Question In Managing Sexual Behaviors in Colonial North America

IntroductIon 7

unusual manner. Rather than coauthor it, we have decided that each of us would

share our particular perspective on the issue and our role in its creation. Instead

of creating the sense of a single critical narrative that frames the pieces, we

wanted to indicate at the outset the diversity and difficulties at the intersection

the issue explores, also graphically illustrating in print form what the issue always

was in process and hopefully will provoke now that it has reached fruition —

a critical conversation.

daniel’s take

Kweh. Se:ko. Ahnee.

It’s mid-April in southern Ontario. Rain has been falling outside for the

past two days, and dark, heavy clouds to the east and west alike threaten further

drenching. I write these words at a massive desk made of a single plank of stained

and salvaged pine, lovingly crafted by a local woodworker of extraordinary talent

and generosity, a man who has, we fear, lost his short battle with cancer, or his lon-

ger struggle with alcoholism — or both, as we’ve heard nothing from or about him

for a year. But the desk is still burnished with his signature stain, a rich golden

red that has deepened and become even more beautiful in the last two years, and

it still radiates with his kindness and the loving attention that distinguishes the

work of a true artist from a dabbler.

Our house sits comfortably among windswept pines and stark paper birches,

nestled between the base of a steep escarpment and the shores of what is now

known as Georgian Bay. The home I share with my husband, his mother, and our

two dogs is built of both log and board-and-batten, built on lands known by previ-

ous inhabitants as Wendake (later Huronia), not far from the historical site of the

community of Wenrio in the traditional homelands of the Attignawantan, or Bear

People, the most powerful nation of the Huron-Wendat alliance. These are lands

with a long, beautiful, and terrible history. The Hurons as a people are gone now,

having fled or been driven into exile by the Five Nations of the Haudenosaunee

Confederacy in the seventeenth century, after a devastating conflict that impli-

cated Jesuit missionaries, Huron converts, Huron traditionalists, and Iroquoian

expansionists and culminated in this area in the destruction of the Jesuit mission

Sainte-Marie Among the Hurons in March 1649. The majority in the region now

are English Canadians, though there is a substantial Franco-Ontarian community,

many of whom consider themselves Métis, being descended from Anishinaabe

women and French voyageurs in the region during the early Canadian fur trade

that followed the devastation of Wendake.9

8 GLQ: A JournAL oF LESBIAn And GAY StudIES

Just across the waters from our home stands Christian Island, named for

the Jesuit and Christianized Huron refugees who sought brief sanctuary there after

the destruction of the Sainte-Marie mission by the Iroquois and their traditional-

ist Huron allies. The island’s name in Huron-Wendat is Ganoendoe; although a

defensible space, it turned out to be nearly impossible to farm and thus made a

poor refuge, famine and further Five Nation attacks rendering it only a temporary

respite before the full Huron diaspora.10 Yet Ganoendoe has another Indigenous

name, Chimnissing (“Big Island”), so called by the Anishinaabe of Beausoleil

First Nation, for whom it’s now a much more amenable place to live than it was

for their Huron refugee predecessors. (It’s also a popular site among non-Native

summer vacationers, who lease beach cottages from the Beausoleil Lands Man-

agement Office.)

About 170 kilometers away from my home in Wendake sits the city of

Toronto, where I teach Aboriginal literatures and Aboriginal studies, and where

I lived when Kent and I first started dating, nearly four years ago. To the Huron-

Wendat peoples, that place is toronton, “the place of meetings,” or, to the Kanieke-

haka, the Mohawks, it is tkaronto, “the place where the trees stand in the water,”

named so for the fishing weirs that were prominent along the edge of Lake Ontario.

Historically, that land and its environs have been a shared space of significance

to the Huron-Wendat alliance, the nations of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy

(especially the Mohawks and Senecas), the Iroquoian Tionontati and Atiwendaron

peoples, and various Anishinaabe communities, and it remains so today, even

while for the vast majority of its inhabitants it is known only as Toronto, the capital

city of the province of Ontario, in the territorial boundaries of the Dominion of

Canada, a Commonwealth Realm within the British Commonwealth of Nations.

Kweh. Se:ko. Ahnee. ’siyo. These are greetings — in Wendat, Mohawk,

Anishinaabe, and Cherokee — that affirm a different kind of peopling and placing

than that asserted by the various nation-states in this hemisphere. They are offer-

ings of generosity, of welcoming, that recognize a different kind of relationship

between peoples, and between peoples and places. To speak of these different rela-

tionships and understandings is, necessarily, to acknowledge not just the comings-

and gatherings-together but also the mixed and many complications of our rela-

tionships, the breakings and divisions, shatterings and woundings that divide us

from our histories, our pleasures, our embodied experiences.

