Writing Timucua: Recovering and Interrogating Indigenous Authorship

This paper offers a reexamination of the Timucua-Spanish relations in colonial Florida, culminating in the Timucua uprising of 1656. Combining our two specialties, linguistic anthropology and history, this paper explores the few Timucua religious materials available, which are the oldest extant Native American texts north of Mexico. Examining the content of these texts (the subject matter, the language, and its arguments) as well as the context in which they were produced, this essay considers the Timucua texts as early expressions of Timucua literacy and authorship. The Timucua texts hint at the complex effects of linguistic collision and exchange. As Timucua authors collaborated and, at times, appropriated these Spanish religious texts, their voices hint at the power of language as a marker of identity and resistance.