Informed by Indigenous Andean knowledge, Ecuador’s 2008 Constitution broke legal ground by enshrining “Rights of Nature,” allowing anyone to litigate on behalf of damaged ecosystems.¹ In 2018, the White Earth Band of Ojibwe adopted a law that bestows the rights of personhood onto Manoomin, or wild rice, a sacred plant. And in 2019, the Yurok tribe declared rights of personhood for the Klamath River. “Not only does [the Klamath resolution] create laws and legal advocacy routes,” explained Geneva Thompson, associate general counsel for the Yurok tribe and citizen of the Cherokee Nation, “but it’s also an expression of Yurok values.” Rivers and rice become people; Indigenous philosophies become legal discourse.

How are we to understand these metamorphoses? Some would argue that modern legal systems are simply adaptive enough to accommodate diverse beliefs and worldviews. But when we talk about competing “worldviews,” as the anthropologist Eduardo Viveiros de Castro has argued, we presuppose that everyone inhabits a common world: that of the liberal West. Thus, rather than discuss a sham democracy of worldviews, which merely preserves the ultimate supremacy of Western knowledge systems, we should speak of a multiplicity of worlds. And the long reign of rational Western thought—with its neat distinctions between “personhood” and “natural resources,” for instance—now falters. Anthropogenic climate change and its existential hazards reveal that the modern liberal order has been only one historically contingent world among many.²

Indigenous activists have campaigned for the legal rights of nonhuman entities for generations, but the movement has gained mainstream traction in recent years. Advocates and experts may disagree about whether these legal maneuvers are practically successful or even tactically desirable. However, the fact that rivers and wild rice have now become legal persons discloses the precarity of previously entrenched definitions of nature, personhood, property, and law: that is, the terms that constitute a world.

Conflicts over the meaning of these terms are not new; they were perhaps nowhere more vividly on display than in the crucible of the early modern Americas, the period which, to a larger degree than is often recognized, set the stage for current struggles. Two recent books grapple with still-neglected histories of conquest and colonialism in the Americas and the subsequent processes of formation and transformation to which we are still in thrall. In vastly different registers, the novel We Are Green and Trembling by the Argentine writer Gabriela Cabezón Cámara (translated by Robin Myers) and America, América: A New History of the New World by the Yale historian Greg Grandin, ask those of us who call the Americas home: How did we arrive at this historical moment? How will we proceed? More fundamentally: Who’s “we,” and who are we?

We Are Green and Trembling is a genre-bending fictionalized account of the 17th-century nun-turned-conquistador Antonio de Erauso (born Catalina de Erauso). Epistle, picaresque, theological dialogue, confession, and Mbyá Guaraní creation story: These and other forms weave a text in which “extraordinary metamorphoses” of bodies, kinships, and epistemologies abound.

Much of what we know about de Erauso comes from his own memoir, translated by Michele Stepto and Gabriel Stepto in 1996 as Lieutenant Nun: Memoir of a Basque Transvestite in the New World (and in which he tends to refer to himself as a man). Born around 1585 in Basque country,³ de Erauso escaped his aunt’s convent at age 15, cut his hair, and adopted the name Antonio. By 1603, he set sail for the Americas. There, de Erauso fought in the Arauco War against the Mapuche people in the territory that is now Chile, (inadvertently) killed his own brother, gambled, brawled, enjoyed various relations with women, and narrowly escaped jail and death sentences many times over. When his many imbroglios seemed to finally catch up with him, he confessed to a priest that he was born a woman: “The truth is this: that I am a woman. … when I was about to profess my final vows, I left the convent … undressed myself and dressed myself up again, cut my hair, traveled here and there, embarked, disembarked, hustled, killed, maimed, wreaked havoc, and roamed about, until coming to a stop in this very instant, at the feet of Your Eminence.” He agreed to allow two women to inspect his genitalia; they confirmed his confession and more: “they had found me to be an intact virgin, as on the day I came into the world,” a detail which may have saved his life.

De Erauso then returned to Spain and gained celebrity status as the “lieutenant nun.” He received both a yearly stipend from the Spanish crown and, perhaps surprisingly to modern readers, permission to continue living as a man. In 1630, he returned to the Americas, after which little is known about his life.

We Are Green and Trembling disrupts the conventional hemispheric progress narrative.

Even 400 years after it was written, the memoir is a riveting and troubling document, and Cámara could have easily written a novel following its contours. Instead, she renders a selection of these events through a confessional letter, interspersed throughout the novel, that Antonio pens to the aunt he abandoned from the South American jungle. The narrative present, however, is imagined. Whereas decades of commentators have fixated on de Erauso’s gender, Cámara’s intervention is to reimagine his relations with Mbyá Guaraní people, an Indigenous group native to southern Brazil, Paraguay, and Argentina, and their cosmology.

