Throughout the novel, khipus are an important symbol of the power of storytelling, controlling one’s own history, and the silence imposed on marginalized people. A khipu is an ancient Incan recording device made of string. The strings are knotted in a variety of ways to record data and other information. Some even believe that khipus might hold “poetry, celestial maps, genealogies, military reports, legal code. Potentially everything” (68). The khipus were made and read by individuals called quipucamayocs, “a priestly class” respected for “[holding] the power of documentation” (68). Prior to colonization, the Incan king had “an expansionist diplomatic policy” (68); he conquered other groups and brought them into the Incan empire. Part of this policy included killing the people’s quipucamayocs and destroying their khipus so that he could “erase their memories” and “control the narrative” (68). When the Spanish arrived, they killed more quipucamayocs and destroyed more khipus, and now, the method of reading the remaining examples has been lost. Many of the remaining khipus are housed in museums and studied by white anthropologists and archeologists. The khipu represents how generations of Indigenous knowledge and history have been lost to colonization; even now, the history that remains is out of the control of those to whom it pertains.