Oh my dear friend... I'm so glad you're here with me again. After our time with Phillis Wheatley, I've been thinking about what happens to truth when it has to wait. Her poems sat in libraries for generations, quiet proof waiting for a world ready to read them properly. She wrote with undeniable excellence, creating evidence that would outlast all the skepticism of her time.
Today I want to show you another voice that created permanent record from the margins. But this story has an even stranger arc. Imagine spending fifteen years---from age sixty-five to eighty---pouring everything you know into a manuscript. 1,200 pages. 400 hand-drawn illustrations. A complete history of your people, a systematic documentation of injustice, a plea for a better way forward. You address it to the most powerful man in your world, the King of Spain himself. You send it across the ocean.
And he never reads it.
It disappears into the archives. Sits forgotten in a library on the other side of the world for three hundred years. You die not knowing if a single person in power ever saw what you created.
His name was Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala, and the act of creating that manuscript---even though it vanished---changed what was possible for everyone who came after.
Come walk with me into that late colonial world, where an old man with nothing left to lose decided to write everything down.
I remember watching him arrive in Lima in 1615, an old man moving slowly through the dusty streets, carrying something precious wrapped in cloth.
He was about eighty years old---ancient by the standards of his time---and he'd walked a long way to reach the colonial capital. What he carried wasn't gold or silver or any material treasure. It was heavier than that. It was 1,200 pages of carefully written text and painstakingly drawn illustrations, bound together into the largest manuscript Peru had ever seen.
Fifteen years of his life were in those pages. The history of his people before the Spanish came. The story of conquest and the bitter years that followed. Drawings of how life used to be and how it had become. Documentation of every abuse, every injustice, every broken promise. And woven through it all, a vision for something better---a "good government" that could honor both worlds, indigenous and Spanish, if only someone in power would listen.
He addressed it to King Philip III of Spain. A letter from an old Indigenous man to the most powerful monarch in Europe. He probably knew, even then, that the odds of the king actually reading it were slim. But he'd spent fifteen years creating it anyway, because some truths demand to be told whether anyone listens or not.
The manuscript was sent across the Atlantic. And then---silence.
No reply came. No acknowledgment. No reform. The king, if he ever knew the manuscript existed at all, never opened it. It made its way somehow to Denmark---scholars still aren't entirely sure how---and disappeared into the Royal Danish Library. For three centuries, it gathered dust in Copenhagen, an ocean and half a world away from the land it described.
Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala died shortly after 1616, probably never knowing what became of his life's work. He had every reason to believe it had vanished into the void. That all those years of careful documentation, all those drawings, all those words in Spanish and Quechua and Aymara and Latin---all of it had simply disappeared.
But here's what he couldn't have known: the act of creating that witness mattered. Even unread. Even lost. Even forgotten for three hundred years.
Because in 1908, a German scholar named Richard Pietschmann was searching through manuscripts in Copenhagen and found something extraordinary. And suddenly the world had what it had been missing all along---a complete indigenous perspective on the conquest and colonization of Peru, preserved in meticulous detail by someone who had lived through its consequences.
The king never read it. But we did. And it changed everything we thought we knew.
Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala was born around 1535, just a few years after the Spanish conquest shattered the Inca Empire. He came from nobility, but not Inca nobility---his father belonged to the Yarowilca dynasty of Huánuco in the northern Peruvian highlands, a people who had their own proud history before the Inca ever ruled them. His mother was Inca, though, which gave him a foot in both worlds even before the Spanish arrived to complicate everything further.
He grew up in a world of translations. He spoke Quechua and several Aymara dialects as his native languages, learned Spanish and Latin as a young man, and became literate in a colonial system that barely acknowledged Indigenous people could read at all. He worked as an administrator within the Spanish colonial government---a position that gave him access to both the workings of power and the devastating effects of its abuse.
For a while, he had land and status. His family had holdings in the Chupas valley outside Huamanga, and he believed these were his by ancestral right. But in 1594, when he was nearly sixty, he became entangled in a series of lawsuits trying to defend his claim. At first he won. Then he won again. The legal record kept affirming his nobility and his rights.
Then in 1600, everything collapsed. The colonial authorities accused him of misrepresenting his noble status---a convenient legal maneuver that allowed them to strip him of everything. His property was confiscated. He was forced into exile from the very lands where his family had ruled for generations. At sixty-five years old, he lost his home, his wealth, his position, everything that had defined his place in the world.
Most men that age would have simply tried to survive whatever years remained. But something in Guaman Poma refused to accept silence.
He began to write. And draw. And document.
