This paper aims to contribute to an ongoing effort to demonstrate that kinship, reformulated as necessary to accommodate contemporary facts and interpretations, remains pertinent to social anthropology. The decade of Indigenous languages (2022-2032) makes it particularly relevant to address questions of translation. This entails not only the transposition of Indigenous terms into the languages being used by anthropologists, but also the question of which anthropological concepts are deemed appropriate to account for the phenomena to be understood. The Indigenous movement in Brazil presently encapsulates its outlook with the phrase: "the future is ancestral", aptly summing up recognition of indebtedness to the ancestors for their legacy of Indigenous knowledge. Indigenous art is presently experiencing an international boom, translating easily into aesthetic appreciation, as does music, but kinship terminologies, the object of centuries of philosophical speculation, concerning gender and generation amongst other issues, fail to enjoy the same success. For example, the Mẽbêngôkre have an elaborate set of triadic terms that combine simultaneously the perspective of the speaker and the interlocutor. Some such terms refer to the kràmdjwỳ, translated by the Mẽbêngôkre into Portuguese as "compadre" (godfather), and by anthropologists as "formal friend", whereas it could more aptly be considered sui generis, thus untranslatable, being transmitted patrilineally and associated with inherited affinability. Matrihouses, an emic exogamous category (analysed with the software Puck), evoking both house-based-societies and clans are masked in translation as "families". The Mẽbêngôkre kinship terminology has long been classified in the literature as Omaha(-like) whilst it can at least partially be explained by onomastic practices. The replication of ancestral names in each generation bridges the gap between the living and the dead demonstrating that both the present and future are ancestral.