Table of Contents

Prologue and Acknowledgments

Part I -- The Methods and the Story

Chapter One -- Mistranslation and Unsettlement
Columbus and La Navidad: A Parable of Unsettlement
Treasonous Translators, Interpretive Infidelity, and the Unsettling Captivity of John Smith
Autonomous Translation and the Story of Juan Ortiz
Hispanophone Squanto

Chapter Two -- An Unfounding Father: The Story of Don Luis
How Paquiquineo Became Don Luis
Rhetorical Instrumentality and the Failed Expedition of 1566
Don Luis's Negocio: Jesuit Spiritual Conquest and the 1570 Settlement of Ajacán
Epistolary Theory and the Record of Indigenous Authorship: the Quirós and Segura Letter
The Lost Colony of Ajacán and the Letter of Juan Rogel
Don Luis, estragado: the Relación of Juan Rogel
The Fictive and Visual Don Luis
'En esto me e engañado,' or, What Happened to Alonso?

Part II -- The Afterlives of Don Luis

Chapter Three - El Inca Garcilaso de la Vega and the Political Don Luis:
the Hemispheric Epistemology of La Florida del Inca
Pedro de Ribadeneyra and the Emergence of Don Luis as a Political Figure
Garcilaso's Desolate Americas: Don Luis in Cordova, Spain
"The present high price of negroes in that place": Garcilaso's Las Casas
Cabeza de Vaca and Captivity (Un)redeemed
The Failure of Imperial Translation: Garcilaso's Cabeza de Vaca
Americas Exceptionalism

Chapter Four -- Don Luis in La Florida
"El más ladino de todos": the (Anti-)Conquest Memoir of Hernando de Escalante Fontaneda
The Hemispheric Consciousness of the Calusa: the Problem of the Interpreter
Don Luis Resurrected: Andrés de San Miguel and the Ladino Baroque

Part III -- The Translation of Don Luis: From the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo to the Good Neighbor Policy

Chapter Five -- The Politics of Unsettlement in the Nineteenth Century
Robert Greenhow and "Oregon Country"
Edgar Allan Poe and the Unsettling Narrative of Julius Rodman
Don Luis and the Doctrine of Discovery
John Gilmary Shea and the "Log Chapel on the Rappahannock"
William Cullen Bryant and the Popular Don Luis
Don Luis and the Dawes Act: Alice Fletcher's Indian Education and Civilization
The Translators of Nineteenth-Century Indian Reform:
Colonial Settlement and the Native Critique of Anthropology

Chapter Six -- The Good Neighborly Don Luis: Roanoke, Ajacán, and the Hemispheric South
"The First Colony": Roanoke v. Virginia
"Africay," Croatans, and the Spanish Fate of Paul Green's The Lost Colony
"Mr. Cabell Goes South": Don Luis as the "First Gentleman of America"
From Epic to Ironic National History
From the Western Hemisphere Idea to Anglo-Atlantis
The Conquest of Irony

Epilogue -- From Ajacán to Aztlá

About the Author

Anna Brickhouse is Associate Professor of English at the University of Virginia and the author of Transamerican Literary Relations and the Nineteenth-Century Public Sphere.

Reviews

"This is a fascinating and important book with an ambitious historical and disciplinary range.... Traitor, manipulator, far-sighted opponent of settlement and conquest-Brickhouse reads the contemporary accounts scrupulously and brilliantly in order to explore Don Luis's complex identity." --Nineteenth-Century Literature
"This is an excellent literary study of a historic figure and the world he witnessed. For historians it is a thought-provoking read that reminds us to question our sources." --Journal of American History
"A marvelous achievement that profoundly unsettles fundamental assumptions about colonial encounters in the European conquest of the Americas. The fascinating story of a Native American translator, Don Luis de Velasco, powerfully challenges the binary between indigeneity and cosmopolitanism that structures past and present historical narratives. Brickhouse's intellectual creativity in reading against the grain, reaching across historical periods, and
reflecting on methodology makes this book a model for future scholarship in hemispheric and transnational American studies." --Amy Kaplan, author of The Anarchy of Empire in the Making of U. S. Culture
"Perhaps the most unsettling message of The Unsettlement of America is that a figure so important as the 'unfounding father' Don Luis de Velasco has largely been forgotten. In recovering his enigmatic presences-from his role in both advancing and thwarting the Spanish attempt to colonize the Chesapeake in the 1570s through a host of obscure and not-so-obscure texts down to the twentieth century--Anna Brickhouse reveals much about the agency of
indigenous peoples in the continent's history, about the nature of translation and conquest, and about the logics and illogics of settler colonialism." --Daniel K. Richter, author of Before the Revolution: America's
Ancient Pasts
"The Unsettlement of America is both a tremendous scholarly feat and a brilliant critical provocation. It traces the literary record of Don Luis de Velasco, a Native American anti-colonialist translator and captive from an area that the Spaniards called Ajacán and the English called Virginia, from the sixteenth to the twentieth century. Retrieving the history of this fascinating figure against the grain of a largely Euro-American colonialist
archive written in Spanish and in English, this book represents a major intervention into colonial Latin American, (early) American, Hemispheric American, and Native American studies scholarship." --Ralph Bauer, author
of The Cultural Geography of Colonial American Literatures
"This is a sweeping tour de force that deserves a broad circulation, particularly among those drawn to cutting-edge works of which this is an outstanding exemplar." --Journal of Jesuit Studies