WHOSE PEN, WHOSE SWORD? Discovery Narratives of America, Archival Power, and the Silencing of Indigenous Pasts

 

 

 The Sword Behind the Pen

 

I want to begin today not with a date, not with a map, and not with the name Christopher Columbus.

I want to begin with a sword.

Specifically, I want to begin with a particular kind of sword — Toledo steel, the finest blade manufacture in sixteenth-century Europe, forged in the workshops of a city in central Spain that had, only decades before the conquest of the Americas, been a meeting place of Islamic, Jewish, and Christian artisans working side by side. Toledo steel was the weapon of choice of the conquistadors. It caught the light. It was terrifying. And it was entirely inseparable from the documents, the chronicles, the legal instruments, and the archives that we students of history and anthropology spend our lives reading and interpreting.

Subhadra Das, in her recent book Uncivilised: Ten Lies that Made the West, puts it this way:

There is a power, a value inherent in the written word, so much so that it has been possible to wield it as a weapon to determine whose stories got told and whose didn't. In our supposedly civilized Western world, it's not that the pen is mightier than the sword, it's that your pen is only really mighty if you happen to be holding a sword in the first place, Toledo steel glinting in the sunlight. — Subhadra Das, Uncivilised (2024)

 

Now, Das is writing as a cultural historian, making a broad argument about Western civilisation. But I want to suggest to you today that her image is not merely metaphorical. It is a precise, historically accurate description of how the so-called 'discovery' of the Americas was made — and, crucially, how it was made into history.

So let me put it to you directly: what exactly is a 'discovery narrative,' and why should we, as students of history, still be bothered by one?

 

A discovery narrative is not simply an account of finding something. It is a claim — a legal, cultural, and epistemological claim — about who has the right to name, possess, and narrate a place and its peoples. When European explorers and their chroniclers wrote that Columbus 'discovered' America in 1492, they were not recording a neutral fact. They were inscribing a perspective. They were performing an act of erasure — erasing the fact that tens of millions of people already lived there, had named every river and mountain and plant and star, and had their own rich, complex, and diverse histories stretching back tens of thousands of years.

And here is the crucial point: that erasure was not accidental. It was made possible — indeed, it was made permanent — by the sword. By the coercive power that determined whose writing survived, whose archives were preserved, and whose were burned.

 

Introducing Our Guide: Michel-Rolph Trouillot

To help us navigate this terrain, we are going to spend the first part of this article with one of the most important — and, I think, still underread — theorists of historical production of the twentieth century: the Haitian scholar Michel-Rolph Trouillot, and his 1995 masterwork, Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History.

Who was Trouillot?

Michel-Rolph Trouillot (1949–2012) was born in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, and spent his academic career at Johns Hopkins and the University of Chicago. He wrote in the tradition of Caribbean and Black radical thought. His background is significant: Haiti was the site of the only successful slave revolution in the Atlantic world, when enslaved Africans overthrew French colonial rule between 1791 and 1804 and established the first Black republic. For South Asian readers, an analogy might be helpful: imagine if the 1857 Indian uprising against the British East India Company had succeeded in establishing a fully independent India — and then imagine that this event was almost entirely absent from world history textbooks. That is roughly what Trouillot argues has happened to the Haitian Revolution.

Trouillot's central argument is deceptively simple: the production of history is always also a production of power. History is not just what happened. History is what gets recorded, preserved, retrieved, and — crucially — declared significant. And at every single one of those stages, power is present.

He identifies four specific moments at which silences enter the historical record:

 

•  The moment of FACT CREATION — the making of sources. Who writes things down? In whose language? With whose interests in mind?

•  The moment of FACT ASSEMBLY — the making of archives. Which documents get kept? Which get burned? Who controls the archive?

•  The moment of FACT RETRIEVAL — the making of narratives. Which archived facts get used? How are they interpreted? Whose scholarship gets funded and published?

•  The moment of RETROSPECTIVE SIGNIFICANCE — the making of History with a capital H. Which narratives become founding myths? Which become national holidays?

 

Can you already see where this is going with the 'discovery' of America?

