The University of Arizona Press

June 3, 2024

In Mexico today, the terms “Indigenous” and “science and technology” are rarely paired together. When they are, the latter tend to be framed as unrecoverable or irreparably damaged pre-Hispanic traditions⁠, relics confined to a static past. In Indigenous Science and Technology, Kelly McDonough works against such erroneous and racialized discourses with a focus on Nahua environmental engagements and relationalities, systems of communication, and cultural preservation and revitalization. Attention to these overlooked or obscured knowledges provides a better understanding of Nahua culture, past and present, as well as the entangled local and global histories in which they were—and are—vital actors. Today, we ask five questions of scholar Kelly McDonough:

This is a book about how Nahuas—native⁠ speakers of Nahuatl, the common language of the Aztec Empire and of more than 2.5 million Indigenous people today—have explored, understood, and explained the world around them in pre-invasion, colonial, and contemporary time periods. What started you on this work?

Thanks for asking! The project is a natural extension of my earlier work on Nahua intellectual history – I wanted to continue getting at what Nahua intellectual life was and is. I wanted to keep poking holes in the widely circulating myth that Nahua intellectual life was rich only prior to the Spanish invasion in the sixteenth century when it rapidly deteriorated. I definitely knew that “science” was a topic I wanted to dig into deeper when I was talking (ranting) to a colleague, and I said, “it drives me crazy when people say that Indigenous people do not have science!”

I’ve learned that most times when I say “it drives me crazy that…” (at least related to my work) it is likely an area of research I will enjoy and will feel worthwhile. Related to science, I wanted to draw attention to the many Nahua technological innovations I have seen in the archives and in person to disrupt another erroneous myth about “lack of technology” that still circulates today.

This is a deep dive into Nahua theoretical and practical inquiry related to the environment, as well as the dynamic networks in which Nahuas create, build upon, and share knowledges, practices, tools, and objects to meet social, political, and economic needs. What are some of your approaches to this research?

I took cues from lots of smart people from a variety of disciplines and fields to approach and think about Nahua science and tech. I ended up drawing a lot and creating multimedia diagrams on the walls to try to understand scholarship along with Nahua theories, networks, and layers of needs and interests all together in such a way that I could even attempt to write about them. But most importantly, I have had lengthy, ongoing conversations with Nahua friends and colleagues who are deeply concerned about how Nahua youth are barraged with messaging in mainstream educational settings and general discourses that tells them that only non-Indigenous people are thinkers and inventors.

You included what we called “interludes” between the chapters of short biographical sketches and interviews with contemporary Nahua scientists, artists, historians, and writers, accompanied by their photos. Why was this critical to this work?

The book would have been impossible without these individuals, their families, and communities; they have been wonderful, patient teachers who have guided and encouraged me. For example, Flor Hernández spent a full day showing me how backstrap weaving, from dying of yarns to the dance of the warp and weft is, in her words, physics. Baruc Martínez Díaz took me to work at his chinampa (raised lakebed garden), and talked for hours about all of the relationships among plants, animals, humans, and geographic features that inhabited the chinampas. And I was absolutely struck by how Abraham de la Cruz Martínez talked about his laboratory at work and his laboratory in the corn field.  I also wanted to include their words and photographs to hammer on the idea that Nahua brilliance is still in action, not stuck in a static past. The interludes or “interruptions” are also meant to avoid any notion of a lineal, chronological march toward “progress.”

What advice would you offer to up-and-coming scholars embarking on their own projects?

We all have such different temperaments and work styles, so I’ll just say that for me it was time well spent talking to people and reading about workflows and practices related to the craft of writing. I have a tried-and-true system for dealing with everything from naming conventions of files to how I take notes (I subject my poor graduate students to a 5-page description of said system every year). But some people would hate that – it really is about finding what works best for you. It has also been immensely helpful to have a writing partner. I’ve been working with the same person since 2016. We don’t do anything elaborate, we just check in on most days on Slack and share a sentence or two about our plan for our writing session(s) that day. For me, the accountability is good, the articulation of reasonable and measurable writing goals is practical, and the ability to share doubts, irritations, breakthroughs, small victories, and ugly first drafts as they come along indispensable.

What are you working on now?

My next monograph deals with 400 years of Indigenous justice in the town of Cholula in the state of Puebla, Mexico. My team has been digitizing the town’s judicial archive, once thought to have burned in the Mexican Revolution, for five years. Cholula was one of nine “Indian Cities” in colonial Mexico, which meant they had a unique juridical personality and relationship to the king of Spain. This archive gives an unprecedented view of what that mean in day-to-day practice during the colonial period, but also transitions when, for example, Mexico became independent from Spain or during the Porfirian dictatorship at the end of the twentieth century. I’m really interested in how Nahuas interpreted the changing laws, how they influenced the implementation of new ones, and how they used evolving notions of “justice” (or not) to their benefit.

Before jumping into that project, I have two smaller ones right now: one is an oral history project with Nahua women in the diaspora (within Mexico and beyond) and the other is an article that was meant to be a chapter in the book, but I didn’t get to it in time. For now, it is called “Sky Stories:” it is about how Nahuas have explained and related to what is understood to be in or part of the sky – clouds, planets, sun, moon, stars, meteors, ancestors, gods, and so on. 

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Kelly S. McDonough is an associate professor in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese and the Program in Native American and Indigenous Studies at The University of Texas at Austin. She is also the author of The Learned Ones: Nahua Intellectuals in Postconquest Mexico.