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CAROLINE DODDS PENNOCK: My name is Caroline Dodds Pennock. I am Senior Lecturer in International History at the University of Sheffield in the UK. I started as a historian of the Aztec-Mexica world

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before moving more towards the colonial period and the transatlantic experience. And my latest book is called On Savage Shores-- How Indigenous Americans Discovered Europe.

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And it looks at the earliest indigenous travellers to Europe after 1492, flipping the script essentially. So we're not just looking at white men travelling west and discovering the Americas, and instead thinking about

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the many thousands of indigenous people who came to Europe around the founding of Jamestown. That's a big question, because I use so many different kinds of sources in my research.

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When I started as an Aztec-Mexica historian, working on indigenous histories in Mexico, you were really constrained by the fact that when the Spanish arrived, they

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destroyed the vast majority of indigenous sources. So for the period before 1521, the fall of Tenochtitlan, you were essentially using sources that are material culture, so archaeology, big buildings,

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the temples, remains that archaeologists find, or else working with one of the very few pictographic sources left in Mexico for that period. More commonly though, as a historian

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working on indigenous histories in the colonial period, you end up working with sources that were created either by, or for, or under the aegis of the colonial empire. That doesn't mean that indigenous peoples

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aren't creating them. But they're operating in this colonial context. And so you have to use lots and lots of different kinds of source to gather indigenous histories.

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For example, we use codices, which are often created talking about the indigenous peoples themselves, sometimes by indigenous people sometimes in collaboration with them like the Florentine Codex which

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is a huge history of the Aztec-Mexica people. We have missionary records, writings by conquistadors, letters, and writings, and city chronicles by the indigenous peoples themselves

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talking about their own histories and their own experiences. You have legal records. One of the big sources for my most recent book

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was the records of freedom suits, so applications by indigenous peoples for their freedom in Spain, who've been illegally enslaved. And as part of those, you get to hear

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the histories of their lives. Because they have to tell people what's happened to them in order to try and get free. But of course, legal records have their own problems.

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So what you're doing is putting together snippets from lots and lots of different kinds of source-- official records, personal testimonies, city records, and then different kinds of media--

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so material culture, pictographic sources. Sometimes in some areas, so for example in Peru, they would use things like quipus, the knotted ropes, that were used to record indigenous histories.

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It's a case of putting together fragments from many, many different places and points of view in order to study the history that you're looking at. There are quite a lot of challenges

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when it comes to accessing indigenous histories in the colonial world. As I've mentioned, in the case of the Aztec-Mexica, the vast majority of the really rich pictographic record

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produced by the Aztec peoples, what we know as the Aztecs, they would have called themselves the Mexica or the Tenochca. That was destroyed by the Spanish who believed

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it was a corrupting influence. So we have an issue simply of availability of materials. Archaeological record is very constrained by what people choose to dig up.

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So we have an awful lot of money that goes into digging up pyramids for example and ballcourts, what we call monumental archaeology that is good for tourism, and much less in terms

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of people's everyday lives. Because bits of pot and the foundations of houses aren't perhaps quite as attractive of money as big monumental sites.

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So we're are limited by what's available to us. We're also then limited by the perspectives that influence those sources when they're created in the colonial world.

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The archive itself is structured by certain kinds of expectations. So even indigenous peoples writing about their own histories in the colonial world

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might feel that they need to conform to Spanish expectations, to Spanish structures. They may want to seem more hispanized in order to succeed in that period.

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They may choose to conceal certain aspects of their own past really deliberately. And that of course is completely understandable, but it can make it difficult for us to access

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those parts of the past. We're also very restricted by the fact that an enormous amount of these sources are created by elite men.

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So even when indigenous peoples are involved in the creation of sources, it's often elite men. So for example, the Florentine Codex which was edited by a Franciscan friar called Bernardino de Sahagun,

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he works with hundreds of indigenous informants to collect a history of their past, and works with indigenous collaborators to turn it into 12 big books which

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tell the history of the Aztec-Mexica world, or particularly of the Tenochca world, the capital city. But all the people he interviews or all the people we know about are noble men.

