ABSTRACT
This chapter addresses three fallacies that continue to dominate discussions around indigenous literary production. The first one has to do with the widely accepted premise that indigenous peoples did not have writing until Europeans introduced the alphabet; second, that indigenous literature can be compartmentalized through a traditional orality/literacy divide; and third, that authenticity should be associated to a pre-Columbian way of being in the world. The chapter offers a short historiography of contemporary indigenous literature produced in the late twentieth century and twenty-first century and emphasize how they depart from these three assumptions to carve out a new intellectual, political, and artistic space that challenges nation-state lines. The memory of hieroglyphic texts plays an important role in the revision of dominant literary and cultural histories. Contemporary indigenous writers have not attempted to write in hieroglyphics, yet the cultural referent provides an alternative genealogy to the idea of knowledge/power.