 

At every single one of these four moments, the European colonial project and the American 'discovery' narrative operated to silence Indigenous voices. And I am going to show you, through five detailed case studies, exactly how that worked — and what it produced.

But first — because many of you come from the South Asian scholarly tradition, which has its own, very rich experience of colonial narrative-making — I want to pause on an analogy that I think will make Trouillot's framework immediately legible.

Think about how the British Raj narrated India. Think about the 'discovery' of Sanskrit by Sir William Jones, as though Sanskrit had been hiding until a Welsh judge arrived in Calcutta in 1783. Think about James Mill's History of British India, published in 1817, written by a man who had never visited India, couldn't read a single Indian language, and yet produced the official history used to train colonial administrators for decades. Think about how Indian knowledge systems — Ayurveda, Unani, the mathematical traditions of Kerala, the astronomical traditions of the medieval Islamic world that came through Persia to Mughal India — were systematically dismissed as superstition or folklore in order to justify the epistemic authority of European science.

The mechanism is identical. The scale in the Americas was, if anything, even more catastrophic. And it begins in 1492.

 

 Let us travel back — to a ship's deck in the Caribbean, in the small hours of the morning, 12 October, 1492

 

Columbus and the Making of Discovery

The Journal That Does Not Exist

 

Here is something that should stop every historian of the Americas cold — something that is rarely foregrounded in popular accounts of Columbus.

The original journal of Christopher Columbus's first voyage to the Americas — the foundational document of the entire 'discovery' narrative — does not exist. It has never existed, as far as we can establish, in any form accessible to modern scholarship.

What we have is an abstract — a selective summary, a paraphrase with occasional quotation — made by the Dominican friar Bartolomé de las Casas, probably in the 1530s, from a copy of the original that was itself already a transcription. Las Casas's abstract is what historians work from. The original is gone.

So: the most important document in the history of Western colonialism — the very source of the 'discovery' narrative — is, at its foundation, a document we cannot read. It has been filtered through the hand, the perspective, and the interests of a later colonial interpreter. Does that not tell us something extraordinary?

 

It tells us that Trouillot's first silence was operating from the very first moment. The 'fact' of the discovery — the record of what Columbus saw, said, and did on 12 October 1492 — was created not by Columbus alone, but by the entire apparatus of Spanish colonial documentary culture, including the scribes, the copyists, the archivists, and the friar who decided what to preserve and what to summarise.

Columbus and the Spanish Crown

Christopher Columbus (1451–1506) was a Genoese navigator sailing under Spanish patronage. His four voyages were commissioned by King Ferdinand II of Aragon and Queen Isabella I of Castile — the monarchs who had, in the same year 1492, expelled the Jews from Spain and completed the Reconquista by defeating the last Muslim ruler of Granada. Spain and Portugal were in fierce competition for oceanic trade routes, with Portugal having already established the route around Africa toward India — a route of obvious relevance to South Asian readers. Columbus, on all four voyages, believed he had reached islands off the coast of Asia. He died never knowing otherwise.

Now — even within this mediated, abstracted, filtered text — look at how the encounter is narrated. When Columbus describes the Taíno people of the Caribbean islands — the first human beings he encountered in the Americas — they appear in his journal as:

 

•  Objects to be assessed for their potential as labourers and converts.

•  Evidence of the land's fertility and its suitability for Spanish colonisation.

•  Sources of information about gold — always gold — whose location Columbus is perpetually pressing them to reveal.

 

What they are never treated as — in Columbus's account — are people with their own history, their own political systems, their own knowledge of the geography, ecology, and cosmology of the region. Their perspectives are not recorded. Their names for their own islands are not preserved with any care. Their stories about where they came from, what the stars meant to them, how they governed themselves — none of this makes it into the journal.

And here is the ceremony that crystallises it all.

On the morning of 12 October, Columbus went ashore on the island the Taíno called Guanahani — he renamed it San Salvador — and raised the royal banner of Castile. He took formal legal possession of the island in the name of the Spanish Crown. He had a notary present to certify the act. He read a declaration of possession. This ceremony was performed in full view of assembled Taíno people who had come to the shore to observe these strange newcomers.

