TRAILING “PATHS BACK”: WHAT YOU LEARN WHEN WALKING ON THE FRONTIER
Self-Recognition; Indigenous People; Body-Territory; Identity
The denial of our ancestry by colonization is a wound that few of us have accessed the right to care for. Centuries ago, local historiography determined the disappearance of the Potiguar indigenous, which reflects the genocide of the native peoples of Rio Grande do Norte. In view of this and other clues for the research, I approached the Guayumi Potyguara indigenous woman and her experience of ethnic recovery, proposing as a general objective: To understand the process of self-recognition of an indigenous woman and her relationship with her life experiences. And, as specific objectives: a) to rescue with the interlocutor her life story, thinking about her body-territory in the process of self-recognition as an indigenous woman; and, b) analyze her process of constitution as an indigenous woman and the effects on her life, on gender relations in the family and community spheres. We bet on the hybridization of other methodologies with the ethical-political perspective of decoloniality, this is not just a concept or a definition, but a life option, defined by action and engagement. We use the following tools: field diaries; narrative interviews; tour of the collection of photographic memories and productions of this woman; and, my writings. We seek to weave political narratives that encompass the dimensions of her self-recognition process, her body-territory and the effects on her experience as an indigenous woman. The narratives were initially written by me, but read and modified after reading Guayumi, building a methodology in the form of a circle, referring to the daily indigenous formations that organize both spaces, towers, decision-making spaces, even their cosmovisions. The question of indigenous identity is complex, since it deals with subjective as well as collective processes. However, we can see that contrary to what we have given by identity as something that is static, typical of modernity, the identity for is very one more flow, movement and transformation.. After all, we are all part of this living organism that is the earth, we are this body-territory.