Not too long ago I reviewed a novel for an academic journal, a novel supposedly

about two-spirited/queer Native people, cowritten by a gay anthropologist who was

a problematic but groundbreaking leader in the scholarly study of variant gender

IntroductIon 9

and sexuality in Native communities in the 1980s, and a gay New Age – inflected

novelist whose highly didactic work advocates a primal, sacred wisdom essential

to gay male experience. Not surprisingly, the novel — a hackneyed story of a gay

white man who comes to Navajo territory in the aftermath of the U.S. Civil War

to discover his inner “two spirit” through frequent and enlightened sex with a

range of queers of color — was a troubling text on numerous stylistic, narrative,

and ethical grounds. Neither should it be a surprise in the paracolonial context of

the Americas that, in 2006, a novel written by highly educated, ostensibly intel-

ligent, and apparently very earnest “Indian lovers” was, at the end, a predictably

frustrating lesson in the long and demeaning history of cultural appropriation,

ethnocentrism, and colonialist sexual objectification.

Until relatively recently, the only widely available resources queer Native

folks could access in understanding their sexual/gendered selves as tribal peo-

ples were either soulless anthropological treatises or paperback anthro-porn. The

absence was (and sometimes continues to be) particularly acute if those with

knowledge of diverse gender or sexual cultural practices, understandings, or cer-

emonies were reticent to share publicly that information. Beginning in the early

1980s, and emboldened in part by the ongoing liberation struggles by people of

color, women, and gays and lesbians, a number of openly gay, lesbian, bisexual,

and, more rarely, transgendered Native activists in urban areas began to articulate

their tribal sexualities and gendered identities in ways that brought together the

varied threads of their embodied experience around an Indigenous center. This

issue of GLQ was made possible largely because of this important genealogy.

Native and queer subjectivities have a long and quite vexed history of inter-

connectedness within the early modern context of colonialism and imperialism. In

1513 Vasco Nuñez de Balboa, a failed Spanish entrepreneur-turned-conquistador

and explorer, led his soldiers against the village of Quarequa. After slaughtering

and dismembering the chief, Porque, and over six hundred of his warriors, Bal-

boa turned his attention to the “house of this kynge,” which was “infested with

most abhominable and unnaturall lechery.” There he found “the kynges brother

and many other younge men in womens apparell, smoth & effeminately decked,

which by the report of such as dwelte abowte hym, he abused with preposterous

venus.”11 Balboa ordered that the men, who numbered around forty, be fed alive to

his hunger-maddened war-dogs.

“Infested.” “Abhominable and unnaturall lechery.” Disease, deviance, and

death — this is the measure of queerness in the “conflict zone” between the Indig-

enous people of Quarequa and the Spanish raiders. The response is dismember-

ment, obliteration. In 1583 the Third Provincial Council of Lima, the colonial

10 GLQ: A JournAL oF LESBIAn And GAY StudIES

administration in what is now Peru, declared through its published Tercero Cath-

ecismo y Exposición de la Doctrina Christiana that

above all these sins [of fornication] is the sin we call nefarious and

sodomy. . . . If there is anyone among you who commits sodomy, whether

with another man, or with a boy, or a beast, let . . . [it] be known that they

carry the death penalty under the just laws of our Spanish kings. Let it be

known that because of this the Holy Scriptures say that God destroys king-

doms and nations. Let it be known that the reason why God has allowed

that you, the Indians, should be so afflicted and vexed by other nations is

because of this vice that your ancestors had, and many of you still have.

And let it be known that I tell you from God’s command that if you do not

reform all your nations will perish, and God will finish you, and will eradi-

cate you from the earth.12

By this missionary rhetoric, genocide is justified by the supposedly unnat-

ural desires of the Indigenous population, just as the rape of Indigenous women

is justified by colonialist rhetoric that both hypersexualizes them and inextricably

links their physical bodies with the God-ordained penetration and “taming” of

the “savage wilderness” by Christian patriarchy enriched by resource and bodily

exploitation. There are numerous other examples we could draw on to argue for

some sense of historical empathy between the oppression of Native peoples and

the persecution of sexual minorities, and a number of fine scholars have explored

in detail the sexual and gendered history of colonization (including Rayna Green,

Andrea Smith, and Jonathan Goldberg, among others).13 Yet an important (and

more recent) point of connection is a geographic one, and one that deserves more

scholarly attention.

Much of the grassroots theorization and activism for Native rights emerged

from disenfranchised, politicized, and sometimes detribalized young Indians in

major urban areas throughout the United States and in Canada. One particular

site of energetic activism was San Francisco. Though the American Indian Move-

ment (AIM) was founded in Minneapolis, its leaders were highly visible in San

Francisco — most notably, through their occupation of Alcatraz Island, with sig-

nificant support from many in the Bay urban Indian community — and this helped

mark the city as a center of Native resurgence. Yet many AIM leaders (as well

as members of other ethnopolitical movements, such as the Black Panthers and

the Brown Berets) shared the mutual influence and adoption of a sexist, “macho-

warrior” pose that drew far more from white stereotypes of Native masculinity

than from decidedly more complex and often less hyperaggressive tribal models,

IntroductIon 11

with the result that, as the Lakota anthropologist Beatrice Medicine wryly notes,

