What, to echo Walter Benjamin (1968), is the task of the translator in interpreting an Indigenous myth? This article tries to identify the stakes, and it argues that they are high. I account for the thorny issues of translation and colonial violence I have faced during decades of working with an Indigenous population, often called ‘the Warao’, in a rainforest in eastern Venezuela. I relate these issues of translation to the ‘collection’ and translation of myths by proponents of the so-called ‘ontological turn’ in anthropology and to decolonial, Indigenous scholarship on myth and translation.1

Indigenous critiques of Americanist research on Native American narratives

The Americanist tradition, classically advanced by Franz Boas, placed the ethnographic collection and translation of myths and other Indigenous narratives at the heart of anthropology, linguistics, and folkloristics. This task was almost a requirement for getting a Ph.D. under Boas, thus being positioned for academic prominence. The reputations of such figures as Edward Sapir, Ruth Benedict, Paul Radin, Melville Jacobs, Dell Hymes, Dennis Tedlock, and other anthropologists were made, in part, by collecting, translating and interpreting Native American myths and using them as key intellectual infrastructures for launching frameworks for generalizing about language, culture, ‘world view’, psychological dispositions, and much more. This work was hardly confined to North America. Perhaps most famously, Claude Lévi-Strauss—one of the most prominent anthropologists and intellectuals of the mid-twentieth century—published a four-volume set, Mythologiques, and several later books on the mythology of South and North America (1969, 1988, 1995). For him, myths were the key sources in revealing the fundamental logic of individual cultures, a basic Amerindian cultural pattern, and the structure of the human mind.

This scholarly tradition has been recently brought back into the limelight through what has been called the ontological turn, specifically in highly visible work by Eduardo Viveiros de Castro and Philippe Descola. Viveiros de Castro (2004, p. 481) suggested that “[i]n our naturalist ontology, the nature/society interface is natural: humans are organisms like all the rest—we are body-objects in ecological interaction with other bodies and forces, all of them ruled by the necessary laws of biology and physics”. This ‘Western’ ontology posits a single nature that is thus perceived distinctly by multiple cultural lenses. He further argued that “Amerindian cosmologies” picture the relationship between humans and non-humans through “perspectivism”: persons, animals, and objects are defined relationally by how they “apprehend reality from distinct points of view” (1998, p. 469). According to Viveiros de Castro (2004, p. 464):

If there is one virtually universal Amerindian notion, it is that of an original state of nondifferentiation between humans and animals, as described in mythology. Myths are filled with beings whose form, name, and behavior inextricably mix human and animal attributes in a common context of intercommunicability, identical to that which defines the present-day intrahuman world. Amerindian myths speak of a state of being where self and other interpenetrate, submerged in the same immanent, presubjective and preobjective milieu, the end of which is precisely what the mythology sets out to tell.

Suggesting that “in the past Indian America formed part of an original cultural whole,” Descola similarly argues that myth provides privileged evidence for “a homogeneous semantic substratum” that reflected “a common conception of the world, forged in the course of thousands of years of movements of peoples and ideas” (2013, p. 17). I am impressed by Viveiros de Castro’s and Descola’s attention to the ontological richness and importance of myth. At the same time, exploring a decolonial performance of a myth suggests to me that this project can be extended by going beyond attention to the referential content of decontextualized texts, seen as reflections of autochthonous worlds, to listen to their formal or poetic properties and seeing how performances can be woven into the everyday experiences of racial oppression faced by Indigenous peoples.

The last few decades have also witnessed important critiques by Indigenous scholars of practices of collection, translation, and interpretation. Cherokee scholar Chris Teuton (2012) adopts a generally charitable view of white research on Native American narrative, using the work of Dell Hymes and Dennis Tedlock in particular in presenting a collection and interpretation of Cherokee stories from Cherokee perspectives. At the same time, he places his research within American Indian Studies and his own relationship to the Cherokee community, prompting a shift toward designating Cherokee readers as his primary audience. Rather than offering white audiences privileged access to Indigenous worlds, Teuton suggests that they become attuned to what the narratives can teach them about Indigenous sovereignty, decolonization, and self-determination. Indeed, engagement with narrative forms part of a shift inaugurated by Indigenous and other scholars away from colonial visions of ‘endangered’ or ‘threatened’ languages and cultural traditions in favor of joining Indigenous conversations that project robust futures of language, life and vitality, and push for scholarly participation in efforts to catalyze language revitalization (Perley, 2011).

Cutcha Risling Baldy (2015), who is Hupa, Yurok and Karuk, accuses white scholars of using simplistic ways of translating Indigenous narratives that inflict colonial violence by erasing Indigenous understandings and distorting the ontological status of mythological characters. Risling Baldy focuses in particular on ways how non-Indigenous scholars have translated a principal figure in many mythic narratives as coyote, both as the animal Canis latrans and a trickster figure who is cunning, unscrupulous, and often obscene. Suggesting that the character is better regarded as Coyote First Person, a creator and ancestor, Risling Baldy cautions that such problematic translations reflect “very little engagement with Coyote First Person’s Indigenous names” and failure to consult Indigenous interlocutors. She concludes that this translation problem provides crucial evidence of the colonialism of this body of scholarship and “erases how Coyote First Person actually builds and supports Indigenous ideas about the world and unsettles western ideas about the world” (Risling Baldy, 2015, p. 2). Gerald Vizenor (Minnesota Chippewa Tribe) suggests that white scholars have fundamentally misconstrued the nature of Native American narratives by taking them as direct reflections of cultural beliefs and world views. Translations and interpretations offered by white scholars erased “the creative irony” of stories (2019, p. 4), thereby missing the fact that they are the origins of concepts of “native liberty, natural motion, and survivance” (Vizenor, 2019, p. 95).

