ABSTRACT In 2016, a group of Wayana intellectuals from French Guiana approached academics and museum curators to assist them in recovering texts, images, sound recordings, and ancient artefacts collected over the years by several generations of travelers and researchers. This led to the creation of a bilingual Wayana‐French portal designed to facilitate virtual access to these formerly scattered collections. Although the main objective was to create a digital database developed according to Wayana‐defined criteria, the initiators soon felt the need to produce a parallel printed work to relate their experience. Written exclusively in their language, the book, titled Itëneimëk Kunolo , was published in 2019. This paper recounts its making and its social significance, with emphasis on the challenges of achieving authorial autonomy in the context of a collaborative digital repatriation project.
Philippe Erikson (Thu,) studied this question.