The Indigenous Identity

Memory and Resistance in Eliane Potiguara’s Writing

Abstract

This article is an analysis of the work of the indigenous writer Eliane Potiguara, Half face, Half mask (2019) in light of postcolonail theories and the indigenous identity. The approach favors the representation of indigenous women in Potiguara Literature, the collective voice of Brazilian indigenous peoples, gender, race and the struggle for territory of the original inhabitants of Brazil. The countercolonial lyrics and voices of indigenous women are a permanent anti racista manifesto from the oral memory of the elderly to the writings that reach the classrooms, educating for the respect for Mother Earth and her dissident bodies-territories. With the theoretical instrumentation of the Black skins, White masks (2008) by Frantz Fanon, I analyze the split identities of the “red skin, white masks” resulting from the anti-indigenous racism of the neocolonizers; and the decolonial pedagogies that envision several worlds and various forms of knowledge such as the thought of Lorena Cabnal, Community Feminism (2018) which brings together Latin American women, inhabitants from Abya Yala : indigenous, black, mestizo women, identities violated since the 16th century by patriarchy, white, christian and capitalist. Indigenous Literature is an area of knwolwdge that makes all of us aware of the urgency of defending our nature and all of the peoples who fight for its preservation