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The introduction explains the objective of the collection, which is to plumb the ideas and interpretations which Indigenous people of the British settler colonies have formulated and articulated about or through Queen Victoria in response to the colonial encounter. Essays also consider how the representatives of the Crown employed the figure of the monarch in their interactions with Indigenous people. The introduction explains the scope of the collection, why the focus is on the settler colonies. It describes how this is an innovative, original, timely and significant contribution. It brings together scholarship that has been isolated within the confines of national histories, and contributes to understandings of comparable colonial cultures and networks and webs of empire. It is explained why the collection is divided into three parts, and the themes and issues that link the chapters. Each chapter is summarized. It concludes with the hope that this will generate further interdisciplinary scholarship.

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.

A narrative of the first half of Ostenaco’s life, it tells the story of the Cherokees from their first encounters with Europeans to the deadly Anglo-Cherokee War of 1760-61. Ostenaco’s life illuminates the Cherokees’ changing sense of themselves, from a town-based identity, to a region-based identity, to a nation-based identity. It also reveals an Indigenous face to the history of empire. We learn that, in Cherokee terms, the story of Ostenaco’s life started with his mother rather than with the actual fleshy entrance of his body into the world. From the description of Ostenaco’s childhood, we also learn about the peculiar gender dynamics of Cherokee society as well as its clan system, economic values, and overall embeddedness in the place of the Appalachians Mountains. By the 1740s, Ostenaco had gained the high-ranking military title of Mankiller; by the 1750s, he was allying with British officers like George Washington. In early 1760, deteriorating relations with multiple colonial centres lead Ostenaco abruptly to reject all colonial alliance.

In late 1762, Ostenaco returns to a changing Appalachia. The chapter narrates the second half of his life, detailing his adventures with home life, war, land cession, and much else. The year 1763 brings the momentous news of Britain’s final victory over France. With European rivalry now removed, British settlers seem more rather than less intrusive upon Native Americans. Such a reaction prompts both an Indian backlash in the shape of Pontiac’s War and a British administrative scramble to legislate some measures of protection against settler encroachment. Ostenaco is caught up in the consequent maelstrom. Although he maintains his diplomat’s demeanour through the 1760s and the early 1770s, something snaps for Ostenaco in 1775. That year, he witnesses the Cherokee young-blood, Dragging Canoe, stamp his feet and refuse to negotiate with any whites any longer. By 1777 Ostenaco has joined Dragging Canoe’s Chickamauga secessionists. The plot twist in Ostenaco’s story, then, is in how he manages to remain, in his own mind at least, loyally Cherokee while bucking the prevailing Cherokee trend towards surrender. Through a novel turn to non-cooperation, Ostenaco maintains a sense of autonomy from empire till the very end.

The final chapter traces Mai’s voyage back from Britain to the Pacific. This voyage was arranged by the British government and led, again, by James Cook. Mai experiences various adventures during the voyage, including some altercations with different indigenous groups. In New Zealand, Mai secures two Maori boys to join him as servants. His arrival on Tahiti proves moving for Islanders and British alike. Here Mai reunites with a sister and an aunt, wrangles with a chief, and acquires a large canoe. Mai expects to be deposited back on Ra‘iatea, but Cook at the last minute decides against it, fearing Islander conflagration, and takes him to Huahine instead. Disappointed, Mai is at least gratified to have Cook’s men build him a house. In many ways, Mai’s plotline is the most tragic of the three characters: he begins as a refugee from his own society and never fulfils his dream of restitution. Even so, Mai offers at least one small twist to the old tale—European empire never steals the limelight in his story; instead, Mai turns the tables by employing European empire, almost entirely on his own terms, to seek his ultimate end.

Like 1 & 2, this chapter sketches the broad shape of Ra’iatean society through the story of Mai’s ancestry and childhood, once again thwarting common assumptions about who gets remembered as an object of anthropology and who gets granted the dynamism of history. Mai was born around 1753 on Ra‘iatea in the Tahitian archipelago. When Mai is ten his homeland is overtaken by marauding Bora Borans; his father is killed and his remaining family flees to Tahiti. From his teens, Mai harbours a lifelong obsession to avenge his rightful inheritance. Through the late 1760s, Mai witnesses British and French ships “discover” his islands. Rather than a menace, however, he decides they represent the means to enact his vengeful dream. Mai secures a berth for himself to Britain via James Cook’s second Pacific expedition. If Ostenaco’s life mirrors eighteenth-century Cherokee society and Reynolds’s life represents the conflicts within his world, then Mai’s life is that of the outsider to his own culture, looking in. His view of eighteenth-century Ra‘iatea is filtered through the experiences of a refugee from it—crucially a refugee created by internal politics rather than European forces. Mai’s life is most characterised by a determination to use foreign empire for his own ends as much as possible.

Archaeologists struggle to understand the demise of Great Zimbabwe because of poor appreciation of local and regional histories of the southern Zimbabwe plateau, post-fifteenth century. Listening to some of these extant regional histories and living narratives is key to understanding developments around Great Zimbabwe from the sixteenth century onwards. The focus in this chapter is on two sites, Boroma, a toponym east of Great Zimbabwe, and Chizhou Hill, some 80 kilometers to the north. In sixteenth-century Portuguese accounts, "Burrom" (Boroma) is presented as a prince in charge of a 'fortress' whose location coincides with Great Zimbabwe. Local narratives and indigenous histories collected from villagers near Chizhou Hill, as well as documented written sources, connect the site to the resettlement of the area by migrants from the Mutapa State in northern Zimbabwe. Combined, both sites attest to a complex process leading to the demise of Great Zimbabwe and its culture from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries.

Arguments still rage regarding whether the Amazon was a pristine, sparsely populated natural forest or a region of cultural forests, complete with areas of dense settlement, agriculture, and working forests associated with large, regional polities. Debates remain entrenched because of a paucity of well-documented case studies. In this study, mapping and excavation of archaeological structures document pronounced human-induced alteration of the forest cover, particularly in relation to large, dense late-prehistoric settlements (circa 1200 to 1600 A.D.). Thus, in the Upper Xingu region of Brazil, at least, archaeology and indigenous history of Native Amazonian peoples reveal unexpectedly complex regional settlement patterns and large-scale transformations of local landscapes over the past millennium. The findings contribute to debates on human carrying capacity, population size and settlement patterns, anthropogenic impacts on the environment, and the importance of indigenous knowledge, as well as contributing to the pride of place of the native peoples in this part of the Amazon.