What did the Taíno make of it? What did they think was happening?

 

We cannot know — because nobody asked them, and nobody wrote it down. The ceremony did not require their comprehension. It required only a notarial document, a royal standard, and the implicit threat of the swords and firearms that Columbus's crew carried. The legal possession was real not because of any communicative exchange, any consent, any acknowledgement from the island's actual inhabitants — but because Spain had the institutional machinery to make it real. The pen was mighty because the sword was there.

 

Las Casas: Critic and Complicit

 

Now, I need to introduce a complication — because history is always more complicated than it first appears, and it would be intellectually dishonest of me to give you a simple villain-and-victim narrative.

Bartolomé de las Casas, the friar through whose hands the Columbus journal was transmitted to us, was also the most forceful European critic of Spanish colonial violence in the sixteenth century. His Brevísima Relación de la Destruición de las Indias — A Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies, written 1542, published 1552 — is a harrowing, systematic catalogue of Spanish atrocities: massacres, enslavement, torture, starvation. It is one of the most extraordinary documents of moral witness in the history of colonialism.

It is also — and this is where it gets complicated — a document that was almost immediately weaponised by Spain's Protestant rivals across Europe. England, France, and the Netherlands circulated las Casas's account not because they were deeply concerned about Indigenous rights, but because it was extraordinary propaganda against Catholic Spain. Historians call this the 'Black Legend' — the anti-Spanish narrative constructed around the documented atrocities of the conquest.

What does it mean for a victim's testimony to be turned into a weapon in someone else's war?

 

It means the victim is silenced twice. First, by the perpetrator. Then by those who claim to speak on their behalf. The suffering of Indigenous Americans became, through the Black Legend, a tool of European religious and commercial rivalry. Their voices were appropriated — converted from testimony into propaganda — without their consent and without any accompanying commitment to actually stopping the violence or restoring their sovereignty. This is Trouillot's silencing operating at its most subtle and its most damaging.

And las Casas himself? He participated in one of the most revealing silences in the entire history of colonial thought. In 1550 and 1551, the Spanish Emperor Charles V convened a remarkable debate — the Valladolid Junta — to settle the theological and legal question of whether the conquest of the Americas was morally justified.

The Valladolid Debate (1550–1551)

The Valladolid debate is considered the first major European debate about the rights of colonised peoples and is of great significance in the history of international law. It pitted the theologian Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda, who argued that Indigenous Americans were 'natural slaves' in Aristotle's sense and could be justifiably conquered, against Bartolomé de las Casas, who defended Indigenous humanity and rational capacity. Charles V — Holy Roman Emperor and King of Spain — temporarily suspended further conquest pending the debate. No definitive verdict was reached, and the conquests resumed.

Sepúlveda argued Indigenous people were natural slaves. Las Casas argued they were rational human beings fully capable of receiving Christianity. The debate lasted months.

Here is the question I want you to sit with: who was not at Valladolid?

 

The Indigenous peoples whose humanity was being debated were not present. They had no voice in the proceedings. Two European men argued about whether Indigenous Americans were fully human — and the Indigenous Americans themselves were not consulted, not represented, not asked. The debate about them proceeded entirely without them. This is a silence so complete, so structurally invisible to its participants, that most contemporary accounts of the debate don't even register it as a problem. And that is precisely the most insidious kind of silence Trouillot is pointing to.

 

From the debate hall of Valladolid, let us move to a beach — and to one of the most extraordinary documents in the history of colonialism —

 

The Requerimiento — Law as Theatre

 

Imagine you are standing on a beach somewhere in the Americas. The year is, let us say, 1515. You have never seen a European before. You are part of a large coastal community. You have your own government, your own priests, your own legal system, your own history. Suddenly, a group of armed strangers arrives in large boats. They come ashore. One of them — or sometimes, in one documented case, a man on a boat offshore — begins reading aloud from a piece of paper. In Spanish. Or sometimes in Latin. Nobody translates.

The document being read is called the Requerimiento — the 'Requirement' — drafted in 1513 by the Spanish jurist Juan López de Palacios Rubios, and used by conquistadors throughout the Americas for several decades thereafter.

