This gracefully written book focuses on three Paez (highland Indians of southern Colombia) historians to show how “native” history differs from Eurocentric historiography. This difference results almost in a “chronicle of the impossible,” because indigenous attempts to integrate their own brand of historical and cosmological thought with Western-style discourse can cause both to be “effaced in the process because they contradict each other” (p. 2). Joanne Rappaport illustrates how the two kinds of histories differ. Some of Paez history is not narrative—it is brief or episodic, taking the form, for instance, of resguardo titles to communally held land, geographical encodings, ritual, or daily practice. These nontextual histories organize the manner in which history is conceptualized and remembered. Indigenous peoples like the Paez, Rappaport argues, do have a concept of linear time, do distinguish between fact and fiction, and do know when they are telescoping a time period, but prefer fictive and fantastic images because “these may help them to reflect more fully upon the real” (p. 16).

The three historians, Don Juan Tama, Manuel Quintín Lame, and Julio Niquinás, were clearly able to synthesize and interpret; not just repeat stories but weave new ones. They also were all political activists who had acquired “a more global perspective on the thoughts, actions, and problems of their people” (p. 20). Moreover, tellingly, not one was “pure” Paez in some manner, even though each associated himself, through supernatural symbols of ancestry, with the Paez.

Rappaport demonstrates how a long-oppressed people uses the available fragments of historical interpretation to create a highly politicized form of historical thought, one that resists the state and yet interacts with its moral assumptions. Such thought produces a history that is not exclusively oral or written; that uses timeworn themes and symbols from pre-Columbian, colonial, and postindependence Colombia; that reveals a moral continuity between past and present Paez experience. This history is a vehicle for changing the course of history, a “re-invention of tradition” that permits the Paez to validate their claims and influence power wielders in the dominant society.