Therefore, the first objective of this article is to provide a general introduction to the broad industrial relations context including an overview of the political economy; key features of the labour market; labour market regulation and labour issues. The second objective is to provide historical and contemporary insights on the Kanak labour struggle and political (anti-colonial) activism. The research is informed by interviews in 2011 and 2014 and ongoing participant observation among Kanak political forces. Our argument is twofold. First, Caledonian industrial relations are politicised within the politics of reconciliation – the political platform for a so-called common destiny. Second, the politics of reconciliation have been deployed in response to the long-lasting indigenous struggle for sovereignty, with Kanak organised labour at the forefront of this struggle.

Economia cristã e religiosa política: o “Memorial sobre o governo temporal do colégio de São Paulo”, de Luigi Vincenzo Mamiani

The article aims to present an important documentary source that has received little attention of historiography and that reports on and analyses the situation of the Indians who worked at the Jesuit college of Sao Paulo: the “Memorial” written by Father Luigi Vincenzo Mamiani, S.J., during a visit to that college around 1700. After situating it in its particular (social, demographic and intellectual) context, we summarize and then analyse its content. We emphasize the use of time categories by Mamiani to characterize and intervene on the material structures of the Sao Paulo region and also a peculiar link between economy, morality and religion . The transcription of the source is attached at the end of this paper. Keywords: College of Sao Paulo, indigenous labour, religious politics.