Let me summarise what it says, because you need to hear it to believe it.

The Requerimiento begins with a brief history of the world: God created the heavens and the earth; from one man and one woman, all of humanity descended; God gave authority over all souls to Saint Peter and his successors, the Popes of Rome. Then it informs its audience that Pope Alexander VI, in 1493, donated the Americas to the Spanish Crown. Therefore, the Spanish king and queen are now the lawful sovereigns of this territory and its people. Therefore, the assembled audience must immediately acknowledge the authority of the Church and the Spanish Crown.

And if they refuse — or, just as importantly, if they fail to respond at all, which of course they would, since they cannot understand a word — the Requerimiento concludes:

…we shall take you and your wives and your children, and shall make slaves of them, and as such shall sell and dispose of them as their Highnesses may command; and we shall take away your goods, and shall do you all the mischief and damage that we can, as to vassals who do not obey… — The Requerimiento (1513), trans. Lewis Hanke

Now — is this a legal document or a theatrical performance?

 

It is both, and that is precisely the point. The Requerimiento was not designed to communicate. Nobody seriously expected an Indigenous audience to hear this in Spanish, understand the legal intricacies of papal jurisdiction, consider the theological claims, and respond with either submission or reasoned counter-argument — all in the time it took to read the thing aloud.

The Requerimiento was designed to produce a written record. It needed to be read in front of witnesses — Spanish witnesses — and those witnesses' testimony would subsequently form part of the legal archive justifying whatever violence followed. The 'fact' of Indigenous non-submission was manufactured by the document itself, independent of the actual historical reality of the encounter. In Trouillot's terms, this is fact creation at its most nakedly coercive: the source is produced to legitimise the sword, not to describe reality.

The historian Patricia Seed observed that the Requerimiento was sometimes read on ships while still at sea, out of earshot of any Indigenous person. It was sometimes read to trees and empty beaches after a battle had already been won. The Spanish soldiers who used it reportedly found it darkly comic — the chronicler Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo records asking Palacios Rubios, the jurist who drafted it, whether the conscience of the Spaniards was truly satisfied by the document. Palacios Rubios laughed.

The Papal Donation and the Doctrine of Discovery

The Inter Caetera papal bull of 1493, issued by Pope Alexander VI (the Spanish-born Rodrigo Borgia), divided the non-Christian world between Spain and Portugal along a meridian west of the Azores. The theological basis was the 'Doctrine of Discovery': the principle that Christian princes had rightful sovereignty over lands not ruled by Christian rulers. This doctrine undergirded US property law well into the nineteenth century — Chief Justice John Marshall relied on it in Johnson v. M'Intosh (1823) to establish that Indigenous peoples held only a right of occupancy, not legal title, to their lands. Astonishingly, the Catholic Church did not formally repudiate the Doctrine of Discovery until March 2023.

He laughed. Because everyone involved understood that the Requerimiento was not law in any meaningful sense. It was Toledo steel with paperwork attached. It was the sword making the pen mighty.

 

Let us now go further inland — to the great libraries of the Americas, and to the fires that consumed them —

 

Fire and Ink — The Destruction of Mesoamerican Writing

What Was Burned?

 

I want to ask you to hold a number in your mind.

Four.

Four Maya codices — folded books made from bark paper — are known to have survived the Spanish colonial period. The Dresden Codex, in Germany. The Madrid Codex, in Spain. The Paris Codex, in France. The Grolier Codex, in Mexico.

Note, first, where they are: scattered across European collections, far from the communities that produced them. Note, second, what they represent: the entire surviving written heritage of one of the most intellectually sophisticated civilisations in human history.

The Maya had developed, independently and over centuries, a writing system of extraordinary complexity. They had astronomical calendars more accurate than anything in contemporaneous Europe. They had mathematical systems that independently invented the concept of zero — a concept that South Asian scholars will immediately recognise, having themselves developed one of the world's first notations for zero in the Brahmi numerical system. They had books recording genealogies, histories of dynasties, ritual calendars, medical knowledge, cosmological systems. They had, in short, a literature.

