This is a book about how we think about encounters in the history of the human sciences, the forms of knowledge production they engendered, and what they can tell us about the relationship between science, empire, and colonialism. Focusing on case studies from Latin America and the United States Empire, many of which center Indigenous peoples, it asks how we might decolonize the history of the human sciences and develop a more ethical, social justice-oriented approach to writing about past encounters that today seem problematic, or troubling. Its thematic organization moves between a variety of scales for reconstructing interactions between scientists, the human subjects and nonhuman (or in some cases, once-human or human-related) objects they studied, and a variety of other historical actors. Some chapters adopt a local perspective, others a national one, and yet others draw attention to transnational and even global domains. In doing so, they explore the myriad interactions of expedition science, the relationality implied in fieldwork, the logics of settler colonial custodial institutions, the global circulation of ideas about human nature and behavior, and the relationship between science, state power, and governance.
A notable feature of this book, and one that has aided us in thinking about the themes described above, is its engagement of scholarship from Indigenous Studies. This has not occurred by accident. At an information session during the 2017 meetings of the Latin American Studies Association (LASA) in Lima, Peru, two of us (Warren and Rodriguez) listened as a notable intellectual historian of Latin America refused to consider the possibility that Indigenous epistemologies should be recognized specifically as playing a meaningful role within a broader initiative on Latin American contributions to the global history of knowledge. We interpreted his comments as casually dismissing not just the role of past and present Indigenous peoples in global knowledge production, but also Indigenous epistemology as a category of analysis and the contributions of an entire field of study, Indigenous Studies, that seeks to center and advocate for Indigenous ways of knowing, rights, and self-determination.
Conversations following that LASA session continued over email and at the 2018 meetings of the American Historical Association in Washington, DC, where all three of us participated on a panel with historian Micah Oelze. A lunchtime discussion with Oelze and Sebastián Gil-Riaño ultimately inspired us to organize a workshop at the University of Washington titled “Ethics, Settler Colonialism, and Indigeneity in the History of the Human Sciences,” which took place in November 2018. There, we deliberately brought together historians of science with Indigenous Studies scholars and scholars of race and empire to consider anew the relationship between knowledge production, scientific research, and ethics, and specifically how we might write about past ethical breaches in the history of the human sciences. We asked Indigenous Studies scholars to serve alongside historians of science as discussants and theorists at this workshop, rather than relegating them to the role of presenting case studies from their communities or speaking as representatives of those communities. Their feedback (together with others’) generated a rich discussion, helped us to more clearly identify and articulate the stakes of the project, and improved immeasurably many of the papers presented that day, several of which are included in this book.
Following the workshop, we sought to deepen our engagement with Indigenous Studies literature through greater attention to work in Indigenous Science and Technology Studies, work on Indigenous epistemologies and knowledge making, and work focused on museum collections and relations with Indigenous communities.Footnote 1 We also identified models of the kind of Indigenous scholarship we sought to engage in the book, such as that of Abenaki anthropologist Margaret Bruchac in Savage Kin: Indigenous Informants and American Anthropologists (2018), and various chapters of Western Shoshone historian Ned Blackhawk and Isaiah Wilner’s edited volume, Indigenous Visions: Rediscovering the World of Franz Boas (2018).Footnote 2 Bruchac brilliantly complicates the process of knowledge production in the human sciences and decenters the authority of the ethnographer by emphasizing both the contributions of Indigenous informants to knowledge production and the practices ethnographers used to erase Indigenous roles.Footnote 3 Her work centers questions of relationality, encounter, and affect between researchers, research subjects, and intermediaries in ways that fundamentally question the frameworks historians of the human sciences and intellectual historians have long trusted and employed, some of which were on display in Lima, Peru. Likewise, various chapters in Blackhawk and Wilner’s edited volume effectively demonstrate how Pacific Northwest and other Indigenous peoples contributed to key forms of globalized knowledge that we associate with modernity through their encounters and influence on Franz Boas and others. As they describe it, their collection “discloses the global sources of modern thought, bringing focus to the dissemination of knowledge from those supposedly under study to those who supposedly carry the study out – a binary that imposes false assumptions about who is acting and who is reacting, and that therefore requires rethinking and revision.”Footnote 4
We found it helpful to compare these works to the work of Warwick Anderson, who graciously participated in the 2018 workshop at the University of Washington. We found especially useful his work on scientific research and reciprocity among the Fore in The Collector of Lost Souls. In this study, Anderson provocatively situated the practices of the Fore as essential to shaping the novel research program of the mercurial Carleton Gajdusek, and in this important way pushed the history of science toward a paradigm of accepting the centrality and agency of Indigenous people in their encounters with Western biomedicine. At the same time, when contrasted with Bruchac’s and Wilner and Blackhawk’s studies, it is apparent that The Collector of Lost Souls provides but one approach to identifying the range of reciprocity on offer by granting agency to all knowledge creators present in the moment of relational exchanges. It prompts questions, furthermore, of what a decolonial approach to such projects might look like, especially one that is informed by Indigenous Studies, and whether it would offer something different from what Anderson’s postcolonial method enables us to see.Footnote 5
As scholars who acknowledge their subject positions as settlers trained primarily as Latin American historians and historians of science and medicine, and as scholars who have only recently embraced decolonial methods themselves, the editors wish to make clear that they do not see this book as a major intervention in Indigenous Studies and Indigenous history. Admittedly, we have perhaps more to say about the structures of human sciences research and the history of human sciences knowledge creation in contexts defined by empire and colonialism – settler, internal, and otherwise – than about the rich and complex histories of the Indigenous peoples’ lives that appear within its pages. These categories are often not easily separable, of course, and engagement of both varies across the chapters.
