This dissertation examines how the indigenous subject has been constructed in the Americas and explores the interests of individuals, power groups, and institutions behind these characterizations. Two notions are proposed: literary portrait and self-portrait, as opposing tendencies configuring the indigenous subject. The portrait starts as a Hispanic colonial creation that kidnaps indigenous memory, pillages natural resources and is the basis of stereotypes that still endure. Next, creoles and mestizos' portrait at the birth of Latin American nations shows the indigenous as barbarians or noble savages, enabling territorial and mental occupation of indigenous spaces and attempting to assimilate the indigenous to the new nations. A portrait of indianism emerges, idealizing and accepting the "indian" under the mestizo category, dissociated from a culture, assumed as dead or a relic of the past. The final representations are the portraits of indigenism, where the indigenous are social subjects without protagonism, and of neo-indigenism, where they are represented with a religious wisdom and power to fight against foreigners that destroy the sacred circle of nature. In radical contrast, the self-portrait defies all previous representations. Authors Enrique Sam Colop (Maya K'iché), José Luis Ayala (Aymara) and Elicura Chihuailaf (Mapuche) recover indigenous literary autonomy. Vito Apüshana (Wayúu), Briceida Cuevas (Maya Yucateca) and Natalia Toledo (Zapotec) consolidate the self-portrait at the end of the XXth and the beginning of the XXIst centuries. Self-portrait is built from tradition and reinvention of the culture, recovering indigenous agency, burying centuries of the seizure of indigenous memory and witnessing from a plural "I" their historical resistance to old and new colonialisms. This literary self-portrait accompanies the struggles for political, economic, cultural and ecological autonomy; recovers the indigenous languages as a tool for resistance, knowledge and aesthetic; uses the dominant foreign languages to form a multicultural reader; defends the notion that nature possesses a language that can be decoded; emphasizes the power of words; uses poetry as a tool for decolonization, fighting racism, and demanding equality; and values of the concept of Buen Vivir. These concepts proclaim a deep cultural transformation that is now underway. This dissertation is written in Spanish.

This thesis probes the ways in which land-based and bodily violence inform contemporary North American Indigenous poetry. Since the “Oka Crisis” of 1990, English-speaking North American Indigenous writers have produced a substantial body of poetry that has significant implications in forwarding national sovereignty struggles. Gender violence enabled settler colonial land appropriation; resource exploitation also harmed Indigenous bodies. This project considers the ways in which Indigenous authors with diverse geographic, cultural and embodied experiences employ common strategies toward using poetry as an emancipatory tool. A poem is both whole, and a fragment of a larger body of work; engaging with the works of individual poets, and multi-authored anthologies allows for varied readings of the same poems and their engagements with the project’s key themes of homeland and embodiment. This paper is informed by the reading of many Indigenous theorists and poets, and aligns with an Indigenous-feminist critique that suggests that nationalist sovereignty struggles are meaningless as long as bodily violence against Indigenous women and Two-Spirit people is still prevalent. As such, contemporary struggles for reclaiming Indigenous lands must also be struggles toward a sovereign erotic, sovereignty over one’s sexuality and gender identity. / Thesis (Master, Gender Studies) -- Queen's University, 2012-09-12 03:07:52.957