This chapter compares some critical approaches to literature produced by authors who self-identify as Maya, Wayuu, and Mapuche. I argue that the word “itinerary” is useful when thinking about the decisions that the critic must make while reading these literatures. The “ethnic itinerary” is one among many and, in general, reveals the understandings about the identity of the reader her/himself, rather than the author. I use specific words borrowed from native languages to imagine new/old methodologies. Words in English and Spanish become insufficient to express Indigenous epistemologies, while translation becomes a political cross-cultural stage. Indigenous literatures today are not just about books but a constant effort in translating nonverbal codes, native languages, and Indigenous paradigms. Divisive dichotomies such as oral/written, Indigenous/urban, native/migrant, and tradition/avant-garde are challenged. Despite the differences between the various nations, languages, and literary projects, contemporary Indigenous voices from Abiayala are calling for a return to their land, language, ancestors, and to themselves. While in the 1990s and 2000s literary critics and editors were showcasing the work of Indigenous authors, twenty-first-century critics are unsettling literacy itself and the matrix of coloniality. The language-body-territory thread weaves throughout the chapter.

What might a truly comparative Native American and Indigenous literary studies look like? Building from an extended contextualization and “literary” analysis of a work of carving, painting, inlay, and assemblage, this essay suggests a range of possible approaches to comparative, global, and/or trans-Indigenous projects based in engagements with alphabetic literatures. Both the sculptural and alphabetic examples expose ways in which the work of contemporary artists and writers elucidates neither Indigenous stasis nor Indigenous isolation—as colonial stereotypes continue to assert—but rather Indigenous connections to wider worlds, often in multiple ways simultaneously, and often explicitly within processes of real and imagined travel. In these examples, artists and writers center the Indigenous in their works in terms of the cultures, histories, and aesthetics they reference and engage, but also in the very conceptions of space, place, movement, and time their works evoke and, indeed, enact.