Paula Prescod, Université de Picardie Jules Verne, France
The European conquest that began in the late fifteenth century brought to the “New World” explorers, cartographers, missionaries, and military officers to whom we owe much of the historical narrative of the Americas. Colonial administrators and planters added their bit to the narrative that would serve the historiography of the Age of Exploration. Most of these historical writings, on which we have relied almost exclusively until recently, have obscured the lived experience of the Indigenous people in the Americas, the meanings of their experience, and the role Indigenous and colonized people played in resisting land confiscation and preserving their sovereignty. Relevant to this discussion are the words of Chinua Achebe to the effect that “until the lions have their own historians, the history of the hunt will always glorify the hunter. … the story of the hunt will also reflect the agony, the travail—the bravery, even, of the lions” (qtd. in Brooks) when it is related from the perspective of the lions.