Indigenous Literature Research Articles

Reframing Authorship in Abiayala: Marisol Ceh Moo’s Novelistic Production and Authorial Construction

ABSTRACT This article considers the novelistic production of Yucatec Maya writer Marisol Ceh Moo and her process of authorial construction as a decolonizing Indigenous cultural intervention. By analyzing the content and impact of her novel X-Teya, u puksi’ik’al ko’olel/Teya, un corazón de mujer (Teya, a Woman’s Heart, 2009), this article elucidates how the adoption of a modern literary genre such as the novel and Indigenous authorial formation create a specific locus of enunciation that aligns with the resistance to cultural coloniality embedded in the heterogeneous Abiayala movement. Moreover, this research reveals the need to rethink the analytical categories that are part of the author theory when it comes to the study of contemporary Indigenous literatures in Latin America.

The Sentimentalist Terrain of Ora V. Eddleman Reed’s Twin Territories Fiction

Abstract This article grapples with the messy legacy of Ora V. Eddleman Reed, editor of Twin Territories magazine in the Muscogee Nation, Indian Territory, at the turn of the twentieth century. Twin Territories vocally opposed US statehood in Indian Territory and furthered the literary careers of many Native writers. It was an important and influential venue of Native literary expression in the early twentieth century that deserves greater attention from Indigenous literary and print culture studies. However, the magazine’s ambitions and how we make sense of its legacy are complicated by Eddleman Reed’s racial politics, her own (non)citizenship, and the contents of her short sentimental fiction, all of which did as much to reinscribe racialized notions of Indigeneity as they did to challenge prevailing settler assumptions about Native people. Reed has been hailed as a recovered Cherokee writer, but her family’s rejected Cherokee Nation enrollment applications and recent genealogical research raise critical questions about framing her in this way.

The Moral Law of Ngozi Crime in Two Zimbabwean Novels: The Case of Emmanuel Ribeiro’s Muchadura (1967) and Solomon Mwapangidza’s Rebel Soldier (2013)

The modern Western-inspired Literature and Law movement has inspired African works of art in which the creative imagination perceives itself as a form of moral law. In Africa, a literature and law movement has given rise to dynamic discourses of human rights. Human rights scholars have then tended to read imaginative works with a legal handbook on the side to try to verify the veracity of legal acts in works of art. In these legal-literary perspectives, the question regarding the extent to which the literary imagination imagines itself as a source of indigenous law is undervalued. This current desktop study examines what can be gained by prefacing African and indigenous literature as the point of departure when debating the elements of a contemporary literature and law movement in Africa. My unit of analysis consists of two novels, Muchadura (You shall confess) by Emmanuel Ribeiro, and Rebel Soldier (2013) by Solomon Mwapangidza. My argument is that in the two novels the narrativisation of the ngozi crime challenges current understandings of transitional justices such as retributive, compensatory, restorative, distributive, and emancipatory justices and denies the stability ascribed to them in African legal scholarship.

Two hundred years of indigenous literature in South Africa

As far back as the 1860s, Tiyo Soga wrote about the need to collect and write stories about African pasts so that they could be deposited in newspaper archives, which could become a ‘big corn pit’ of knowledge for the nation. His biographer noted that he was sometimes up after midnight in a hut, ‘notebook in hand’, learning from ‘wrinkled countrymen of his own’ about the past. Izibongo zoogxa, a compilation of some of the writings of Samuel Edward Krune (S.E.K.) Mqhayi, one of the most important figures in the history of Xhosa literature, is part of the multigenerational harvest that Soga envisaged, and there are two special reasons to celebrate its publication.

Decolonizing Higher Education Curricula: Perspectives from Teaching Indigenous Literature

Decolonizing Higher Education Curricula: Perspectives from Teaching Indigenous Literature

‘These ones will learn it too’: transforming relationships with Chelsea Vowel's ‘kitaskînaw 2350’

ABSTRACT Reading representations of relationships in Chelsea Vowel's story ‘kitaskînaw 2350’ from the graphic anthology This Place: 150 Years Retold, I consider how portrayals of expanded relationships are a call to action – a generative lens through which settler-colonial studies may engage with anticolonial teachings. I aim to demonstrate how reading Indigenous literatures can expand and transform the settler-colonial imagination that has been taught to understand the world through a lens of exclusive ideologies like white supremacy and, broadly, the linear and the binary in relation to gender, time, and ways of being. Looking to Vowel's story as an example, I contend that such work is of particular significance to the ongoing surge of Indigenous literary and creative production and to the dismantling of settler-colonial teachings in so-called Canada. This analysis of ‘kitaskînaw 2350’ underlines complex connections between settler-colonialism, knowledge creation, language, imagination, power, and Indigenous literatures. Joining many other scholars who are showing how Indigenous literatures generate new imaginaries that can transform colonial behaviors and systems, I read representations of Indigenous-led worlds and anticolonial teachings as an urgent call to action to heal.