In what follows I explore the bearing of these powerful critiques for research by non-Indigenous scholars on myths in lowland South American Indigenous communities. I introduce what I consider to be another insightful critic of non-Indigenous engagements with Indigenous myth, Santiago Rivera. Rivera lived in the Mariusa area of Delta Amacuro state in eastern Venezuela. In a performance of the myth of “The emergence of the non-Indigenous peoples”, he put my presence on the spot and demanded active support for his community’s struggle to overcome land expropriation, ecological destruction, and non-Indigenous abuses of Mariusan labour and women. In my reading, his performance was decolonial in a way that challenged a long history in which missionaries, government representatives, and anthropologists have transformed myths into decontextualized texts that can be easily extracted and appropriated for non-Indigenous interests. His challenge prompts me to suggest that decolonial strategies require decolonizing practices of collection, transcription, and translation that form an integral part of colonial enterprises, including through contemporary documentation and analysis of Indigenous South American myths.

An ethnographic exploration of myths in Delta Amacuro, Venezuela

As an engaged scholar, Delta Amacuro residents asked me in 1985 to study their language and cultural forms to help with designing bilingual education programmes and culturally appropriate forms of healthcare. For nearly four decades, translation has been central to my role there. I was asked to translate petitions to provide access to health, education and other resources, and end labour and ecological abuse. I translated for an Indigenous woman falsely accused of infanticide (Briggs, 2007). Working with a Venezuelan public health physician, Clara Mantini-Briggs, I spent much time translating for health education efforts, particularly in outbreaks of cholera and rabies (Briggs and Mantini-Briggs, 2003, 2016).

Delta residents deemed myths (dehe nobo) crucial. Remarkable leader and educator Librado Moraleda considered myths essential for decolonizing schools (Escalante and Moraleda, 1992). Healers emphasized the myths that underlie therapeutic songs. The prominence of Warao myths extends far beyond the rainforest area. Collecting and translating myths preoccupied Capuchin missionaries throughout the twentieth century, including Catholic missionaries Basilio Barral (1960), Antonio Vaquero (1965), and Julio Lavandero Pérez (1991). Remarkable ethnographer Johannes Wilbert published myths (Wilbert, 1964) and used them in interpreting cosmology (Wilbert, 1993, 1996). Acclaim for Delta myth is evident in frequent references in Lévi-Strauss’s Mythologiques. Learning to listen to and translate myths was thus unavoidable.

Rather than eliciting myths, I made recordings when performances were taking place during ceremonies, when master storytellers were teaching neophytes, during casual exchanges in daily life, and during nights when master myth tellers treated their communities to elaborate performances. I would then find a chance to spend anywhere from a few hours to several days transcribing the recording with the help of Tirso Gómez, a myth narrator and healer who was bilingual, generally the principal narrator, and anyone else interested in participating, including people who wanted to learn the myth. Discussions spontaneously emerged that illuminated the performance, other variants, connections to healing, and broader historical, social, cultural and political-economic factors. This procedure was community-based or, in Steven Feld’s (1987) terms, dialogic. Then Tirso and I would translate the text into Spanish. We would return to the narrator to clarify issues arising in translation.

My account of this translation practice is problematic. It focuses too squarely on intralingual and interlingual dimensions and projects the reduction of performances to texts. It thus misses Susan Gal’s insight that translation “points usefully to a whole family of semiotic processes” (Gal, 2015, p. 224). Moreover, it places me in the extractive modality critiqued by Indigenous scholars. True, the dialogically-based process hopefully avoided the mistranslation of the names and ontological status of characters. It brought Indigenous perspectives—those of the narrators and others—centrally into translations and interpretations. Years of work with narrators and Gómez, who have rich senses of humour, left room for appreciating sarcasm, irony, and play—including making fun of hotarao (non-Indigenous persons) like myself. Nevertheless, my account of translation practice so far fails to grapple with Teuton’s, Risling Baldy’s and Vizenor’s call to place research on narrative into the broader context of Indigenous people’s demands for sovereignty, decolonization, self-determination, liberty, and survivance. It notably fails to confront the profound legacy of colonialism in the translation and interpretation of myth and the possibility of positioning it as a crucial component of the ways in which reclaiming land and confronting oppression enter into decolonial agendas (Tuck and Yang, 2012).

Focusing squarely on these challenges, I present a translation of a myth that was not only performed for me but about me. It was, as narrator Santiago Rivera declared, my myth, the story of the emergence of the non-Indigenous people. The entailed translation problems included, following Benjamin, not only transforming Spanish and English as the target languages whose role was a focus of the myth itself, but also translating the limits of myth, of narrative, and my own potential shortcomings as a particular sort of human. Rivera’s performance raises questions that are seldom discussed explicitly by researchers: What is a myth and, more broadly, a narrative? Who gets to decide? In discussing this particular case, I confront below what counts as a myth, the temporalities it conjures, and how its relations to surrounding discourse raise issues of colonialism and decolonial struggles in Indigenous communities. The performance also makes particular sorts of demands on the history and contemporary practice through which non-Indigenous people make claims as translators and interpreters of Indigenous narratives.

Myth performance as decolonial challenge: Santiago Rivera’s performance of “The myth of the emergence of the non-Indigenous peoples”

In May 1987 I was living on the Mariusa coast in the Delta Amacuro rainforest with Rivera and his family. His head was broad and angular, his nose prominent, his hair wavy and tousled, his build strong. Having met at a ritual event, he invited me to live with his family. He would help me deepen my knowledge of Warao in exchange for teaching him English, which he needed to press Trinidadian customers for better prices for the crabs they sold. Translation was thus a constitutive force in shaping our relationship. Rivera was a master myth performer, skilled healer, and fearless leader.

