A very current discussion in Brazil concerns the question: What does it mean to be Indigenous? In Brazil, the news has shown a highly unfavourable chain of events: Indigenous territory losses, lack of public investment in Indigenous schools, and political scenario changes—such as the end of some Indigenous rights and transference of power over the territories from FUNAI (the National Indigenous Peoples Foundation) to the Ministry of Agriculture—are some examples that reinforce the challenges that Indigenous peoples must fight against so they can preserve their identity.
Sarah Shulist experienced these and various other issues at the moment she decided to understand the role of language in a place where twenty-two Indigenous languages coexist (from which three have become co-official) plus Portuguese (considered the lingua franca). The anthropologist has searched not only to understand but also to take part in a fight to maintain/improve Indigenous identity.
Language revitalization is related to language discussion and practices. Simultaneously, it also involves other discussions rather than only debating about the language itself; as Shulist states: ‘Language is a part of this broader system of cultural practices that people wish to preserve as well as a symbolic index of the strength of Indigenous identity as a whole’ (21). Given that, language in Upper Rio Negro is ‘central to culture’ once it is considered a symbolic matter that comes together with other symbols of identity, such as material artefacts, cultural performances, particular economic systems, and so on.
Concerning the aim of the book, Shulist presents, in a very pleasant manner, how indigeneity has been transformed along the years in São Gabriel da Cachoeira, a small town located in Amazonas, Brazil, and how the efforts of Indigenous language revival must be thought of in terms of urbanization, political aspects, and Indigenous singularity.
Language regeneration in São Gabriel faces various problems in and outside the Indigenous sphere. It involves language-in-education policy, language use in schools, urban and rural spaces discussion, and even the colonial-age debates in which Indigenous people have been classified as noncivilized. Furthermore, there is also a problem concerning whether the choice of co-official Indigenous languages has really expressed democracy.
The question that still remains, besides so many others related to Indigenous language revitalization, as Shulist points out, is an invitation to explore deeply the literature and Indigenous research, summarized in these three main questions: (i) What is language? (ii) What are the boundaries between language and culture? and (iii) To what degree is language revitalisation the same thing as cultural revitalisation?
