Piratá Waurá
is an Indigenous scholar from the Wauja community of Piyulaga, located on the Tamitatoala River. The Wauja speak an Arawakan language, in addition to Portuguese, and reside in the Xingu Indigenous Territory in the state of Mato Grosso, in Central Brazil. Piratá received his undergraduate degree from the State University of Mato Grosso. He currently teaches high school in his village of Piyulaga.
In 2017, he received funding from the Americas Research Network to participate in research and training in Washington, DC. He studied approaches to transcribing and translating oral texts, as well as best practices for creating and maintaining digital archives of primary source material for language revitalization.
In 2018, he was chosen to be Coordinator for Piyulaga village in the Wauja Language Documentation Project funded by the Americas Research Network (arenet.org). As coordinator, he passed onto his students the training he had received, and guided them as they transcribed video-recorded oral commentary into written text, and then translated the written Wauja into written Portuguese.
In 2019, with funding from Arenet, he was one of three Wauja schoolteachers who visited a neighboring Indigenous group to participate in a week-long linguistics workshop on orthography and translation issues, taught by Bruna Franchetto, Professor of Linguistics at the Museu Nacional de Rio de Janeiro (UFRJ).
