Appropriating Colonists’ Symbols: History from Below in Kickemuit and on Santiago’s Horse in New Spain
Christine DeLucia’s 2015 article, “Locating Kickemuit: Springs, Stone Memorials, and Contested Placemaking in the Northeastern Borderlands,” and William B. Taylor’s 1997 book chapter, “Santiago’s Horse: Christianity and Colonial Indian Resistance in the Heartland of New Spain” use microhistory to offer new vantage points from which to view the power-struggles that took place in present-day New England and Mexico respectively. As “Histories from below,” they allow us to look up from the vantage point of those who occupied the “below” position of the colonial structures enforced by Protestant and Catholic encroachers. As Stacy put it in our Discussion board for this week, DeLucia “is urging historians of Early America to explore the idea that these may not be the only narratives, and that by not telling other stories, we are actually erasing and unmapping events, and places. The same is true, I argue, for Taylor’s piece. Taylor is urging historians to explore the narratives and potential or most-likely viewpoints, for the original inhabitants of New Spain. He complicates the easy-to-assume narrative of colonizer dominating, colonized submitting, by tracing the complex interweaving of myths, dances, and court cases associated with the domination implied by Santiago’s horse.
Related to this is the power of word choices (such as “assimilate” versus “appropriate”) by historians as one way to transfer power from the colonizer to the colonized, and thus to complicate the overly simplified narratives of colonial power structures. Shifting power between the indigenous community and the Spanish alongside the expansion of what is considered as historical evidence (such as DeLucia’s focus on archaeology) aids in understanding not only indigenous history, but also “history period.” Taylor’s piece especially shows the ways that the indigenous peoples in this case took power into their own hands, recalling last week’s readings on “history from below” and the goal of historians to understand events in terms of people’s resistance, or not—what I understand is what can those being imposed upon by colonists control, and what they cannot control. Tangent: This discussion, of the indigenous community appropriating the court system and Santiago’s horse for their own ends meant that they still were operating in the power structure of the colonizer and on the colonizer’s terms. Similarly, Laura Doyle argues in Freedom’s Empire: Race and the Rise of the Novel in Atlantic Modernity, 1640-1940 (a trans-Atlantic historical approach I just recently read) that Olaudah Equiano uses the “freedom plot” and also ideas of race, black and white worthiness for freedom/liberty—appropriating the dominant structure’s tactics but still, as Audre Lorde says (my take) using the master’s tools in attempt to dismantle the master’s house.
Works Cited
DeLucia, Christine. “Locating Kickemuit: Springs, Stone Memorials, and Contested Placemaking in the Northeastern Borderlands.” Early American Studies, Spring 2015.
Taylor, William B. “Santiago’s Horse: Christianity and Colonial Indian Resistance in the Heartland of New Spain.” Violence, Resistance, and Survival in the Americas: Native Americans and the Legacy of Conquest, eds. William B. Taylor and Franklin Pease G.Y. Smithsonian Institution Press, 1997.
