The twentieth and twenty-first centuries have witnessed a literary revival in the Indigenous languages of the region known canonically as “Latin America.” Across this varied corpus, a major theme is the cultural significance of maize. This article compares the depiction of maize in four bilingual poems, each written in a different Indigenous language alongside Spanish: Nahuatl (Ethel Xochitiotzin Pérez), Yucatec Maya (María Dolores Dzul Barboza), Central Quechua (César Vargas Arce), and Southern Quechua (Emilio Corrales). Through close textual analysis and by recourse to theoretical perspectives such as “literary cartography,” the “textual continuum,” “deep mapping,” and “trans-indigeneity,” the article argues that each poem communicates culturally specific ways of understanding geography that, when set in dialogue, challenge hegemonic definitions of the Western Hemisphere such as North, South, or Latin “America.” Rather, the poems in combination weave an interconnected yet multiperspectival cartographic tapestry with maize as the common thread.

In this article I demonstrate how in the post-Thaw period—the period of “soft” socialist realism—the northern indigenous minorities began to (re)invent literary writing and manifest their own version of the canon. Due to the lack of a pre-Soviet written literary tradition, “young” literatures were born as a symbiosis of folklore, beliefs, indigenous-Christian customs and the surrogate literary tradition of the Russian-European center: the Soviet “master plot.” Having graduated from universities in Moscow or Leningrad, the first generations of writers “(re)invented” a view of themselves as simultaneously native and Other. A consequence of the fact that the authors internalized the role of the youngest “brother” was, among others, the amalgamation of children's and adults' narrative and pedagogical zeal, which combined folklore ethics with socialist realist moralism. The study is of a transitional time: before the local authors had experienced a cardinal reevaluation of their values during perestroika and afterwards.

Thomas King’s novel Green Grass, Running Water stands as an indictment of North American colonialism and the continuing injustices facing indigenous peoples; it also offers valuable insights in terms of what constitutes good teaching. With reference to personal experiences of teaching the novel in a large lecture course, this article discusses its author’s efforts at implementing the novel’s implied pedagogical principles, which include a scepticism about granting authority to certain texts over others; a collaborative model of learning; a wariness regarding totalizing narratives and claims of interpretive mastery; and a need to wrestle in class discussion with texts’ unresolved problematics.