Within scholarship on indigenismo, it is commonly held that the Indigenous uprisings in the southern Andes at the turn of the twentieth century spurred the cultural and political activities that we understand as the indigenista movement. Under the growing global demand for wool, these violent uprisings responded to new injuries accreted to old in a region where a variety of colonial relations, within an imaginary of coloniality, persisted. In this understanding of indigenismo, strangely, Indigenous peoples’ protest is interpreted to be an inspiration for indigenismo writ large. In contradistinction, this chapter reconceptualizes indigenismo by drawing on literature usually excluded by that term. The point is twofold: to illustrate the complex web of practices, often undertaken by Indigenous peoples themselves, in which indigenismo arose; and to reinvigorate our understanding of how local responses to transnational economic flows embodied a cultural imaginary that brought elite and nonelite actors together.

A significant proportion of the threatened idioms of the world are small, pre-literate languages spoken by communities encapsulated within modern ‘developed’ countries (e.g. Canada, the USA, Australia and New Zealand) whose dominant population uses a European competitor language of great prestige and wide currency. This acute asymmetry has been referred to by some Canadian indigenous leaders as characterizing the ‘Fourth World’ languages. Growing concern about the future of these languages has led to a focus on developing indigenous language literacy to prevent or even to reverse their loss. Focusing on the ‘standardization’ of the Innu language spoken in Quebec (Canada), this case study addresses the issue of whether standardization can actually foster literacy in the indigenous language and curtail (or even reverse) shift to the dominant language. The chapter discusses the process of orthographic standardization among the Innus as it unfolded in the past fifty years. It compares it with similar contexts across the world. A growing consensus emerges that standardization and literacy skills in indigenous languages cannot prevent language loss, and it is doubtful that it can foster the revitalization of the receding language.

This essay explores the multiple literacies of Indigenous writers from the earliest moments of American settlement, with a particular focus on early New England. The chapter sketches out the contours of early New England Native writing: its principal figures; its plural etiologies and intent; and its contested emergence at the fractious join of Native and settler spaces, institutions, and worldviews. Moving from John Eliot and his earliest missionary attempts to produce a new kind of alphabetic literacy for Indigenous converts, the essay documents the tensions between missionary-driven literacy projects and Indigenous uses of such literacy for specific political and cultural reasons. From 18th century figures like Samson Occom, Joseph Johnson to the 19th century writer and activist William Apess, Native writers produced rhetorically sophisticated texts that expressed a deep commitment to the continuity of Native peoples.