NEH Grant to Support History Research on South American Indigenous War and Mission Militias

Shawn Austin

Austin at Simancas Spain Archive

Shawn Austin, associate professor of history, received a National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Stipend — one of two recipients of NEH support in the state of Arkansas in the 2024 cycle — for his book project titled Guaraní Militias and the Politics of Defense in the Spanish Río de la Plata, 16th-19th Centuries.

The NEH was created in 1965, is an independent federal agency, and is one of the top national funders for the humanities. NEH awards are highly competitive; the NEH funded just 13% of the total summer stipend proposals this year. Kathryn Sloan, interim dean of the Fulbright College of Arts and Sciences and Latin America historian, congratulated Austin on receiving the stipend, noting that "it is an honor to receive a National Endowment for Humanities award and bespeaks the project's originality and high caliber."

Austin explained that "historians are finding more and more that Indigenous and African militias constituted some of the most important fighting forces in the Spanish Americas. This bears out in the Río de la Plata as well, where Guaraní militias were the military backbone of the region until military reforms and the gradual decline of the Guaraní missions after 1750."

Austin's approach to this topic is unique in that he employs linguistic methods via original readings of Guaraní-language texts. He explains that after Nahua, Maya, and Quechua, Guaraní constitutes one of the largest indigenous language-corpora for Spanish America.

"There are many Guaraní-language historical sources, including lexicons, letters, and even theatrical accounts, which help elucidate evolving Guaraní ideas about war and peace as well as specific militia activities," he said.  

The NEH Summer Stipend will support the final stage of Austin's research this summer at the Society of Jesus's (Jesuit Order) archive in Rome, just outside Vatican City. He will read manuscript letters penned by Jesuits from the seventeenth century to better understand the genesis of the Guaraní militias in the early mission towns. Austin has already consulted historical archives in Argentina and Spain. Last summer, he spent two out of five weeks in Simancas (Spain), at a castle-turned-archive, where he identified unexplored Guaraní-language letters from a time when some Guaraní rebelled, deploying militias, against the Spanish monarchy.

"It may seem odd to be researching Guaraní peoples from a borderlands region in archives throughout Europe," he explained, "but such is the nature of studying peoples subject to the Spanish monarchy and the Jesuit order, which both featured record-hungry bureaucracies."

Austin hopes to publish his book by the end of 2026.