Introduction

The birth of the field of ethnohistory in the United States at the intersection of Indigenous rights activism and state law is well known. Jump-started by anthropologists called upon to evidence the claims of Native Americans protesting treaty breaches in a specially designed forum—the Indian Claims Commission, created in 1946—the history of the field is the subject of several accounts that emphasize its political and ethical stakes (Harkin 2010; Lurie 1978; McMillen 2007; Rosenthal 1990). However, less attention has been paid to the development of ethnohistorical fields in other places and in more recent periods of political and economic transformation of state, society, and research (although, see Ray 2016). This forum brings together four scholars who work ethnohistorically in different parts of the world, in different periods, and at different scales—from the regional to the national and even continental—and whose work is framed by neoliberal restructuring of the late twentieth century. We seek to open up a conversation about the diverse and changing contexts for ethnohistorical work in places where complex and fraught relationships between activism, law, state authority, anthropology, and history continue to shape the methods and approaches of ethnohistory, but in distinctive ways.

The essays grew out of an American Society for Ethnohistory 2020 Annual Meeting plenary session titled “Authority, Interpretation, and Justice: Writing Indigenous Histories around the Globe.”¹ We organized the forum in response to heated debates over the ethical possibilities for intellectual work, the subject of recent high-profile scholarly forums concerning the practice of early and later American history (“AHR Exchange” 2020; “Forum” 2018). Those forums aim to foreground marginalized histories, put alternative epistemologies to work, and reckon with distinctive modes of narration and interpretation as an assertion of epistemic sovereignty and decolonial agency. These ethical visions are shared by the contributors to this forum, albeit from different standpoints and with a range of goals in mind. That their research is grounded outside the United States—and, in the cases of Bonny Ibhawoh, Gloria Lopera Mesa, Yanna Yannakakis, and Joanne Rappaport, in the so-called Global South—provides alternative and diverse perspectives on the pressing question of how to address historical injustices while meeting the interpretive demands of our disciplines. These cognate ethnohistorical projects generated in world regions beyond North America are embedded within distinct and overlapping intellectual genealogies, and they engage with the challenges of serving justice, framing authority, and making interpretations in contexts of resurgent Indigenous claims-making, shifting state demands, and the legacies of colonialism.

Neoliberal restructuring and its intersections with recognition of Indigenous rights figures centrally across the essays and provides an overarching framework for the forum. Neoliberalism has often been accompanied by multiculturalist policies and the incorporation of Indigenous customary law into national constitutions. Common and entangled phenomena that are produced by and that emerged in response to these concomitant processes can be observed running across the diverse research sites represented here: the interaction of the international Indigenous rights movement with local and regional social movements for economic and social justice, some of which fall under the umbrella of the Indigenous, and others of which are conceived more broadly; ideas of truth and reconciliation within nation-states and attempts to redress grievances; and the rise of a global discourse of “Indigeneity” as something that is to be cherished and recognized through laws and constitutions (a rupture form earlier modernist state projects that pursued the assimilation of Indigenous peoples into the nation).

At the same time, neoliberal restructuring has generated inequality in wealth and access and ushered in a new era of resource extraction. Economic change has, in turn, forced Indigenous peoples to develop new collective strategies and promoted the restructuring of universities and produced new bureaucracies that shape research agendas and orient knowledge production toward particular goals. These contexts have real effects on the scope of archives that ethnohistorical scholars assemble; the possibilities and expectations for sustained collaboration with Indigenous activists, intellectuals, and communities; the bureaucracies they must navigate for access and funding; the different roles they take on (as advisers, lawyers, policy makers); the languages they must learn; and the audiences for whom they write. More gravely, in many regions of the globe, civil war and state-sponsored and paramilitary violence directly impact the work of ethnohistorians as well as the lives of their interlocutors, delimiting what they can or should do and raising the stakes on the knowledge they produce and the effects of its circulation.

