Republish
Myths and Legends of California and the Old Southwest is a 1912 compilation of folktales, creation stories, and fables from Indigenous populations in the southwest United States authored by Katharine Berry Judson. One story is “The Beginning of Newness,” first recorded by Frank Hamilton Cushing, an anthropologist who studied the Zuni people of New Mexico.
An artifact of colonialism, the text furthers the delegitimization of Indigenous beliefs in comparison with the overwhelming Christian influence of settlers. As these stories were catalogued, the original storytellers were anonymized while the catalogers gained critical acclaim.
Republish is a digital book that visualizes this dichotomy, overlaying the Zuni origin story with the Christian Book of Genesis over the dark dust of the Zuni River valley. As a .epub file, the bold text in the foreground obscures the background, preventing its selection by software, representing the obfuscation of knowledge.