So where did it go?

 

In July 1562, the Franciscan friar Diego de Landa supervised what the Spanish called an auto-da-fé — a ritual act of faith, associated with the Inquisition — at the town of Maní in the Yucatán peninsula of Mexico. In a single afternoon, he burned an unknown number of Maya codices. He also burned sacred images, ritual objects, and what he described as instruments of the devil.

He later wrote about it himself, with a chilling mixture of self-justification and inadvertent acknowledgement:

We found a large number of books in these characters and, as they contained nothing in which there was not to be seen superstition and lies of the devil, we burned them all, which they regretted to an amazing degree, and which caused them much affliction. — Diego de Landa, Relación de las Cosas de Yucatán (c. 1566)

'They regretted it to an amazing degree.' Yes. I imagine they did. Centuries of accumulated knowledge, gone in a single afternoon. The loss is incalculable.

And de Landa was not unique. The first Archbishop of Mexico, Juan de Zumárraga, reportedly burned vast quantities of Aztec books and sacred objects in Texcoco in 1530. The systematic destruction of Mesoamerican writing accompanied the conquest as surely as military violence did. The archive of the conquered was destroyed to make room for the archive of the conqueror.

The Paradox of De Landa

Here is the extraordinary paradox I want you to wrestle with: how do we know about Maya culture? What is our primary source?

 

Bartolomé de las Casas — the man who transmitted Columbus's journal — had a Yucatán counterpart. De Landa himself, shortly after the burning, wrote an account of Maya culture, history, customs, and — most valuably — the Maya writing system. His Relación de las Cosas de Yucatán is now the foundational scholarly text for the study of the very culture he helped destroy.

Think about what this means. Our primary source for Maya knowledge is the account written by the man who burned the Maya books. In a European language. Preserved in European archives. Subsequently interpreted by European and American scholars.

The coloniser's account of the colonised becomes, through the accident of archival preservation, the primary source for the colonised's own history. This is Trouillot's second silence — the making of archives — in perhaps its most extreme and most visible form. The archive does not neutrally preserve the past. It actively determines which pasts are accessible, and to whom, and in whose voice.

Mesoamerican Civilisations

For South Asian readers less familiar with pre-Columbian history: the Maya civilisation flourished in what is now southern Mexico, Guatemala, Belize, and Honduras, with a peak period between roughly 250 and 900 CE. The Aztec (Mexica) Empire, centred at Tenochtitlan — a city built on an island in Lake Texcoco, now the site of Mexico City — was at its height when the Spanish arrived in 1519. Tenochtitlan had a population estimated at 200,000–300,000, making it one of the largest cities in the world at the time — larger than London, Paris, or any contemporaneous European city. The comparison with Mughal Delhi or Vijayanagara might be a useful scale reference.

There is, however, a counter-story here — and we must tell it.

The Franciscan friar Bernardino de Sahagún undertook, between 1540 and 1585, the most ambitious ethnographic project of the sixteenth century: a twelve-book encyclopaedia of Aztec culture, history, religion, medicine, and natural knowledge, compiled through systematic interviews with Indigenous elders and recorded in both Nahuatl and Spanish. The result, known as the Florentine Codex, is extraordinary.

But the scholars who have studied it most carefully — James Lockhart, Frances Karttunen — have shown something remarkable: the Nahuatl-language portions of the text, the sections written in the Indigenous language of the informants themselves, preserve perspectives, framings, and concerns that exceed, contradict, and sometimes subvert the Spanish framing texts. The Indigenous voice is not simply absent. It is present, embedded, constrained — but present. This is theoretically crucial. Trouillot insists that silencing is never total. Voices inscribe themselves in the interstices of the colonial archive. And it is in those interstices that decolonial historiography begins its work.

