Sometime early in the seventeenth century, a native Andean named Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala (1530s –c. 1616) decided to write his own account of the Inca past, together with a fierce denunciation of Spanish colonialism.1 An indigenous interpreter fluent in Quechua and erstwhile collaborator of the Spanish religious authorities, Guaman Poma had participated in the campaigns to “extirpate idolatries” in the Andean highlands.