That said, the work of Indigenous and Indigenous Studies scholars has helped us to think through how we might historicize and explore the experiences of Indigenous communities and other communities in encounters with researchers in the human sciences. We recognize that, like Anderson, our ability to reconstruct encounters with scientists from the perspective of Indigenous historical actors is constrained not only by the limitations of the archive’s fragmented records, which were often created by scientists themselves and do little to shed light on the experiences of those “researched,” but also in many cases by our own subject positions and by differences of epistemology, worldview, experience, and desire. In acknowledging these limitations, we aim to acknowledge not only the challenges of accessing past experience that are common to all historical research, but also the specific responsibilities that reconstructing Indigenous histories entails. We believe engaging these concerns should form a key component of writing an ethical form of history.
Taking these concerns into account while asserting that accessing the historical experiences of Indigenous, Black, and mixed communities is not completely beyond reach, the chapters in this book engage both the limits and possibilities of what we might be able to say. In initial instructions to authors, we stressed the rich intellectual work that several key theoretical concepts in Indigenous Studies make possible for historians. These include Kahnawake Mohawk anthropologist Audra Simpson’s theorizing of “ethnographic refusal,” which Unangax̂ scholar Eve Tuck and her collaborator, K. Wayne Yang, engage and build upon in their own work, as one productive way to make sense of past Indigenous encounters with researchers.Footnote 6 For historians, their work proves valuable for thinking about silences in the archives of human sciences research, and it does so in ways that dovetail nicely with anthropologist Michel-Rolph Trouillot’s work on archival silences and the making of history in Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History (1995).Footnote 7 Remaining silent in the face of ethnographic questioning and engaging in other acts of refusal challenge the narrow, ritualistic, procedural, and unethical ways in which Indigenous people have been described and knowledge about them has been configured within anthropology as well as other human sciences. It is a way to reshape human scientific knowledge through withholding or resetting engagement, challenging moral and ethical frameworks, and placing limits on what the researcher can say, limits that are arrived at “when the representation would bite all of us [Indigenous people] and compromise the representational territory that we have gained for ourselves in the past 100 years.”Footnote 8
Other authors find especially valuable the way Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang have built on Simpson’s work. Tuck and Yang argue that “refusal to do research and refusal within research” can also be a means of developing an ethics and a way of “humanizing researchers,” particularly among communities who are over-studied in damage-centered research. In this sense, refusal constitutes an important collective strategy and response among a broad range of forms of engagement, and one carried out in the interest of establishing good (or better) relations. Tuck and Yang’s critiques of damage-centered narratives and their call for a focus on Indigenous desire in academic research on Indigenous communities also resonated with contributors; the latter concept informs several chapters.Footnote 9 While not aimed at historians specifically, this work also serves as a useful provocation for rethinking whether, why, and how certain histories should be written. Combining their theoretical contributions with Anishinaabe scholar and writer Gerald Vizenor’s concept of survivance and the related idea of thrivance, they can form part of an effort to more closely examine the archive for traces of how Indigenous communities and other communities aimed to relate to researchers through various kinds of encounters, and in some cases sought to transform them.Footnote 10
As editors, we hope scholars, especially Indigenous Studies scholars, will see this book’s engagement of theory from Indigenous Studies and other fields as a reflection of our recognition that writing about the human sciences demands an ethical choice to be inclusive, respectful, humble, and thoughtful in drawing upon and learning from interlocutors. Moreover, we hope this book invites further conversation about how Indigenous Studies theories and methods might take center stage in postcolonial and decolonial histories of the human sciences. We make no pretenses to having figured out the answers to these questions, or even to having done so as effectively as we could have, and our work certainly does not solve the structural inequalities, inequities, and violence that privilege certain voices over others in the history of science and the academy at large.Footnote 11 Finally, we acknowledge that actual theorizing within Indigenous Studies takes place from specific subject positions and is rooted in particular relationships and lived experiences. That said, we hope our work serves as a call for historians of science to read, take seriously, and think alongside the work of Indigenous and Indigenous Studies scholars from across the Americas and beyond and recognize the ethical necessity of doing so.
