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Abstract Histories generally portray southern Ethiopians as pagans who lacked kings because they rely on the historical accounts of their northern Abyssinian conquerors, who adopted Christianity in the first century AD. Justified by a call to spread Christianity and suffering the threat of famine and disease to his empire, Abyssinian emperor Menelik II (1889–1913) conquered and colonized southern Omotic-speaking polities, who cultivated a drought-resistant crop, enset (Ensete ventricosum). According to most Ethiopian histories, Boreda were one of the southern Omotic societies, who quickly succumbed to conquest, adopted new agricultural technologies, and paid tribute and corvée labor. Boreda identity and history are entwined with farming enset, a relationship that provided food security, structured their historic settlement landscape, and charted their relationship with technology, each other, and outsiders. The authors argue that everyday practices, such as the farming of enset, are spaces within which Indigenous peoples frame and materialize ontological resilience against colonialism, religious conversion, and persecution. Boreda oral traditions, life histories, and daily practices support their efforts to resist settlers and richly inform the archaeology of their historic places, Bayira Deriya.