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This essay explores, in part, queer theory's queerness in relation to the religious (Christian) and ethnic (European) frame that largely produced it. Although affect and temporality theories offer important possibilities—finally—for queering Christian theology, I suggest that even these may not escape the ossifying tendencies of conceptual closure so dominant in the trajectories of European and Christian thought. Gerald Vizenor's (Anishinaabe) theory of survivance, developed out of a Native American "postindian" philosophical context, opposes settler colonial closures of "the Indian" and may help illuminate and break through queer theory's (and theology's) entrapping reliance on ethnic European concepts to work through persistent problems of identity, eschatology, and ontology.

This chapter examines the works of first-generation renaissance writers Gerald Vizenor and Leslie Marmon Silko to address how their shared visions of indigenous Mexico constitute a point of convergence. The publication of Vizenor’s The Heirs of Columbus and Leslie Marmon Silko’s Almanac of the Dead enabled the Greater Indian Territory to make a dramatic return to American Indian literature in 1991 and to expand into Canada, the Carribbean, and Central and South America. Vizenor’s The Heirs of Columbus is a narrative of migration and the creation of a new, sovereign Anishinabe tribal nation with significant Mayan origins; while in Silko’s Almanac of the Dead, the Mayans play a central role in the emergent pan-North American indigenous rather than tribal nation-specific revolutionary movement.

This chapter examines elegy in the “Native American Renaissance” and after, starting with the elegiac autobiographical text The Way to Rainy Mountain (1969) by N. Scott Momaday and “Prologue” from Linda Hogan's novel Solar Storms (1995). It also considers Gerald Vizenor prose elegy for a red squirrel, along with elegiac work attributed to various Native American poets such as Sherman Alexie, Jim Barnes, Kimberly Blaeser, Jimmie Durham, Lee Francis, Lance Henson, Maurice Kenny, Adrian Louis, Simon Ortiz, Carter Revard, and Ralph Salisbury. Many of these elegiac poems engage in various forms of melancholic mourning by telling the stories, reciting the names, and remembering those who have died, so that the People might live.

This chapter presents a reading of Karen Tei Yamashita’s Tropic of Orange. It considers discussions of multiculturalism in Los Angeles at the end of the twentieth century to understand how narratives of race and indigeneity within the United States have been recycled to provide a justifying logic for the transit of empire mapped onto Asian American bodies. It analyzes how indigenous peoples are discursively transformed into immigrants, while Asian Americans simultaneously become both cowboys and Indians as a means to police difference within liberal multicultural settler colonialism. The chapter concludes with a reading of Gerald Vizenor’s Hiroshima Bugi, which considers the linkages between American Indian history and the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki to end World War II in order to reframe victim narratives within colonial and imperial logics.

This chapter takes up the question of reparation. How can we begin to make amends, and how to ensure that such efforts are not fantasies? The chapter looks at the long-distance atonement of Faulkner as he reaches out in apology to Japan after World War II, hoping in the same gesture to reach out in apology to displaced Choctaws and Cherokees in Mississippi. This attempt at reparation, largely wishful, becomes less so when crowd-sourced by chance, distributed to Native and immigrant authors far from Faulkner’s orbit, whose weak connectivity makes them resourceful mediators. Gerald Vizenor, Jim Barnes, and Lucien Stryk are rarely seen in the company of Faulkner. Unbeknownst to him, they have built a resilient set of ties giving substance to his hoped-for atonement. Taking many forms over the years, from teaching appointments in regional universities, to dedicated translation of Japanese haiku, to the sending and receiving of postcards, this trans-Pacific network, low-key and steadfast, links the catastrophe of New World genocide to the catastrophe of the atomic bombs without being fixated on either—a nonlinear mediation, speaking for Faulkner and perhaps in his despite.

Theopoetics begins in poetry and ends in theology. It is a mode of theological analysis that enables critical evaluation and overcoming of the limits of mono-linear thought toward more robust understandings of lived multiplicity. This chapter follows Gerald Vizenor's suggestive concepts of “native modernity” and “ontic significance” to highlight both the limits of monotheistic presuppositions of linearity and illuminate indigenous logics that make sense of creation as incarnation. In doing so it explores the pros and poetry of Joy Hajro as an example of narratives that disrupt linear and absolute logic.