Felipe Guamán Poma de Ayala

Felipe Guamán Poma de Ayala was an Andean noble of the generation after the conquest of Peru who worked as an interpreter and assistant to Spanish officials, and around 1615 sent to Philip III a letter of twelve hundred pages, with four hundred drawings, describing the history of the Andes, the abuses of the colonial regime and the way to reform it. The manuscript was never answered and lay in the Danish Royal Library until 1908. The Appeal Concerning the Priests is the portion the lists assign, an indictment of the clergy’s exploitation of the Indians in the words of one of them. It is the most important indigenous account of Spanish rule.