Before American History

Front matter

Before American History

Nationalist Mythmaking and Indigenous Dispossession

Christen Mucher y UNIVERSITY of V VIRGINIA PRESS

CHAPTER 6 An American Babylon in the Mexican Republic 205 EPILOGUE After American History 243

Notes 249 Bibliography 327

ILLUSTRATIONS

FIGURE 1. Orator’s Mound, Yellow Springs, Ohio (c. 1890). Courtesy of Antiochiana, Antioch College. xiv FIGURE 2. “Turn and Learn,” Aztalan State Park, Aztalan, Wisconsin. Author's photograph, 2016. 2 FIGURE 3. Karl Nebel, “Plaza Mayor de Mexico,” detail, Voyage pittoresque et archéologique (1836). 3 FIGURE 4. La Piedra del Sol, Museo Nacional de Antropologia (INAH), Mexico City. Author’s photograph, 2016. 4 FIGURE 5. Giovanni Francesco Gemelli Careri, “Siécle des Mexiquains,” Voyage du tour du monde, t. 6 (1719). Courtesy of the Bibliothéque Nationale de France. 33 FIGURE 6. Codex Boturini (c. 1530), detail. Courtesy of el Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia (INAH), Mexico. 34 FIGURE 7. José Joaquín Granados y Gálvez, Tardes Americanas (1778), pl. 1. Courtesy of the John Carter Brown Library, Brown University. 44 FIGURE 8. Francisco Javier Clavijero, "Il Tempio Maggior di Messico,” Storia antica del Messico (1780), t. 2 pl. 1. Courtesy of the John Carter Brown Library, Brown University. 74 FIGURE 9. Benjamin Smith Barton, Observations on Some Parts of Natural History |. ..] (1787). Courtesy of the John Carter Brown Library, Brown University. 87 FIGURE 10. José Antonio de Alzate y Ramírez, "Plano de Tenochtitlan" (1789), detail. Courtesy of the Bibliothéque Nationale de France. 106 FIGURES lla and 11b. Antonio de León y Gama, Descripción histórica y cronológica de las dos piedras |. . .] (1792), pls. 1, 2. Courtesy of the Kislack Collection, Library of Congress. 119 FIGURE 12. “Sala 1,” el Museo del Templo Mayor (INAH), Mexico City. Author's photograph, 2016. 127 FIGURE 13. Alexander von Humboldt, “General Chart of the Kingdom of New Spain [. ..]" (1804), detail. Courtesy of the Library of Congress. 130 xi xii Illustrations

FIGURE 14. “Great Body of Clay,” Memoirs of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences 3 (1809), f. 2. Courtesy of the Biodiversity Heritage Library and Missouri Botanical Garden. 170 FIGURE 15. Caleb Atwater, “Ancient Works at Circleville Ohio,” Archaeologia Americana (1820), pl. 4. Courtesy of the Library of Congress. 176 FIGURE 16. Sarah Clifford, “Triune Idol” (c. 1820). Courtesy of the American Antiquarian Society. 180 FIGURE 17. Abner Reed, “Map of the State of Ohio, including the Indian Reservations Purchased and Laid out into Counties and Townships in 1820,” detail. Archaeologia Americana (1820). Courtesy of the American Antiquarian Society. 199 FIGURE 18. North Bridge Street Mound, Chillicothe, Ohio. Author’s photograph, 2018. 204 FIGURE 19. Title page, Colección de las antigúedades mexicanos (1827). Courtesy of the Newberry Library. 231 FIGURE 20. Ricardo Almendariz, Colección de estampas copiadas de las figuras originales (1787), pl. 23. Courtesy of the Kislack Collection, Library of Congress. 237 FIGURE 21. “Table Cross.” Courtesy of the American Philosophical Society. 239

PREFACE: UNSETTLING THE MOUNDBUILDERS

I want my ink to bellow— Where is this ground unstained with blood?

