In tracing the theme of discovery in Iberian and English colonial writing from 1496 to 1690, Timothy Vasko’s Making All the World America raises fundamental questions about the most basic categories of modern thought: reason, religion, native, authority, liberty. This kind of digging down to the bedrock of human experience is a feat for any writer, let alone a first-time author. For this reason alone,the bookdeserves a wide and truly interdisciplinary readership.
The book is also a treat for specialists in a variety of areas. To cite only one example from the perch of political theory, my own field, Vasko’s stunning account of John Locke as the inheritor of a two-hundred-year debate about the grounds for discovery, possession, and rule over/with Indigenous peoples is a can’t-miss, recasting the entire Lockean enterprise for political theorists who cut our scholarly baby teeth on reading Locke as the avatar of early modern liberalism.
There is plenty more worth praising in Making All the World America, but I would like here to take a few steps back to summarize the argument of the book as I understand it and then to present what I consider to be an important contemporary implication of Vasko’s erudite intellectual history. Vasko begins his intellectual history by convincingly impressing upon readers the genuine crisis occasioned when an insular European-Christian world stumbled upon the western hemisphere. Christendom’s (later Europe’s) initial encounter with unanticipated places and peoples was a true world-rending shock that “hollowed out the basic epistemic foundations of classical and Scriptural knowledge” (133).
Under these conditions, European-Christian governments and societies had to rehaul much of what they knew and their protocols for knowing with certainty. Intellectuals and statesmen who took the bible as literal truth faced the problem of an entire world of which scripture had been wholly ignorant. They tried to make sense of the existence of a “New World” and its peoples by adapting and reconceiving spiritual and political received truths that had become unsettled. Yet as would-be conquerors, they also needed to legitimize the goal of establishing stable possession and political rule. What scholars in colonial studies now call terra nullius – the umbrella term for the legal and moral fiction of empty land up for grabs by colonial powers – could not have been a jumping off point for early modern colonial projects. Certainly not at the beginning and, perhaps, as Vasko argues, not as their dominant justification throughout because of the inescapable need to reckon (morally and strategically) with the enduring presence of Indigenous peoples.
And here’s where the argument really gets going, as Vasko traces a new thread through a tapestry of cross-pollinating Iberian and English colonial thought. For Vasko, the European-Christian world could only claim its discovery as a genuine source of authority by also grounding that knowledge in—in fact, inventing—the counterpart to discovery in the form of the native: “The claim to the discovery of land in the Americas, in its very earliest enunciations, locates its legitimacy and authority in the parallel discovery of the Indian’s soul through means of native information” (72). Thus, discovery could only be made to generate legitimate possession when it was premised upon the projection of European-Christian familiarity with the knowledge, culture, politics, and “soul” of Indigenous peoples of the Americas, what Vasko calls “native information.”
Crucially, if native information has played the role Vasko suggests in authorizing Spanish and then English colonial rule, even expert Native intellectuals trained in European canons such as Incan scholar Garcilaso de la Vega (known as El Inca) and the Nahua historian Don Fernando de Alva Ixtilxochil had to navigate their typecasting as mere parochial ethnic informants, as grist for discovery: “The fact that Indian difference was positioned as both the critical limit to and authorizing mechanism of imperial legitimacy should lead us to be cautious in announcing any ‘discovery’ of Indigenous critique in the archive of native information and discovery discourse” (68).
What is most intellectually discombobulating (in a highly fertile way!) about Vasko’s coupling of the Doctrine of Discovery with the frame of native information is that native information animates both the empire’s ongoing quest to vindicate its practices and a kind of imperial self-critique aiming to find the moral-political limits of imperial violence through knowledge of native self-government.
The Doctrine of Discovery polices its legitimacy by anxiously calibrating the limits to raw coercion in light of securing knowledge about the social and spiritual forms of the native (with Indigenous peoples’ “denunciations of and resistance to the colonial order” often motivating those reconfigurations but pushed into the interpretive background (27)). But these limits are always already self-posited, Vasko carefully argues, since the native is a figure invented along with, and for the purposes of, the project of discovery. Holding up the native as a “critical mirror” (26) to the Western self as a humbling maneuver aimed at reform also stemmed, ironically, from a supremely arrogant European-Christian sense that they could chasten their own civilizational pathologies by knowing the other even better, perhaps, than the other knew themselves (yet another of those civilizational pathologies!).
Altogether, I would like to suggest that Vasko’s central interpretive insight about native information advances a deflationary counterpoint to contemporary decolonial sensibilities around the politics and promise of indigeneity. Undoubtedly heightened today by the disorientation of living through planetary catastrophe, many thinkers and institutions are now echoing the promise of recovering notions of indigeneity and Indigenous knowledge (or “Traditional Ecological Knowledge”) as a kind of non-modern and non-alienated alternative key to navigating the self-destructive pathologies of modernity. In the academy, such a list would include decolonial thinkers like Walter Mignolo, post-development scholars like Arturo Escobar, practitioners of the “ontological turn” in anthropology such as Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, and (both Indigenous and non-Indigenous) scholars of Indigenous studies.