This is a bold move, given that the actual de Erauso only ever mentions Indigenous peoples as the objects of imperial violence. Rendering de Erauso as a character who develops relations with Guaraní children thus risks obscuring the colonial brutalities he participated in. But revising de Erauso’s Indigenous relations neither exculpates nor sentimentalizes; to be sure, the novel portrays the atrocities of conquest in unflinching terms. Rather, We Are Green and Trembling disrupts the conventional hemispheric progress narrative, which begins with Spanish “discovery,” ideologically crescendos with the liberalism of the American Revolution, and plateaus with the Monroe Doctrine’s license to US supremacy, all of which implicitly depended on clearing the land of its Native inhabitants: the world’s “largest human mortality event in proportion to the global population,” as demographers have written (and Grandin has cited in his book). Other models of politics and sociality flourished and resisted. They have urgent lessons for the current moment.

In a pivotal scene in We Are Green and Trembling, Antonio frees two young Guaraní girls and two capuchin monkeys from the cages that his superior, the captain, keeps them in, near starvation, in the name of “science.” “Through experiments,” the captain tells Antonio, “we come to better know the world that He has made. And to know His creation is to worship it.” The experiment had been to determine whether the Indians could form social hierarchy, as the monkeys do. Unlike the capuchins, “these human vermin could not organize themselves even while dying of hunger and thirst; they insisted on distributing their crusts and droplets equally. … What kind of intelligence is that?” The captain’s logic is not hyperbole; as Grandin writes in America, América, his was a frequently cited justification for Indigenous enslavement by the Spanish: “that Native Americans couldn’t organize themselves into a true civilized society founded on property.” At stake, then, are the modes of knowledge and the forms of wealth and property deemed legitimate by certain groups, and the violence those determinations authorize. The image of children in cages only emphasizes the contemporary resonance of the questions this scene evokes.

After Antonio frees the girls (Michī and Mitãkuña) and the monkeys (Kuaru and Tekaka), along with a mare, her foal, and a dog (Red), the eight of them escape into the jungle, where they form an improbable community. Through these new relations, Antonio undergoes yet another transformation of identity: “He slept like a log, not that his sleep was profound. Or long. He slept like a log because he was enlaced with the tiny arms and legs of the two monkeys and the two girls and Red’s small head. … Antonio is a tree.” He tells the girls of Genesis and how God created the world from nothing. In response, they sing to him the Mbyá Guaraní creation story and mock him for thinking that God doesn’t eat. By the end, the girls transform into jaguars and Antonio’s figurative arboreal metamorphosis becomes literal: “Mitãkuña springs onto him. … She gives him another lick, and goes. When the foliage has nearly swallowed her, she turns back to look at Antonio: he has burst into blossom. A hummingbird sips at him. The warmth of Kuaru and Tekaka in his canopy, sweet Red curled in the hollow of his roots.”

“Ecology” comes from “oikos,” meaning both household and family. Antonio finds a way to make a mutual home for both himself and his heterogeneous family. In Cámara’s telling, Antonio abandons the European progress narrative and instead enters into reciprocal kinships with the human and nonhuman communities of the jungle. He undergoes a kind of rebirth, which also entails a death. He changes worlds.

The novel thus makes a timely intervention into debates over the New World’s founding mythology, debates exacerbated by the Trump administration’s war on American history through its Orwellian “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History” executive order and via the AI agit-slop of the Founders Museum. These initiatives reanimate another version of American history, one that refuses to ask how land dispossession, genocide of Native peoples, and enslaved labor was foundational to the entity we now call the United States.

This denialism has deep roots in the US. One of Grandin’s central arguments is that, while the Spanish vigorously debated the legal, theological, and moral legitimacy of conquest, “the Anglo experience was different. Evasion and denial were English settlement’s hallmarks. … No ethical dilemma accompanied the destruction of [North America’s] indigenous people.” Citing Scripture, medieval scholasticism, ancient Greek philosophy, and other sources, the Spanish argued about the status of Natives: Were they, too, descendants of Adam and Eve? Were they the lost tribes of Israel? Aristotle’s category of “natural slaves”? Fully human? The New England Puritans, by contrast, accepted Indigenous genocide as the work of Providence, and to question Providence was to deny God.

