Introduction

The essays in this AHR Forum bracket three centuries of experiences that Indigenous peoples have had with colonial legal systems in North America. In seventeenth-century Spanish colonial Mixteca, Oaxaca, in today’s southern Mexico, Ñudzahui communities contended with a system of hierarchically nested judicial and authority structures that blended Indigenous and early modern Spanish legal practices. In a radically different colonial and natural environment thousands of miles to the north and several hundred years later, Yellowknives Dene peoples of Canada’s Northwest Territories found their lives circumscribed by international and national laws that were at odds with treaty rights they had reserved for themselves in the early twentieth century. Despite the disparate times and places of the legal cases analyzed in these two essays, they both demonstrate the centrality of colonial law to Indigenous lives. Specific historical contexts framed these Indigenous legal experiences. The Spanish invasion of Oaxaca began in the 1520s, and like many intrusions of Spanish empire into Mesoamerica, it included thousands of Indigenous allies, specifically 4,000 Nahua soldiers from the Valley of Mexico.1 Colonial Oaxaca was a very diverse region. The Ñudzahuis (“the people of the land of the rain,” more popularly known as Mixtecs) recognized—and continue to recognize—themselves as a unique people, distinct from neighboring Zapotecs and Chochos and from the invading Nahuas and Spaniards. Similar to the Nahuas with their altepetl (ethnic states), Ñudzahuis had organized themselves into small autonomous polities called ñuu. These centered around palace complexes where nobles assembled, received gifts, and feasted. Smaller sisui, groups of commoners, contributed goods and labor in this hierarchical social structure in which the lower classes observed reverence for and deference to elites. Among nobles and commoners, Ñudzahuis practiced a considerable degree of gender equality, as women owned land and property like men and even ruled as caciques. The dispersed nature of ñuu resulted in the fragmentation of Ñudzahuis as a political entity, which continued through colonial times and allowed local Indigenous communities to function on their own. After Spanish conquest, caciques and nobles continued to exercise day-to-day authority over ñuu and sought to defend and promote local interests. Much like the populations of other regions throughout Spanish colonial America, Ñudzahuis survived the trauma of colonialism through “complementary adaptation,” particularly throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. They incorporated their own concepts of the sacred into Christian discourse to form a new Native religion and worldview. Where Indigenous and Spanish practices converged, such as around notions of property-holding and inheritance, Ñudzahuis pursued various strategies of cultural hybridity to maintain their communities and identity, a situation that continued through most of the seventeenth century.2

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