 

 From Mexico, let us sail north — to the grey shores of New England, and to a story most of you will have encountered in its most sanitised form —

 

Squanto, the Pilgrims, and the Myth of Thanksgiving

 

The Mayflower and the Pilgrim Fathers

The 'Pilgrim Fathers' were a group of English Protestant separatists who sailed to North America on the ship Mayflower in 1620, landing at what is now Plymouth, Massachusetts. In the United States, Thanksgiving — observed on the fourth Thursday of November — commemorates a harvest celebration held in autumn 1621 between these settlers and Wampanoag Indigenous people. It is among the most widely observed American national holidays and is accompanied by a powerful founding mythology of intercultural harmony and gratitude.

If you have any familiarity with American popular culture — and given the global reach of Hollywood, most of us do — you will have some version of the Thanksgiving story in your head. The brave Pilgrims, fleeing religious persecution. The hard winter. The providential appearance of a helpful Indian — Squanto — who teaches them to plant corn. The feast of fellowship. The founding of America as a project of multicultural harmony.

It is a beautiful story. It is also, in almost every significant particular, a distortion of a far darker and more complex history.

Let us begin with Squanto.

His real name was Tisquantum. He was a member of the Patuxent band of the Wampanoag Nation. And he had already had one of the most extraordinary and harrowing biographies in the history of the Atlantic world before the Pilgrims ever set foot ashore.

In 1614, the English sea captain Thomas Hunt kidnapped Tisquantum, along with approximately twenty other Wampanoag men, and took them to Spain — where he sold them as slaves. Tisquantum was bought by Franciscan friars, who educated him and eventually allowed him to seek passage to England. He reached London, where he was taken in by a merchant with interests in the New England trade. He learned English — fluently. He attempted multiple times to return to his homeland, finally succeeding in 1619.

What did he find when he arrived home?

 

Nothing. Or rather — the absence of everything he had left behind.

Between 1616 and 1619, a catastrophic epidemic — almost certainly introduced by earlier European fishing and trading expeditions — had swept through coastal New England. The Patuxent, Tisquantum's own people, were entirely gone. His village had been wiped out. The cleared fields, the stored food, the community structures — all abandoned.

When the Pilgrims arrived at Plymouth in 1620, they were settling, quite literally, at the site of a cemetery. They were farming fields that Tisquantum's people had cleared. They were eating stored corn that the epidemic's survivors had left behind. The 'wilderness' they described encountering was not virgin land. It was a landscape in mourning.

So why did Tisquantum help them? Why did he teach them, negotiate for them, translate for them?

 

The historian David Silverman, in his meticulous 2019 study This Land Is Their Land, argues that Tisquantum's assistance was not simply Indigenous generosity. It was a political strategy — the strategy of a man without a community, in a world remade by violence, trying to find a position of safety and influence within the new power structures that the epidemics and English arrivals had created. Tisquantum needed the Pilgrims as patrons. He manipulated both the Wampanoag sachem Massasoit and the Pilgrim leadership for his own strategic purposes. He was a sophisticated political actor navigating an extraordinarily dangerous situation.

He died in 1622 — probably from the same epidemic disease complex that had destroyed his people.

The standard Thanksgiving narrative takes this story — kidnapping, enslavement, epidemic catastrophe, the destruction of an entire people, complex political agency in the face of overwhelming dispossession — and converts it into: a helpful Indian appeared and showed the settlers how to plant corn.

This is Trouillot's fourth silence — retrospective significance — at its most culturally powerful. The myth doesn't just omit inconvenient facts. It actively inverts the moral weight of the history. Dispossession becomes assistance. Catastrophe becomes providence. And this inversion is then institutionalised in a national holiday observed by hundreds of millions of people every year.

 

The Empty Land That Was Never Empty

The English colonial narrative in New England required one further legal and philosophical fiction: the doctrine of vacuum domicilium — 'empty dwelling' — the claim that unenclosed, uncultivated land was legally vacant and available for settlement, regardless of its inhabitants.

John Locke, in his Second Treatise of Government (1689), gave this its most influential formulation: only labour — specifically European-style agricultural enclosure and improvement — created legitimate property. Since Indigenous peoples did not improve land in this sense, their territories were legally 'waste.'

Do you see the circularity of this argument?

