This paper is the result of a dialogue of about five years that we established with the Javaé
indigenous people of Boa Esperança village, located on Bananal Island, Tocantins State, and
its main objective is to identify the contributions of Javaé ancestral narratives to multiliteracies
in Boa Esperança indigenous village, from a bilingual and intercultural perspective. Thefore,
we sought in the theoretical-methodological assumptions of Interactional Sociolinguistics
(Gumperz, 1982; Blom and Gumperz, 2002 [1972] and Goffman, 2002 [1979] and 2012) and
Educational (Bortoni-Ricardo, 2004, 2005), of ethnography ( Erickson, 1988) and participatory
action research (Thiollent, 1986) support for us to make the bilingual record of Javaé ancestral
narratives and carry out transdisciplinary workshops on reading and producing verbal and non-
verbal texts at the Watakuri Indigenous School based on the recorded narratives, in addition to
carry out an ethnographic study about this people. The research aims to meet a demand from
the researched community itself, which demonstrates the desire to keep alive the memory and
the cultural and linguistic identity of its people, concerned with the offer of an indigenous
school education that starts from the sociocultural reality experienced by the indigenous Javaé.
Thus, the data were generated through direct interaction with the survey participants (elderly
woman, indigenous and non-indigenous teachers, elementary and high school students and
other members of the community), through participant observations, spontaneous
conversations, audio recordings and videos and conducting pedagogical workshops.The text
that we present as a result of this study is a dialogical construction between us and the
Indigenous Javaé, which brings a brief ethnographic description of the historical, cosmological,
sociocultural and linguistic aspects of this people; the record of ten Javaé bilingual ancestral
narratives and one narrative only in Portuguese; and the description and analysis of the
pedagogical workshops on reading and bilingual textual production carried out from the reading
of the registered narratives. The analyses, based mainly on Paiva (2013); Neves (2015);
Marcuschi (2008 and 2010); Rojo (2009); Dolz, Noverraz and Schneuwly (2011); Bortoni-
Ricardo (2005); Blom and Gumperz, 2002 [1972]; Goffman, 2002 [1979] and Brasil (2017)
reveal that Javaé ancestral narratives can be classified as a textual genre that fulfills the specific
social function of maintaining the sociocultural, historical and cosmological memory of the
Javaé people and working with them in a classroom, is a way of keeping the culture and
language of these people alive, as well as contributing to the multiliteracy of indigenous
students. With this research, we hope to contribute positively to indigenous linguistic, cultural
and educational studies, especially for the Javaé community of Boa Esperança village, as we
seek to collaborate in the construction of activities that meet the precepts of Brazilian
indigenous school education, as well as this people.
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