What, to echo Walter Benjamin, is the task of the translator in interpreting an Indigenous myth? The author faced thorny issues of translation and colonial violence working with an Indigenous population in a Venezuelan rainforest. Renowned healer, storyteller, and political leader Santiago Rivera performed the myth of “The emergence of the non-Indigenous people”, framing it as not only addressed to the author but as being about him. The analysis begins with work by Indigenous scholars Chris Teuton, Cutcha Risling Baldy and Gerald Vizenor in interpreting an ironic section about how Indigenous people came to be poor and non-Indigenous people wealthy, interpreted by a missionary as evidence of an Indigenous inferiority complex. Rivera posed fundamental questions for translating Indigenous myths, questioning who gets to determine what constitutes a myth and what a decolonial translation entails, by tying the myth’s action to struggles to confront non-Indigenous exploitation of their lands, coastal water, labour and women’s sexuality. Just as the performance challenged the author to participate in Indigenous struggles, it raises questions for the rich mythic analyses and decolonial ambitions of ‘ontological turn’ scholars Eduardo Viveiros de Castro and Philippe Descola, extending questions posed by Descola’s Araweté interlocutors.