One evening, Rivera discussed with his sons and sons-in-law where they would fish the next day and when they would gather crabs. Business concluded, he launched into a dehe nobo, the myth of the transformation of the sun.2 Once the lengthy story ended, his sons and sons-in-law began to drift away, some to go to sleep and others to join non-Indigenous Spanish-speaking Venezuelan fishermen who were playing cards nearby. When the two of us were alone, he suddenly announced: “I’m going to tell your myth, the story of the emergence of the non-Indigenous peoples.” The story focuses on a pair of gigantic monsters devouring Indigenous residents.3 In the initial scene, two cannibals encounter a couple who formed part of the primordial ancestors of the present-day Indigenous people. Challenging him to wrestle, the male cannibal killed the husband. The woman escaped and summoned her relatives. They found the cannibal couple sleeping in a giant tree after having roasted and eaten the husband. The cannibals died after people burned the tree, leaving two long lines of ashes, one white and one black. Particularly interested in where Rivera takes the story from here, I will present the remainder in an ethnopoetic transcription:4

Following the ashes of cannibals and their tree:

So then the multitude of Warao returned,
      they returned.
      The sun slept,
      another night fell,
      another sun,
      on the third sun,
      they went off,
      they were going off.
Where the tree had been
      there stood a great pile of ashes,
      a pile of ashes.
Again the sun set,
      it set,
      it set,
      and during this fourth day they went again,
      just like before,
They went at eight o'clock,
      they returned at five o'clock,
      and they came again at five the next day.
By then the ashes had formed a long line,
      the ashes went waaaay out there,
      waaaaaay out there,
      waaaaay out there.
“What could this be?
      What is this?
      What's this for?”
Then they traveled along [following the pile of ashes] for fifteen days.
Arrival at the strangers’ town:
After traveling that far,
      they ended up in front of a town,
      the houses appeared,
      cockadoodledoo,
      cockadoodledoo,
      cockadoodledoo!
There are horses,
      there are cows,
      there are goats,
      there are cats,
      there is everything
And when the people spoke,
      the Warao couldn’t understand them,
      because they couldn't understand Spanish,
      they couldn’t understand English.
Half of the pile of ashes extended waaay over there.
Those black ashes,
      black ashes,
      the ones by the black ashes are the English-speakers,
      the English-speakers.
The white ashes nearby became the non-Indigenous people,
       the non-Indigenous people were transformed,
      their town stretched out for miles,
      their town was transformed
      and the houses emerged.
They couldn't understand their language.
Now these Warao had a pet parrot
      who was good with languages,
      a parrot who was good with languages.
Nearby they had a macaw
      who was good at languages,
      a macaw who was good at languages.
So they brought out both of them.
The parrot arrived,
      and they brought it out.
      Then the macaw arrived,
      and they made it stand up there.
They understood these languages.
The one who could talk,
      the parrot,
      was already speaking Spanish.
Then the macaw spoke English,
      he did the same with English,
      he was already speaking English.
When they spoke English,
      the macaw understood.
And the parrot understood Spanish.

The Warao are offered riches:
They recounted everything that was said to their owners,
      “that fellow is saying this:
      all these goods,
      they're going to give them to you,
      it’s said,
      they're going to give you motor boats,
      enormous motor boats.”
The Warao replied,
      “We’re not going to take them.”
They gave them the horse,
      they didn’t take it.
They gave them the cow,
      they didn’t take it.
They gave them the horse,
      they didn’t take it—
      they didn’t take any of the goods.
With all the things that they gave us,
      if we had taken all the things they gave us,
      we would be just like the non-Indigenous people.
Because we didn’t take them,
      we became Warao,
      just like we are today.
Now if we had taken all those goods,
      if we had taken the motor boat,
      if we had taken the cow,
      if we had taken the horse,
      if we had taken the donkey,
      if we had taken the cat,
      if we had taken the chicken,
      all of these would be our animals,
      we would be just like the non-Indigenous people.
Then they gave garden plots to the Warao.

A tree was felled over here:
      “This tree was felled to make a garden plot;
      this one is for corn,
      the tree that is being felled over here is for rice,
      the tree that is being felled over here is for corn,
      the tree that is being felled over here is for the ocumo tuber,
      the tree that is being felled over here is for sugarcane,"
      dividing them up.
But we didn’t understand all this,
      because the parrot didn't tell us what they had said,
      he only told us what they said about the tree that was felled over here,
      over here toward the setting sun.
The Warao spoke about that one,
      “we'll take this area,
      this very one,
      we'll take this one alone.”
That one is our place to defecate,
      this is how we came to have a place to defecate,
      a place to defecate,
      this is how we came to be in the place to defecate,
      so that we would become poor,
      with only a place to defecate,
      this is how we came to have a place to defecate.
When we travel in the forest,
      this is how we came to fell trees in order to have a place to defecate.
Now if we had taken all those goods,
      we, too, would have our own motor boats today,
      we would have our own motor boats,
      we would have our own huge motor boats,
      we would have all those goods,
      we would have our own storehouse.
They gave us the storehouse
      and we refused it,
      because we were truly Warao,
      because we weren’t sneaky.

Race, translation, poverty, and the Indigenous “inferiority complex”

Rivera’s performance reads racial relations against the grain in two ways. Dominant discourses of race in Venezuela view the country’s population in terms of a White/Black binary (Wright, 1990), thereby casting Indigenous peoples as geographically and historically marginal. Lying only some seven miles from Trinidad, the Black/White binary gets transposed in Mariusa to ‘Whites’ as Spanish-speaking Venezuelans and Blacks as Trinidadians. Rather than a seemingly isolated and pure Indigenous society, Warao people’s colonial constitution included seafaring over a broad area. The histories of Spanish, English, Dutch, and French colonial penetrations in the Delta included trafficking in enslaved Africans and Indigenous peoples and centuries of missionization. Close relations with Trinidad included adopting some key spiritual figures from obeah men, practitioners of African diaspora forms of healing, in Trinidad (Goldwasser, 1996). Rivera’s interest in learning English, aimed at bargaining for better prices from Trinidadians who purchased crabs from Mariusans, entered into this colonial historical cartography. The myth places the Warao ancestral population as existing before Black and white populations and projects the latter’s emergence as a product of Indigenous agency—the act of burning the tree housing the cannibal monsters. The implications of having descended from cannibals were not lost on me: would I continue to eat—meaning exploit and oppress—Delta residents like my ancestors?

