Indigenous Language Literacies of the Northwest Amazon

Abstract

Since the demarcation of the Indigenous Territory of the Upper Rio Negro in the Brazilian Amazon in 1996, indigenous language literacy and specialized indigenous schooling has been prioritized by the indigenous governing authority.This paper illustrates how the centrality of indigenous language literacy to indigenous self-governance, and the particular form which it takes, grow out of three kinds of engagements with literacy in the region; (a) instruction in Portuguese reading and writing (and the marginalization of indigenous languages) in Catholic boarding schools set up by Salesian Missionaries in the first half of the 20th century; (b) the translation of the Bible into indigenous languages by Protestant missionaries and its close relationship to conversion experiences; (c) the phonetic transcription of indigenous languages, especially of myths, by anthropologists and linguists.The paper illustrates how the values of literacy naturalized through these various encounters, as they interact with indigenous language ideologies, constrain and condition the manner in which reading and writing in indigenous languages takes place in the Northwest Amazon today.

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