More surprisingly, this kind of appeal to indigeneity is now common in the institutions of global governance and international civil society. Organizations like the World Wildlife Fund and Conservation International, accused for many years of abetting grave human rights abuses against Indigenous peoples in the name of protecting nature, now have symbolically and sometimes materially recruited Indigenous peoples as the ideal practitioners of the conservation enterprise: the original guardians of nature, the original conservationists.
Vasko clearly shows that the contemporary search for a paradigm shift fueled by turning to indigeneity is itself (unreflectively) deeply modernist: The very anxiety and aspiration to find an escape from the conditions of modernity in the “critical mirror” of indigeneity is nothing new; it is quintessentially colonial and modern, itself based upon a deep-rooted grammar of the western self. The reform-oriented criticism of thinkers like Thomas More and Bartolomé de Las Casas was “in many ways the main trope of native information” (26).
In tracking Vasko’s argument, I came to read this intellectual-historical emphasis on the imperial production and re-calibration of Indigenous difference alongside other scholars who also raise critical questions about more contemporary invocations of Indigenous embeddedness in place, reciprocal reciprocity with the non-human, and thoroughgoing relationality and stewardship of nature. To name three recent interventions: Julian Reid claims that international relations theorists erase the military histories of Indigenous peoples, typecasting them as “embodiments of non-violence, cooperation, and empathy.” Drawing on ethnographic research on resistance to extractive industry in the Bolivian Chaco, Penelope Anthias and Kiran Asher challenge the framing of indigeneity “as embodying a way of being that might be appropriated and replicated to withstand” the socioecological crisis. The problem is that this investment deflects realities of sustained asymmetries of violence and domination of which Indigenous peoples are on the receiving end. Similarly, Matthew Gravlin laments how theorists of the Anthropocene desperate for alternatives invoke indigeneity as a rare glimpse of a relational alternative to the dualism and mastery over nature that they construe as the central failing of paradigms of western humanism.
Vasko’s work provides indispensable historical grounding by which to trace the roots of the contemporary sensibilities these critics seek to caution against. He shows how the Doctrine of Discovery “presupposes and polices a firm boundary between the Native as the holistic and primordial exteriority of the colonial order and the ‘modern’ era that the establishment of the colonial order inaugurates” (26).
For his part, Vasko’s history underscores how fundamental that practice is, as he dates it back far before the current climate crisis to the disorienting experience of discovery itself: “The image of the American Native marks the point that the modern subject of Western reason begins a devastating self-imposed exile from nature. The symbolic value of this figure derives from its bearing the scars of an irreparable severance, while at the same time gently cradling the promise of reconciliation and redemption” (101).
This “naturalized Native” bears enough of the alienation of separation from nature but also enough of a continued proximity to nature to represent the hope of resolving Western reason’s “devastating self-imposed exile from nature.” The same logic is reproduced today in a progressive vein (though, pace Vasko, that progressive dimension was always there!), positing Indigenous peoples’ forms of life as an imaginative relief or unrealized possibility that may counter the increasingly evident self-destructive pathologies of political modernity such as war and violence, environmental destruction, and anthropocentric illusions of human supremacy and sovereign mastery.
There are two punchlines that stem from this serious worry about the conscription of Indigenous peoples into a narrowly designated slot in the imaginative and material architectures of modern politics. The first is that, if Indigenous peoples are conceived as an outside or antithesis to modernity whose knowledge is claimed by all humanity, then they will never be seen as full participants in and authors of modernity. No matter how crucial their actual material contributions to political struggles for a more robustly universalistic conception of, say, equality, development, and freedom in light of how they have negotiated structures of domination, they will always be contained to an ahistorical and remnant primordialism. That stricture only reinforces the fictional image of a self-correcting European modernity that needs no real outside to itself, which then creates even more Eurocentric provincialism.
Ironically, the failure to unearth the dialogical character of the colonial encounter ensures the impossibility of genuine critique. This failure itself often takes on the shape of critique. The strong insistence that follows here is that Indigenous peoples ought to be treated in their full complexity as modern political actors who continually reinvent modern political concepts and not, instrumentally and derivatively, as (yet again) the ethnographic and metaphysical grist upon which to offload responsibility for the pathologies of western modernity.
The second punchline is that making Indigenous peoples the symbolic bearers of a longed-for relational paradigm-shift obscures the much more ordinary violence(s) of capitalism and colonialism. It obscures real and worsening pressures like accelerating extreme weather events most acutely grinding down Indigenous peoples and other oppressed and exploited peoples forced to navigate the death-worlds of capitalism and colonialism. Real power and stakes are erased.
Those struggles also bring with them an ineluctable political messiness, as with any politics; such messiness – and, typically, compromise and complicity of various kinds – is perforce struck from the record when Indigenous peoples are metaphysically framed as innocently exterior to modernity. Such a move sidelines discussion of the more banal and excruciatingly unromantic problems of structural inequality, underdevelopment, and exploitation that are the stuff of contemporary global capitalism. It seems to me that Vasko’s history pushes us to begin there.
Making All the World America is a tour-de-force intellectual history. It is also a serious provocation to the present, demanding that its audience think beyond claims often thrown about in representations of Indigenous peoples today.
