Eternal Sovereigns

“Eternal Sovereigns represents a significant, powerful, and needed ethical intervention into art history, visual culture, settler colonialism, and area studies. Gloria Jane Bell’s juxtaposition of original archival research with her illuminating first-person perspective and creative voice makes for a fascinating and important book that constitutes a major contribution to Indigenous studies.” - Jennifer DeVere Brody, author of Punctuation: Art, Politics, and Play

“Intimate and personal yet also universal and grand, Eternal Sovereigns serves as an essential read for all disciplines engaging with Indigenous materials and the history of collections. In this provocative ‘ancestral art history lesson,’ Gloria Jane Bell tells the fraught story of the Vatican’s Indigenous objects from the Americas displayed first in the 1925 Vatican Missionary Exposition. This well-researched and clearly written study ultimately demonstrates how archives and museums act as colonial powers on a global stage.” - Lia Markey, author of Imagining the Americas in Medici Florence

"Bell’s extensive footnotes, combined with her first-person accounts of archival research, reveal her breadth of knowledge and indefatigable commitment to her project. Her appendix letters to Pope Francis and Justin Trudeau... underscore an already clear awareness of her work’s international stakes. Altogether, Eternal Sovereigns is a thoughtful consideration of Indigenous presence and creativity in Rome." - Lois Taylor Biggs, CAA.Reviews