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This chapter offers a provisional history of the authors, genres, and subjects of queer Native studies, narrating a map of relationships and thereby providing a much needed genealogy of the field. It exhumes and invigorates genealogical connections, and as a way to demonstrate that the seeming renaissance of the twenty-first century stems from deep and abiding roots and long-standing Indigenous intellectual traditions. It also contributes to the ongoing conversation about queer images and texts in Native American and Aboriginal literatures.

This chapter analyzes Maurice Kenny’s early poetry from 1970s queer journals such as Fag Rag. Fag Rag is categorized as a gay male porn magazine because of its inclusion of essays with erotic content and photographs and drawings of male bodies and sexual acts. Through the recovery and analysis of Kenny’s writing from Fag Rag, this chapter expands the understanding of the Native literary canon, showing that the current rise of queer Native studies and Two-Spirit critiques have their roots in an earlier time and in unexpected venues. Kenny’s writing from the periodicals of the gay cultural renaissance also highlights the ways in which Two-Spirit texts have offered new ways of reading, seeing, and imagining the world.

This introductory chapter explains the theoretical analysis of settler colonialism conditioning the formation of Native and non-Native queer modernities in conversation. It draws from and advances Native, feminist, critical race, and queer studies by emphasizing Indigenous feminist and queer thought and Native queer and Two-Spirit activism. It examines how settler colonial power relations among Native and non-Native people define the status “queer.” It explains that modern queer subjects, politics, and culture have developed among Natives and non-Natives in interrelated, yet distinct, ways. Native queer cultures and politics critique colonial heteropatriarchy by asserting Indigenous methods of national survival, decolonization, and traditional renewal, including within Two-Spirit identity. Additionally, the chapter explains the narrative relationships among queer subjects by situating them within ethnographic and historical accounts of U.S. queer politics.

This chapter explains the globalism of U.S. queer modernities as effects of settler colonialism by tracing how homonationalism and white settler queer primitivism may relate within white queer politics and diasporic queer of color critiques until resituated by the transnationalism of Two-Spirit organizing. In the framework of white settler society, queer projects propose a global scope by naturalizing their inheritance of settlement and then projecting a desired indigeneity worldwide. Scholars have depicted Western queer projects as a neocolonial globalizing force dominating local sexualities, or postcolonial queers as distinctly engaging colonial legacies and Western politics without being assimilated. Queer diasporic critics and transnational feminists trace how local creativity and global constraints cause colonial complicities to be integral to queer postcoloniality even while provoking critical agency.

This book addresses how contemporary queer Native writers use the representation of bodily, emotional, and psychological sensation in challenging U.S. formulations of political subjectivity, while seeking to reimagine what counts as sovereignty and providing alternative ways of figuring Native experience. The supposedly apparent continuity of Indianness gives way to genealogies of sensation that trace how peoplehood exists within forms of feeling, prompting these queer writers to theorize dynamics of Indigenous sociality that shapes the meaning of self-determination under settler rule. Through this, possibilities for conceptualizing and realizing alternative versions of collective identity and indigeneity gradually emerge, in the attempt to go against the efforts to displace, translate, and erase Native peoples.

Chapter 1 – It provides the theoretical and methodological background for the study. Surveying relevant scholarship in nineteenth-century American literary studies, Native studies, and queer studies, it develops in detail the meaning, scope, and implications of the book’s central concept (settler common sense), elaborating its contribution to those three fields.

Chapter 2 – Nathaniel Hawthorne’s House of the Seven Gables takes up the Lockean assumptions of earlier struggles against elite propertyholding in Maine. In doing so, the text opens up the potential for a non-nuclear vision of homemaking, but it makes non-native labor on the land ethically paradigmatic in ways that efface the persistent presence and claims of Wabanki peoples.

Chapter 3 – In critiquing the debt produced by the effort to own property, Henry David Thoreau’s Walden develops an autoerotic vision of selfhood based on withdrawal into the space of “nature.” That vision, though, takes existing accounts of the peculiarity of Native landholding as the basis for imagining the potential for non-native exploration and reverie.

Herman Melville’s Pierre draws on the Anti-Rent movement in upstate New York to critique inherited estates, and it positions the city as an escape from inequities in the country. Casting New York City as such a site, though, overlooks the ways its phenomenal growth in the nineteenth century depended on the displacement of Iroquois peoples.