The scene at the stranger’s town ties Indigenous presents to a multilingual and multispecies history. Delta communities until recently featured only three species of pets: dogs, parrots and macaws. The non-Indigenous people who invaded Delta lands brought chickens, cattle, horses and pigs. Many sections of the upper Delta have been largely deforested to create cattle ranches. The “gardens” of rice, corn and sugarcane represent non-Indigenous commercial incursions, including early twentieth-century plantations. Before missionarization, Warao communities were small, mobile settlements in the interior of marshy islands, such as those constructed by Mariusans. The myth thus maps how colonialism changed the human and ecological geography of the Delta (Heinen and Gassón, 2006). Race, linguistic difference and multispecies relations are tied to materiality as the strangers’ motorboats, storehouses and vast goods are revealed.

Translation is central to this narrative. Appreciating parrots’ and macaws’ ability to imitate human language, the mythic ancestors mobilized them to translate Spanish and English. The birds even mapped verba dicendi and indexical relations to particular speakers, explaining who said what to whom. Rather than rendering translation a transparent tool for crossing racial boundaries, the narrative emplots it as partial and problematic. Talal Asad (1986) argued insightfully that translation projects “institutionally defined power relations between the languages/modes of life concerned”; languages of the colonized are defined relationally as “weaker” in comparison to colonizers’ “stronger” languages (p. 57). Languages become part of a complex colonial matrix that includes colonizing and colonized peoples, wealth and poverty, demography, and land appropriation, a legacy that includes missionaries, state actors, merchants, linguists, and anthropologists.

The problematics of translation catalyze the seemingly-bizarre refusal to accept animals, motorboats and riches. Capuchin missionary Basilio Barral presented this part of the myth as proof of a psychological pattern witnessed in the colonial enterprise as a whole: “the inferiority complex of the Indigenous people” (Barral, 1960, p. 340; translation mine). Linguistic anthropologist Juan Luís Rodríguez (2008) trenchantly analyzed the linguistic ideologies of Barral and other Delta missionaries, arguing that they constructed Warao discursive practices as unsuited to bringing Indigenous people into modernity; the poverty of the language seemingly gave rise to the poverty of its speakers. Rodríguez noted how Delta residents reversed this relation, characterizing the missionaries’ poverty of translation as giving rise to a mistranslation of poverty and placing the violence of mistranslation at the heart of colonialism. Barral’s commentary misses—as Vizenor would have predicted—Rivera’s biting irony and playful inversion of processes of colonial extraction. In the Delta, missionaries quintessentially embodied strangers, arriving with motorboats, animals, and seemingly limitless goods and teaching Spanish, Christianity and capitalism. Barral could not see how he was interpellated within the myth’s cartography.

The myth forces us to face the question I raised above: Who decides how we decontextualize (Bauman and Briggs, 1990) one stretch of discourse as being the myth and discard, for purposes of transcription, translation and analysis, what lies on either side? Rivera’s following words pose more serious and interesting issues for questions of colonialism, narrative and translation:

We Warao were here first:

