In her article in this issue, Miranda Johnson casts contemporary Aotearoa (New Zealand) history as the search for “a past future that can serve a proximate now”: a utopian vision of a redeemable past that not only guides the imagination of some Indigenous and non-Indigenous historians but also is central to the objectives of certain government institutions. At first glance, as Johnson notes, this appears to run counter to accepted archival practice. It has, however, been baked into funding priorities in Aotearoa, thus transforming the landscape of academic research.Johnson is one of four authors of this Ethnohistory dossier, each approaching Indigenous legal history from a different standpoint and from diverse points on the globe, but coinciding in that they advocate for a revitalization of historical research practices while at the same time acknowledging impediments to change how we study Indigenous history. Gloria Lopera-Mesa voices the dilemma of reconciling her reading of the archival record as an academic scholar with her earlier collaborative work as a lawyer who used historical documents to defend the land rights of a Colombian Indigenous community; Lopera-Mesa points to the intellectual benefits of the tensions that surround the work of scholars who are simultaneously advocates. Bonny Ibhawoh’s reflections touch on the various ways in which customary law can inform approaches to African human rights histories that are attentive to cultural specificity; she urges historians to use participatory methodologies in addition to more conventional approaches. Complicating Ibhawoh’s recommendations, Mexicanist Yanna Yannakakis, intent on discovering ways to read the historiography of Mesoamerican customary law through contemporary Indigenous understandings of custom, reminds her readers that customary law has always served divergent interests in different settings in Latin America, concluding that there is no single recipe for how a historian can collaborate with an Indigenous community.I read the four contributions against the backdrop of my own research in Colombian Indigenous communities, which has become increasingly collaborative in approach over the past four decades, combining archival and oral historical research with ethnography. My interest in the dynamics of participatory and collaborative research methodologies—how and what we learn when we work in collaboration with the peoples we once professed to study—led me to consult the personal archives of Orlando Fals Borda, one of the early Latin American proponents of participatory research, along with more well-known Brazilian educator Paolo Freire (Freire [1970] 2005; Rappaport 2020).1 During the early 1970s, Fals Borda collaborated with the peasant movement of the Colombian Caribbean coast to unearth histories of rural resistance to land-grabbers in the first half of the twentieth century.2 The topics covered by his research team were arrived at in consultation with local leaders of the National Association of Peasant Users (ANUC) in the department of Córdoba (Escobar 1983; Rudqvist 1986; Zamosc 1986). They conducted interviews with elderly peasant activists who had participated in earlier agrarian struggles, whose testimony was translated by local artist Ulianov Chalarka into sketches that were critiqued by peasants and compiled into documentary comics circulating among the ANUC rank and file, alongside prose histories composed in language accessible to peasant readers (Chalarka 1985; Fals Borda 1975; Fals Borda 1976).Fals Borda and his associates were not concerned at the time with penning academic histories but instead focused on identifying those institutions and cultural practices that were key to the struggles of the past, which could be revitalized by ANUC to guide their coordination of mass mobilizations and the occupation of large landholdings that had escaped the agrarian reform of the 1960s. Fals Borda called this process “critical recovery” (Bonilla et al. 1972). Only later, after his three-year collaboration with ANUC ended, did Fals Borda turn to academic writing, publishing a four-volume history of capitalist expansion and peasant resistance on the Colombian Caribbean coast, Historia doble de la Costa, written in an experimental format that juxtaposes oral narrative and documentary sources to academic forms of analysis and eschews conventional historical writing in favor of what sometimes looks like literary nonfiction (Fals Borda 1979–86).3Fals Borda’s collaboration with ANUC provides me with a backdrop for reflecting on the issues brought up by the four authors of this Ethnohistory dossier. Despite the fact that his work did not focus on Indigenous communities, Fals Borda’s experience on the Caribbean coast of Colombia provides food for thought that addresses various concerns that have been raised in the face of the increasing popularity of methodologies that combine other forms of evidence with the conventional sources used by historians and that interpret historical sources in dialogue with nonacademics. In particular, critics of collaborative and participatory research fear that the use of Indigenous oral narratives and nonwritten forms of evidence might impoverish scholarship insofar as it sidesteps the rigorous evaluation of evidence (“AHR Exchange” 2020). However, quandaries over method go much deeper than disputes over the how to substantiate our arguments, given that how we seek out evidence potentially determines the end results of our research. For example, as Argentine collaborative anthropologists Claudia Briones and Ana Ramos (2021) argue, ethnographers (and oral historians) tend to demand immediate responses to queries, neglecting to reflect on how we frame our questions or how formal interviews impinge on our relationship with our interlocutors. In other words, the nature of our interrogations skews our research in ways that deny knowledge-bearers the right to inquire, to doubt, to pose questions of their own, and to guide the course of research. By pursuing oral testimony with a heavy hand, we run the risk of missing important details and ignoring avenues of analysis. But even more importantly, we create a hierarchical relationship that negates the subjecthood of our interlocutors. Briones and Ramos also question the ethical necessity of obtaining informed consent. Their Mapuche interlocutors emphasized that this