Writers and Storytellers: Lee Maracle, Eliane Potiguara and the Consolidation of Indigenous Literatures in Canada and in Brazil (original) (raw)

Aspects of Indigenous Participation in Brazilian Literature (Fábio Almeida de Carvalho)

Journal of Foreign Languages and Cultures, 2023

The article both presents how, from the end of the 1980s onwards, native peoples have begun to occupy certain spaces of textual production and circulation that they had not previously occupied in the Brazilian cultural scene (for social, linguistic, and cultural reasons, but also political and juridical) and discusses how this process has provoked a vigorous movement of dilation of traditional textual and discursive borders in Western culture. Texts deriving from indigenous peoples in the sphere of academic discourse are, in general, bilingual, and are structured in ways that combine aspects of intellectual production with those of artistic creation. Moreover, they are also structured around a rather complex conception of the notion of authorship (considering that they are written by an author but represent the voice of their people). As examples, the article analyzes the case of Os cantos tradicionais Ye'kwana [Traditional Ye'kwana Chants], by the indigenous teacher and researcher Fernando Ye'kwana Gimenes, winner of the 2020/2021 edition of the Dirce Cortes Riedel Masters Dissertation Award by the Brazilian Association of Comparative Literature, as a typical example of the cultural phenomenon discussed. The traditional Ye'kwana chants present significant transgressions in relation to the traditional notions of narrative logic and the dominant forms of narration in the fields of literature and history. The awarding of this academic prize to an indigenous inhabitant of the forest, on the border between Brazil and Venezuela, by the largest association of comparative literature in Latin America, in addition to being an important act in political terms, demonstrates how urgent it is to rethink processes of global literary dissemination beyond the restricted frameworks configured by the logic of hegemonic cultures, which are based on closed divisions and hierarchies. With this, we intend to contribute to the process of including Amerindian texts in the repertoire of Comparative Literature and World Literature.

Indigenous Voices in Literature (Latin America)

Oxford Bibliographies in Latin American Studies, 2018

Introduction The indigenous peoples of Abya Yala (Latin America)—which in the Kuna language means “Land in Its Full Maturity”—are the descendants of the first inhabitants and ancestral owners of the lands that were later conquered by European conquistadors. Indigenous peoples, indeed, have resisted centuries of colonialism and neocolonialism, which attempted to strip them of their territories, native languages, and cultural identities. Since the time of Christopher Columbus, the Spanish word indio has been used to imply the racial, cultural, linguistic, and intellectual inferiority of indigenous peoples, yet they have never accepted colonization and exploitation passively. There is a long history of indigenous rebellions and symbolic reappropriations of the “New World.” Today, there are more than eight hundred indigenous ethnic groups in Latin America, and two hundred more are estimated to be living in voluntary isolation, according to the United Nations. The cultural and linguistic heritage of indigenous peoples contributes to the world’s diversity. Indigenous literatures, in particular, are a paradigmatic example of this rich cultural heritage. Based on collective oral traditions (myths, rituals, legends, stories, songs, etc.), these literatures encompass a vast heterogeneous textual production (pre-Hispanic codices, colonial documents, letters, chronicles, autobiographies, testimonies, poems, short stories, novels, etc.) that has been written by indigenous peoples themselves, often using their own languages and reflecting their own worldviews. In this sense, indigenismo, understood as an urban-white-criollo cultural tradition of representing and speaking about and for indigenous peoples, has a radically different point of view (see the Oxford Bibliographies in Latino Studies article “Latino Indigenismo in a Comparative Perspective”). During the last few decades, the production of indigenous literatures has flourished, putting an end to traditional indigenismo and modifying views on national histories of literatures and conventional literary concepts. New multilingual editions and anthologies of indigenous poetry, fictional narratives, and other genres are currently being published, sometimes as the result of literary festivals and workshops, scholarships, and projects with the participation of indigenous peoples. This new literature is also part of the contemporary social struggle of indigenous communities to affirm their right to live with dignity and preserve their own cultures and languages. Quechua, Kichwa, Aymara, Nahuatl, Maya, and Mapudungun literatures, among many others, allow us to hope that a full social, political, and cultural recognition of indigenous peoples is not so far away. In this bibliographical review, key pre-Hispanic, colonial, modern, and contemporary indigenous authors and works are considered chronologically, giving special priority to indigenous primary sources, and to English translations when they are available. http://www.oxfordbibliographies.com/abstract/document/obo-9780199766581/obo-9780199766581-0199.xml?rskey=9usSqA&result=3&q=juan%20carlos%20grijalva#firstMatch Introduction General Overviews Reference Works and Bibliographies Pre-Hispanic Codices, Colonial Testimonies, and Other Documents Anthologies Across the Americas Early Modern Indigenous Narratives Indigenous Testimonio and Autobiography Anthologies of Contemporary Indigenous Narratives Anthologies of Contemporary Indigenous Poetry Selected Contemporary Indigenous Writers (Prose and Poetry) Translations into Indigenous Languages

Reflections of Native-American Indigenous Culture in Brazilian Indigenous Authors