—Laura Da’, “American Towns,” 2015

I grew up on Shawnee and Miami homelands, a descendant of European settlers looking to escape their former lives. I do not know why they made their journeys, nor why they settled where they did; I do know, however, that my ancestors benefitted from established and emergent systems of labor, credit, and kinship as well as settler colonial modes of domination that included Indigenous eviction and erasure from the lands on which they settled. Uninvited guests who never left, my relatives grew deep roots in places I still think of as home. Their experiences comprise wholly conventional settler events: the claiming of a homestead, naming of a road, marking of boundaries with fence posts and burial plots, the tallying and settling of debts with neighbors, landlords, and savings banks. Their few acknowledged connections to Indigenous peoples were filtered through dishonorable mascots and town seals, as well as—on one side—an indistinct sense of pride in our distant cousin Davy Crockett.

Although my school fieldtrips included visits to important Shawnee and Miami sites like Cedar Bog, Buckeye Lake, and the Johnston Indian Agency, the lessons largely centered on “natural history.” In good weather, I would walk a few blocks with my schoolmates to the local nature preserve, where we studied swamp cabbage, jack-in-the-pulpit, and box turtles, passing several “Indian mounds” on our way. These registered as much a part of the landscape as the nearby limestone caves and rusty mineral springs. Despite becoming a “junior naturalist,” I little recognized the earthen architecture around me as much older than any other history I knew of the Midwest. Nor did I have any sense of my location in Native space—let alone Shawnee or Miami place-worlds—despite always knowing myself to be in rural Ohio and, especially during the first Gulf War, in the United States of America.’ Then, I did not understand how the xiii xiv Preface: Unsettling The Moundbuilders

FIGURE 1. Orator’s Mound, Yellow Springs, Ohio (c. 1890). Courtesy of Antiochiana, Antioch College. This burial mound was reportedly used as a speaking platform by Daniel Webster and Edward Everett Hale. Excavated and emptied in the 1970s, the remaining structure is now being reabsorbed by the forest.

violence of war, occupation, and displacement centuries-over had enabled my incipient patriotism, nor how internalized dispossessive logics overwrote deeply held Indigenous histories with fables about “First Ohioans." Really, I knew little outside what Lenape scholar Joanne Barker has referred to as “settler colonial thought and reality? Even then, my very concepts of history, time, and space had already been constricted by the teachings of “colonial permanence,” nationalist liberalism, and settler futurity.*

If the settler project disciplines Indigenous homelands, histories, and empowered objects into properties, legends, and antiquities—and above all, into a past that is settled, in all of its preterit force—then the practice of unsettling the settler-produced past disrupts the imaginaries and epistemologies that petrify and extinguish Indigenous presents and futures. Unsettlement calls on settler and settler-educated scholars to relinquish the dispossessive intellectual legacies of their academic inheritance, which involves “decenter[ing] settler perspectives”—especially whiteness—and upsetting those easy ways of knowing and living that maintain settler futures at the expense of Indigenous ones? In their influential 2012 article, “Decolonization is not a metaphor,” sociologists Eve Tuck (Unangax) and K. Wayne Yang remind readers that decolonization is unsettling—uncomfortable—because it challenges the structure of

Preface: Unsettling The Moundbuilders xv property-holding at the heart of colonization.* But decolonization, they explain, “is not a metaphor for other things we want to do to improve our societies.” It is instead a serious call for the restoration of “Indigenous land and life.”” While I see the unsettling of American history as a practice in support of Indigenous futures, engaged in solidarity with Indigenous resurgence and necessary to the land-rendering demanded by decolonization, Before American History is unsettling rather than decolonial.? That is, it seeks foremost to unsettle the quotidian, dispossessive ways of knowing the past that have been and are being enacted by settler scholars on Indigenous lands in the name of American history and American futures.

Often non-Indigenous people say that they “never learned” Native history.’ But I was taught to be a settler—how to think like one, how to see like one, how to take up space like one—even if the curriculum was never explicitly assigned. It is through the process that some Native American and Indigenous studies (NAIS) scholars call “colonial unknowing” that settlers have learned not to understand their lives or the life around them in relation to indigeneity.'? For settlers, unlearning the unknowing means recognizing our ways of living as themselves learned and practiced, especially in those most mundane, “innocent,” or “natural” of situations. This book attempts to unlearn that “unknown”

history—and thus to unsettle the past as I once knew it—before “America.”

