WRITERS AND STORYTELLERS: LEE MARACLE, ELIANE POTIGUARA AND THE CONSOLIDATION OF INDIGENOUS LITERATURES IN CANADA AND IN BRAZIL

This article proposes a reading of Bobbi Lee, Indian rebel (1975) and I am woman (1988), by Lee Maracle (Salish, Canada), and Metade cara, metade mascara (2004), by Eliane Potiguara (Potiguara, Brasil) from the perspective of literary genres as performances that construct knowledge (John Frow, 2005). Maracle's and Potiguara's books are representative of a Native Renaissance in the Americas, which signals the moment of development and consolidation of Indigenous Literature as a field of literary studies. These texts present autobiographical and testimonial characteristics as well as recover aspects from traditional Indigenous storytelling, which Maracle defines as oratory (2007). The authors' process of writing evinces a search for a literary aesthetics according to a Western tradition, at the same time that they recover and reaffirm Indigenous traditional ways of constructing knowledge.