Post-Scriptum, 2019

Daniel Munduruku, écrivain autochtone brésilien, et Maurício Negro ont écrit un livre intitulé A palavra do grande chefe (Le discours du grand chef). Ce livre est une adaptation du célèbre discours que le chef Seattle a prononcé lors des négociations du traité de 1854. Le président des États-Unis de l'époque, Franklin Pierce, a fait une offre aux peuples Duwamish et Suquamish : celle d'acheter une grande partie de leurs terres en échange d'une autre réserve située ailleurs. Noah Sealth, ou chef Seattle, a répondu brillamment dans un discours déjà adapté d'innombrables fois. Le discours est tout à fait d'actualité puisque la relation entre l'humain et la nature doit encore être défendue contre les forces prédatrices capitalistes. Le livre a été lancé lors de « Feira do Livro Indígena de Mato Grosso (FLIMT) », une foire du livre des peuples autochtones brésiliens, et a été lu à de nombreux leaders autochtones dans l'assistance, un choix performatif qui fonctionna comme une reconstitution du texte original. Après la lecture, de nombreux autres auteurs brésiliens ont réfléchi à la gravité des leçons apprises avec leur « proches parents » issus des communautés autochtones des États-Unis. Dans cet article, nous avons l'intention d'analyser comment Daniel Munduruku et Mauricio Negro ont adapté le contexte du discours original à la réalité brésilienne dans leur livre, y compris l'utilisation de l'iconographie traditionnelle Suquamish et Suwamish et l'adaptation du discours original, mettant de côté les di érences 20/12/2021 20:09 Reflections of Native-American Indigenous Culture in Brazilian Indigenous Authors | Post-Scriptum https://post-scriptum.org/27-04-reflections-of-native-american-indigenous-culture/ 2/18 culturelles. Nous analyserons quels résultats cette démarche a eu dans la formation des discours actuels et futurs des autres auteurs autochtones du Brésil comme Eliane Potiguara ou Olivio Jekupé notamment.

Expressing Guineidade Through Lit/Orature: Semedo, Sila and their Meta-Narratives of Orality

Journal of History and Cultures, University of Birmingham, 2015

Poet and short story writer Odete Costa Semedo and novelist and playwrite Abdulai Sila and are two of Guinea-Bissau’s most acclaimed authors. This article examines the success of these two authors in fiercely upholding the local whilst writing in the ‘global’; expressing their guineidade through the form and language, rather than solely in the content, of their published fictional prose. It launches from existing critical works on Sila and Semedo’s assertion of local cultures via the subversion of the Portuguese language with Bissau-Guinean Crioulo vocabulary, structures, cultural references, names and song. This article builds upon that existing critical work by engaging with these authors’ foregrounding of the non-static or changeable nature of stories within oral literary culture, and how they construct a meta-narrative of orality to engage with an imagined active audience and foreground the context of orality from which these literary works spring. It posits that the maintenance of elements of oral literature in these written works questions the western mode of storytelling and asserts that guineidade can be upheld when writing in the language of the former colonizer. Indeed, in the case of Guinea Bissau, subverting that very language forms part of the creation of guineidade. This paper concludes that it is the authors’ intent that these stories are in the first instance part of Guinean local oral literature, and that the act of writing and publishing them is a method of preservation and dissemination rather than their conversion into western non-oral literature and the confines it presents.

Brazil’s Indigenous Peoples and Their Autobiographical Narratives

Journal of Literature and Art Studies, 2016

When considering indigenous people in Brazil, both in academic and non-academic settings, the individuals' names are almost always ignored for the sake of representing their collectivity as communities, as Peoples. Discussing autobiographies or indigenous biographies is still an uncommon endeavor, even in our field of Letters/Liberal Arts or in Indigenous Ethnology. However, since the beginning of the process of reclaiming the lands that once belonged to them, the indigenous Peoples have been producing autobiographical narratives, demonstrating how this genre of text production-traditionally linked to the development of the Western individual-can constitute and be appropriated in different Amerindian translations. It is from this perspective that I intend to present a discussion about those text productions, analyzing what their collective signatures express, and how their proper names are constructed and signified on behalf of the group.

Writing the Indigenous Americas

American Literary History, 2023

This essay considers three recent works in NAIS scholarship that take up past and present-day understandings of writing in the Americas: Gesa Mackenthun and Christen Mucher’s edited collec￾tion, Decolonizing “Prehistory”: Deep Time and Indigenous Knowledges in North America (2021); Chadwick Allen’s Earthworks Rising: Mound Building in Native American Literature and Arts (2022); and Edgar Garcia’s Signs of the Americas: A Poetics of Pictography, Hieroglyphs, and Khipu (2020). Although writing is not the most immediate brief of any one study reviewed here, each contributes to the continuing relevance of thinking about the scholarly role of this category. In particular, I explore how each book enables us to see the concept of writing in ways that are not reducible to the positions outlined above, even while addressing the interpretive risks each position poses. Rather than reading these works as polemics invested in an either/or choice on the matter of expansive or narrow definitions of writing, I suggest that each con￾tribution be understood as an act of scholarly generosity that proffers decolonial ways of interpreting the communicative media of the Indigenous Americas.