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I've lived with this project for so long and amassed so many obligations that these words can only begin to express my gratitude. The research and writing for this book was done on myriad Indigenous homelands including Wabanaki, Nipmuc, Susquehannok, Lenape, Shawnee, Miami, Potawatomi, Odawa, Ojibwe, Baxoje, Chiwere, Notoway, Piscataway, Cherokee, and Nahua lands. I gratefully acknowledge these lands’ peoples and I thank them for hosting and teaching this uninvited guest. I am grateful for the financial support provided by Smith College, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Antiquarian Society, and the Newberry Library, which made this publication possible. Although much of the work for this book happened after graduate school, my time at Penn English laid its foundation. To my cohort and fellow students who made the intellectual world in Philadelphia so vibrant, my million thanks: Kate Aid, Raquel Albarran, Dave Alff, Avi Alpert, Sari Altschuler, Jarrett Anthony, GerShun Avilez, Rachel Banner, Marina Bilbija, Cal Biruk, Julia Bloch, Larissa Brewer-Garcia, Ashley Cohen, Sarah Dowling, Jeffrey Edwards, Stephanie Elsky, Scott Enderle, Shonni Enelow, Laura Finch, Ellery Fouch, David Gardner, Isabel Geathers, Matt Goldmark, Sarah Mantilla Griffin, Chris Hunter, Emily Hyde, Ren Heintz, Jen Jahner, Adrian Khactu, Greta LaFleur, Grace Lavery, Jeehyun Lim, Phil Maciak, Cliff Mak, Mel Micir, Vanessa Mongey, Rachael Nichols, Emily Ogden, Joshua Ratner, Jessica Rosenberg, Courtney Rydel, Ana Schwartz, Jill Shashaty, Laura Soderberg, Emma Stapely, Lucy Swanson, Mecca Jamilah Sullivan, Chris Taylor, Lindsay Van Tine, Megan Walsh, Emily Weissbourd, Sunny Yang, and Jason Zuzga. I am so grateful for Poulomi Saha, who stayed with me through it all. A course with Bethany Schneider changed my trajectory, and David Kazanjian and Amy Kaplan helped me follow the new path. David was an indefatigable advisor and has been a true mentor and friend, opening doors I didn’t know existed, tolerating my stress-noodle, and skilled in the ways of cross-continent tag. Amy always knew when she saw my best work, and I wish I could have shown her this. Thank you to my committee, David, Amy, Max Cavitch, Yolanda Padilla, and María-Josefina Saldafia-Portillo, for your indispensible feedback, support, and patience with my footnotes. Thanks too go to Nancy xvii xviii Acknowledgments

To the amazingly accommodating archivists, librarians, and support staff at the American Antiquarian Society, American Philosophical Society, Archivo General de Nación, Bentley Historical Library, Biblioteca Nacional de Antropología e Historia, Bowdoin Library Special Collections, Library of Congress, Missouri Historical Society, Morgan Library, Newberry Library, New-York Historical Society, Smith College Circulation, ILL, and Special Collections, the Smithsonian Archives and Libraries, University of Pennsylvania Libraries and Special Collections: thank you. Scott Sanders at Antiochiana and Mike Kelly at Amherst Special Collections will always deserve an extra shout-out. Thank you also to Brad Lepper and Tim Jordan at Ohio History Connection.

