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M. Bianet Castellanos, Lourdes Gutiérrez Nájera, and Arturo J. Aldama, eds., Comparative Indigeneities of the Américas: Toward a Hemispheric Approach. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2012. 376 pages. ISBN 978-0-81652101-2. $37.95 USD.
That in this book's title the word Américas is spelled thusly speaks to what this edited collection is all about. It indeed in many ways is a "hemispheric approach"-about Indigenous people, their identity, their resistance to an ongoing colonial project, their resilience and survival, and their inherent sovereignty, across the Western hemisphere of North and Latin America. But in another way, the Spanish spelling of the word conjures up the type of European colonialism that the authors of the essays here are trying to show that Indigenous groups in the region are creatively resisting. The same is true with the editors' curious choice of using English and Spanish translations of the "ancient Aztec poem" (vii) "Huehuetlatolli" as the book's epigraph. Even the word "Aztec" is a colonial mistranslation of the Nahua people's name for themselves. This slew of unfortunate contradictions mars what readers see first when opening the book, and it is one of the things that I wish the volume's editors had been more attentive to.
Nonetheless, this is an important collection. Its twenty-one chapters, re...