The Concept of Alterity

Before colonial encounters devised ways to create ‘the other’ out of Indigenous populations, we were other to them. Indigenous populations of the Americas greeted European newcomers using rites of hospitality perfected through time and enacted for all those who were other to them. The state of Otherness was not exclusionary or related to cognition of a power imbalance but was bracketed by the difference embedded in ‘not us, the people.’ But Otherness constituted a space of impending danger particularly as an encounter lingered, because time required the incorporation of the Other into the social fabric of the group, albeit in a liminal state. Based on archival and ethnographic evidence, this chapter explores several narratives of first encounters with colonizers and the immediate aftermath of such encounters probing into strategies and tactics of accommodation and social integration of newcomers.