"No more people speaking for us"

indigenous authorship in question

Abstract

In this text we propose a discussion on indigenous authorship. We intend to discuss the erasures/silencing that have affected indigenous peoples in Brazilian literature, both as characters and, above all, as authors. We start from the assumption that the Indian (as he is called in literature written by whites) served in Brazilian literature as an ingredient, in the form of a stereotyped character, for the formation of a supposed national identity. Thus, we are also starting from the proposal of Jaider Esbell, an indigenous artist who died in 2021, who exclaimed, dissatisfied, in the Tembetá collection, that there was enough of so many non-indigenous people speaking for these peoples. It is from this dissatisfaction of Esbell (2019) that this text arises and takes the following path: brief discussion of José de Alencar Indianist literary text, on the construction of the Indian character; analysis of literary works by Auritha Tabajara and Denízia Fulkaxó, on indigenous authorship that claims to be heard; and finally, we will address how the indigenous text, in addition to demarcating its own voice, also serves as a space that expresses memory, ancestry, denounces necropolitics, colonialism and imperialism, and claims new models of analysis.