Sky Woman, Trickster, Windigo: Reflections of Traditional Storytelling in Contemporary Canadian Indigenous Novel

This work examines the way contemporary Indigenous writers of Canada work with the tradition of oral storytelling in their writing. It studies the role and importance of storytelling for Indigenous cultures and consequently for literature and then analyzes several novels by contemporary Indigenous writers. The analysis is centred around three characters significant and recurrent in Indigenous storytelling – Sky Woman, the trickster, and the windigo — and it observes the meanings created by their employment in the narrative, it studies the way oral storytelling shapes the narrative style, and the way Indigenous referential frameworks are manifested in this process. The work argues that the three examined characters do not only teach the principles of relationality — they embody them, and that oral storytelling and its reflections in written texts should not be taken as a special feature of Indigenous literature, but rather as a core element of it, which influences not only the themes, but also the structure of the text and the entire referential framework the text manifests.

Indigenous Wisdom-Based Literature at Buru Island: Situation and Need Analysis for Developing Indonesian Teaching Materials

The study of language and literature today are inseparable. Unfortunately, the phenomenon of Indonesian learning in junior high schools is in a hesitant position due to the lack of formulating literature as teaching material including indigenous wisdom-based literature that can threaten the extinction of indigenous literature. At Buru Island, literature learning is integrated into Indonesian subjects, but the teachers there are more focused on teaching language using general literature rather than indigenous wisdom literature. Therefore, this study aimed to explore the situation and needs analysis of the indigenous wisdom-based literature in teaching Indonesian language at Buru Island. To achieve the objectives of the study, the researchers employed Research and Development (R&D) applying Borg and Gall’s steps. This method has certain procedures for the information collecting data related to the situation and needs analysis of 350 junior high school students through questionnaire distribution, interview, and observation toward the process of Indonesian teaching in the classroom. The situation of learning literature in the study involved (1) the law of local content learning, (2) curriculum, (3) syllabus, (4) lesson plan, (5) coursebooks, (6) teachers’ competence, and (7) stakeholders’ concerns, while, the students’ need analysis involved (1) current ability and interest in literature, (2) feedback of students’ ability and interest in literature, (3) literature skills priority, (4) learning style, (5) literature learning facilities and infrastructure, (6) literature materials on indigenous wisdom, (7) coursebook of indigenous wisdom-based literature, and (8) learning approaches and strategies based on indigenous wisdom. The result shows that there were still many shortages in implementing of indigenous wisdom-based literature learning in junior high schools, so students’ ability and interest were lack. Therefore, the situation and need analysis becomes very important to be explored and to be a consideration in designing course books in indigenous wisdom-based literature for the future.

RESISTÊNCIA E A LITERATURA DE AUTORIA MULHERES INDÍGENAS: estudo da poética de Graça Graúna e Faumelisa Manquepillan

This work aims to present an overview of resistance studies based on poems published by indigenous women from the Potiguara (Brazil) and Mapuche (Chile) ethnicities. Resistance literature is a field of literary theory that emerges in contexts of authoritarianism, states of exception, situations of barbarism, trauma or that thematizes such socio-historical and psychological conditions. Indigenous literatures bring within them forms of resistance to the domains of discriminatory hegemonic practices arising from a colonizing perception that still persists even in contemporary times. In view of this, we will observe the literature produced, Graça Graúna and Faumelisa Manquepillán Calfulo, poets who, through words, transcend resistance from the perspective of both gender and ethnic identity. As theoretical assumptions, we used Bosi (2000; 2002), Graúna (2013), Lugones (2008; 2014), among others. Through them, we will also observe literary resistance in the light of feminism from a decolonial perspective. Therefore, one of the contributions of this work is the joining of resistance literature to indigenous literatures, adding another narrative to this field, from a decolonial source that crosses bodies and texts that were, for a long time, excluded from literary studies.

Cultivating sustainability through indigenous literacy: A SWOT analysis

Sustainability is the goal of every entity requiring a holistic approach that considers the interconnectedness of environmental, economic, and social factors. It’s a dynamic process that necessitates continuous adaptation and collaboration among individuals, communities, businesses, and governments. Sustainable Development Goals of 2030 were formulated to improve people’s lives regardless of race, ethnicity, and socio-economic status. Since time immemorial, the Indigenous people have been among the most vulnerable, marginalized, illiterate, and exploited sectors of society, thus, implementing intervention for their development could be a great contribution to attaining the SDGs. The Mindoro State University in collaboration with Mansalay local government unit planned to conduct a 5-year community development program. To ensure an effective and sustainable program, a SWOT analysis was conducted to determine the internal attributes (strengths and weaknesses), and external factors (opportunities and threats) that could be used in formulating a strategic plan for the development of the indigenous community in Mansalay, Oriental Mindoro in the Philippines. This study was part of the SWOT analysis and was focused on identifying the literacy level of the community. The research design utilized was ethnography through community immersion, survey, interview, and focus group discussions. The findings showed that there are professional teachers in the community, however, some elders are illiterate, and some are working instead of attending schools. The findings recommend conducting a literacy drive, especially for elders. As a way forward, the results of the study were integrated into the extension project for the College of Teacher Education.