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And so there are big gaps in that record in terms of people's experience and the perspective. As a historian of gender, I would really, really like to know what a society like the Mexica who were really

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obsessed with blood thought about menstruation, for example. But that doesn't appear in the sources at all because you have elite men.

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And they don't think to ask those kinds of questions. And they probably wouldn't have felt comfortable recording the answers if they did. So you have all these limitations simply

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by virtue of who is asking the questions. Legal records themselves have their own expectations and structures. So even if people are telling their own histories

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as part of an appeal, for example, they will choose to structure that within the framework that will get them the thing that they're looking for.

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It's really a case of being aware that there are so many different perspectives influencing these sources, and being creative in trying to overcome those silences, and listening to the voices of indigenous peoples

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in those sources and today in trying to overcome those challenges. There's an extent to which we can't overcome the absences in the record.

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We just have to recognise that they're there. Sometimes what's not written down can tell us as much about as what is, about the history as what is. And so I think it's a bit difficult

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to say we can overcome the challenges. What we can do is to approach these sources with a really strong awareness of their limitations and of the influences which are acting on them,

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and recognising that there's such a huge diversity of them that all do different things, and trying to bring them together in a way that is creative. So if we take maps, for example, that's

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a source that often shows all those different influences. It may be at the same time a legal record, a social record. It may be being created by indigenous artists to tell an indigenous history but in order

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to appeal to a Spanish legal system. And just knowing that all those influences are acting on it enables you to try and tell a productive history even if it's not always a complete one.

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In a way, it depends what you're approaching these sources for, what you're trying to do with them. Because as I've mentioned, there are many many different forces acting on these documents.

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So it's incredibly important I think for me first of all to keep in mind the indigenous people that you are looking at and that they may have approached their lives, their histories, with a totally

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different mindset to the one that you have or to the one that the colonial records are taking. So the Aztec-Mexica people, for example, saw history as being cyclical.

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The world comes round and round. And so their calendar has particularly key dates in the cycle at which things are expected to happen, or are particularly portentous.

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And they interpret their past and their daily experience within this cyclical supernatural framework. But when colonial histories come along, they try and impose a European linear framework

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on those histories. So for example, there's a friar called Diego Duran who was very sympathetic to indigenous peoples in terms of believing they had a great past,

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that they were a real-- in his point of view a kind of a great civilization, and had a history that was worth recording. And he wrote a big history of the indigenous people

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having interviewed the Aztec-Mexica people. And he records this long history. But what he does is to turn it into a European dynastic history, a history of kings and emperors.

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And so he's imposing a framework on it that really wasn't how the people experiencing it at the time would have seen what was happening. Now that doesn't mean that that source isn't useful.

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He gives us huge amounts of information, and details, and clearly had access to pictographic sources and to informants who we don't have access to now. But when we use his work, we have

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to start with the viewpoint that the indigenous peoples may not have all seen it in this same way. And of course, with the viewpoint that there are many, many, many different indigenous peoples.

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There are more than 60 recognised languages in Mexico today, and hundreds more have been lost. So we have to recognise that there's no thinking about the colonial world and indigenous peoples.

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There are many different perspectives operating here and they may all have very different points of view. There are some shared points of view, but there are also many specificities.

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So one thing I would say to bear in mind as well is that the work you're doing has to be really deeply informed by place and time. Think about the people who are living there

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at that moment, what they were experiencing, how they may have been responding to colonialism, the many different responses that even happened within one community or one type of people.

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In Mexico, very frequently what's seen as the indigenous perspective was that of resistance to colonialism or of agency within the colonial world.

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The Tlaxcalans allied with the Spanish very early on during the conquest, and they see the Spanish victory as it's usually framed as their victory.

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It's a triumph for them. And they succeed within the constraints of the colonial world, and the necessity to convert, and so on.

