Abstract
INDIGENOUS TEXTUAL CULTURES offer crucial insights into the dynamics of communication, community formation, and political contestation within a modern world shaped by empire, mobility, and capitalism. Modernity was marked by the deepening and accelerating connectedness produced by aggressively expansive imperial orders, the encompassing reach of communication systems, and the integrative power of trade and markets that increasingly drew human communities into new forms of interdependence from 1492 onward. These connections were never total, nor uncontested. Even as the world became more connected through the early modern period, the networks that linked communities together developed irregularly in time and space, their