Indigenous Authorship in Fifteen Years of Letters

Abstract

There are many studies that analyze letters about indigenous peoples for a critical understanding of Brazil's political and literary history. In these analyzes, the epistles are treated as valuable archives for the creative processes of their authors, testimonies of notorious identity and political situations or historical/biographical documents foundational to understand our history. However, there is a significant gap in these researches and approaches when the indigenous becomes the sender of the letters, the author of this type of text, that is, when the biography, testimony or historical document was produced by the indigenous himself. In 2013, we prepared the project The Letters of Indigenous Peoples to Brazil to discuss this gap and to create the first virtual and physical archive of these correspondences -fundamental for the presentation of another view from Brazil, narrated and created by authorship of indigenous peoples. In this article we will analyze the specificities of some of these correspondences, discussing the letter as a support used by the natives for a conversation with Brazil, Brazil itself as the recipient of these correspondences and the ways of constructing collective authorship among the natives.