Jan 28, 2019
In this episode we speak with Bianca Premo and Yanna Yannakakis about their article “A Court of Sticks and Branches: Indian Jurisdiction in Colonial Mexico and Beyond,” which appears in the February 2019 issue of the AHR as part of a forum titled “Indigenous Agency and Colonial Law.” The forum also features an article by Miranda Johnson from the University of Sydney titled “The Case of the Million-Dollar Duck: A Hunter, His Treaty, and the Bending of the Settler Contract” and an introductory essay by University of Washington historian Joshua L. Reid. Bianca Premo is Professor of History at Florida International University. Her most recent book is The Enlightenment on Trial: Ordinary Litigants and Colonialism in the Spanish Empire (Oxford University Press, 2017). She is also the author of Children of the Father King: Youth, Authority, and Legal Minority in Colonial Lima (University of North Carolina Press, 2005). Yanna Yannakakis is Associate Professor of History and currently the Winship Distinguished Research Associate Professor of History at Emory University. She is the author of The Art of Being In-Between: Native Intermediaries, Indian Identity, and Local Rule in Colonial Oaxaca (Duke University Press, 2008). Her current book project is titled “Mexico’s Babel: Native Justice in Oaxaca from Colony to Republic.”