língua mãe / MOTHER LANGUAGE
PRESENTATION
“Língua Mãe”, which gives its name to this ritual meeting, is located on the horizon of an event of the greatest importance that has been spreading throughout Brazil. It is the affirmation of the different indigenous languages in the political dispute over original territories, the object of the violent colonial abduction that founded the country. A kidnapping that was accompanied by the denial of the existence of its original peoples and which, not by chance, included the erasure of their linguistic diversity, which has continued to this day.
The repression of this linguistic diversity is one of the central micropolitical strategies of the colonial abduction of these lands. If indigenous activism contributes to the enrichment of the country's linguistic landscape, it also denounces the persistent action of the Brazilian State in erasing these linguistic memories, confronting its transgenic violence that affects the ground and bodies. A song, a gesture, the expression of a word, the song-word have their origin in affection: they are expressions of the mother tongue. Putting them into circulation brings to light other ways of living and denounces the scoundrel patriarchy that justifies structural racism: it is thus revealed that linguistic monoculture is a project, and not the mere consequence of the colonial history that founded Brazilian society .
It is no surprise that UNESCO established the period from 2022 to 2032 as the International Decade of Indigenous Languages, recognizing that these languages hold ancestral knowledge about their territories, about healing processes, about the forest and are instruments for combating the climate crisis. . →