by now standard procedure forces the people we work with into the role of “informant” instead of “coresearcher,” while at the same time freeing us from the acknowledging the consequences of our research, which we can only achieve if we construct horizontal relationships of equality and respect. Far from ensuring rigor, the insistence on imposing external research models and information-gathering techniques on the Indigenous realities about which we seek to learn ultimately impoverishes our research.The elderly witnesses with whom Fals Borda recorded stories of earlier peasant struggles were not informants but, more properly, cointerpreters of history who, like an academic historian, constructed a narrative out of skeins of information they remembered as eyewitnesses, accumulated as good listeners, and sometimes accessed as readers. In both the materials produced for peasant readers and in his scholarly writings, Fals Borda attributes interpretive faculties to these knowledge-bearers and offers multiple means of substantiating their narratives, both orally and through archival documentation; because his project unfolded in a politicized arena where misstatements would be met with severe repression, Fals Borda and his associates were careful not to include statements that they couldn’t back up with various forms of evidence.I think, however, that dwelling on how Fals Borda weighed the evidence he had at his disposal simplifies how his participatory methodologies fostered the generation of new forms of knowledge. For example, we need to look at the techniques he used to gather information. Instead of conducting formal interviews, he frequently provoked conversations among elderly peasant eyewitnesses to the struggles of the past. You might say that these interview sessions were actually exercises in participatory interpretation. Of course, Fals Borda also unearthed documentary evidence from notarial archives, contemporary press reports, photographic collections, and judicial records, so there was a paper trail backing up oral narratives, but he also sought out source material in unconventional locations. Most interesting was his use of what he called archivos de baúl (which I translate as “kitchen archives”), the documentary traces, photos, and mementos that peasants stored in their homes, which were used as aide-mémoire to stimulate oral narrative. The contents of these personal treasure troves motivated researchers to compose written materials not only in a language accessible to peasants but also in one that embodied a local historicity, one with its own distinct narrative arc and landmarks of memory.There is always a tension between an academic scholar’s interpretation of the evidence and that of the communities whose history we are studying. This was as true in Fals Borda’s time as it is today, as Lopera-Mesa and Ibhawoh describe in their contributions to this issue of Ethnohistory. If we disregard this tension and only depend on our own interpretations of the past, we become blinded to how our research methods can effectively silence the very voices that we purport to be seeking (McGreavy et al. 2021). On a more pragmatic level, as Yannakakis suggests in her article, there are numerous possible actors and myriad political positions subsumed under the rubric of “our interlocutors.” On the one hand, the multiple contradictions and confrontations that arise between and across these actors make it impossible for external researchers to conduct collaborative research without making enemies. But more importantly, this very heterogeneity of the universe of conversation gives the lie to the notion that there is a single “community narrative” to which our interpretations can be compared or opposed. On the other hand, academic researchers studying Indigenous history should not parrot blindly the narratives we hear in Native communities, which originate in specific social contexts and are guided by particular objectives, but must endeavor to construct narratives that intersect with but do not necessarily reproduce what we discover in oral histories or in archival documentation.I follow Charles Hale (2006) in seeing such tensions as productive, as part and parcel of collaborative approaches to research. We don’t always use the same evidence, construct the same arguments, or come to the same conclusions, in large part because the purpose of our research is different—something that Lopera-Mesa eloquently underlines in her contribution to this special issue. We can respectfully disagree: that is a fundamental component of collaboration. In fact, it would be surprising if we always agreed. Instead, we must engage these productive tensions through the generation of new research questions that differ from those we would have pursued had we worked solo. Fals Borda’s insistence on reading the history of peasant struggles against large landowners in the Caribbean coastal marshlands through the prism of rural people’s relationship with their lacustrine environment—he calls theirs an “amphibious culture”—came out of the close relationship he developed with ANUC and his receptivity to their concerns. Similarly, in my collaborative research on the politics of the Indigenous movement, conducted with Native scholars from the Regional Indigenous Council of Cauca (CRIC) and non-Indigenous collaborators with the movement, I was alerted to tensions originating in the different positionalities of members of our research team, which, instead of silencing us, led to a discussion of the internal boundaries of Indigenous activism and the place of non-Indigenous sympathizers in the movement; this was not part of my original set of research objectives (Rappaport 2005). Even in the 1980s, before I began to do collaborative work, I was prompted by members of the Indigenous community of Cumbal to read colonial documentation through the prism of their territorial organization, which arrayed segments of the community into a hierarchy that proceeded in descending order from north to south. In particular, this helped me to identify colonial-era social hierarchies through an analysis of the order of Native signatories to eighteenth-century documents and of census entries, which operated according to a logic similar to the section hierarchy I was observing in the 1980s (Rappaport 1994: 41–42, 44). In other words, by paying heed to Indigenous