How "Indians" Think: Colonial Indigenous Intellectuals and the Question of Critical Race Theory by Gonzalo Lamana (review)

Gonzalo Lamana, associate professor in the Department of Hispanic Languages and Literatures at the University of Pittsburgh, writes an intellectual history in his monograph, How "Indians" Think. The author's temporal range begins with 1492 when Christopher Columbus's Spanish crew first landed in America through Spanish colonization of Peru in the seventeenth century. Lamana considers the early seventeenth-century works of two native intellectuals: Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala and Garcilasco de la Vega, known as El Inca, who had unique insight into both the Andean indigenous world and the Spanish worldview. Lamana makes an argument comparable to that of historian Richard White in The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires, and Republics in the Great Lakes Region, 1650–1815 (1991), in which he describes the way Andean indigenous peoples and Spanish colonists came to understand (as well as misunderstand) and interact with each other. Using Guaman Poma's and Garcilasco's works as case studies, Lamana describes colonists' consideration for how to deal with the "Indian problem," and how native people sought to create a future for themselves upon meeting and cohabitating with the Spanish.

Lamana first considers the ideologies of Spanish intellectuals to determine how the Spanish thought about the native people they encountered in South America. He then considers the weaknesses of studying colonial archives to learn more about indigenous agency because the Spanish did not believe that natives had the capability to form their own thoughts and decisions. Lamana considers the benefits of analyzing Guaman Poma's and Garcilasco's works. Both were of native descent and their works provide insight into how the marginalized felt and perceived the world around them, and their methods for changing the dominant, Spanish narratives.

Garcilasco, the son of a Spanish conquistador and an Inca princess, wrote Comentarios reales de los Incas (CRI) (1609) and Guaman Poma, the son of a Yarovilca lord and an Inca woman, worked as a Spanish clergyman and wrote Neueva corónica y buen gobeirno (NCBG) (circa 1614). These two intellectuals wrote manuscripts that not only represented what the Spanish and indigenous peoples thought of each other but also disproved the common Spanish idea that native people could not think for themselves. Furthermore, Guaman Poma explored what the Spanish thought of indigenous religious experiences. For example, the Spanish could be good or bad Christians, but the Spanish thought of Indians as either Christian or non-Christian. Also, Spaniards believed that the Indians were never inherently good and missionaries failed to teach natives Christianity only because the Indians were supposedly unwilling to learn. Another disconnect between Spanish and native intellect is that the Spanish believed the Indians were of the past whereas native people viewed the Spanish as part of their future. Lamana calls upon anthropologist Johannes Fabian (1983) and adopts the term "denial of coevalness" to explain that the Indians and Spanish colonists did cohabitate but did not view one another as equal races (48).

In an analysis of Guaman Poma de Ayala's NCBG, Lamana recognizes three major themes in the text: that readers would examine race and coloniality in addition to cultural differences, that the text is pedagogical and has many riddles in it that require the readers to question what they already know or assume, and that it did not follow the beliefs of Spanish colonists. Furthermore, Guaman believed race was a colonial construct and that if Indians, like himself, considered themselves white, they could be taught the ways of the Spanish. Guaman Poma twisted the Spanish's theory of the degeneration of Indians to one of "Indian exceptionalism," an idea that opposed leading Spanish racial theory that prior to first contact with Europeans, the native people had been too remote and secluded from the rest of the world to know how to properly learn or think for themselves (76). Guaman Poma also highlighted religious contradictions of sin. For example, he chastised the Spanish...