Indigenous Freedom Suits, Epistemological Mobilities, and the Deep Archive

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article focuses on ways of thinking productively about Indigenous freedom litigation suits, how scholars read that documentary record, whether we can give voice to the voiceless, and how ways of reading litigation records that included records from the ‘deep archive’, namely notorial and parish records, can inform epistemological seeing and knowledge mobilization. It is a cautionary tale that encourages a careful approach to slavery’s archives as sites that constitute, validate, and activate historical evidence about Indigenous slaves who litigated for their freedom.