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This chapter discusses the growing interest in Native North American heritage among both Native and non-Native Americans alike. Underlying many Native Americans' renewed interest in their own traditions is their increasing disenchantment with a society that for centuries has been presented as the ultimate model of true civilization. Paralleling the disenchantment of Native Americans is the non-Native Americans' questioning of many of the basic premises of their own civilization. The chapter highlights some problems that can arise when non-Natives attempt to adopt Native American traditions without fully understanding them. It also argues that approaches taken to Native American religious traditions should be rigorous and scholarly in the best Western sense. But, in addition to such reification of the subject, it is also essential to understand these traditions as they are lived by human individuals.

Chapter three serves as a companion to chapter two, substantiating the reciprocal commercial and cultural transactions between Detroit and its various controlling powers. It asks: as the “goods of empire” poured into Detroit, what “goods of frontier” poured out? Those frontier goods included moccasins. The chapter begins by tracing the history and prevalence of moccasin-wearing by non-Native peoples. It charts across Canada the fabrication of non-Native-made moccasins from home-craft to cottage industry to manufactured commodity. It then reconstructs Detroit's moccasin manufactories’ facilities, production, output, and distribution, demonstrating how Detroiters attempted to capture some degree of commercial autonomy. Finally, it tracks the dissemination of manufactured moccasins along the east coast and beyond, exploring moccasins’ evolution from frontier cultural item to metropolitan commodity, analyzing how non-Native wearers on both sides of the Atlantic used and conceived of moccasins, and revealing an instance of transculturation: an occasion in which the periphery shaped the core.

This chapter addresses the question “How did it feel to be Samson Occom?” taking as a point of departure a difficult episode in Occom's life, when he appeared drunk in public in the winter of 1769. Reading this incident as a manifestation of Occom's frustration and despair over his extremely straitened economic and political circumstances, the author attempts to reconstruct how Occom's hard feelings and personal shortcomings were processed by Occom's non-Native mentors in the ministry, then by Occom himself, and finally by the Native Christians he served. This chapter hopes to show how theologies can determine the way traumas are collectively processed and particularly how Native Christian communities in New England developed religious beliefs and practices that facilitated the processing of trauma.

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.