 

The English colonists encountered partially cleared forest, managed landscapes, cultivated fields — and described it as wilderness. They looked at Indigenous agricultural systems, including the polyculture technique of the Three Sisters — corn, beans, and squash grown together in a system that maintained soil fertility while maximising yield — and described it as primitive gathering. The extensive controlled burning that Indigenous peoples used to manage woodland and encourage game was described as natural forest.

And here is the final irony, documented by the environmental historian William Cronon in Changes in the Land (1983): the 'empty' landscape the English colonists encountered in coastal New England was, to a very significant degree, a product of the 1616–1619 epidemic. The cleared fields were cleared because their cultivators had died. The 'providential' availability of land was, in fact, the direct consequence of European-introduced disease. The pen — the legal and philosophical writing that declared the land vacant — was mighty because the sword — in this case the invisible sword of epidemic disease — had prepared the ground.

 

 Which brings us to where history always brings us — to the present, and to the question of what we do with it —

 

Recovering the Silenced — Decolonial Historiography

 

I have spent the last half an hour showing you how the 'discovery' narratives of America were made — the specific mechanisms by which Indigenous voices were silenced, Indigenous writing was destroyed, and the coercive power of the Spanish and English colonial projects was converted into archival and historical authority.

But I want to be careful not to leave you with a narrative of pure victimhood and total silence. Because that narrative is itself a form of erasure.

Indigenous peoples were not passive. They were not silent. They resisted, adapted, inscribed themselves in the colonial archive in ways that are only now being fully recognised by the scholarly community.

The scholars James Lockhart and Frances Karttunen opened up what Lockhart called the 'mundane record of Indigenous life' — a vast archive of documents written in Indigenous languages, particularly Nahuatl, using the European alphabetic script. Nahua nobles used Spanish legal procedures to protect community lands. Mixtec scribes maintained pictorial manuscripts alongside alphabetic documents. Maya communities, after the destruction of the codices, produced entirely new books — the Chilam Balam, chronicles of history and prophecy written in the Maya language in European script.

And the oral traditions that colonial authorities could never fully destroy — the stories, the songs, the genealogical knowledge, the ecological understanding passed from generation to generation — survived in forms that contemporary Indigenous scholars are now articulating as legitimate historical evidence in their own right.

 

But here is a harder question — one I want to put to you, because we are the ones who need to answer it: what is the responsibility of academic historians and anthropologists in the face of this history?

 

Vine Deloria Jr., the Standing Rock Sioux scholar whose 1969 book Custer Died for Your Sins is one of the great polemical works of twentieth-century American intellectual history, made a pointed observation about academic anthropology. He noted that Indigenous communities had become, in effect, a laboratory for generations of academic careers — that scholars arrived, collected data, wrote dissertations and monographs, achieved tenure, and departed, while the communities they had studied remained in poverty and political marginalisation. He was not wrong.

Linda Tuhiwai Smith, the Māori scholar whose Decolonizing Methodologies (1999) has become one of the most widely cited works in Indigenous studies globally, goes further: she argues that the entire epistemological framework of Western academic research — its assumptions about what counts as evidence, what counts as knowledge, who counts as an expert — was constructed in and for the colonial project, and cannot be made decolonial simply by adding Indigenous content while retaining European methods.

The Columbian Exchange and South Asia

The term 'Columbian Exchange,' coined by the historian Alfred Crosby in 1972, refers to the two-way transfer of plants, animals, diseases, and cultural practices between the Americas and the Old World after 1492. From the Americas came maize (corn), potatoes, tomatoes, chilli peppers, cacao, tobacco, and many other crops. These transformed agriculture and diet across Asia, Africa, and Europe. Chilli peppers, now absolutely central to cuisines from Karachi to Chennai, arrived in South Asia via Portuguese trade routes in the sixteenth century. The potato, from the Andes, became a staple across the subcontinent. What is now considered 'traditional' South Asian food is, in part, a product of Indigenous American agriculture — a contribution that the 'discovery' narrative almost entirely fails to acknowledge.

The decolonial turn in historiography and anthropology — which includes not only Indigenous studies but also the Black Atlantic tradition of Trouillot, the subaltern studies school developed in South Asia by scholars including Ranajit Guha, Dipesh Chakrabarty, and Gayatri Spivak, and the Latin American coloniality/modernity framework of Walter Mignolo and Aníbal Quijano — represents a fundamental challenge to the discipline's foundational assumptions.