As someone who works at the overlap and intersection of many disciplines and subfields, I have had the pleasure of making friends and finding mentorship in many corners. Many thanks go to the organizers and members of the AAS “Histories of the Indigenous Book” seminar, where I met kindred souls and made fast friends, including Angie Calcaterra, Ashley Cataldo, Paul Erickson, Drew Lopenzina, Mark Mattes, Dan Radus, Phil Round, Kim Toney, Kelly Wisecup, Hilary Wyss, and Nan Wolverton. I was supremely lucky to return to the “Generous Dome” with Jim Casey, Elizabeth Eager, John Garcia, Sebastian Herrmann, Tyesha Maddox, Whitney Martinko, Don James McLaughlin, Kappy Mintie, Sharada Balachandran Orihuela, Hunter Price, Wendy Roberts, Len von Morze, and Clay Zuba. At the Newberry Library, the company and fellowship of Chelsea Blackmore, William Brooks, Susan Gaylard, Kara Johnson, Kat Lecky, Erin-Marie Legacey, Suparna Roychoudhury, Miriam Thaggert, Cynthia Wall warmed the Chicago winter. The year I was on fellowship changed my project and gave me an incomparable set of new intellectual companions, including Seth Cotlar, Patrick Del Percio, Leon Fink, Melissa Gniadek, Heather Kopelson, Patricia Marroquin Norby, Coll Thrush, Caroline Wiggington, and Seonaid Valiant. I thank both the American Antiquarian Society and the Newberry Library for their generosity, as well as the National Endowment for the Humanities and Lloyd Lewis Memorial Fund.

Thank you to Sean X. Goudie, Priscilla Wald, Thomas Beebee, Hester Blum, the Center for American Literary Studies at Penn State, and my fellow first First Book Institute members: Adrienne Brown, Todd Carmody, Danielle Heard, Samaine Lockwood, Ted Martin, Sarah Juliet Lauro, and Sonya Posmentier.

Acknowledgments xix

Thanks to Laraine Fletcher and George Scheper for organizing the “Native Grounds” NEH Seminar at the Library of Congress and introducing me to Christina Giacona, Lindsey Kingston, Adriana Link, Kenlea Pebbles, and Cristina Stanciu. Thank you also to Heike Paul, Margaretha Schweiger-Wilhelm, and the Bayerische Amerika-Akademie as well as Nuremberg participants Melanie Eis, Eve Eure, Liana Glew, Andrew Hnatow, Amber Rose Johnson, Mark Kelley, Mahshid Mayar, Spencer Tricker, and Cecily Zander for timely interventions, long walks, and supportive hugs. I thank my super collaborator Gesa Mackenthun for her rigor, warmth, and consolation. I thank Amy Greenberg and Ari Kelman for the invitation to join the C19 Settler Colonialism seminar as well as Rick Bell and Holly Brewer for welcoming me to the Washington Early American Seminar. Thank you as well to colleagues and community at the Tepoztlan Institute for the Transnational History of the Americas.

Smith College has given me countless opportunities to grow into the scholar I want to be. I thank my students and advisees, including top research assistants Ilaria Dana and Celeste Clerk, and the colleagues and friends who helped me find my place, including Jeff Ahlman, Lisa Armstrong, Carrie Baker, Chrissie Bell, Brigitte Buettner, Darcy Buerkle, Floyd Cheung, Jay Garfield, Michael Gorra, Jennifer Guglielmo, Ambreen Hai, Lane Hall-Witt, Michele Joffroy, Connie Kassor, Alex Keller, Elizabeth Klarich, Daphne Lamothe, Mehammed Mack, Jen Malkowski, Liz Pryor, Jeff Ramsey, Daniel Rodriguez, Shani Roper-Edwards, Vicky Spelman, Andrea Stone, Michael Thurston, Lester Tomé, Susan Van Dyne, and Fraser Ward. A special thank you to Pinky Hota, Laura Kalba, and Andrea Moore, who lifted me up and carried me along. Without the care, collaboration, and guidance of Dana Leibsohn, Kevin Rozario, and Steve Waksman, I would be lost. The Jean Picker Fund generously funded course releases and research materials, as did the Kahn Liberal Arts Institute.

I have learned more from the Five College NAIS group than I could ever say. I thank Lisa Brooks, a model reader and mentor, as well as Sonya Atalay, Paul Barton, Kathleen Brown-Pérez, Christine DeLucia, Rae Gould, Jennifer Hamilton, Alice Nash, Bob Painter, Mary Renda, Neil Salisbury, Kiara Vigil, Ron Welburn, and Ashley Smith. I also send thanks to Hiba Bou Akar, Nusrat Chowdhury, Jennifer Fronc, David Hernandez, Hannah Holleman, Fran Hutchins, Vinayak Ramanan, and Uditi Sen.