knowledge I was able to read the archive in new ways.I return to Johnson’s assertion that both state research institutions and Indigenous and non-Native scholars are searching for “a past future that can serve a proximate now.” My friends in CRIC spoke of their objectives as “utopias,” which they understood not as impossible dreams but as courses of action for revitalizing Indigenous culture. One of CRIC’s earliest utopias was the revival of the resguardo, the Indigenous landholding corporation that functions under the supervision of Native authorities. The resguardo system dates to the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries but was debilitated after Colombia gained its independence in the early nineteenth century, when large resguardos with hereditary lords at the helm were divided into smaller units whose elected leaders were more easily persuaded to cede their territorial rights to non-Native landowners (Rappaport 1998). CRIC revitalized resguardo governance so that communities could more effectively protect communal lands, revive previously resguardos whose status had been terminated in the past, and expand existing territory through an agenda of land occupations and other forms of direct action. To accomplish this, the organization embarked on a program of archival research combined with the resuscitation of oral narratives about the colonial-era hereditary lords who founded the first resguardos. Dissemination of this narrative was enabled by the fact that Native authorities had read and reread eighteenth-century resguardo titles over the centuries in the course of legal battles, and their contents had sedimented into the oral memory. Víctor Daniel Bonilla, a journalist experienced in working with such sources (and who, not by accident, was a member of a network of activist-researchers spearheaded by Fals Borda) collaborated with CRIC in compiling this historical narrative (see Rappaport 2020, introduction).4The revival of an autonomously functioning resguardo was a “past future” that in the course of several decades became a “proximate now.”5 The narrative of the past resulting from the process of critical recovery was conveyed through picture maps and easy-to-read pamphlets, ultimately inserted into political discourse and practice (Bonilla 1977). Given this narrative’s refocusing of historical research on Indigenous agency and its insistence on braiding documentary evidence with oral narratives, it functioned as a political stimulus for the organization. But at the same time, it has been accepted as a valid narrative for guiding academic research, albeit following different practices for substantiating historical evidence, hewing more closely to the archival record, and producing an account that is comprehensible across the broader regional and national political arena. There is a continuing tension between this documentary-based account and local oral narrative, which is mythic in nature, embedding colonial hereditary lords in a supernatural world and casting them as timeless entities with a continuing hold over Indigenous communities. Despite the fact that the two constructions of the “past future” differ in their details and their use of sources, they continually enter into dialogue with each other, because each of them appeals in its own way to the utopian impulses of the organization. What is more, both Nasa activists and non-Native collaborators use both narratives, depending on the contexts in which they find themselves. Ultimately, they furnish a common ground for dialogue with academics. Certainly, there is a tension between the two narratives, but it is a productive and inclusive tension.We are not required as academic scholars to adhere uncritically to the narratives of our Indigenous interlocutors; instead, we are asked to enter into dialogue with them. Historical critics who disparage collaborative approaches to Indigenous history and who question the use of unconventional source materials lacking rigor are guilty of fashioning a caricature of what these approaches can accomplish. I sense that historians, particularly those who primarily address their readers within a disciplinary framework, approach these alternative methodologies somewhat timidly; Orlando Fals Borda’s bold experimentation in Historia doble, like Richard Price’s First-Time, remains an outlier (although neither was written by a historian). Anthropologists confront other demons. While we long ago came to accept the legitimacy of Indigenous histories and do not always feel the need to seek archival substantiation, we tend to frame these narratives as materials suitable for ethnographic description and analysis, as information useful for answering anthropological questions that are irrelevant to the people who have shared their lives and their knowledge with us; we continue to deny them the status of interpretations in their own right. This is as much due to the constraints of our research methods as it owes to the conventions of ethnographic writing (Ingold 2015). That is, both anthropologists and historians find it difficult to reconcile our disciplinary habits with what our interlocutors tell us. Using our disciplines as a shield, we deny them equal status as interpreters and creators.It is possible, in Ibhawoh’s words, to engage a “culturally sensitive critical eye” in order to open new vistas for studying Indigenous history, but we must make a great effort to do so. In essence, research is a creative activity through which we strive to fit together many pieces of a story into a narrative that speaks to our needs. This does not require that we hew to conventional metanarratives and traditional forms of evidence: we can accomplish it by crafting alternative frameworks for interpretation and exposition. Fals Borda achieves this by inserting into the various volumes of Historia doble a series of personifications arising out of his conversations with peasants: the notion of “amphibious culture,” which I mention above, is one possibility. The use of such guiding metaphors does not interfere with our claims to scholarly rigor; indeed, it allows us to interrogate our sources responsibly using intercultural frameworks. Writing Indigenous history is certainly empirically based, but it is also a creative process that unfolds in a dynamic tension with the context not only about which, but in which, it is crafted.