For over half millennia, narratives of European conquest, exploitation, and displacement of Indigenous peoples have overwhelmingly dominated discussions of the Western Hemisphere’s past and the challenges that Indigenous peoples face to this day because of it. Indigenous Nations and scholars over the past several decades, however, have increasingly challenged and transformed our understanding of these narratives. In particular, the active participation of Indigenous peoples in influencing the outcome of historical events continues to be revealed, as do the roles that Indigenous routes, ecologies, human mobility, and community formation and evolution played in these processes. With emphasis on the day-to-day connections that show how people in the Americas navigated their worlds in the early modern period, the participants of this panel explore the intersections of the aforementioned themes to show how Indigenous and colonizing peoples contributed to the unfolding of early modern history in the Americas. The panel argues that a hemispheric perspective demonstrates that Indigenous routes, exploitation of local ecologies, and social and physical mobility were the tendons that connected disparate places, groups, and experiences together.

The four panelists will present case studies rooted in the Northwest Atlantic, the Yucatan Peninsula, Northern South America, and Peru. Jack Bouchard explores migratory systems within Beothuk, Mi’kmaq, Innu, Inuit, and St. Lawrence Iroquoian societies in the sixteenth century Northwest Atlantic to reveal a social, economic, and ecological system that was shaped and controlled by Indigenous communities. Moving south, Scott Doebler examines the Spanish construction of “two Yucatans” in the early sixteenth century. He shows how the ecologies of the tropical lowlands played an integral role in early contact with the Yucatan Peninsula and ultimately reveals Indigenous Mayas’ ecological power throughout the early modern period. Katherine Godfrey’s focus on sixteenth and seventeenth century criminal cases and petitions for travel licenses that mestizo minors from Northern South America requested demonstrates the significance of family and kin in connecting distant and “difficult” to reach locales. Overall, she argues that mestizo children, while perhaps small in physical and legal stature, played an integral role in the building of the Spanish Empire. Leo Garofalo’s study of Asian and Asian-descended peoples in the city of Lima during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries takes as points of comparison the Indigenous migrant population and the African and Afro-Andean experiences in Lima. Living in a society shaped by freedom and enslavement, Garofalo examines Asian participation in local markets and colonial institutions to reconstruct the lives and actions of people hard to distinguish in the historical record. Together, the panelists highlight how social and physical connections between groups functioned in order to yield a more intimate understanding of how mobility, ecology, and community informed one another to challenge or even to compliment the increasing presence of European empires.