Speaking Objects

Blends material, performance, and gender studies to highlight Indigenous women's vital contributions to ritual movement and dance.

This book examines the cultural history of materials (feather, turtle shell, metal, and seashell) used to add sound to dancing in the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Americas as a way of rediscovering the foundational nature of Indigenous women’s cultural, spiritual, and political actions and their links to cultural revitalization today. Objects created by Indigenous women throughout the Americas added aural and visual spectacle to ritual movement and dance, activities that carried spiritual, political, martial, and diplomatic significance. Women’s skilled labor was thus essential to reproducing culture and tending spiritual connections with other-than-human beings, even when women were not the main dancers, musicians, or singers. This book joins conversations about hemispheric connections across historiographical boundaries of “Latin American” and “early American” scholarship and offers an interdisciplinary focus on women, gender, material culture, and performance. It shows readers how stories about the past, covering a fuller range of human experience, come from so much more than alphabetic written documents and are about so much more than European invasion and colonization. Meant to broaden students’ ideas about what counts as history, this book also offers vivid details to capture the attention of more general readers.

Heather Miyano Kopelson is an associate professor in the Department of History at the University of Alabama and is a coadvisor to the recently founded Indigenous students’ group Bama Indigenous Student Organization and Network (BISON). She holds a PhD from the University of Iowa and is the author of Faithful Bodies: Performing Religion and Race in the Puritan Atlantic.