This chapter assesses the images that have been used to depict queer Native people in contemporary narrative film. Contemporary narrative film, which offers the most widely viewed representations of queer Native people, often reenacts fragmenting visions of the erotic. Films like Big Eden, Johnny Greyeyes, and The Business of Fancydancing replicate the legacies of settler colonialism in their depictions of Two-Spirit Native people, leaving queer Indigenous people with an untenable choice in which they are “forced to choose.” They must either embrace family and nation in the silence of desire, or embrace sexuality at the expense of tribal and familial alliances.

This concluding chapter answers the question of what can be gained by considering “the queerness” of Native American literature. Queering Indigenous literary history and engaging specifically queer Indigenous literary history forces the reconsideration of foundational moments in Native studies. The writers, artists, and scholars discussed in this book both build upon and extend pre-existing intellectual genealogies and geographies. These genealogies and geographies represent archives of more diverse social roles, indexes of creative kinship relations, and essential meaning-making practices through which to generate and organize knowledge. Examining Indigenous erotics not only strengthens approaches to queer and Indigenous studies but also forwards restorative decolonial practices.

This chapter explores how “settler sexuality” queers Native peoples to attempt their elimination compatibly with emphasizing racialized heteropatriarchal control over subject people of color placed on Native lands. The queering of white settlers then rests on the existence of a settler colonialism that conditions both heteronormative and queer gender and sexual politics on stolen land, which Two-Spirit activists and Native queer resist. It argues that the biopolitics of settler colonialism creates settler sexuality as the context traversed by Native and non-Native people formulating queer modernities. Non-Native queer modernities develop by gathering a multiracial, transnational constituency as a diversity that exists in a non-Native relationship to disappearing indigeneity. Moreover, settler colonialism is a primary condition of the history of sexuality in the United States.

This chapter presents conversations on berdache as spaces that produced queer modernities for Native and non-Native people in close relationship in the late twentieth century. The popularity of berdache was heightened when gay and lesbian politics expressed progressive legacies of U.S. anthropology. Gay and lesbian and allied anthropologists in the 1970s began to evaluate sexual conservatism in anthropology and U.S. society by creating the Anthropological Research Group on Homosexuality (ARGOH), later renamed the Society of Lesbian and Gay Anthropologists (SOLGA). The twentieth-century scholars linked the anthropology of homosexuality to the pursuit of sexual minority politics within anthropology. U.S. anthropology of homosexuality correlated research on homosexuality to the activist defense of gay and lesbian anthropologists. ARGOH made sexual minority politics a basis for anthropological knowledge production by promoting research on homosexuality and defending gay and lesbian anthropologists.

This chapter traces how desires for cultural authenticity linked queer politics in the United States to what Elizabeth Povinelli has called “liberal settler multiculturalism” while being challenged by multiracial and transnational queer alliances led by Two-Spirit activists. Settler citizenship conditions the relationality of non-Native and Native people within queer politics. Whether nominally universal or markedly restricted, settler citizenship confers opportunity, security, and liberty by facilitating the colonial domestication or replacement of Native nationality. The chapter also argues that queer narratives of cultural integrity inflected by “race” locate freedom in belonging to a settler nation. U.S. queer projects define their integrity by appealing to the cultural status of an ethnic group.

This chapter explores how non-Native gay counterculturists pursued multiple desires for queer indigeneity that, while contested by antiracist critique, confronted their settler formation only in relationship to Native gay and Two-Spirit men. Gay and lesbian counterculturists in back-to-the-land collectives across Canada and the United States inspired broader circulation of their rural practices. One of their lasting legacies is the Radical Faeries. Radical Faeries employ back-to-the-land principles to a mobile practice that made retreat to rural space a conduit for urban and itinerant people to realize portable truths. Radical Faerie culture privileged rural retreats as a way for non-Native gay men to liberate an Indigenous gay nature and incorporate it in their everyday lives.

This chapter discusses how Native activist critiques of heteropatriarchy in Native communities, settler states, and global fields mark the settler colonial biopolitics of health governance and stimulate global Indigenous alliance for decolonization. While homonationalism produces queer integration into settler citizenship and union with Native lands by naturalizing settlements, Native queer activists lead Native peoples to challenge settler colonialism, the very formation homonationalism reinforces. Thus, Native activists resemble queers of color who lead communities of color in antiheteropatriarchal struggles against imperialism and racism that challenge the power of the state. The chapter also argues that by engaging Native peoples in diasporas caused by colonization, Native queer and Two-Spirit movements model transnational modes of naming and defending Native sovereignty.