Maize Landscapes in Indigenous Literatures: Toward Alternative Cartographic Imaginaries

Abstract The twentieth and twenty-first centuries have witnessed a literary revival in the Indigenous languages of the region known canonically as “Latin America.” Across this varied corpus, a major theme is the cultural significance of maize. This article compares the depiction of maize in four bilingual poems, each written in a different Indigenous language alongside Spanish: Nahuatl (Ethel Xochitiotzin Pérez), Yucatec Maya (María Dolores Dzul Barboza), Central Quechua (César Vargas Arce), and Southern Quechua (Emilio Corrales). Through close textual analysis and by recourse to theoretical perspectives such as “literary cartography,” the “textual continuum,” “deep mapping,” and “trans-indigeneity,” the article argues that each poem communicates culturally specific ways of understanding geography that, when set in dialogue, challenge hegemonic definitions of the Western Hemisphere such as North, South, or Latin “America.” Rather, the poems in combination weave an interconnected yet multiperspectival cartographic tapestry with maize as the common thread.

Revelations about the seeds we planted: huikau, kū̒ē, and the Lāhui

Although emerging research on families of color explores internalized oppression and resistance, there is a gap in the literature on these phenomena’s incidence among Kanaka ̒Ōiwi (Native Hawaiian) ̒ohana (families) and the Lāhui (Hawaiian people, nation). Furthermore, scholars have yet to contextualize internalized oppression and resistance as huikau (confusion) and kū̒ē (to oppose, protest, resist), respectively. This conceptual article thus addresses this research gap while interweaving metaphors from Black feminist and Indigenous literature. This article provides a historical analysis of how internalized oppression and huikau came to afflict Kanaka ̒Ōiwi (Native Hawaiians) and conceptualizes the potentiality for kū̒ē at the ̒ohana dimension to generate a widespread disruption of huikau in communities and the Lāhui for collective social change. This conceptualization is offered as a culturally responsive intervention for educators, social workers, and health practitioners who engage with Kanaka ̒Ōiwi ̒ohana.

The Different Facets of Love: Exploring Mandaya Love Songs

This study explores the cultural significance of Mandaya literary songs, particularly focusing on themes of love. Set within the context of the Mandaya community in Mindanao, the research aimed to interpret messages conveyed in these songs, describe the cultural expressions of love, and illustrate values through a comprehensive analysis using Braun and Clarke’s (2006) thematic analysis framework. The researchers transcribed and translated audio recordings of Mandaya love songs to facilitate analysis. Findings revealed a predominant focus on heartbreak, betrayal, unrequited love, and the yearning for reciprocated love. The songs also portray emotional depth, hopefulness, and resilience in the face of heartbreak, providing a nuanced understanding of Mandaya love and romantic indigenous culture. This research contributes to the appreciation of indigenous literature and art, understanding cultural diversity and preserving traditional practices, specifically regarding Mandaya love songs. Further research is needed to explore the discrepancy between expected and actual themes, enhancing comprehension of how romantic love is depicted in Mandaya songs.

Stepping outside my perspective: An autoethnographic review of Indigenous literature in Walyalup/Fremantle, Western Australia

Autoethnographic processes are valuable for creative practitioners and researchers as they allow for an intensive analysis not only of the practice-led approach being undertaken, but of the practitioner’s own personal and cultural impact on the artefact developed. I, as a white woman of migrant heritage, have undertaken a reflexive autoethnographic process during a review of Indigenous literature of the Walyalup/Fremantle area of Western Australia. This process required a deep, personal autoethnographic review of my own sociocultural context and biases, which resulted in key “epiphanies” (Ellis et al., 2011, p. 276) that have informed the ongoing approach to my geocritical research and creative writing practices. The process of autoethnographic notetaking aided in the identification of epiphanies around the importance of language, the emotional response as a researcher, and the limitations of locational boundaries and available sources around the privileging of hegemonic perspectives. This article explores how an autoethnographic reflexive process strengthens place-based research, specifically in interactions with Indigenous texts as a non-Indigenous researcher.