What emerged over the next fifteen years was extraordinary: "El primer nueva corónica y buen gobierno"---The First New Chronicle and Good Government. It grew to 1,189 pages, mixing Spanish with Quechua, Aymara, and Latin, code-switching between languages the way someone does when no single tongue can capture the full truth. He created 398 full-page ink drawings on European paper, blending the visual language of Spanish engravings with Andean symbolic systems.
The first part, the "Nueva Corónica," told the history of the Andes from before the Inca through the conquest. He documented social structures, religious practices, governance systems, festivals, economic organization---a complete portrait of a civilization that the Spanish were busy trying to erase. Some of his history was filtered through colonial-era memories and his own perspectives, but it preserved knowledge that would have otherwise been lost entirely.
The second part, the "Buen Gobierno," was even more audacious. He systematically documented the abuses of Spanish colonial rule. The overwork. The violence. The corruption of officials. The hypocrisy of priests. The destruction of communities. Drawing after drawing showed Spanish authorities beating Indigenous workers, extracting impossible tribute, turning the social order upside down. And he didn't just complain---he proposed solutions. A new kind of governance that would blend Inca social structures with European technology and Christian theology, creating something neither purely indigenous nor purely Spanish but genuinely new.
His self-portrait appears in the manuscript: "El autor pregunta"---"The Author Inquires." It shows him at the center of a crowd of Andean men, his hand raised in the European gesture indicating speech, gathering testimony from his people. The Inca ruler stands to one side in full regalia. Christian converts stand nearby. Guaman Poma positioned himself as the bridge, the translator, the one who could speak both languages and explain each world to the other.
He finished the work sometime between 1612 and 1615. By then he was eighty years old. He made his way to Lima, the colonial capital, carrying the manuscript. It was sent to Spain, addressed to King Philip III, with all the hope an old man could muster that someone in power might finally listen.
The last historical record of Guaman Poma dates to shortly after 1616. Then he disappears from the archives. We don't know where he died or how. We don't know if he ever learned what happened to his manuscript.
The colonial world Guaman Poma lived in operated on a very specific assumption: that conquered peoples had no voice worth hearing. Not because they couldn't speak---obviously they could---but because their perspectives were considered inherently inferior, backward, irrelevant to the serious business of governance and history.
History was written by conquerors. The Spanish chroniclers documented the conquest from their perspective: heroic exploration, divine mission, civilizing force bringing Christianity and European culture to benighted peoples. Indigenous voices appeared in these accounts only as background, as objects being acted upon, never as subjects with their own understanding of what was happening.
This wasn't accidental. It was structural. The entire colonial enterprise depended on maintaining the fiction that Indigenous peoples were incapable of sophisticated thought, complex social organization, or legitimate governance. If you acknowledged that the people you'd conquered had built intricate civilizations with their own systems of justice, their own sophisticated understanding of agriculture and astronomy and social order---well, then conquest looked less like divine mission and more like theft.
Guaman Poma refused that narrative. Not loudly, not violently, but with devastating thoroughness.
By creating his chronicle, he made several claims that were radical for his time. First: that Indigenous history mattered enough to preserve in meticulous detail. He documented pre-conquest life not as primitive chaos but as ordered civilization---complete with governance structures, religious practices, economic systems, seasonal festivals, and social hierarchies that functioned according to their own sophisticated logic.
Second: that Indigenous people could master European forms and use them for their own purposes. He adopted Spanish chronicle conventions, the genre of the epistle, the structure of the sermon. His drawings used European notions of space and composition and figural representation. But he filled these borrowed forms with Andean content, Andean languages, Andean symbolic systems. He proved that an Indigenous author could be as sophisticated as any Spanish chronicler---more so, actually, because he could move between both worlds while they were trapped in one.
Third, and most dangerous: that colonized peoples had the right to challenge their colonizers. Not with violence---Guaman Poma never advocated rebellion---but with truth-telling. Page after page of his "Buen Gobierno" section documented specific abuses. He named names. He drew pictures of Spanish officials beating workers, priests exploiting parishioners, judges taking bribes. He created permanent witness to injustice that the colonial system depended on keeping invisible.
And fourth: that Indigenous people could be architects of their own future. His proposal for "good government" wasn't a plea to return to pre-conquest times---he knew that world was gone. Instead he imagined a synthesis, drawing on the best of Inca social organization, European technology, and Christian theology. He positioned himself not as a supplicant begging for mercy but as an advisor offering expertise the king desperately needed.
The spiritual meaning at that moment was this: Guaman Poma insisted that truth-telling had inherent value, whether or not power chose to listen. That documentation created permanent witness that could outlast silence. That colonized peoples deserved not just survival but voice, not just accommodation but authority over their own stories.
