Aztlan Libre Press Publishes New Book

by Award-Winning Chicano Historian Juan Gómez-Quiñones:

Indigenous Quotient/Stalking Words: American Indian Heritage as Future


Aztlan Libre Press, an independent Chicano press based out of San Antonio, Texas, announces the publication of its third book: Indigenous Quotient/Stalking Words: American Indian Heritage as Future, by the award-winning educator, author and Professor of History at UCLA, Juan Gómez-Quiñones.

“Indigenous Quotient/Stalking Words” are two scholarly essays by the acclaimed academic that begin
by saying that: “American Indian ancestries and heritages ought to be integral to K-12 curriculums and
university explorations and graduate expositions for obvious reasons - contemporary universalist understandings. I refer not to a special presentation, project option, or ethnographic appreciation here and there, but rather to the full integration of Native American histories and cultures into academic curriculums. The Indigenous voice matters, yesterday and today, in substantive pedagogical and philosophical discourses.”

“Indigenous Quotient” depicts the history of academic discourse on American Indigenous Peoples.
Gómez-Quiñones chronologically examines the context and purpose of Western discourse, specifically
U.S. and Spanish/Mexican on Indigenous peoples, which demonstrates a continued attempt by Western
intellectuals to rationalize colonization from Columbus to current proponents of financial globalization.

“Stalking Words” begins where “Indigenous Quotient” left off by developing a paradigm rooted in
Indigenous ethos that consists of: 1) critiquing colonialism and all oppressive power structures; 2) selfreflection of historiography, theory, and philosophy; 3) responsibility of transmitting heritage; 4) Indigenous epistemology as the foundation of personhood and auto-validation; and 5) ideological autonomy.

By establishing these tracts as a foundation for intellectual theorizing, Gómez-Quiñones points students
and researchers towards theory that also serves as a pedagogy that teaches the values and ethics of compassion and understanding, or as he states it, “of strong heart and wise character.”

Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, Professor Emeriti, Ethnic Studies, at California State University East Bay,
and author of Roots of Resistance: A History of Land Tenure in New Mexico, has this to say about the book for the back cover: “Juan Gómez-Quiñones has dug deep and absorbed the relevant literature and Indigenous perspective, giving us a concise and brilliant interpretation, written in his unique and elegant style. This is a text sure to become essential and a classic, a challenge to every living scholar of the Americas.”

She goes on to say in her e-mail to the editors that she had written a note to Juan Gómez-Quiñones
saying that: “…if I were rich, I would buy up a million copies of this book and have them dropped from airplanes on every university campus in North America.”

For more information, or to purchase Indigenous Quotient/Stalking Words: American Indian Heritage
as Future, visit http://www.aztlanlibrepress.com/

ISBN-13:978-0-9844415-2-5 * $18.00 * 132 pages * Trade Paperback * Publication: March, 2012