Indigenous Literature

This paper synthesizes Indigenous critical theories of literature and the cultural languages that shape Indigenous literary texts, centering these approaches, and arguing that without this body of literary criticism, it would be impossible for Indigenous and non-Indigenous readers alike to appreciate Indigenous literature, including its profound value to humanity. It demonstrates the power of these theories by offering a reading of Thomas King’s The Back of the Turtle using them as lenses to uncover the rich tapestry, the convergence of tradition and innovation, and the transformative power of Indigenous narratives in shaping our shared understanding of humanity. In many ways, the paper argues, Indigenous critical theories have significantly paved the way for the study and interpretation of Indigenous literature, broadening the scope for readers from diverse backgrounds.
 

Pain Pleasure Principle in Joy Harjo's Poetry: The Foundation of Personal Choices and Identity

This article examines Joy Harjo’ journey, the renowned poet and musician, has navigated a tumultuous life filled with pain and adversity. The pain pleasure principle is a fundamental aspect of human decision-making. Beliefs, values, actions, and decisions are all shaped by this principle, but it is crucial to examine them critically through a postcolonial lens to better understand the power dynamics and social structures that influence our interpretation of pain and pleasure. A lot of studies have been conducted on Indigenous literature, but very little has delved into the exploration of pain and pleasure, specifically in the works of Joy Harjo. However, the current study argues that when examining Indigenous literature, it is essential to approach it through the lens of post-colonial theory and consider concepts such as identity, hegemony, and hybridity in order to fully understand the hidden motives behind these literary works. In her literature, Harjo's poetry serves as a testament to the transformative nature of language and its ability to heal. Harjo's work, particularly her book "Conflict Resolution for Holy Beings," emphasizes the importance of language in bridging cultural and linguistic gaps. Joy Harjo ‘literature reflects the pleasure serves as a driving force in our lives, motivating us to make certain choices and take specific actions. These choices and actions, in turn, shape our individuality and help us develop a unique identity. The study stresses on Pain pleasure principle that plays a crucial role in Indian American literature, particularly evident in the works of Joy Harjo

Indigenous literature and resistance in Brazil

We know that the writer Eliane Potiguara is a voice of resistance in the midst of the erasure of the culture and literature of indigenous peoples, so this paper aims to highlight the role and contribution of this indigenous writer to Indigenous Literature by women in Brazil. Our study is a bibliographical survey of the writer's career, based on other indigenous voices that highlight her importance, as well as an analysis of some fragments of poems from her book Metade Cara, Metade Máscara (2018). As a theoretical contribution, we drew on Castro (2022), Graúna (2012), Mendonça (2012) and Mignolo (2017). We conclude our study by emphasizing that Eliane Potiguara, through her struggles and her writing, consolidates herself as the first indigenous woman writer in Brazil, inaugurating the indigenous women's writing movement in the country.

Ethical engagement through 'Critical Dispositioning': A pedagogical and research praxis for responsible engagement with Indigenous literature

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The Self-Making, Worlding Processes of Contemporary Zapotec Literature

This essay considers the main features and status of contemporary Zapotec literature, an “ultraminor” Indigenous literature in southern Mexico. Tracing its modern emergence through 20th century literary circuits that were preeminently local and politically-rooted, Zapotec literature has taken what Laachir et al. describe as a “ground-up and located approach” to literary production and circulation—one that clashes against the globalizing, capitalist, Western-centric relations prevalent in the field of World Literature. Shaping g/local readers and raising cultural and linguistic awareness, Zapotec authors write in their linguistic variant and self-translate their work and worldviews into Spanish—a major Western language with a strong colonialist legacy and presence in the field of World Literature. Although they translate their work as a form of authorial validation within the nation, they primarily seek to nurture autochthonous forms of expression and circulation that are key in Indigenous-led cultural revitalization processes in their territory. As examples of literary worlding, I engage two contemporary Zapotec texts: Víctor de la Cruz’s seminal anthology of Zapotec literature Guie’ sti’ diidxazá/La flor de la palabra and Natalia Toledo’s poem “Ni guicaa T. S. Eliot / A T. S. Eliot,” published in her bilingual collection Guie’ yaase’/Olivo negro.

Национальный язык как объект и предмет в современной латинографичной и арабографичной поэзии на суахили в Восточной Африке

The article presents a survey of Kiarabu, a tradition of writing in Swahili using the Arabic script, as an integral component of the so-called East African Swahili civilization which since the Medieval Times had been constituted as a network of coastal and island sultanates extending from the South of Somali to the North of Mozambique along the coast of the Indian Ocean. In the colonial times this kind of indigenous literacy gradually came out of use being replaced with the Roman script-based literacy within the project of standardization and making the standard form of Kiswahili an official language in British East Africa. However, Kiarabu still remains an occasional practice and a means to manifest Swahili cultural identity in some areas, where poets-traditionalists write verses in it involving newly designed dialect-based modifications of the alphabet.