Indigenous leaderships beyond the tangle of concepts and their functions in the tracks of history: An exercise in listening

Abstract

This study is an excerpt from a broader research, which was conducted between the years of 2014 and 2017, on the implications of non-indigenous schools on the formation of indigenous leaderships. Here, we analyzed the scholar upbringing of two leaderships from the Krikati people, who inhabit the western Maranhão area, and how the knowledge from the Western society contributed to their trajectories and life stories, without diluting their culture and indigenous identity. In this paper, we focus on the concepts of traditional and political leadership. We highlight characteristics of what it means to be a leader in indigenous societies, with the purpose of analyzing what can be considered as political constancy by leaderships from different cultures, historical and geographical contexts. We also discussed the types of leaderships, their attributions and functions from the theoretical framework that supports these discussions. We used accounts from traditional indigenous leaderships, Krikati political leaderships and from political leaders who are nationally recognized by Brazilian native peoples. The determination of native leaders to appropriate Western knowledge has been contributing to the strengthening of their leaderships and, consequently, to the realization of projects in their Territories. Thus, this work is theoretically and methodologically based on the history of the present time and history from oral sources.