Indigenous Literature as a way of Resignifying The Past: narratives of resistance, in-betweenness and border thinking in Latin America

Abstract

This article analyzes contemporary Indigenous literature as a privileged space for resignifying the historical past and confronting hegemonic narratives of coloniality in Latin America. It is based on the understanding that official historiography, structured under a Eurocentric logic, has produced systematic silencing of Indigenous peoples, marginalizing their experiences, knowledge, and memories. In this context, Indigenous literature emerges as an aesthetic, political, and epistemic practice that claims the right to historical self-inscription and the production of alternative meanings about the colonial past. The main objective is to analyze the work The Falling Sky: Words of a Yanomami Shaman, by Davi Kopenawa and Bruce Albert, understanding it as a production of the “in-between place” (Santiago, 2000) and as a manifestation of “border thinking” (Mignolo, 2000). Methodologically, the study adopts a qualitative, bibliographic, and interpretative approach, articulating literary analysis with a review of Decolonial Thought, drawing on authors such as Quijano, Dussel, Mignolo, Walsh, Grosfoguel, and Santiago. It argues that the Indigenous narrative operates as a form of epistemic disobedience by confronting the coloniality of knowledge, power, and being, repositioning Indigenous peoples as historical subjects and legitimate knowledge producers. It concludes that Indigenous literature not only resignifies the past but also projects ethical and political horizons for the decolonization of memory, imagination, and Latin American epistemologies.