Book cover of "Nueva Crónica y Buen Gobierno", written by Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala in 1615, aproximately.

Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala, best known as Guaman Poma, (c. 1550 – after 1616) was an indigenous Peruvian who became disillusioned with the treatment of the native peoples of the Andes by the Spanish after conquest. Events February 7 - Julius III becomes Pope. ... Events October 25 — Dirk Hartog makes the second recorded landfall by a European on Australian soil, at an island off the Western Australian coast Pocahontas arrives in England War between Venice and Austria Collegium Musicum founded in Prague Nicolaus Copernicus De revolutionibus is placed on the Index of Forbidden Books... A Hupa man, 1923 The term indigenous peoples of the Americas encompasses the inhabitants of the Americas before the arrival of the first European explorers in the late 15th century, as well as many present-day ethnic groups who identify themselves with those historical peoples. ... The Andes between Chile and Argentina The Andes form the longest mountain chain in the world. ... Conquistador (meaning Conqueror in the Spanish language) is the term used to refer to the soldiers, explorers, and adventurers who achieved the Conquista (this Spanish term is generally accepted by historians), i. ...

The son of a noble family from the central Southern Peruvian province of Huamanga or Ayacucho, Guaman Poma was a native Quechua speaker who probably learned the Spanish language as a child or adolescent, and who went on to become fully literate in the language. He described himself as "eighty years of age" in his 1615 manuscript (see below), leading many to deduce that he was born in the year 1535, when the Spanish conquest of Peru was in full swing. It seems that he used the figure "80" as a metaphor for old age, however, and many other references in his text indicate a more probably birthdate of 1550 or shortly thereafter. Ayacucho is the capital of the department of Ayacucho in Peru. ... Quechua (Standard Quechua, Runasimi Language of People) is an Native American language of South America. ... This article is about the international language known as Spanish. ...

We know from a handful of sixteenth-century documents in that Guaman Poma served in the 1570s as a Quechua translator for Spanish priests in the campaign to "extirpate idolatry" in the Peruvian countryside. Guaman Poma himself appears as a plaintiff in a series of lawsuits from the late 1590s in which he attempted to recover land and political title in the Chupas valley that he believed to be his by family right. These suits ultimately proved disastrous for him; not only did he lose the suits, but in 1600 he was stripped of all his property and forced into exile from the towns that he had once ruled as a noble. Quechua (Standard Quechua, Runasimi Language of People) is an Native American language of South America. ... The neutrality of this article is disputed. ...

Guaman Poma's great work, the nearly 1,200-page El primer nueva corónica [sic] y buen gobierno (The First New Chronicle and Good Government), is the longest sustained critique of Spanish colonial rule produced by an indigenous subject in the entire colonial period. Written between 1600 and 1615 and addressed to king Philip III of Spain, the Corónica outlines the injustices of colonial rule and argues that the Spanish were merely foreign settlers in Peru. "It is our country," he said, "because God has given it to us." Philip III of Spain Philip III (Spanish: Felipe III) (April 14, 1578 – March 31, 1621) was the king of Spain and Portugal (as Philip II Portuguese: Filipe II), from 1598 until his death. ...

The Corónica is remarkable in many ways: first, for its brilliant melding of writing and fine line drawings (398 pages of the book consist of Guaman Poma's famous full-page drawings); second, for expressing the view of a provincial noble on the conquest (most other existing expressions of indigenous views from the colonial era come from the nobility of Cusco, the ancient capital of the Incas); and third, for the author's frequent use of Quechua words and phrases in this primarily Spanish work. This is the only surviving text that has actual illustrations of pre-conquest Inca life, and is an invaluable resource for archaeologists and anthropologists studying the Inca. Cusco (also Cuzco, Qosqo, or Qusqu) is a city in southeastern Peru, near the Urubamba Valley (Sacred Valley) of the Andes mountain range. ... For other meanings of Inca, see Inca (disambiguation). ... Quechua (Standard Quechua, Runasimi Language of People) is an Native American language of South America. ...

The original manuscript of the Corónica has been kept in the Danish Royal Library since at least the early 1700s, though it only came into public view in 1908. A facsimile edition was produced in Paris in 1936. In 1980, a thorough transcription of the book by John Murra, Rolena Adorno, and Jorge Urioste was published as Felip Guaman Poma de Ayala, Nueva crónica y buen gobierno (Mexico City: Siglo XXI). A high-quality digital facsimile of the original manuscript was published online in 2000. The Royal Library in Copenhagen (Danish: Det Kongelige Bibliotek) is the national library of Denmark and the largest and most important library of Scandinavia. ...

Guaman Poma's name means "Eagle (or Falcon) Puma" in Quechua. In modern Quechua orthography, it would be spelled Waman Puma, and it is sometimes listed as such, or as any number of variants, such as Waman Poma and Guamán Poma (the latter with an incorrect Spanish accent; the correct accent is on the first syllable). In his own writing, he sandwiched his Quechua name between his Spanish baptismal name, Felipe (or Phelipe, as he spelled it) and the family name of a Spanish conquistador connected to his family history, Luis Ávalos de Ayala. Guaman Poma writes about the symbolism of all his names in his book, so it would not be stretching things to see the form of his name as a statement that his Quechua identity remains his core, though it surrounded by flamboyant Spanish names. The orthography of a language is the set of symbols (glyphs and diacritics) used to write a language, as well as the set of rules describing how to write these glyphs correctly, including spelling, punctuation, and capitalization. ... Conquistador (meaning Conqueror in the Spanish language) is the term used to refer to the soldiers, explorers, and adventurers who achieved the Conquista (this Spanish term is generally accepted by historians), i. ...

External links

• "Guaman Poma - El Primer Nueva Corónica Y Buen Gobierno" – A high-quality digital version of the Corónica, scanned from the original manuscript.

(Note: this article was corrected by the translator of the forthcoming Hackett Publishing edition of Guaman Poma's book, and contains much of the same information that will be found in the introduction to that translation.)