The humanities in general and Americas studies in particular are prone to turns. Recent decades have seen the linguistic turn, the spatial turn, the transatlantic turn, the hemispheric turn, to name but a few of the most salient. It is, then, to Anna Brickhouse's tremendous credit not only that she puts these disparate or even antagonistic turns in dialogue with one another, but that she motivates the strategies of the turn itself to do so. The turn, in her case, is spelled out in her book's subtitle. It is the turn to translation, interpretation, and to the story of Don Luis de Velasco. And it is a turn that she sustains, or rather keeps turning, over the span of nearly four hundred years and three hundred pages.

The story of Paquiquineo, a Native translator better known under his baptismal name as Don Luis de Velasco, is about strategy as much as it is about content. The content is that Don Luis de Velasco, a translator who had seemingly converted to Christianity and acculturated to Spanish colonial rule, destroyed a Spanish settlement that threatened his native land on the eastern seaboard. Refusing to be a tool of imperial conquest, he became an indigenous agent who resisted the rule he seemed to support. The strategy that Brickhouse traces over the longue durée is one of “unsettlement,” a term that she does not just use in outright distinction from settlement – though that, too. Brickhouse uses the term in a way that does not depend on the success or failure of anticolonial strategies; she uses the term to show how resistance to colonial settlement is inscribed within the very narratives of that settlement, and remains a recalcitrant, multifaceted force for reopening the historical and narrative foreclosures of “settlement.”

The fact that the Spanish settlement of Ajacán preceded Roanoke by over a decade unsettled the English claim to the land known as Virginia; the importance of being first increased rather than decreased in the course of the nineteenth century, when it was codified in Johnson v. M'Intosh as the governing logic for land claims. The story of Don Luis functioned in this context as a constant threat to the enterprise of settlement in that it could delegitimize the literal grounds on which settlement sought judicial justification. All the more reason why scholars with various political ties – such as the US Department of State's official “librarian and translator” Robert Greenhow – turned to the text and reinterpreted it to support their larger geopolitical aims.

I particularly admire Brickhouse's attention to translation as a multifaceted form of linguistic unsettlement. Taking issue with the reduction of translation to a tool of empire, while remaining attentive to its ability to function that way in Greenhow's deliberate mistranslations, Brickhouse amply demonstrates how and when translation can function as a translatio imperii while also creating space for translation to be precisely the thing that undermines and undercuts empire. Drawing our attention to what she describes as “motivated mistranslation,” for instance, Brickhouse richly shows the many different ways in which languages in the plural and translations in the plural can be used.

One of the most exciting is translation's ability to foster networks that generate complex transmissions of knowledge, and particularly transmissions of native knowledge. Her detailed account of Don Luis's participation in and contribution to a larger network of indigenous knowledge is invaluable for understanding unsettlement. It is not just as an isolated incident but itself an epistemology and a knowledge formation within what Jace Weaver calls the “Red Atlantic.” As Brickhouse reveals, it is not indigenous culture that unsettlement foregrounds, but indigenous knowledge. The distinction is important, in that Brickhouse recovers the knowledge so long denied indigenous societies by scholars’ recourse to the concept of culture. In the contexts that Brickhouse outlines, culture has functioned as a marker of difference in being but not an acknowledgement of difference in knowing. It is through this crucial recovery of indigenous knowledge that the narrative of unsettlement can unfold, for only this frame enables us to recognize that Don Luis had “multiple sources of empirical and indirect evidence by which to understand that a return to his homeland” would destroy Ajacán (56).

Don Luis's actions were themselves an act of unsettlement; they were also the basis for numerous interpretations and reinterpretations that tried to inscribe this unsettlement within narratives of settlement. These attempts stretch from the Spanish colonial context through the US nineteenth century and into the twentieth century's reinvention of these acts. Last but not least, as Brickhouse herself points out, her own work participates in this process of unsettlement. The linkages between these seemingly disparate time frames and contexts are nuanced and fascinating. For instance, Don Luis's story was crucial in the nineteenth century because of the doctrine of discovery. The narrative of a first discovery by Spain of Virginia was certainly unsettling to the United States and its claims of first discovery as a justification of territorial expansion (in which, according to Brickhouse, Edgar Allan Poe plays the role of Don Luis when he produces the Journal of Julius Rodman ostensibly to support but then ultimately to unsettle US expansion to the Oregon territory). She also points out how the narrative of first settlement was doubly used to dispossess Native Americans, to undercut other imperial powers, and to use the narrative of Native American conquest over previous indigeneities as a justification for expansion into southern territories – thus generating a multifaceted Americas drama that pits competing American exceptionalisms against each other.

This book contributes to current scholarship in the humanities even above and beyond these accomplishments. At a time when the most recent turn seems to be to the digital, this book is a timely intervention into the fantasies of data-mining and mapmaking that seem to underlie at least one strand of the digital humanities endeavor. This book unmakes our maps and refuses to let texts stand as isolated datapoints. It is as wary of textual and spatial integration via practices of mapping as it is forceful in offering an alternative paradigm for how we may revisit the past as the foreign country that it truly is.