Larger institutional and structural changes incentivize some kinds of research projects over others. Further, they shape the individual decisions that scholars make in terms of research design and conduct. In other words, these contexts frame and sometimes even determine our work. Insofar as we ourselves seek to hold open dialogical space for the negotiation of ethical relationships between scholars and interlocutors and between the discipline and scholars, we are also interested in the structural constraints on and the dilemmas facing ethnohistorians. Scholars must be responsive and sensitive to local, national, and geopolitical contexts—even if they are based in the North American academy, as three of the scholars convened here are. At the same time, they may also be engaged in critique of the intellectual, political, economic, and social context of their respective fields, as social movements across the globe that demand redress for histories of slavery and dispossession call on us to reflect on our disciplinary practice and ethical commitments. Nonetheless, the local still matters. Different approaches have emerged in reckoning with the evidentiary problems in Indigenous and colonial histories in different contexts. Some of these approaches aim to show how conventional disciplinary practices can be bent or reshaped so as to bring Indigenous voices to the fore; others might repudiate such conventions as themselves “colonial.” Thus, respect for the achievements of social movements and critiques of what happens when the aims of such movements are absorbed into state processes can come into tension or even conflict with one another.

In the essays that follow, contributors contend with these tensions as they reflect on their ethnohistorical methods and approaches. These are shaped by particular ethical commitments these scholars hold and the nourishing or delimiting of their agendas in distinct political contexts. Given the heterogeneity of these contexts and the distinct scales and objectives of their work, there is a broad spectrum of scholarly positioning and methodologies across the essays. Gloria Lopera Mesa writes as a lawyer-historian who has worked for years with the Cañamomo-Lomaprietas, an Indigenous community in the Colombian Andes, to help document their legal claims to land. Her research takes her back into nineteenth-century archives, and her commitments to the Cañamomo-Lomaprieta people in the present lead her to questions of the tension between historical objectivity and advocacy. Yanna Yannakakis’s contribution reflects on her long-standing work in Oaxaca, Mexico. While her legal historical scholarship focuses on the colonial period of the sixteenth through eighteenth centuries, putting some distance between her research and the current moment, her focus on customary law necessarily involves engagement with present-day communities and the negotiation of local as well as national politics. Miranda Johnson shifts to the national scale and examines the formation of a bicultural state in Aotearoa New Zealand. This project, initially spurred by Māori activism, entails the reshaping of research practices in the context of historical inquiry into breaches to the Treaty of Waitangi and shifting priorities in public institutions as they seek to embed bicultural principles. Bonny Ibhawoh works at continental scale, aiming to decolonize the discourse of human rights from an African-centric perspective. This can be achieved, he argues, by countering the universal claims made in relation to the rubric of human rights and centering other actors and their epistemologies. Joanne Rappaport, who writes the afterword for this dossier, engages the work of Colombian sociologist Orlando Fals Borda as a means for exploring the ethical commitments of anthropologists and historians. Fals Borda, who helped to found participatory action research in the 1970s, a critical period for Indigenous resurgence in Colombia, put forward a vision for intercultural engagement that demanded respect and critique among participants, eschewing submission to another’s point of view (Rappaport 2020).

All of these essays consider disciplinary and methodological intersections between history and law, and the legacies of colonialism in the present. Traditionally cognate disciplines in terms of their truth and evidentiary practices, as this forum contends, the methodological links between history and law raise complex issues for writing Indigenous histories where legal sources have provided the basis for collective identity, territoriality, and social memory over the longue durée. Is it possible to disentangle Indigeneity from these complex overlapping processes—and would we want to? The essays in this forum wrestle with these ironies of colonialism, particularly in terms of the unanticipated uses that archives may be put to in claiming land rights and writing new histories of Indigeneity. Grappling with these ironies happens through layered negotiations in relation to particular political contexts, in engagement with Indigenous communities, in response to the distinctive needs and demands of scholarly research, and in the reshaping of universal norms. Thus, taken as a whole, the forum points to context-specific challenges in undertaking research collaborations, fashioning interpretive authority, and meeting intersubjective responsibilities. Rather than offering a unified doctrine for approaching such challenges, we believe that grappling with the various possibilities as well as structural and personal limits described in these essays offers opportunities for a plural and nuanced conversation about the practice of ethnohistory.

The larger point made by these contributions is perhaps an obvious one—that no individual scholarly decisions are made in a vacuum. We feel that it is a point worth emphasizing and investigating. Without an appreciation of comparative differences between field sites, one set of normative expectations may be extended to research sites where they do not fit or for which they are inappropriate. In such cases, scholars are bound to fail to meet such standards, or worse, fall foul of communities, organizations, or governments. By situating historical knowledge production and the ethical and normative expectations that emerge from and are debated in specific contexts, this forum highlights that opportunities for redress and the possibilities for and constraints on engagement look different in different places. The Pacific historian Greg Dening (2008) once referred to scholarly responsibilities as an “art of way-finding”: such an emplaced narrative of responsibility, respect, and critique is at stake in the essays assembled here.

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Works Cited