“militant men often say they are fostering Indian unity by having girl friends in

each tribe and by fathering as many children as possible.”14 Compromised in part

by its homophobia and sexism, AIM offered at least as many problems as possibili-

ties for LGBTQ Native people, so Gay American Indians (GAI) was founded in

San Francisco in 1975 by Barbara Cameron (Lakota) and Randy Burns (Paiute)

in part to counter both the racism of the gay and lesbian rights movement and

the homophobia of other Indian activists.15 Offering social, political, familial, and

educational support and resources to its members, GAI was an important early

model for subsequent politics in the then-emergent two-spirit movement (a term

coined at a conference in Winnipeg in 1990 to replace the offensive anthro-fetish

of “berdache”), which now includes thousands of active members in dozens of

two-spirit organizations across North America, as well as the annual international

Two-Spirit Gatherings.

As evidenced by this brief and admittedly scattershot history, there are

and have been many continuities and connections between the tribal and the

sexual in the paracolonial Americas, but such history also demonstrates the chal-

lenges inherent in acknowledging those links. In an era of polarized politics and

increasing inequity in economic, political, and geographic access, the challenges

are likely to increase rather than diminish.

Like the words of welcome that open my introductory remarks, this issue

of GLQ is an invitation to address those challenges directly. It’s an invitation for

readers and contributors to gather together to engage the aesthetic, intellectual,

experiential, and theoretical sexual subjectivities of Indigenous North America.

We hope it will help prompt further such conversations and collaborations.

Certainly it has already served these purposes for the three of us. As

Mark’s comments note, I was a latecomer to this project as coeditor, but not as a

contributor; the call for papers that he and Bethany crafted was eloquent, incisive,

and challenging, and I was excited to send along a proposal, which (after many

revisions and permutations) became the essay included elsewhere in this issue.

What impressed me then, and continues to impress me now, is how this project

has excited so many scholars — Native and non-Native alike — to push their ideas,

talents, and perspectives farther than they expected, to abandon the comfort of

trite and predictable arguments for the more troubling but important currents

beneath the analytic surface.

The interpretive provocations and interventions herein function as a criti-

cal gifting that honors the diversity, efforts, and lived realities of generations of

lovers, activists, artists, and scholars. From Scott Lauria Morgensen’s critique of

12 GLQ: A JournAL oF LESBIAn And GAY StudIES

the colonial interplay between heteronormativity and settler politics, to Andrea

Smith’s insistence that queer studies can offer valuable insights to Native stud-

ies with regard to decolonization and escape from the normative structures of

“ethnographic entrapment,” from Craig Womack’s argument for the necessity and

pragmatic values inherent in the naming of queer desire in queer Native texts to

Qwo-Li Driskill’s community-based narrative recovery of Cherokee traditions of

sexual diversity, and Lisa Tatonetti’s compelling discussion of the instability of the

queer Native subject in contemporary films like Johnny Greyeyes and The Business

of Fancydancing, the numerous contributions to this issue offer no single politic,

no monolithic argument or shared critical perspective. Instead, these essays reflect

the rich complexity of Indigenous and queer experience.

Bethany, Mark, and I worked with neither the expectation of nor the desire

for unanimity; indeed, our personalities, like our scholarly and editorial emphases,

are so different as to render any such possibility decidedly unlikely. What we did

and do share with one another and the issue’s varied contributors, however, is a

commitment to intellectual rigor, honesty, and respect — qualities that the essays

in this issue demonstrate both individually and in dynamic conversation. It’s been

a wonderful experience; Bethany and Mark deserve enormous credit for having

envisioned and committed themselves to seeing this project realized — they’re the

true visionaries behind its clear success, and, to be quite frank, they’ve done far

more of the difficult editorial work than I have, and for much longer. Yet I’m hon-

ored to have been asked to participate as a coeditor, and thankful that I accepted

the invitation, as both the process and the result have been enriching beyond any-

thing I could have anticipated. Best of all, I’ve come to know these two fine schol-

ars and the other contributors so much better as a result, and my own work is the

richer (and, I hope, better) for the experience. It’s been a pleasure to bring my own

ideas to this shared vision and to see it become something that promises to make a

real contribution to this important critical conversation.

Native peoples of all sexualities and sexual dissidents of all ethnicities,

genders, and orientations have much in common that merits study, but our dif-

ferences offer important insight into both the limits and possibilities of solidar-

ity across those commonalities. Cross-disciplinary conversations — like cross-

cultural interactions — are fraught with difficulties and inevitable conflicts. At

their best, however, the analyses and methodological explorations made possible

through these conversations also provide some of the most tender, generous, and

delightful reminders of what it is to be shamelessly, beautifully, and fabulously

human in thoughtful relation to each other and to those who inhabit the other-

than-human world.