These days the Warao are different—
      back then we were truly Warao,
      truly Warao,
      Warao,
      Warao.
They weren't like the new generations of Warao that have come along these days.
If they had been like these people,
      they would have taken all the goods.
If we had taken all the goods,
      today we would be just as well off as the non-Indigenous people,
      just like them,
      just exactly like the non-Indigenous people,
      just, just like them,
      all the goods would be ours.
Because we didn't take the goods at that time,
      we don't have any of those goods,
      we became very poor.
The non-Indigenous people were transformed after us.
      The English speakers,
      the English speakers were transformed after us.
We Warao were transformed first,
      the Warao came first.
But even though the non-Indigenous people were transformed after us,
      they came out ahead of us.
We became very poor.
This land belongs to the Warao,
      this land,
      this land belongs to the Warao,
      this land doesn't belong to the non-Indigenous people,
      it doesn't belong to them.
Even though it doesn't belong to them,
      lots of non-Indigenous people have settled here.
Because we Warao became very poor,
      we had no priests,
      none at all.
They were transformed at the same time,
      the priests were transformed at the same time,
      priests appeared.
The English speakers,
      the English speakers didn’t have priests either,
      priests were transformed for the English speakers.
So that they could speak English,
      English came into being,
      English was transformed long ago.
They appeared after us,
      the non-Indigenous people were transformed after us,
      we Warao were transformed first,
      we came first from up there [points to sky],
      we came first from the sky.
That’s why the non-Indigenous people came after us.
We Warao are still very poor.
This is the story that was told to us by our deceased ancestors,
      the story that was told to us by our deceased ancestors.
I, too, have listened to this story I’m telling,
      I have listened,
      I have listened to this story I’m telling.
This all took place, it is said,
      according to the story,
      this truly is the story,
      the Warao's story,
      this must be true,
      this is the story.
I, too, have listened to this story I’m telling,
      I’m telling it because I listened to it.
If I hadn’t listened to it,
      I wouldn’t be telling it.
If this hadn’t taken place,
      the non-Indigenous people would have become poor.
Venezuela really belongs to us Indigenous peoples,
      and we would be better off than the non-Indigenous people,
      better off than the non-Indigenous people.
But the non-Indigenous people say,
      “Venezuela is ours,
      Venezuela is ours!”
But it isn’t theirs!
Venezuela belongs to the Indigenous peoples,
      to the Indigenous peoples alone,
      Venezuela doesn’t belong to the non-Indigenous people.
Ah, these non-Indigenous people,
      Venezuela doesn’t belong to the non-Indigenous people.
The non-Indigenous people only came yesterday—
      the Warao were transformed long, long ago.
This story recounts our transformation,
      a story that was told to us by our deceased ancestors
      so that this story would come into being.
We tell it the way they always told it.
We took the dog,
      so that it would become a pet for the Warao.
The dog was the one thing they gave us that we took,
      only the dog.
If we had taken all the animals,
      we would have come to have all kinds of pets,
      we would have become just like the non-Indigenous people.
The dog was the one thing we took,
      and that’s how we came to have dogs.
This happened so we would suffer while living in our houses,
      so that we would eat awful food.
Non-Indigenous people eat really good food.
Non-Indigenous people eat at tables,
      but we don’t eat at tables,
      we eat uncomfortably.
We boil our food,
      and our food is filthy,
      it’s filthy;
      the non-Indigenous people’s food isn’t filthy.
If we, too, had taken all that they were offering us,
      if we had taken it, we would have become the same,
      the same as the non-Indigenous people.
A few Warao,
      the ones who have learned to read and write,
      yes, a few members of the new generation of Warao,
      some of this new generation learned how to read and write.
By learning how to read and write,
      some of us are getting to be just like non-Indigenous people,
      some are getting to be just like non-Indigenous people.
Long ago our deceased ancestors were not like non-Indigenous people,
      not like non-Indigenous people,
      not like non-Indigenous people.
Now we Warao who have come after them are getting to be just like non-Indigenous people,
      we are almost just like non-Indigenous people now.
The same thing is happening with Spanish,
      we speak Spanish,
      we speak English,
      we only speak a little bit of Warao,
      just a tiny bit,
      just a little bit.
That’s the story,
      That’s the story,
      That’s the end of the story,
      the end.

Far from a vision of autochthonous worlds that exist apart from ‘the West’, Rivera’s performance depicts a colonial world of racial difference and racism and gross inequities. It embodies W.E.B. Du Bois’s double-consciousness (Du Bois, 1990, p. 8), the painful process of looking at oneself through the lens of a dominant racializing and racist sector. Piling on satire, irony, and bitterness, Rivera quotes a generic non-Indigenous claim (“Venezuela is ours!”) and racist characterizations of Indigenous land use, food, and architecture. If the content might lead some ethnographers/translators to exclude the section as forming part of the myth, its phonological contours (Tedlock, 1983) and parallelistic formal-functional patterning (Hymes, 1981) announce its generic framing and intertextual continuity. Moreover, it contains classic linguistic features of myth performances through quoted speech, and Rivera provides formal closure (“that’s the end of the story”) only at the end of the section.

Assimilationist discourses on Indigenous life would take Rivera’s words as a lament about linguistic and cultural loss. However, sitting in a house without walls constructed with logs and a thatched roof at the mouth of the Mariusa River would make such an interpretation hard to sustain. Mariusa lacks stores, government offices, and missionary infrastructures. Mariusans, at the time, lived by fishing and gathering in the forests, depending substantially on moriche palm starch, a spiritual and dietary centre of Warao life. In other areas, missionaries had instituted boarding schools, a centre of colonial violence throughout the Americas, and taught horticultural skills. Missionaries settled ex-students in mission-dominated towns along riverbanks, where they lived off gardens, fishing, and hunting. Mariusans were exceptional, having never accepted Christianity, horticulture or a sedentary life. Given that Mariusa (at that time) had never been provided with a school, residents lacked literacy skills and were monolingual, although some youths gained rudimentary competence in Spanish by working with fishermen. Rivera’s statements about language loss and cultural assimilation are not an ironic celebration of cultural purism. For years, Rivera demanded a school for Mariusa, knowing they needed to be bilingual and literate to demand services that Mariusans were guaranteed as Venezuelan citizens.

Rivera positions Indigenous people as the only Delta residents who arrived before the temporalities of colonialism. His allusion to “we came first from the sky” is an interdiscursive link to a foundational myth that positions Warao people as first living in the sky and descending to the earth (Wilbert, 1964, p. 23-27). Nevertheless, the myth depicts Warao people as constituted relationally, as evident in “This story recounts our transformation”. The myth is an origin story for racial capitalism, a story of how colonialism created vast racialized differences in material wealth and forms of production.

Myths are viewed as living beings whose transformative power in the present can be released through performance. The warning that he was about to tell “my myth” pointed to the performance’s goal of a particular relational transformation, constituting Rivera’s audience as a constituting a particular sort of non-Indigenous person in addition to the non-visible being named in the narrative. Rivera was preparing at the time to travel to the state capital to demand that officials prohibit non-Indigenous fishermen from working at the mouth of the Mariusa River, thereby depleting the maritime resources available to residents and exploiting Mariusan men’s labour and young women’s bodies. The performance presaged our collaboration in work in which he dictated a petition, which I translated into Spanish. He signed it with an X. Rivera was aware of efforts by Librado Moraleda and other activists to demand title to lands occupied by all Indigenous communities through the Unión de Comunidades Indígenas Warao (Union of Indigenous Warao Communities). As I sat on the floor in front of him, feeling his intense gaze as he concluded the performance, I felt the weight of the decision that he was imposing upon me. Casting me inescapably as the cannibals’ descendent, the performance—enacted early in my decades-long engagement with Mariusans—presented me with two choices: continue to eat Indigenous people, their land, labour, and environment, or join an anti-racist and anti-colonial struggle. Would I join the decolonial struggle and the process of decolonizing racial categories, materialities and temporalities that he outlined in the myth?