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They succeed enormously by comparison with other cities. And they go to great lengths to secure their privileged position within that framework. And so what you have is a very different experience

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between different groups and then also between even different peoples within that group. Of course elite men are having very different experiences to ordinary people.

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And you then again have descendants who are often forgotten of African and African descended peoples in Mexico. And all these people are mixing.

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They're influencing each other. This is a really diverse and multiple framework. And if I could emphasise one thing really, it's just going into the research,

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being aware that there is no one perspective. There are many, many different ones. And you can't hope to understand all of them. But you have to work out what questions you

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want to ask of your sources. And be aware that the answer might differ depending on exactly who you're looking at and when you're looking at. There are, as I've said, always going

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to be gaps in the archival record, things that we simply can't access using traditional Western methods. And there's been amazing work done

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in recent years on possible ways to speak to those important experiences that we're unable to access. One really productive way of thinking has been done by people like Saidiya Hartman who

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have written creative nonfictions, who have imagined themselves in her case into the experiences of African-American, women of descendants of enslaved people, combining personal experiences, personal reflections,

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with those histories and allowing them to speak from the present to the past. I think the involvement of descendant communities can be an incredibly important way to fill those gaps.

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But we have to accept that sometimes descendant communities don't want to be involved with that research, and absolutely rightly so. Nonetheless, some of the richest work

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that's been done in recent years has been by scholars, academics, activists, and thinkers, writers and other indigenous community elders for example who have worked in indigenous communities

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and with indigenous peoples to gather their own experiences, their knowledge, their wisdom, their understandings, and to use that to speak to the historical record. There was some amazing work done in San Juan Chamelco by Ashley

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Kistler who worked with a Maya community there about the histories of a man called Don Juan Aj Pop B'atz who travelled to the Spanish court. He saw prince Philip the second in the 1540s.

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And the group he travelled with actually were the first recorded people making drinking chocolates in Europe. It's an incredible story. And one of the things her research shows

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is how much richer it can be if you include testimonies of contemporary indigenous communities. She worked with indigenous people in the community

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to collect understandings memories, heritage, and to record that. And it made such a difference to the way we understand that story and why it matters.

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He's become a hero to his people in that region because he converted to catholicism. He was the first to convert to catholicism in that region. And he did that deliberately to save his people,

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having seen the decimation of communities around. And he's also a hero because when he went to court, he refused to bow to the prince, because he said I am a king as well.

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I shouldn't be bowing to you. So even though he's operating within this colonial framework, and obviously there are constraints to what he's able to do, and he's

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having to respond to enormous amounts of pressure. He is able to maintain that respect of his people. And that's something that's very much come down into the community testimonies and into their histories.

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And that now has transformed what's happening in the community. They have a road named after him. They have a book for children.

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He's learned about in schools. And they also shared with Ashley Kistler an archival record which is copied and recopied every few generations in order to retain a particular history

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of that moment. So there are many ways, of course, we can try and fill these archival silences. But one of the most important for me is listening

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to indigenous peoples and how they think we can do that, or perhaps in some cases that we shouldn't do it. That it's simply not for us, that history. That it is more important to the community and it's

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not for outsiders. And in Chamelco they have really focused on using that history within their own community. But it has also informed bigger debates.

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I do also think that it's important to be able to speculate. But it has to be informed speculation. For me, there's a really clear line as a historian.

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It's perfectly fine to say, I wonder if they may have felt like this, may have behaved in this way, because of this reason. So for example, many of the travellers to Europe

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who I study in my book have left no testimonies themselves to help us understand how they felt about the experiences they were having, or why they did the things that they did.

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And so my book is full of informed speculation. Where I say, coming from, for example a woodland community, what must it have been like to be in London, this big city of stone, and brick, and noise.

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And we can speculate about that. But for me as a historian the responsibility is always to draw the line between what I know and what I'm speculating about.

