Event

As the only Nahua natural history produced during the colonial period of what we today call Mexico, Book XI of the Florentine Codex, entitled “Earthly Things,” is an unparalleled register of sixteenth-century Indigenous science. The fruit of a decades-long collaboration between elite-class male Nahua scholars and elders, and a Franciscan friar, Book XI offers rare insight into Nahua engagement with, and understandings of, the environment they inhabited in the Central Valley of Mexico. In my presentation, I analyze sixteenth-century Nahua science through a focus on Nahua principles, methods, and rationales of scientific investigation, as well as modes of communication related to scientific knowledge production, gathering, and dissemination. From this analysis, I argue that Nahua science, as seen in Book XI, was 1) based on a blend of first-hand, embodied experiences along with ancient authority; 2) concerned with predicting and influencing future outcomes; and 3) used to model an ethical framework that would ensure Nahua survival in an interconnected world.

Kelly McDonough (Anishinaabe [White Earth Ojibwe] and Irish descent) is Associate Professor of Latin American Literary & Cultural Studies and Indigenous Studies in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at The University of Texas at Austin. ​​Her primary areas of research include Critical Indigenous Studies; Nahua Intellectual History; and Indigenous Science, Technology, and Society. She is the author of The Learned Ones: Nahua Intellectuals in Postconquest Mexico (2014), and various articles on Indigenous literacies, inter-Indigenous class conflict, Nahua narrative mapping, and contemporary Mexican Indigenous literatures. Her forthcoming book, currently in production, is entitled Indigenous Science and Technology: Nahuas and the World around Them. McDonough recently completed a four-year term as Co-Editor of the Native American and Indigenous Studies journal, the journal of the Native American and Indigenous Studies Association (NAISA).