From Lévi-Strauss to Descola and Viveiros de Castro on myth

Rivera’s performance constituted a powerful provocation that was aimed at me, having been designed to structure my relation to Mariusans and shape my actions. My argument in this article is that the myth presented a profound decolonizing challenge. In order to engage it adequately, I had to critically rethink the understanding of myth that I carried as intellectual baggage when I came to work with Rivera. I suggest here that his challenge further requires me to take Rivera seriously as a theorist as well as a performer and teacher of myth, and thus to use his insights in suggesting a broader critique of how non-Indigenous scholars research and interpret Indigenous myths.

Thinking about how non-Indigenous people have translated South American Indigenous myths brings me quickly to a foundational moment: Lévi-Strauss’s extensive writings about myth. Invoking Saussure’s “arbitrary character of the linguistic signs [sic]” and langue/parole opposition (1955, p. 429-430), Lévi-Strauss presents a reductionist logic that excludes context, acts of speaking, differences between speakers of the same language, consciousness and agency. A foundational move threw issues of form and translation out of the window:

Myth is the part of language where the formula traduttore, tradittore reaches its lowest truth-value. From that point of view it should be put in the whole gamut of linguistic expressions at the end opposite to that of poetry […]. Poetry is a kind of speech which cannot be translated except at the cost of serious distortions; whereas the mythical value of the myth remains preserved, even through the worst translation. Whatever our ignorance of the language and the culture of the people where it originated, a myth is still felt as a myth by any reader throughout the world. Its substance does not lie in its style, its original music, or its syntax, but in the story which it tells. (Lévi-Strauss, 1955, p. 430)

Despite his increasing incorporation of Jakobsonian linguistics, Lévi-Strauss opposed myth to poetry rather than poetics. Echoing Jakobson’s (1960) work on parallelism, as so beautifully manifested in Rivera’s performance, Lévi-Strauss asked “why myths, and more generally oral literature, are so much addicted to duplication, triplication or quadruplication of the same sequence” (Lévi-Strauss, 1955, p. 443). Nevertheless, Lévi-Strauss closed these openings, answering his question thus: “If our hypotheses are accepted, the answer is obvious: repetition has as its function to make the structure of the myth apparent” (Lévi-Strauss, 1955, p. 443). Work by Dell Hymes (1981), Dennis Tedlock (1983), and such Native American scholars as Vizenor (2019) and Teuton (2012) has richly demonstrated the centrality of poetic features to the meaning and naturalcultural lives of myths.5 Lévi-Strauss’s rejection of form went beyond its Saussurean roots, suggesting that analysts need not worry about translation, performance and temporalization. “A myth”, he argued, “always refers to events alleged to have taken place in time: before the world was created, or during its first stages—anyway, long ago” (Lévi-Strauss,1955, p. 430). If we were to follow Lévi-Strauss here, Rivera’s performance, particularly its final section, would disappear, along with how narrators connect narrative events with events of narration (Jakobson, 1971).

In reducing translation issues to a binary between form and content—dismissing the role of formal features and asserting the ready translation of referential content—Lévi-Strauss erased ways in which the violence of colonialism shaped the form and content of the myth collections he analyzed. There is a connection here to the politics of mythology in Delta Amacuro. In Mythologiques, Lévi-Strauss made ample use of Warao myths. He cited not only anthropologist Johannes Wilbert but also Evangelical Protestant missionary Henry Osborn (1958, 1960), British colonial administrator William Roth (1915), and Catholic missionary Basilio Barral. Here it is worthwhile to keep in mind Barral’s comments on “the inferiority complex of the Indigenous people” and Juan Luís Rodríguez’s analysis of how the language ideologies and collection and publication practices of missionaries working in the Delta naturalized colonial constructions of the Warao language and its speakers. In addition to the work of nineteenth- and twentieth-century anthropologists, natural scientists, historians, and linguists, in his work on myth Lévi-Strauss relied on myth collections by missionaries, colonial officials, and military officers. He did not allow his view of myths as reflections of the minds of Indigenous peoples to be complicated by how texts were appropriated, filtered, fragmented, and interpreted by this range of non-Indigenous perspectives, practices, and interests—in short, how the myth texts he analyzed were deeply colonial artifacts. By dismissing questions of form, context, and translation, Lévi-Strauss excused himself in a single, sweeping theoretical gesture from dealing with the violence and coloniality that produced many of the texts he analyzed.6

To be sure, non-Indigenous anthropologists working in South America have sustained Lévi-Strauss’s interest in myth. Even beginning to survey this work would take me far beyond the scope of this essay. Given how Descola and Viveiros de Castro see themselves as building on Lévi-Strauss’s analysis of myth and their success in renewing attention among scholars in South American Indigenous myths, their work provides a useful point to think about the resonances of Lévi-Strauss’s approach as seen through Rivera’s critical challenge.

Despite the resolutely ethnographic character of In the Society of Nature, Descola tucked away his approach to mythic research in a note: “All of the Achuar texts used in this work were recorded in the vernacular, then transcribed and translated by Anne-Christine Taylor or myself, with the help of bilingual Shuar informants” (Descola, 1994, p. 333). We seldom learn how myths were recorded or are given information about practices of transcription and translation. Texts occasionally end with such statements as “This is the story my mother Chinkias told me when I was a child” and “This is what I was told a long time ago” (Descola, 1994, p. 95, p. 194). Descola’s rigorous commitment to ethnographic detail thus did not extend to myths. Were they elicited? If so, how, in what contexts, and through what criteria? Myths become decontextualized blocks of text; the analysis eschews considerations of poetics and performance in favour of analyzing their referential content. Descola is much more cautious than either Lévi-Strauss or Viveiros de Castro regarding the value of myths for anthropological insight: “there is some risk in using an esoteric myth to draw up the empirical table of the ‘systems of representations’ common to an entire society” (Descola, 1994, p. 192). Descola’s myth documentation contrasts sharply with that of anent, magical songs. Noting that “possession of a rich and varied repertory is one of the aims of all Achuar” (Descola, 1994, p. 199), he provided detailed ethnographic descriptions of anent performances and emphasized the formal properties—verbal and musical—that rendered them highly privileged. “The anent”, he suggested, “entertains very special relations with mythology, for which it acts as a sort of user’s guide” (Descola, 1994, p. 200).