Grandin likely overstates the moral discrepancy between empires. As a review of the book in the Point argues, “Grandin wants to vindicate [Bartolomé de] Las Casas, not reflect at length on how his reputation as champion of the victims of Spanish colonization brought him personal fame and influence.” Still, this centuries-old ideological schism continues to shape hemispheric politics, Grandin’s research shows. Spanish colonialism’s early moral crisis helps to explain “the persistence of a humanist, social-democratic left [in Latin America], one absorbent enough to take in demands related to gender, race, and sexuality,” as well as “a panoramic conception of citizenship” that includes social rights such as health care. By contrast, the US has never been able to think beyond “a narrow conception of individual rights” or the sanctity of private property above social equality.

Over more than 600 pages, Grandin illuminates in captivating terms many competing theologies and politics that have shaped the Americas since Columbus’s voyages. Casting a shadow over the entire book, for instance, is Bartolomé de las Casas’s fierce Dominican humanism, which, in Grandin’s telling, stood as a beacon of morality against the enslavement and genocide of Natives and “pointed toward a modern ethics of equality.” Contra las Casas was a tortuous Catholic legalism that invented theological justifications for enslavement. It often did this via Kafkaesque methods such as the Requerimiento, a 1513 document that “crams five thousand years of Catholic world history into one very long paragraph.” Scribes would recite the document to Indigenous groups (or, as was often the case, mutter it into the wind), untranslated, which then licensed soldiers to pillage for gold and slaves. To the north, Puritan commercialism established the foundations of what would become an enterprising and expansionist United States.

Later, in the first decades of the 19th century, Simón Bolívar’s international communitarianism became a model for the League of Nations and the United Nations. And the neoliberalism of the Chicago Boys in the 1970s helped to dismantle the “sociality of Latin America’s worldview” and replace it with austerity, deregulated finance, and unpayable foreign debt—the legacies of which continue to wreak economic havoc and fuel right-wing movements up and down the hemisphere.

A critique of America, América is that it almost invariably neglects the Indigenous cosmologies and legal systems that have been displaced and syncretized. Such an omission suggests, implicitly, that those cosmologies ultimately bore little influence on modern politics and ethics in the Americas.

However, scholars continue to elucidate how influential the exchange of knowledges between Indigenous Americans and European settlers has been since the colonial era and into the present. In Law’s Indigenous Ethics, for example, legal scholar and member of the Chippewa of the Nawash First Nation in Ontario John Borrows investigates the deep entanglements between Anishinaabe law and Canadian law. Red River Métis scholar of Indigenous Studies Zoe Todd reminds us that Indigenous peoples, informed by their philosophies of natural environments, “played and play an integral role in bringing the topic of climate change to the international stage.”⁴ In response, researchers are beginning to incorporate “Traditional Ecological Knowledge,” such as that of the Yurok people, into wildlife management practices. This requires nothing less than an overhaul of the concept of “wildlife” and thus deep-rooted distinctions between nature and culture.⁵

Lastly, the anthropologist Judith Shapiro tells the story of the progressive Brazilian bishop Dom Pedro Casaldáliga inaugurating, in 1979, “The Mass of the Land without Evil.” The mass is set to Indigenous music and draws on “the land without evil,” an important concept in Tupi-Guaraní cosmology. Reversing centuries of Church doctrine, the mass represents Indians “as being closer to Christianity” in their pre-colonial state “than they became once the missionaries took charge of their lives.” For radical liberation theologians, “Native societies have become the repositories of true Christianity … while the colonialists, including earlier missionaries, are seen as agents of destruction.”⁶ In other words, a degenerate Church must now be converted to and transformed by practices it once viewed as the embodiment of sin.

Early on, Cámara’s Antonio signals that the jungle will metonymize the course of his life, the novel’s form, and the history of the Americas more broadly: “there are no paths or straight lines, the jungle makes its clay of you, it shapes you with its own shape, and now you fly, an insect, you clamber, a monkey, you slither, a snake.” The novel’s diversity of narrative forms, nonhuman socialities, and queer political subjectivities attests to the Jamaican philosopher Sylvia Wynter’s claim that, in the early modern West, the “genre” of Man came to overrepresent personhood categorically as a white, rational subject.

Alternative genres of personhood and politics have been with us all along, the novel insists. As Grandin reminds us in his epilogue, the genre of the human is still being rewritten, albeit not in ways we might want: “a small cult of tech billionaires” has given themselves carte blanche “to tinker with the way people experience daily life, with what it means to be human.” Other ways of living and thinking have been suppressed, but history is never finished being written. Origins and endings are political fictions, and often dangerous ones. We have always been in the process of “extraordinary metamorphoses.” Cámara’s novel and Grandin’s history prompt us to reimagine the forms of politics and ethics that are possible if we teach and understand more capacious accounts of where we’ve been.