Over the course of millennia Indigenous and European cultures profoundly diverged in how they organized their relationships with other animals. Sixteenth-century European authorities understood these differences in terms of cultural evolution and diabolism: they framed animal husbandry as a mark of civilizational advancement, and, relatedly, viewed many forms of animal subjectivity as potentially demonic. These discourses have seeped into modern scholarship and distorted or even erased the myriad ways Indigenous people interacted with and thought about other-than-human creatures. In particular, scholars have ignored or misunderstood practices of familiarization – the taming of wild animals undertaken for affective, spiritual, and political reasons. In this talk I will explore the entanglement of colonial discourses of domestication and diabolism, and familiarization practices among Nahua, Zapotec, and Mixtec communities before and after Spanish colonization.