Without Kate Aid, developmental editor extraordinaire, I would never have found the project’s threads or pulled them into the right shape. Nadine Zimmerli is the most insightful, supportive, and patient editor, and she always knows just what to send and say. Thank you to the generous series editors at the University xx Acknowledgments of Virginia Press, Anna Brickhouse and Kirsten Silva Gruesz, and to kind and insightful readers Robert Gunn, Erica Panni, and an anonymous UVA Press reader. Thank you also to the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Sustainable History Monograph Pilot program, and Longleaf as well as Kay Banning, Bridget Fountain Manzella, Ihsan Taylor, Sherondra Thedford and Lisa Stallings. So many colleagues have made the Chesapeake a home-away-from-home, including Karen Caplan, David Freund, Julie Greene, James Maffie, Nancy Raquel Mirabal, and David Sartorius. Julie, Jim, and Sophie F. M. Maffie sustained me before and during the pandemic, and I couldn't have found a better pod. To Lesley S. Curtis, Cord Whitaker, and L, friends of my heart: mési. I couldn't be more grateful to Penny Von Eschen for her guidance, love, and taste in wine. Thanks to Karen Miller, a fantastic reader, and a fierce cook. Thank you to Suzi Linsley, who accompanied me through the dark and the light, and to Michelle Boisseau, who always made sure I was loved and fed. Thank you to my family: Kevin and Z Jones, Pat McKane, Charles Osborn, Jan Shanahan, Bob, Jess, Kate, and Laura Woods; to my grandparents, godparents, aunts, and uncles who have given me the gifts of plants, birds, history, storytelling, and fine detail; to my brothers Mike and Stephen, who help me laugh and remind me to pay my bills on time. Thank you to Evangeline Heiliger and Q, whose presence and love has made my life cozier, sillier, and more beautiful. Thank you to my parents, Chris and Cynthia, with whom I've visited countless historical sites, who are always ready for more, and who have already given me everything. And to my love Colleen Woods, who has lived with this book for almost as long as I have and whose words and ideas are all over it, who has traveled with me to visit mounds and museums and bookstores around the globe: I'm stuck on your heart.

A NOTE ON TERMINOLOGY AND METHOD

A transhistorical and hemispheric scope presents problems of terminology. In this book “North America” refers to the landmass containing both New Spain/ Mexico and the United States, respectively differentiated by their relative northerly and southerly positions. Relatedly, I refer to Americas-born Europeans (whether Spanish, British, etc.) from northern North America as “creoles” and southern North America as “criollos,” a roughly similar identity in the period. The neologism “criollo-americano” is meant to reference a transitional, politically autonomous identification among criollos in late New Spain. For convenience, when I refer to Indigenous communities continent-wide and without regard to specificities (tribal, ethnic, national, or otherwise) I use “Indigenous” or “Native.” Otherwise, I strive to use communities’ self-appellations, with reference to conventional scholarly names for clarity. One case is worth elaborating: despite the term’s ubiquity, I use “Aztec” only in reference to the “Aztec Empire"—i.e., the Triple Alliance of Tenochtitlan, Texcoco, and Tlacopan—a polity that lasted from 1428 to 1521 CE. The ancestral Nahua peoples of Aztlan I identify as “Aztecas”: according to tradition this was their name before the sibling groups divided and arrived in the Mexico Valley. Their descendants are called by ethnonational names before 1521 (i.e., Mexica, Acolhua, Tepaneca, etc.) and identified as Nahua (the large Nahuatl-speaking family) afterward.’ Where possible I retain Indigenous terminology, capitalization, conventional singular and plural usages (i.e., teocalli, s., and teocalme, pl.), and avoid italics. I retain period orthography in English, Spanish, and French. In terms of chronology, I deploy “ancient” to designate Indigenous deep time and “distant” to name the millennia before the conceptualization of “America,” roughly 500-1500 CE, a choice further explained in the introduction.