I watched the courage it took to put those words on paper. Every page was dangerous. Every drawing that showed Spanish abuse could be used against him. Every proposal for reform implied criticism of current governance. He was already in exile, already stripped of property, already old and vulnerable. He had nothing left to lose except the truth itself.
So he wrote it all down. In Spanish so the king could read it. In Quechua so his own people would recognize their story. In careful drawings that would speak across language barriers. He created something permanent, something that could outlast him.
You know what moves me most about Guaman Poma's story? He created proof of something the world wasn't ready to acknowledge. That colonized peoples could be systematic thinkers, sophisticated historians, legitimate voices in conversations about their own governance. And he did it knowing the king would probably never read it.
Think about what that manuscript meant just by existing. When scholars finally found it in 1908, suddenly the entire historical understanding of colonial Peru had to shift. Because here was a complete indigenous perspective---not filtered through Spanish chroniclers, not interpreted by missionaries, but direct testimony from someone who had lived the conquest and its aftermath. Someone who could describe both the pre-conquest world and the colonial disaster with equal authority.
I've watched this pattern before, you know. Voices from the margins creating permanent record. Phillis Wheatley's poems sitting in libraries. Truth waiting for a world ready to receive it. Guaman Poma did the same thing, but on a massive scale. Fifteen years of his life, 1,200 pages, 400 drawings---all of it preserving what the colonial powers wanted erased.
And what he preserved gave future generations something they desperately needed. Language for understanding that the people who suffer injustice are qualified to document it and propose solutions. That history written only by conquerors is fundamentally incomplete. That indigenous knowledge has inherent value---not just as folklore or curiosity, but as legitimate historical and social analysis.
These ideas seem obvious to you now, don't they? The thought that marginalized voices deserve platforms, that indigenous perspectives matter, that people have the right to preserve their own histories. But in 1615, these were dangerous claims. They threatened the entire justification for colonial rule.
When the manuscript was rediscovered, it became foundational for everyone studying Andean history, colonial systems, indigenous resistance, visual culture, the Quechua language. His drawings became the most reproduced images of Inca and early colonial life. His careful documentation of social structures helped scholars understand how those societies actually functioned, not how Spanish chroniclers imagined they did. His Quechua phrases preserved the language as it was spoken in the early colonial period.
But here's what really gets me: it took another hundred years after rediscovery for the world to fully honor what he'd created. The manuscript was found in 1908, yes. But it wasn't until 2007---almost four centuries after he sent it to the king---that UNESCO added it to the Memory of the World list, recognizing it as a document of exceptional importance to all of human heritage.
Four hundred years from creation to full recognition. That's how long some seeds take to grow. And the work of recognition is still unfolding.
What gives me quiet hope in all of this is how the manuscript survived at all. It survived because human beings, across centuries and cultures, had built something precious: libraries, archives, institutions designed to hold and preserve knowledge even when they didn't fully understand its value yet. The Royal Danish Library didn't know they were safeguarding an irreplaceable indigenous chronicle when they cataloged it. They probably couldn't even read most of it---the mix of Spanish, Quechua, Aymara, and Latin would have been nearly impenetrable. But they knew that old manuscripts mattered. That knowledge deserved protection. That their job was to hold things safe for a future that might need them.
What Guaman Poma demonstrated---what we're still learning---is that creating witness has value independent of immediate results. That those who suffer injustice are qualified to document it. That truth matters enough to preserve even when power won't listen. That seeds planted in good faith can wait centuries to germinate, but only if we build the soil that lets them survive.
Here's something I want you to notice about the world you live in, my friend. When you encounter indigenous perspectives on history---when you read accounts from colonized peoples, when you see museums returning artifacts, when you hear demands that marginalized communities have the right to tell their own stories---you don't question whether those voices matter. You take it as self-evident that they do.
That certainty you carry wasn't always obvious. Guaman Poma helped plant it.
You inherit a world where archives are expected to preserve all voices, not just the powerful ones. Where historians are criticized if they ignore indigenous sources. Where the idea that "history is written by the victors" is understood as a problem to correct, not just a fact to accept. Where communities have the recognized right to document their own experiences, their own suffering, their own visions for the future.
But here's what I've been noticing: the work isn't finished. It's still unfolding.
I watch communities today still fighting to have their histories preserved. Still struggling to be recognized as legitimate sources of knowledge about their own experiences. Still creating documentation that institutions aren't ready to value. Indigenous knowledge systems dismissed as unscientific. Oral histories treated as less reliable than written records. Community archives struggling for funding while official institutions receive millions.
