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The stories colonizers tell about Diné people represent them as adaptors, uncontrollable, and unruly. These wounding narratives justify the displacement and dispossession of Diné people, masking the ongoing violence of settler colonialism. 

Bundle: Life, Stories, and Hope Across Diné Worlds challenges and dismantles these harmful depictions. By shifting the paradigm away from anthropological lenses, this book offers an exploration of bundling: the active, physical, spiritual, and ideological practice through which Diné people assemble stories, tools, and knowledge. From world shifts detailed in oral narratives to the present deadly structures of colonization, Diné people have long relied on their bundled knowledge systems to sustain their presence across worlds and time. 

Bundle is a must-read for anyone seeking to understand Diné resistance, hope, and worlding. Rather than studying Diné life from the outside, it prioritizes Diné ways of knowing and being to develop bundling as a theory of continuance. For readers invested in decolonization, place-making, and storytelling, Bundle provides an indispensable roadmap for how Diné people continue even in the face of domination.

An examination of the importance of Nahua sacred bundles, emphasizing their impact on power dynamics, language, and culture in the Nahua religious tradition.

The Bundle is a deep scholarly meditation on tlaquimilolli, key religious objects of Mexico’s Indigenous Nahua, formerly “Aztec,” people. These sacred bundles, depicted across Nahua iconography, contained objects associated with the gods and their deeds and were believed to be their embodiments. Drawing on Indigenous sources, Molly Bassett tells the story of the tlaquimilolli’s origins and significance, critically examines previous interpretations, and argues that the form of the tlaquimilolli—not just their contents—is a key to understanding Nahua cosmology.

Bassett turns to Indigenous scholarship to interrogate and “unwrap” accepted narratives, taking the sacred bundle itself as a model for theorizing the world. She attends to tlaquimilolli in the context of glyphs and poetry, ritual and ordinary activity, and ceremonial structures. In revealing ways, the material properties of tlaquimilolli were reflected in the architecture of major temples and key cities, like Tenochtitlan. Bundling was also closely entwined with relationships between caretakers and their dependents. These prosaic attachments cast both sacred objects and Nahua sociability in a new light, challenging existing interpretations of Nahua religious traditions.