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So when we're doing that kind of thing, it has to be done really, really carefully. Reading against the grain is essentially using sources for a purpose other than the one

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for which they were intended. So you take a colonial source. And you look for the absences, the gaps, the silences. And you read between the lines to try and find

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something which sits beyond the colonial structures and narratives that it is overtly promoting. So to take one example in my own work, I started actually as a historian of gender.

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But by the time that my doctorate was becoming a book, I was really focused on trying to understand how indigenous society could commit human sacrifice without being dehumanised by it.

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And so what I was doing was taking sources like the Florentine Codex which were written by missionaries for the purposes of recording indigenous religion so that other missionaries could recognise it and stamp it out.

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These are even if they're ethnographic work and supposedly recording cultures, they're overtly evangelical sources intended to promote christianity.

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I took those sources and used them to understand how Aztec-Mexica culture thought about human sacrifice, or as far as I could tell why they were engaging with it, why it mattered to their society,

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how individuals engaged with it, why it was part of their daily life, of their life cycle. How children were in a taught to become priests, how they were engaged into that structure,

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that belief system. So for example, we have these amazing speeches that were recorded for the purpose of conversion of colonisation.

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And I took those and tried to see them as something happening within a living context and to see how that would change their meaning. That's what reading against the grain is.

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It's taking the sources, and flipping the perspective, and trying to see them for something other than the original purpose they were intended. It's a really difficult question because the advice

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I would give to someone approaching a colonial period would depend on which colonial period they are studying. So the first piece of advice I would give to people studying indigenous histories in colonial contexts

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is to really understand the specificity of the place and time that you're looking at. So to understand that there's no such thing as colonial history, there are only many, many different historical contexts

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periods times moments. I guess this is advice just about doing history generally in many ways to understand that moment. But part of that and why it's so important for indigenous

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histories is understanding that there are so many different indigenous histories, so many different voices, so many languages, so many perspectives that are informing those histories.

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So first of all, to start with really trying to gain a deep understanding of the period, the place, the time, and also the variety of indigenous perspectives that exist at that place and time.

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The second piece of advice I would give is just to listen to indigenous voices, to listen to contemporary indigenous communities, to read indigenous scholars, activists, artists, authors.

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Indigenous peoples remain underrepresented in the academy. But there are so many amazing people coming through now, people like Nick Estes whose

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work on indigenous protest and resistance shows the long tradition of indigenous resistance around land and water, in particular, connecting contemporary protest and showing

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why those legalities matter all through deep indigenous histories. You have wonderful writers like Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, who wrote An Indigenous Peoples History of the United States

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that tells that history from a totally different point of view. And similarly, Ned Blackhawk whose great new book The Rediscovery of America just came out.

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And he does an amazing job of telling us history with indigenous peoples as the protagonist they always should have been. So it's not just an indigenous history.

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It totally reframes indigenous history when we recognise why indigenous peoples were important in the history of the United States. It's I really hope something that

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becomes a textbook for United States history courses because it just tells the story in a totally different way to think about indigenous peoples as being there at that time.

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Philip Deloria is amazing. There's also David Treuer has great work. My friend and colleague, Leila Blackbird has amazing histories coming through.

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And I would also mention finally Kyle Mays, who wrote An Afro-Indigenous History of the United States. African histories and African-American histories and indigenous histories are often seen as in opposition

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to each other or running parallel to each other, and he shows incredibly powerfully how they've intersected and overlapped, and I think is a great example of why we need to recognise

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and listen to indigenous voices now for understanding why these histories still matter today. This is something that I have been really informed by in the last decade or so of my work I. I trained in Oxford.

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I didn't come up being able to hear indigenous peoples speaking about their own past. When I learned history in Oxford in the '90s, I learned that you should centre indigenous histories.

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You should talk about them. But nobody said you should listen to indigenous people. And for me, the last decade or so-- and social media, and digital media, and the internet has been incredibly

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transformative in allowing this-- has really educated me and helped me understand why these history matters so much. And it's totally transformed my point of view.

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And so I can't do better than to recommend that people seek out these voices and make the effort to listen to indigenous scholars, writers, thinkers, elders in doing this work.