1 For Indigenous Science and Technology Studies, see Kim TallBear, Native American DNA: Tribal Belonging and the False Promise of Genetic Science (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013); Maile Arvin, Possessing Polynesians: The Science of Settler Colonial Whiteness in Hawai’i and Oceania (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2019); Eli Nelson, “Walking to the Future in the Steps of Our Ancestors: Haudenosaunee Traditional Ecological Knowledge and Queer Time in the Climate Change Era,” New Geographies 09: Posthuman (2017): 133–138; Jessica Kolopenuk, “‘Red Rivers,’ No More Potlucks,” http://nomorepotlucks.org/site/red-rivers-jessica-kolopenuk/. For Indigenous epistemologies and knowledge making, see Marisol de la Cadena, Earth Beings: Ecologies of Practice across Andean Worlds (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015); Marisol de la Cadena, “Indigenous Cosmopolitics in the Andes: Conceptual Relations beyond ‘Politics’,” Cultural Anthropology 25, no. 2 (2010): 334–370; Marisol de la Cadena and Mario Blaser, eds., A World of Many Worlds (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2018); Helen Verran, “Reimagining Land Ownership in Australia,” Postcolonial Studies 1, no. 2 (1988): 237–254; Helen Verran, “A Postcolonial Moment in Science Studies: Alternative Firing Regimes of Environmental Scientists and Aboriginal Landowners,” Social Studies of Science 32, no. 5–6 (2002): 729–762. For relations between Indigenous communities and museums, see Amy Lonetree, Decolonizing Museums: Representing Native America in National and Tribal Museums (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2012). For theory in Indigenous Studies, see Audra Simpson and Andrea Smith, eds., Theorizing Native Studies (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014).
2 Margaret Bruchac, Savage Kin: Indigenous Informants and American Anthropologists (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2018); Ned Blackhawk and Isaiah Lorado Wilner, eds., Indigenous Visions: Rediscovering the World of Franz Boas (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2018).
3 Bruchac, Savage Kin, 19.
4 Blackhawk and Wilner, Indigenous Visions, xviii.
5 Anderson classifies The Collector of Lost Souls as an example of postcolonial historical method and contrasts it to another of his works that he sees as decolonial, his 2012 article “Asia as Method in Science and Technology Studies.” See Warwick Anderson, “Finding Decolonial Metaphors in Postcolonial Histories,” History and Theory 59, no. 3 (2020): 430–438.
6 Simpson develops ethnographic refusal as a concept to characterize behavior among Indigenous subjects who mediate and place limits on the efforts of anthropologists conducting this kind of work in settler colonial contexts and beyond. For Simpson, ethnographic refusal is an expression of sovereignty by those studied, who when speaking for themselves or refusing to speak, “interrupt anthropological portraits of timelessness, procedure and function that dominate representations of their past and, sometimes, their present”; Audra Simpson, “On Ethnographic Refusal: Indigeneity, ‘Voice’ and Colonial Citizenship,” Junctures 9 (2007): 67–80; Simpson, Mohawk Interruptus: Political Life across the Borders of Settler States (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014); Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang, “R-Words: Refusing Research,” in Humanizing Research: Decolonizing Qualitative Inquiry with Youth and Communities, eds. Django Paris and Maisha T. Winn (Los Angeles, CA: Sage Publications, 2014), 223–248.
7 Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History (Boston: Beacon Press, 1995).
8 Simpson, “On Ethnographic Refusal,” 78.
9 Eve Tuck, “Suspending Damage: A Letter to Communities,” Harvard Educational Review 79, no. 3 (2009): 409–427; Tuck and Yang, “R-Words,” 223–248. There are productive links to be made here between Tuck and Yang’s scholarship and works outside of Indigenous Studies. In many respects, damage-centered narratives further processes of Othering, or Orientalism in the words of Edward Said, which is a cannibalistic stereotyping project that exaggerates difference and feeds on the confidence and sophistication of colonized peoples to normalize and have them internalize their “inferiority” vis-à-vis the “superior” modern West; see Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage Books, 1978).
10 Gerald Vizenor, ed., Survivance: Narratives of Native Presence (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2008). See also Lonetree, Decolonizing Museums.
11 These structural inequalities, inequities, and violence marginalize not just Indigenous voices, but also those of scholars of many different backgrounds across Latin America and the Pacific, whose work receives insufficient attention in an academic world that privileges Anglophone scholarship. Admittedly, the process and circumstances under which this book came about unintentionally reproduced some of that marginalization. All contributing authors are based at institutions in the United States, though many have deep ties to Latin America and the Pacific. We hope that scholars in those parts of the world will see this book as an imperfect invitation to engage in further conversation.
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