Afterlives of Matter: Decay and the Collaborative Rewriting of Indigenous Histories

Abstract

How can Indigenous histories be rewritten when communities engage directly with the archival texts and museum objects through which they were once represented? This presentation examines how collaborative heritage research can reposition dispersed colonial materials as sites for the co-production of history and for processes of fortalecimento cultural (cultural strengthening).

To explore this question, I discuss cultural materials that are largely the legacy of the period of Dutch colonization in Brazil (ca. 1630–1654). Such materials - artefacts, texts, and images - are witnesses to this period and to the intercultural relations that were then forged, and have enabled historians to reconstruct accounts of the period. In my research, I inquire into the potential of these materials beyond academic historiography. What happens when such objects and texts are re-encountered by the cultural descendants of those who were once described in them? What forms of historical knowledge emerge when Indigenous epistemologies and interpretative practices are brought into direct dialogue with early modern archives and museum collections?

In this presentation, I describe and interpret the results of two exercises in reading history with Indigenous partners —one completed and one ongoing. First, I discuss a workshop held with Ka’apor leaders (Eastern Amazon) during their visit to the Netherlands in 2023, in which we collectively read the seventeenth-century book Historia Naturalis Brasiliae (Piso and Marcgraf, 1648). In this encounter, the book functioned not as a fixed historical source but as a dialogical archive. The exercise exposed both the limits of colonial description and the persistence of Indigenous knowledge systems that exceed the textual record.

Second, I reflect on ongoing work with Tupinambá community leaders examining early ethnographic collections that contain Tupinambá belongings now held in European museums. Combining archival research and object-based analysis with Indigenous technologies of interpretation, this collaboration has revealed the durability of colonial narratives while also opening generative spaces within archival silences and material loss. These gaps do not signal rupture alone; they become sites for historical reconstruction and for the reactivation of relationships with dispersed ancestral materials.

Across both cases, decay—of matter, when dealing with objects, and of context and documentation, when dealing with books and manuscripts—serves as a methodological lens. Rather than treating deterioration and archival absence as evidence of discontinuity between past and present, this presentation argues for recognizing Indigenous interpretative authority as central to the very production of historical knowledge.