It is not merely a challenge about whose stories get told. It is a challenge about what counts as a story, what counts as evidence, and who gets to decide.

And has it worked? Has the decolonial turn changed how we do history?

 

Partially. The quincentennial of Columbus's voyage in 1992 was a watershed. The quadricentennial in 1892 — the occasion for the Chicago World's Columbian Exposition, a spectacular celebration of European civilisational achievement — had been a festival of untroubled colonial triumphalism. The quincentennial, by contrast, was met with sustained Indigenous protest across the Americas, with academic conferences dedicated to interrogating the 'encounter' rather than celebrating the 'discovery,' and with a significant shift in scholarly language and framing.

Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz's An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States (2014) demonstrates what methodological inversion looks like in practice: she begins with Indigenous perspectives and moves toward the European incursion, rather than the reverse. The result is a history in which westward expansion and settlement appear as what they were from Indigenous perspectives — a sequence of wars, treaty violations, forced removals, and demographic catastrophes.

Archaeological and genetic research have contributed independently. DNA analysis and bioarchaeological study of pre-contact and post-contact populations have documented the demographic catastrophe following European contact: a mortality rate estimated at between 50 and 90 per cent of the pre-Columbian population of the Americas. To put that in terms that might feel more immediate: the scholarly consensus is that between 40 and 100 million people died from epidemic disease, warfare, enslavement, and famine in the century following Columbus's arrival. For comparison — and this comparison is not meant to diminish either tragedy but to give scale — the Black Death, the bubonic plague pandemic that devastated Europe in the fourteenth century, killed approximately one-third of the European population. The demographic catastrophe of the Americas dwarfs it.

This was not discovered recently. It was known — and suppressed, minimised, or rationalised — for centuries. Because it is incompatible with the narrative of providential discovery.

 

Which brings me to my conclusion

 

CONCLUSION: The Pen, the Sword, and the Ongoing Work

 

I began this lecture with a sword. Let me end with one.

The Toledo steel in Das's image has, in the twenty-first century, taken new forms. It is no longer primarily a blade. It is research funding allocated to some projects and not others. It is the editorial boards at major journals that remain predominantly white and Western. It is citation practices that reproduce the same canonical thinkers and ignore Indigenous scholarship. It is museum collections built on looted objects — the Maya codices in Dresden and Paris are, let us be honest, colonial spoils — that remain in European institutions on the grounds that they are better preserved there. It is the Doctrine of Discovery that was only formally repudiated in 2023.

The pen, in other words, is still not equally mighty. And recognising that is not merely an exercise in historical guilt. It is a prerequisite for doing our discipline honestly.

So what does Trouillot ask of us, finally?

 

He asks us to interrogate our archives. To ask not only what they contain but what they exclude, and why. To treat silences not as neutral absences but as historical evidence of power. To resist the temptation of what he calls 'the formula of the empty moment' — the historian's habit of noting that evidence is absent and then proceeding as if the absence were unimportant.

He asks us, in short, to take seriously the possibility that the most important things in history are sometimes precisely the things the archive will not tell us — because the archive was built by those with the sword, to serve the interests of those with the sword.

And Das asks us to notice the glint of Toledo steel every time we sit down to read a colonial document. To ask: who was holding this pen? What sword made it mighty? And whose story did it displace?

 

The 'discovery' of America was not an event. It was a narrative project — one that required, as its precondition, the simultaneous construction of European historical subjects and the erasure of Indigenous ones. The recovery of what was silenced is not merely scholarly housekeeping. It is, as both Das and Trouillot insist, in their very different registers, an ethical and a political obligation.

Trouillot closes Silencing the Past with a formulation I want to leave you with:

The past does not exist independently from the present. Indeed, the past is only past because there is a present, just as I can point to something over there only because I am here. — Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Silencing the Past (1995)

We are the 'here' from which the past becomes visible — or remains invisible. The silences of the archive are not only historical. They are, in every sense that matters, ours.