Narrando sobre o ontem e sobre o amanhã: narrativas indígenas em metade cara, metade máscara, de Eliane Potiguara

Abstract

For many years, what the majority of the Brazilian population knew about Indigenous peoples, including their literary expressions, was presented by anthropologists and researchers who did not belong to Indigenous cultures. In contemporary times, Indigenous writers such as Ailton Krenak, Eliane Potiguara, Daniel Munduruku, Julie Dorrico, Graça Graúna, among others, began to use literature to denounce the horrors they have suffered for decades since the process known as colonization, and which they still endure today. This research focuses on analyzing how Eliane Potiguara’s narrative in *Metade Cara, Metade Máscara* contributes to the appreciation of ancestry perpetuated through orality and to the preservation of Indigenous cultural identity, using literature as a tool for resistance and the affirmation of Indigenous worldview. This represents an opportunity for Indigenous peoples to rewrite their history through their own protagonists, as literary works produced by Indigenous authors offer the chance to narrate a different version of their traditions, which, over time, have been distorted by those who have appropriated them from the outside. The significance also lies in breaking the stereotypes created in Brazilian literature to represent Indigenous peoples. That is, the idealization of Indigenous characters is a stereotype that does not reflect the complexity of real Indigenous cultures. The main theoretical contributions that supported this research were composed of authors such as Munduruku (2019), Graúna (2013; 2014), Krenak (2019), Marques, Simas, and Silva (2019), among others, mostly comprised of Indigenous writers. The methodology used in this research was bibliographic in nature and qualitative, drawing on existing material to provide the theoretical foundation for this analysis. The main findings indicate that Eliane Potiguara’s narrative places great emphasis on the appreciation of ancestry, perpetuated through oral tradition and now written and rewritten. Through the preservation of Indigenous identity via the teachings passed down by her family, as described in the work, Eliane uses her writing to reaffirm these memories, to recover individual and collective identity, which had been silenced for many years by the colonizers. Finally, it is concluded that *Metade Cara, Metade Máscara* is of great importance in the Brazilian Indigenous literary landscape in its discussion of identity, ancestry, and the preservation of Indigenous culture.