Description text taken from from University of Nebraska Press:
Hemispheric Indigeneities is a critical anthology that brings together indigenous and non indigenous scholars specializing in the Andes, Mesoamerica, and Canada. The overarching theme is the changing understanding of indignity from first contact to the contemporary period in three of the world’s major regions of indigenous peoples.
Although the terms indio, indigène, and indian only exist (in Spanish, French, and English, respectively) because of European conquest and colonization, indigenous peoples have appropriated or changed this terminology in ways that reflect their shifting self-identifications and aspirations. As the essays in this volume demonstrate, this process constantly transformed the relation of Native peoples in the Americas to other peoples and the state. This volume’s presentation of various factors—geographical, temporal, and cross-cultural—provide illuminating contributions to the burgeoning field of hemispheric indigenous studies.
Hemispheric Indigeneities explores indigenous agency and shows that what it means to be indigenous was and is mutable. It also demonstrates that self-identification evolves in response to the relationship between indigenous peoples and the state. The contributors analyze the conceptions of what indignity meant, means today, or could come to mean tomorrow.
Erick D. Langer is a professor of history at Georgetown University. He is the author of Expecting Pears from an Elm Tree: Franciscan Missions on the Chiriguano Frontier in the Heart of South America, 1830–1949 and coeditor of The New Latin American Mission History (Nebraska, 1995).
For this publication, Professor Langer wrote the chapter titled “From Prosperity to Poverty: Andeans in the Nineteenth Century”.
Miléna Santoro is an associate professor of French and Francophone studies at Georgetown University. She is the author of Mothers of Invention: Feminist Authors and Experimental Fiction in France and Quebec.
For this publication, Professor Santoro wrote the chapter titled “Reel Visions: Snapshots from a Half Century of First Nations Cinema”.
GU History alumni Waskar Ari-Chachaki (PhD, 05) and Luis Fernando Granados (PhD, 08) also contributed chapters.