Results by title

Examines the many iterations of a story of child martyrdom in colonial Mexico.

A cornerstone of the evangelization of early New Spain was the conversion of Nahua boys, especially the children of elites. They were to be emissaries between Nahua society and foreign missionaries, hastening the transmission of the gospel. Under the tutelage of Franciscan friars, the boys also learned to act with militant zeal. They sermonized and smashed sacred objects. Some went so far as to kill a Nahua religious leader. For three boys from Tlaxcala, the reprisals were just as deadly.

In Child Martyrs and Militant Evangelization in New Spain, Stephanie Schmidt sheds light on a rare manuscript about Nahua child converts who were killed for acts of zealotry during the late 1520s. This is the Nahuatl version of an account by an early missionary-friar, Toribio de Benavente Motolinía. To this day, Catholics venerate the slain boys as Christian martyrs who suffered for their piety. Yet Franciscan accounts of the boys’ sacrifice were influenced by ulterior motives, as the friars sought to deflect attention from their missteps in New Spain. Illuminating Nahua perspectives on this story and period, Schmidt leaves no doubt as to who drove this violence as she dramatically expands the knowledgebase available to students of colonial Latin America.

In 2008, the Canadian government established a Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) to review the history of the residential school system, a brutal colonial project that killed and injured many Indigenous children and left a legacy of trauma and pain. In Fragments of Truth Naomi Angel analyzes the visual culture of reconciliation and memory in relation to this complex and painful history. In her analyses of archival photographs from the residential school system, representations of the schools in popular media and literature, and testimonies from TRC proceedings, Angel traces how the TRC served as a mechanism through which memory, trauma, and visuality became apparent. She shows how many Indigenous communities were able to use the TRC process as a way to claim agency over their memories of the schools. Bringing to light the ongoing costs of transforming settler states into modern nations, Angel demonstrates how the TRC offers a unique optic through which to survey the long history of colonial oppression of Canada’s Indigenous populations.