The poetics of myth and the path of the master

Abstract

In this essay, I propose to put on the agenda for discussion an idea on which I have been elaborating a discourse over the last decades, most of the time involving teacher training, reading and writing among the indigenous of the various peoples living in Brazil. This idea comes from the experience of making books with the Indians, therefore, from the practices of translation and editing, or from what I called literary experiences in indigenous lands (DESOCIDENTADAS, 2009). Such experiences taught me that orality and writing are transformations of the textual universe on which a reading community is based, such as those that are intended to be constituted with the implementation of schools in villages. It can be summarized in a generic concept such as “indigenous school”, which, with the maximum semantic load in the two terms of the equation, would be equal to “where you become an Indian”. It is an intercultural and bilingual method and those who are part of it do so because they realize that their master is in the ancestry and in the dream. The teaching practices in this school are assemblages of the outside (the environment, the landscape, the other, other people or species) on bodies in transformation. From this "outside", language (including its multiple languages) embodies knowledge. Telling the story well would be the great graduation in this indigenous school, which is done when finally the ancestral thread unfolds in the infinite possibilities of dreaming.