Poetry and artistic expression are the means by which Amerindian peoples express their vision of the world. How is the diversity and creativity of the Amerindian arts and the spaces they occupy expressed today ? Does artistic expression have a diplomatic role to play within the international community ?
Visual artist and representative of the Jeunesse Autochtone de Guyane (JAG), a network of young activists from six indigenous peoples of French Guiana. The movement fights for the recognition of indigenous rights in France. She is a member of the Kali'na Tileuvu group, from the village of Paddock in Saint-Laurent-du-Maroni, French Guiana. She is a student at the Beaux-Arts in Paris, and her artistic work is inspired by native culture, particularly the traditions and rituals of the Kali'na people.
Pierre Déléage is a linguistic anthropologist, CNRS research director and member of the Social Anthropology Laboratory at the Collège de France. He conducted a doctoral study on the epistemology of shamanism among the Sharanahua peoples of Peru, and deciphered their ritual languages (Le chant de l'anaconda. L'apprentissage du chamanisme chez les Sharanahua, Société d'ethnologie Nanterre 2009). His research focuses, on the one hand, on marginalized knowledge and its modes of transmission and, on the other, on minority forms of writing. He carried out ethnographic surveys first in Peru among the Sharanahua, Yaminahua, Amahuaca and Shipibo-Conibo peoples, then among the Wayana of French Guiana, the Tepehua and Otomi of Mexico, the Quechua of Bolivia and the Maya of Yucatan. He coordinated a special issue of the Journal de la Société des Américanistes devoted to "Discours rituels amérindiens" in 2011 and published Inventer l'écriture (Les Belles Lettres, 2013), Lettres mortes (Fayard, 2017) and La Folie arctique (Zones sensibles, 2017).
A lawyer from the Kaingáng people, she holds a Master's degree in Law from the University of Brasília (UnB) and a PhD in Cultural Heritage and Intellectual Property from Leiden University. She specializes in the protection of cultural heritage, both tangible and intangible, and has worked with various international bodies, such as the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) and the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD). In 2023, she became Director of the Museu Nacional dos Povos Indígenas (National Museum of Indigenous Peoples), a scientific and cultural institution of the National Foundation for Indigenous Peoples (FUNAI) in Rio de Janeiro. The Museu Nacional dos Povos Indígenas is responsible for the policy of preserving and disseminating the cultural heritage of Brazil's indigenous peoples, and holds an important collection of archival, museological and bibliographical cultural assets on these communities. The Museum's ethnographic collection includes more than 20 000 contemporary objects from 150 Brazilian indigenous communities.