Although most primary and secondary sources refer to the imaginary race of earthworks-creating people as “Mound Builders,” I employ “Moundbuilders” to avoid confusion with actually existing mound-building peoples. I recognize that there are vast differences in region, culture area, and chronology that I am eliding in my synthetic account of earthworks and mounds.” Moreover, xxi xxii A Note On Terminology And Method archaeologists often reserve the term “mound” for individual conical, rounded, or flat-topped structures and deploy “earthworks” for the extended earthen architecture forming walls, trenches, and related shapes. A notable exception is “effigy mound,” which refers to earthworks resembling specific beings. While acknowledging this complexity, I also recall that many of these technicalities originate in the context under study.

Introduction the archive was never inanimate the archive was never dead the archive was never yours.

—Deborah A. Miranda, “When My Body Is the Archive,” 2017

N SOUTHERN WISCONSIN, NOT far from the capitol at Madison, three large platform earthworks sit on the central plaza of a state park now known as Aztalan. The well-tended earthen architecture and “prehistoric Indian stockade-protected village” site are located about ten miles upstream from the town of Fort Atkinson, where the Black Hawk Tavern, Black Hawk Senior Residence, and high school mascot quietly understate the area's brutal history.' The state park mainly attracts fishing enthusiasts, schoolchildren, and offbeat tourists who come to marvel at the seemingly inexplicable mounds of terraced earth. In the parking lot, a plaque on polished pink granite announces Aztalan’s 1964 designation as a National Historic Landmark, awarded by the US Department of the Interior for its “exceptional value in commemorating and illustrating the history of the United States.”? Another sign announces plainly, “Indian people lived at Aztalan between A.D. 900 and 1200,” although a laminated land survey from 1850 provides no connection between the site’s former residents and its remarkable landscape.’ Across the grassy plaza, a selfpowered “Turn and Learn” audio guide gives lessons in mystery rather than clarity: “around 1300 A.D., the people of Aztalan, like their relatives at Cahokia, simply vanished.” Why the presence and alleged disappearance of Azatlan’s people—at least five hundred years before 1776—illustrates the history of the United States is left unsaid. The Turn and Learn narrative, in which Aztalan’s inhabitants and “their relatives” at Cahokia farther south—or indeed any number of peoples across the continent— "simply vanished” is strikingly similar to the one that originally occasioned the site’s unusual name almost two hundred years before. After the treaty ending the Black Hawk War of 1832, an influx of white settlers rapidly surveyed the grounds, founded their villages—such as Fort Atkinson in 1836— and bestowed new historical narratives on the Ho-Chunk, Dakota, Menominee,

FIGURE 2. “Turn and Learn,” Aztalan State Park, Aztalan, Wisconsin. Author’s photograph, 2016.

and Anishinaabeg homelands.? The same year the Territory of Wisconsin was incorporated into the United States, 1836, rumors of square-topped “mounds” and disintegrating wooden palisades began to circulate across the new white settlements. Milwaukee's Nathaniel F. Hyer, “Counsellor at Law and Land Surveyor,” traveled almost fifty miles westward to see the handiwork for himself. Hyer's map and account, which ran in US newspapers from February to June of 1837, ignored any connections with contemporary Indigenous communities (or concurrent settler aggressions) in favor of a narrative about “the people inhabiting the vale of Mexico.”” For in Wisconsin's misappropriated soil, Hyer saw evidence of an ancient, continental people whose history was apparently important to contemporary settlers. Indeed, believing the structures to have been built by “ancient Aztecs,” Judge Hyer named the site for the traditional Azteca homeland, Aztlán.* His misspelling—Aztalan—remains to this day.

As they presumably did in the late 1830s, the mounds at Aztalan presently bear some resemblance to the immense teocalli (temple) at Cholula near Puebla, Mexico, and to the Pyramids of the Sun and Moon at Teotihuacan, near Mexico pittoresque et archéologique (1836). Courtesy of the Newberry Library. The Sun Stone is visible just behind the cross.