Here we face several questions. Why would Descola be so attentive to poetics and performance for songs but not for myths? If building a repertory of anent requires knowledge of mythology, why does Descola say that most Achuar are uninterested in and poorly acquainted with myths? Here it would seem that a master ethnographer’s research was limited by a priori positions on questions of what is a myth and what is entailed in its collection and translation. If the myths were elicited, as seems to be the case, how might the request for decontextualized mythic texts have stripped away decolonial challenges that would be apparent if they had been documented as they are performed in both everyday and ritually heightened occasions? In Beyond Nature and Culture, Descola suggests that colonialism fragmented the “homogeneous semantic substratum” evident in “past Indian America” (2005[2013], p. 17). Mr. Rivera’s provocation might prompt us to read this formulation the other way around: might the complex interplay of voices that can be apprehended through attention to the poetic and contextual specificities of myth performances provide “systems of representation” (Descola, 1994, p. 192) that challenge histories of colonial oppression?

The same imbalance in treating myth and song appears in Viveiros de Castro’s (1992) From the Enemy’s Point of View, but the reasons are different. First, he reports: “my stay” with Araweté people was “not only rather drawn out, but also intermittent. This made it more difficult for me to learn the language. The group was practically monolingual, and not even my reasonably good ear for language nor my recourse to the Tupi-Guarani literature could compensate for the lack of continuous exposure to Arawete speech” (Viveiros de Castro, 1992, p. 8). Second, he continues, “I was unable to obtain more than fragmentary versions of the corpus of myths […]. People rarely told myths as discursive events separated from the flow of informal conversation, nor were they willing to recite artificially prompted versions to a tape recorder” (Viveiros de Casstro, 1992, p. 8-9). He concludes: “they had little interest in narrating stories to me, knowing that I would only comprehend them in part, given my problems with the linguistic code or my ignorance of their context. Therefore, I had to cling to the ‘implicit mythology’ and to rely on more general cosmological attitudes expressed in discourse and practice” (Viveiros de Castro, 1992, p. 9).

Viveiros de Castro’s limitations in documenting Araweté myths did not spring from a lack of ability as an ethnographer or lack of interest in poetics. He presented a fascinating ethnography of songs performed nightly as male ‘shamans’ capture malevolent spirits that lurk on the edge of villages and invite the dead to communicate with the living. Like Descola’s treatment of anent songs, Viveiros de Castro provides remarkable documentation and analysis of how the poetics and referential content of the songs enact complex, performative dialogues of voices. These songs are repeated by women and children during the day and, currently, “are also reproduced through recordings made by the Araweté themselves” (Heurich, 2022, p. 183). Despite the richness of Viveiros de Castro’s analysis, he modestly declares: “my interpretation of the songs […] is somewhat superficial” (Viveiros de Castro, 1992, p. 8).

I read Araweté reticence as providing an excellent opening for studying myth. Viveiros de Castro “was astonished by the amount of cosmological knowledge that children possessed. Women, for their part, were generally more loquacious and precise than men concerning the world of the Maï” (Viveiros de Castro, 1992, p. 18). He notes that “[t]he shamanic songs are, properly speaking, myths in action and in transformation” (Viveiros de Castro, 1992, p.18). In short, it would seem that fragments of myth discourse were overflowing in daily life. Viveiros de Castro’s disclaimer regarding his research on myth strikes me as pointing to his presuppositions regarding the nature of mythic narratives and their ethnographic documentation. He seems to believe that researchers on myths should, like Descola, decontextualize myths as linear, complete texts. I read Araweté as challenging Viveiros de Castro’s definition of myths and his idea that there is a “corpus of myths” out there that he should be able to uncover. Araweté perspectives seem to align with how Veena Das (2007) eschewed eliciting narratives produced for ready decontextualization in favour of being attuned to fragments of stories. If Viveiros de Castro had followed the Araweté lead, he could have discovered how “fragmentary versions” were woven into and commented on the forms of colonial oppression that Araweté people faced. Viveiros de Castro emphasized that myths provide the conceptual base for grasping ontologies, interspecies relations and fundamental cultural premises: “it is myths that give, once and for all, what will be taken as the given: the primordial conditions from and against which humans will be defined or constructed; this discourse establishes the terms and limits (where they exist) of this ontological debt” (Viveiros de Castro, 2014, p. 177). Rivera’s “The emergence of the non-Indigenous people” certainly centres on a primordial world, but that universe also includes colonialism, the structural imposition of poverty and subordination, and the decolonial struggle unfolding at the time of our encounter. Might the mythic fragments encountered by Viveiros de Castro have similarly not only indexed historical layers of oppression but performatively enacted efforts to confront them?

