Brazilian Indigenous as an Uneven Identity

Abstract

Orality has always been the main channel through which culture and knowledge has passed onto generations of Indigenous peoples in Brazil. Yet, today, the need to resist cultural assimilation or, even worse, annihilation, has led to the creation of new, written materials where Indigenous people can speak for themselves by relating their history, defending their identity, and their cultural territory. Among these, Brazilian geographer, poet, and activist Márcia Wayna Kambeba of the Omágua/Kambeba people uses literature as a space where decolonial thought and traditional knowledge meet to build a philosophical, political, and poetic view on indigenous identity in general and on the experience of Indigenous women in particular. Drawing from previous studies on Brazilian Indigenous literature, decolonial theory, and decolonial feminism, this paper discusses Kambeba’s works and underpins the relevance and need to examine the specificity of the experience of Brazilian Indigenous women writers as fundamental participants in the periphery of the world-literature to discuss the postcolonial configurations of identities in present-day Brazilian society.