Indigenous librarianship: Wefts enchanted by the living earth

Abstract

Objective: (Re)situating Librarianship and Libraries beyond the disenchanted borders of the West and its “content units”, based on two propositions of indigenous origin: i) the living knowledge of the world is the epistemic plan of orientation of indigenous Librarianship and, ii) the land is the library of indigenous peoples.

Methods: controlled equivocation is the method of the text. It is articulated with the indigenous methodological research agenda and the assumptions of Amerindian perspectivism and indigenous multinaturalism, configuring links of the cannibal cogito and the self-determination of indigenous peoples.

Results: The transformational grammar of indigenous peoples, enchanted by the land, disconcerts and alters the configuration plans of the classical theory of Librarianship and the objectivist and disenchanted imaginary of Western knowledge. The living and ancestral knowledge of the land, bodies and languages presents itself as a contemporary bundle capable of re-enchanting the librarianship world through a long-term historiographic rescue of the “library” practices of indigenous peoples.

Conclusions: Life is the nectar of indigenous thought. Installing itself in the space of ambiguity between the natives and us, and curling up, is the translating and concluding task of this text. Translating does not aim to silence the other by presuming an original univocity and an ultimate redundancy between what he and we are saying, but, on the contrary, it is a matter of making a home in library indigenous thought so that it, as an original language, deforms, decolonizes, subverts and transform the destinations and conceptual geographies of our library, documentary, informational language and beyond.