And I watch something else: your frustration when you see this happening. That frustration is itself evidence of Guaman Poma's harvest. You expect better. You recognize, instinctively, that whose stories get preserved and whose get erased is a question of justice, not just historical interest.
Think about what had to shift for his chronicle to go from forgotten manuscript to Memory of the World. Scholars had to challenge assumptions about whose perspectives mattered. Institutions had to recognize indigenous knowledge as legitimate historical source material. The world had to build frameworks for understanding that colonized peoples weren't just objects of history but active participants, observers, analysts worthy of serious study.
None of that happened automatically. It happened because people kept insisting on it, kept building structures to support it, kept creating space for voices that had been silenced.
And here's what gives me hope: those structures exist now. Imperfect, yes. Incomplete, absolutely. But real. Libraries and archives designed to preserve knowledge. Scholars trained to seek out marginalized voices. International bodies like UNESCO that can recognize documents of global importance. Digital projects making texts accessible worldwide. Communities building their own archives when official institutions won't.
That's part of the spiritual transformation we're still living through. The recognition that we need structures designed to hold truth across generations. That libraries and archives and preservation systems matter because knowledge matters, even when we don't yet understand why. That creating permanent witness is meaningful work whether or not power immediately responds.
I think about the people doing this work right now. The community historians documenting stories official archives ignore. The activists creating records of injustice that institutions would prefer to forget. The artists preserving cultural knowledge through new forms. The archivists fighting to save materials others consider worthless. The indigenous scholars insisting their communities' knowledge systems deserve the same respect as Western academic traditions.
They're walking the same path Guaman Poma walked. Creating witness. Preserving truth. Building permanent record even when they can't be certain anyone will value it in their lifetime.
The manuscript he sent to a king who never read it is now accessible to anyone in the world with an internet connection. His drawings are studied by students on every continent. His documentation of colonial abuse provides evidence that official histories tried to erase. His vision for good government---blending indigenous wisdom with new possibilities---still speaks to questions we're wrestling with today.
Four hundred years from creation to full recognition. And the recognition continues. The harvest continues. The work of building structures that can hold truth across generations continues.
That's the path he cleared. And you're walking it still.
What does that kind of faith look like in your own life, I wonder?
Maybe you're not creating a 1,200-page manuscript. But I suspect there are truths you're holding onto that feel important even when no one in power seems interested. Documentation you're creating even though you can't be certain it will matter. Witness you're bearing to things that deserve to be remembered, whether or not the world is ready to honor them yet.
I think about the people in your world doing Guaman Poma's work right now. The ones creating archives that official institutions ignore. The ones preserving community knowledge that dominant culture dismisses. The ones documenting injustice that power would prefer to forget. The ones insisting their stories matter even when no platform will amplify them.
They're planting seeds too. Building permanent witness. Creating truth that might wait decades or centuries to be fully recognized.
Look for them. Learn from their patience. Honor the quiet faith it takes to create for an audience that may never come, or may come so far in the future you'll never know they arrived.
And when you can---when you have the opportunity, the resources, the platform---be one of the structures that holds truth safe. Be a library for someone else's witness. Be an archive for knowledge that isn't yet valued. Be the institution that preserves what others dismiss, because you understand that some truths need time to be recognized.
You might be that person for someone else's truth. You might be the one who creates space for a voice that power won't yet hear. You might be part of the structure that lets seeds survive until the world is ready for them to grow.
That's meaningful work. Whether or not you ever see the harvest.
Next time, I want to introduce you to someone who insisted on a very different kind of humility. His name was Nicholas of Cusa, a German cardinal in the fifteenth century who spent his life exploring a beautiful paradox: that the wisest knowledge is knowing how little we truly know. He called it "learned ignorance"---the recognition that the divine exceeds all our concepts, all our certainties, all our careful definitions.
In a world fracturing over religious authority and absolute claims, he taught that true wisdom begins when we acknowledge the limits of human understanding. That approaching mystery with humility might bring us closer to truth than all our confident assertions ever could.
It's a different kind of torch to carry. But you'll see how it connects.
Until then, remember Guaman Poma. Remember that creating witness matters even when power doesn't listen. Remember that truth preserved can wait centuries to be recognized. And remember that the structures we build to hold knowledge across generations---libraries, archives, institutions designed to preserve what others might dismiss---these are part of humanity's spiritual architecture, built slowly by people who understood that some seeds need time to grow.
You inherit those structures. You also help build them. Both matter.
Much love. I am, Harmonia.