In The Unsettlement of America , Anna Brickhouse explores the fascinating career and ambivalent narrative legacy of Paquiquineo, a largely forgotten Native translator of the early modern Atlantic world. Encountered by Spanish explorers in 1561 near the future site of the Jamestown settlement, Paquiquineo traveled to Spain and from there to Mexico, where he was christened as Don Luis de Velasco. Regarded as a promising envoy to indigenous populations, Don Luis experienced nearly a decade of European civilization before thwarting the Spanish colonization of Ajacán, his native land on the eastern seaboard, in a dramatic act of unsettlement. Throughout this sweeping account, Brickhouse argues for the interpretive and knowledge-producing roles played by Don Luis as well as a range of other translators acting in Native-European contact zones while helping to shape an arena of inter-indigenous transmission in Europe and the Americas, from coastal Virginia and the Floridas to Cuzco, Peru; from colonial Cuba and Mexico to London and the royal court in Cordova, Spain. The book argues for the conceptual significance of unsettlement : the literal thwarting or destruction of settlement as well as a heuristic for understanding a range of texts related to settler colonialism throughout the hemisphere. As Brickhouse demonstrates, the story of Don Luis was told and retold-as well as censored, distorted, and suppressed-in an array of writings from the sixteenth century to the twentieth. Tracing accounts of this "unfounding father" as they unfold across the centuries, The Unsettlement of America addresses the problems of translation at the heart of his compelling story and speculates on the implications of the literary afterlife of Don Luis for the present and future of hemispheric American studies. "This is a fascinating and important book with an ambitious historical and disciplinary range.... Traitor, manipulator, far-sighted opponent of settlement and conquest-Brickhouse reads the contemporary accounts scrupulously and brilliantly in order to explore Don Luis's complex identity." -- Nineteenth-Century Literature "This is an excellent literary study of a historic figure and the world he witnessed. For historians it is a thought-provoking read that reminds us to question our sources." -- Journal of American History "A marvelous achievement that profoundly unsettles fundamental assumptions about colonial encounters in the European conquest of the Americas. The fascinating story of a Native American translator, Don Luis de Velasco, powerfully challenges the binary between indigeneity and cosmopolitanism that structures past and present historical narratives. Brickhouse's intellectual creativity in reading against the grain, reaching across historical periods, and reflecting on methodology makes this book a model for future scholarship in hemispheric and transnational American studies." --Amy Kaplan, author of The Anarchy of Empire in the Making of U. S. Culture "Perhaps the most unsettling message of The Unsettlement of America is that a figure so important as the 'unfounding father' Don Luis de Velasco has largely been forgotten. In recovering his enigmatic presences-from his role in both advancing and thwarting the Spanish attempt to colonize the Chesapeake in the 1570s through a host of obscure and not-so-obscure texts down to the twentieth century--Anna Brickhouse reveals much about the agency of indigenous peoples in the continent's history, about the nature of translation and conquest, and about the logics and illogics of settler colonialism." --Daniel K. Richter, author of Before the Revolution: America's Ancient Pasts " The Unsettlement of America is both a tremendous scholarly feat and a brilliant critical provocation. It traces the literary record of Don Luis de Velasco, a Native American anti-colonialist translator and captive from an area that the Spaniards called Ajacán and the English called Virginia, from the sixteenth to the twentieth century. Retrieving the history of this fascinating figure against the grain of a largely Euro-American colonialist archive written in Spanish and in English, this book represents a major intervention into colonial Latin American, (early) American, Hemispheric American, and Native American studies scholarship." --Ralph Bauer, author of The Cultural Geography of Colonial American Literatures "This is a sweeping tour de force that deserves a broad circulation, particularly among those drawn to cutting-edge works of which this is an outstanding exemplar." -- Journal of Jesuit Studies An exploration of the career and legacy of Don Luis de Velasco. Anna Brickhouse is Associate Professor of English at the University of Virginia and the author of Transamerican Literary Relations and the Nineteenth-Century Public Sphere .