City. Hyer had likely seen engravings of Cholula—circulating since at least 1810—and perhaps images of the Teotihuacan or Tenochtitlan temples as well.’ In fact, it was quite commonplace in nineteenth-century US literary and popular outlets to associate the Mississippi Valley “mounds” with “Aztec” history. This was the case even before 1821—the year of Mexican independence as well as the year US citizens began settling in Tejas—when Michigan Territory's governor Lewis Cass wrote of his certainty that the mounds’ builders were the “progenitors of the Mexicans.” Long before Aztalan got its name, the archive of “Mexican” antiquities was assisting settlers in staking claims to Indigenous spaces and vanishing Indigenous ancestors for the sake of illustrating “American” history. At the same time, in independent Mexico, the “Aztec Calendar Stone”— which had been unburied from Mexico City’s main plaza in 1790—gazed out from the western wall of the Metropolitan Cathedral, visible to anyone who shopped in the market, worshipped at the baroque chapels, or visited the nearby palace. By the 1830s this monument—the “Piedra del Sol” (Sun Stone) as it is more commonly known—was recognizable far and wide. In addition to a

FIGURE 4. La Piedra del Sol, Museo Nacional de Antropologia (INAH), Mexico City. Author’s photograph, 2016.

lithograph included in Baron Alexander von Humboldt’s transatlantic bestseller Vues des Cordilléres et monumens des peuples indigènes de [Amérique (1810), the Hamburg artist Karl Nebel—who lived in Mexico from 1829 to 1834—published two views of the stone in his Voyage pittoresque et archéologique (1836), copies of which were soon available in New York, Philadelphia, and Mexico City." Today the Sun Stone serves as the centerpiece of the Museo Nacional de Antropologia in Mexico City’s Chapultepec Park.

Over the intervening years, the Sun Stone became an icon of Mexican national identification with the “Aztec” past, appearing as souvenir statuettes, on picture postcards, coins, jewelry, and, famously, on Mexico’s 1998 World Cup soccer jersey. While this replication enshrines the archaeological past as a crucial element of the Mexican present, it also effectively effaces currently living Indigenous peoples from the greater Mexican polity, just as the Sun Stone’s relocation to Chapultepec displaced it from the historic city center." Although Mexico counts more than twenty-five million Indigenous residents today—over a million in the vibrant capital alone— the nation's most identifiable expression of indigeneity is carved in stone and kept behind museum doors."

The different ways in which Mexican and US histories locate themselves visà-vis Indigenous pasts depends on their shared, but differently experienced, beginnings in conquest, slavery, colonialism, and imperialism, as well as the different significations of land, labor, and citizenship to the national project.'*In the United States, where archaeological artifacts have long been used to argue that Native peoples were not autochthonous New World populations, Indigenous histories have been overwritten by an empiricism that provided the beginnings for American anthropology.” In New Spain—and later the Republic of Mexico —America's antiquities gave criollos (Americas-born Europeans) an imperial yet non-Hispanic past upon which to base their own sovereignty claims. Yet as different as these national trajectories are, the two countries are united in a mutual project of settler nationalism, and both deploy “American antiquities”—like the Aztalan earthworks and “Aztec Calendar”/Sun Stone—to that end.

As epitomized by the Sun Stone, indigeneity in Mexico has long been figured as ancient, monolithic (literally expressed in stone), and “Aztec” but also tied to mestizaje, the ideology of mixed Indigenous-European ancestry so central to twentieth-century, post-Revolutionary Mexican identity." In the 1940s, Mexican poet Octavio Paz expressed this sentiment, writing: "Any contact with the Mexican people, however brief, reveals that the ancient beliefs and customs are still in existence between Western forms." More recently, Latinx literary critic Nicole M. Guidotti-Hernández identified "the dead Aztec as the foundation of the Mexican Nation."? In the United States, on the contrary, indigeneity is referenced more often than not in the past tense of pilgrims and pioneers, during debates over slurs and mascots, or is replaced altogether by dates more symbolic of catastrophe than continuation (e.g., 1492 or 1830). In other words, whereas Mexican citizens typically have been encouraged to imagine their national history as linked to select Indigenous precedents, US citizens have been incentivized to "play" with, overwrite, and ignore Indigenous pasts.?? While the forms of indigeneity circulating in each national space are usually considered on their own terms, creating North American national histories has meant misappropriating Indigenous pasts across misappropriated lands, continent-wide.?!