In Cannibal Metaphysics, Viveiros de Castro (2014) rarely follows Lévi-Strauss in including missionaries and colonial officials as myth collectors in his bibliographies; most sources are anthropologists. Nevertheless, he similarly leaves issues of poetics aside and pursues Lévi-Strauss’s lead in approaching myths as a decontextualized, bounded body of texts. Viveiros de Castro asks us to conceive of “conceiving anthropological knowledge as a transformation of Indigenous practice”, citing Lévi-Strauss on how anthropology “seeks to elaborate the social science of the observed” (Viveiros de Castro, 2014, p. 46). After initially being forced to engage with precisely such an “indigenous practice” of mythic performance, Viveiros de Castro seems to turn his back on his Areweté interlocutors’ advice by relying in his celebrated comparative and philosophical analyses on decontextualized, largely elicited texts that he analyzes mainly for their referential content. He does not stand on the backs of missionaries, officials, and other collectors who were explicitly part of the colonial enterprise. Still, he adopts a colonial view of myths as decontextualized texts whose referential content is open to dissection by scholars without asking who made the mythic texts, how and why they were produced, and how they were translated and by whom. To his credit, Viveiros de Castro seeks to transform anthropology. He asks, “what would happen if the native’s discourse were to operate within the discourse of the anthropologist in a way that produced reciprocal knowledge effects upon it?” (Viveiros de Castro, 2015, p. 6). I find the question provocative and potentially productive. At the same time, I feel the need to ask exactly what this “native’s discourse” includes and, more importantly, excludes. Is it limited to stretches of referential content that are elicited and decontextualized by anthropologists? Does it engage with ways in which Indigenous ontologies are imbricated with critiques of non-Indigenous power and oppression? If myths are central to this transformative process, their potential can, I think, be better appreciated if the fullness of ways in which they speak to presents of continuing coloniality are adequately documented and made central to the analysis. Indeed, non-Indigenous people are continually emerging—and imposing colonial power on Indigenous populations—in a wide range of ways, including as loggers, cattle ranchers, politicians, bureaucrats, journalists, medical professionals, missionaries, ecologists and, of course, anthropologists. Myths—including fragments lodged in everyday interactions, personal narratives, laments, political rhetoric, and healing ceremonies—can provide critical commentaries on problems faced in dealing with new waves of non-Indigenous actors.

Conclusion

It would almost seem as if the Venezuelan government had heard Rivera’s demand to protect the Mariusa ecosystem. Almost. On 5 June 1991, the Mariusa National Park came into existence through national decree. Unfortunately, one rationale for its creation was to police the supposedly ecocidal practices of Mariusans, not encroachment by non-Indigenous intruders. Shortly afterwards, the government opened the ecologically fragile area along the Delta’s coastline to oil exploitation. British Petroleum (now BP) and other corporations performed intrusive testing and drilled test wells in the Mariusa area. Conducted mainly in secret—even as leases were offered digitally on the internet—Clara Mantini-Briggs and I were surprised to see rigs and oil workers during our research on the aftermath of the 1992-1993 cholera outbreak. We alerted Librado Moraleda, other Indigenous leaders in the Delta, and ecological activists, prompting small protests and media attention. Petroleum development in Mariusa halted when BP decided that extracting oil would be too costly. Geology and capitalism saved the day. One outcome of the public outcry was that BP felt compelled to provide Mariusans with assistance, organized by a small non-profit organization. Finally, Mariusa got its school, staffed by dedicated bilingual teachers. The nurse Clara trained gained space to see patients on the top floor of the school building and a supply of medicines.

Rivera himself did not live to see either the establishment of the school/nursing station or its demise when the BP funding ended. A healer who touched the body of what is believed to be the first local patient presenting with the disease, a non-indigenous fisherman, Santiago Rivera was the first Mariusan to die from cholera in 1992 (Briggs and Mantini-Briggs, 2003). He is one of the friends and mentors I miss the most.

I have tried to build here on Rivera’s and Araweté insights. Viveiros de Castro’s interlocutors were, I think, trying to lead the ethnographer away from searching for a ‘corpus’ of non-fragmentary mythic texts. I have gone on to suggest that compiling collections of monologic, decontextualized myths and using them in scholarly projects without decolonizing the practices of selection, extraction, transcription, translation and analysis lies at the heart of the colonial enterprises enacted by missionaries, colonial officials and anthropologists. I think Rivera’s performance deserves a wider audience, given its potential for opening up alternative archives that critically engage colonialism and its agents. He is hardly alone here. Anthony Oliver-Smith (1969) and Mary Weismantel (2001) document the pishtaco, a mythic figure that takes revenge against white agents of anti-Indigenous violence in the Andes. Sadhana Naithani (2001) and Luise White (2000) present traditional narratives that turn British colonial authorities into vampiric, demonic beings. Rivera goes on to show how a myth framed as “a story that was told to us by our deceased ancestors” about events taking place “long ago” can develop a rich and detailed cartography of contemporary colonialism, reach indexically into contemporary forms of racism and anti-racist struggles, and exert illocutionary force on particular non-Indigenous audiences. His words demonstrate that dripping irony and sarcasm, as Vizenor (2019) suggests, are powerful decolonial tools.

As noted, Risling Baldy (2015) analyzes the mistranslation of the names of Native American mythic characters as the tip of the iceberg of colonial scholarship. Paul Kroskrity (2015) points to broader textual contours of scholarly presentations of Native American narratives as important elements of settler-colonial projects. Translating Indigenous myths walks a delicate tightrope between reproducing colonial hierarchies and providing crucial tools for dismantling them. If myths are central instruments for confronting colonialism, a decolonial practice requires both decolonizing texts and paying special attention to myths, like Rivera’s, that are framed as decolonial performative acts. Even as myths may provide privileged perspectives on “an original state of nondifferentiation between humans and animals, as described in mythology” (Viveiros de Castro, 2004, p. 464), a decolonial approach to the ethnography of myth will reveal how these “original states” have afterlives in critiquing and confronting the continual violence directed against Indigenous peoples and articulating demands to return land, halt ecologically destructive forms of invasion, and respect political and other rights.