Native Wills from the Colonial Americas: Dead Giveaways in a New World

Mark Christensen and Jonathan Truitt's sequel to Susan Kellogg and Matthew Restall's influential 1998 edited volume Dead Giveaways: Indigenous Testaments of Colonial Mesoamerica and the Andes moves the title of the earlier volume to a subtitle, thus emphasizing the expanded scope of their study of native wills and testaments. As the editors remind us in their introduction, native wills continue to be relevant in historical studies of the colonial-era Americas by illuminating myriad facets of colonial culture including gender, identity, and religion. Christensen and Truitt sought to reach beyond Mesoamerica and the Andes in Native Wills from the Colonial Americas but found that there are no known examples of native wills from the French- and Portuguese-speaking colonies and many fewer examples from the English colonies in North America. Nonetheless, their volume offers a rich and broad selection of testaments from various ethnic and linguistic groups in multiple regions of the...