For much of their early national periods, the histories of Mexico and the United States depended on one another: the writings, images, cabinets, museums, and libraries of both “Aztec” and “Moundbuilder” archives relied on interrelated networks of collectors and collections as well as many of the same methods and assumptions. Settler nationalism did not form in isolation but rather was enmeshed in preexisting colonial contexts. Crossing borders, languages, cultures, and political differences, early US and Mexican processes of historical knowledge production interacted with, adapted, and fabricated Indigenous histories of the shared continent. This is not to say that the processes were the same, but rather that they were interrelated and co-constituted.? But while the United States and Mexico shared the same strategy, they used different tactics in their nation-building efforts, and those too were exchanged and repurposed across a vast network of transamerican elites whose loyalties sided with the settlers—not Indigenous peoples—of North America.” Nonetheless, the historiographic, scientific, and museological methods developed and exchanged by creole and criollo elites on either side of changing American boundary lines produced strikingly similar initial results: the successful establishment of settler nations on lands taken from Indigenous stewards.

Before American History reveals the complex transamerican interactions crucial to the process of narrating European colonies into nineteenth-century American nations. Recovering the asymmetrical material and intellectual exchanges across New Spanish criollo patriots, US scientists, and Mexican letrados (educated elites) in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries reveals their commonalities and shows that settlers’ historical work epistemologically and ideologically enabled and depended on denials of past and present violence against the Indigenous peoples of North America.” Before American History, therefore, seeks to understand America’s historiography—Americans’ history writings and writings about America’s history—as a means of discursive control negating Native sovereignty claims and “place-based autonomy,” effacing Native lives, and creating settler attachments to the land through the materiality of Indigenous pasts.”

In making a connection between the literal touchstone (Sun Stone) of Mexican history and the Mississippi Valley earthworks (mounds), this book details the process by which eighteenth-and nineteenth-century Euro-American nationalists wrote Indigenous pasts out of US and Mexican histories and lands to create an “American antiquity,” and it demonstrates that Indigenous dispossession from both land and history are co-constitutive of the two North American settler republics. What is more, Before American History places discussions of past-making and transnational circulation into conversation with accounts of Indigenous displacement and settler land policy to make clear that these seemingly distinct bodies of nationalist mythmaking were already informing each other well before the US-Mexican War. Yet this overlap of intellectual networks and material sources, shared practices of history-writing and archive-making, common struggles over sovereignty and systems of extractive labor, and the inextricability of Indigenous dispossession from nation-formation are often overlooked in the separate national historiographies.** Aztalan, for example, is rarely considered alongside Aztlan.

By following hemispheric imaginings, narratives, and materials of “American antiquities” as they circulated across the continent—and by attending to the epistemological and material consequences of historical knowledge production—this book is committed to analyzing the two nations in relation rather than in comparison, while at the same time holding them both in Native space.” That is to say, in writing a connective, relational history, I attempt to reorient American antiquity within a transamerican network of relationships. And because of this relational approach, the book is in many ways a social history of ideas rather than a traditional intellectual history; it is an account of epistemology “in the making,” one focused on methods, sources, social formations, networks, and circulations. Judge Hyer's construction of Mexican antiquity in Wisconsin, for example, belongs to a long tradition of settler writing, surveying, and mapping techniques intended to capture, transform, and spread certain kinds of information about Indigenous histories even while displacing other local knowledges. Hyer’s Aztlan-Aztalan mistake, moreover, reveals the contingency and capaciousness of the developing archival structure of American settlement and dispossession that had consequences on a continental scale.