The Cambridge History of the Native Peoples of the Americas Volume I, II, and III

Testimonies 43
confessor and his scribe. Nonetheless Titu Cusi's text has points of
unique interest. For one, it is a clear manifesto of resistance in form as
well as content; unlike papers written for natives, it firmly seizes the
authorial role of protagonist. For another, Lienhard suggests, "it seems
like a written 'script' of a qaylli, a ritual homage to an Inka," namely,
the author's mummified father, who had led the first anti-Spanish resistance.
Titu Cusi's narrative contains an early version of a tradition that
diffused all over the Andes and that twentieth-century tellers, perhaps
influenced by re-oralized stories from published versions, still adduce to
explain Quechua alienation from official media:
My uncle [the Inka sovereign] Ataguallpa . .. received [the Spanish] very well,
and when he gave one of them a drink of the drink we use, in a golden beaker,
the Spaniard as he received it from his hand, poured it on the ground, because
of which my uncle became very angry. . . . The [Spanish] showed my uncle a
letter or book or some such, I don't know what, saying that it was the quillca
[drawing, inscription] of God and the King, and my uncle, since he felt offended
about the spilling of the chicha, which is what our drink is called, took the letter
or whatever it was, and threw it away, saying "What do I know about what you
give me? Get going, leave." 16
The Titu Cusi account, a crucial chapter in how Inka nobles gained
command of European historiographic discourse for their own purposes,
is nonetheless misleading as a sample of Andean historic discourse. (Note,
for example, the false exoticism of the 'chicha gloss. Chicha is not an
Andean word but a possibly Arawakan one introduced by Spaniards
arriving from the Caribbean.)
Only one Andean history book attained enough influence to shape
the dominant "history of Indians." It did so by canonizing a privileged
"Indian history" - that of certain royal Cusco lineages - as equal in
worth to European histories of kingdoms. Garcilaso Inca de la Vega,
born in Cusco in 1539 of a conquistador father and a royal Inka mother,
published in 1609 the first part of the Royal Commentaries of the Incas. In
some of the "golden century's" most seductive prose, the half-Inka Garcilaso
purported to record what he had learned as a youth among other
children of the newly converted Inka royalty. His predominant ideological
effort, the vindication of Inka descent as a noble title equal in worth
to European ones, fought in vain the increasingly anti-Inka tenor of
decrees from Spain. But his lavish idealizations of Inka rule as an age of
16 Titu Cusi Yupanqui's Relacidn dt la conquista del Peru (Lima, 1973), 15-16.
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