Queer Indigenous Studies

 

Squaw Jim, "Osh-Tisch, Finds Them and Kills Them," Crow. This remarkable photograph is titled "Squaw Jim and his Squaw." On the left is Squaw Jim, a biological male in woman's attire — a Crow berdache or male homosexual, afforded distinctive social & ceremonial status within the tribe. In addition to special attributes that distinguish the berdache or boté, Squaw Jim served as an enlisted scout at Fort Keogh & achieved a reputation for bravery when he saved the life of a tribesman in the Battle of the Rosebud, June 17, 1876. This image is the earliest known photograph of a North American Indian berdache. The following information is NOT printed on this postcard:

Two-Spirit People, an English term that emerged in 1990 out of the third annual inter-tribal Native American/First Nations gay/lesbian American conference in Winnipeg, describes Indigenous North Americans who fulfill one of many mixed gender roles found traditionally among many Native Americans and Canadian First Nations indigenous groups. The mixed gender roles encompassed by the term historically included wearing the clothing and performing the work associated with both men and women.

A direct translation of the Ojibwe term, Niizh manidoowag, "two-spirited" or "two-spirit" is usually used to indicate a person whose body simultaneously houses a masculine spirit and a feminine spirit. According to Brian Joseph Gilly, the presence of male two-spirits "was a fundamental institution among most tribal peoples." Will Roscoe writes that male and female two-spirits have been "documented in over 130 tribes, in every region of North America, among every type of native culture."

Until recently, the term berdache was used by anthropologists as a generic term to indicate "two-spirit" individuals; however, this term is increasingly considered outdated and inappropriate. Use of the term has widely been replaced with two-spirit (except in scholarly literature), which originated in Winnipeg, Canada in 1990 during the third annual intertribal Native American/First Nations gay and lesbian conference. It was chosen to distance Native/First Nations people from non-natives as well as from the words berdache and gay.

These individuals were sometimes viewed in certain tribes as having two spirits occupying one body. Their dress is usually a mixture of traditionally male and traditionally female articles. Cross dressing of two-spirit people was not always an indicator of cross acting (taking on other gender roles and social status within the tribe). Lang explains “the mere fact that a male wears women's clothing does not say something about his role behavior, his gender status, or even his choice of partner...” Two-spirits might have relationships with people of either sex. www.changingworld.com/catalog/squaw

As the introduction states, “The issue of terminology always pushes at the limits of language,” (pg. 3). Heteronormative is the associative colonizing word, one which casts Indigenous queer critiques into a tangled web of native, traditional, historical, contemporary, gendered, masculine, and feminist discourses. The queered analysis of Two Spirit is an example of the attempt to bridge the “complexities of anthropological constructions of Indigenous gender and sexual diversity,” in a western or colonial socio-politic structure (s). Again, language is critical as the translation must transcend word to meaning, i.e., Two Spirit derives from berdache of which there is no translation that properly explains that role or behavior in English. Please note the following:

Driskell tells us, “through the action of colonial discourses, the bodies of Native women and men are queered and racialized as disordered, unreproductive, and therefore nonheteronormative”, (Queer Indigenous Studies, 37). This makes the native (the entire body politic: body and land), conquerable.  Further it promotes the white heteropatriarchy that has its foundations rooted in imperialism and settler-colonialism.

The ways in which anthropological academics, other literary scholars, non-natives, and some natives themselves, frame the indigenous world begins with notions of paternalism where eroticism or sexuality are over-emphasized and needing to be controlled, or ambiguous, both justification for the taking of land and body.

What we must remember is the sexual deviance of the white heterosexual male himself, whose desires of native women (and men), not only capped his sexual needs, but configured upon Indigenous or native communities, new narratives of oppression and identity crisis.

This history is challenged by Driskell, Finley, Gilley, and Morgensen who provide narratives as interventions which address Indigenous identities in Queer Indigenous Studies, steering away from a one fits all model and delving into broader, interconnected issues that directly affect GLBTQ2 people and the binaries assigned to them and all native peoples.

The ideas of Smith’s “talking back” and Womack’s “code talking” are examples I have used myself in my own masters’ thesis on the mapping of an indigenous identity and contention of non-Native or white canon. Methodological applications that are indigenous are the means of talking back. It’s application refuses to be silent or placated, and will be heard. In this way native people become the power of their own convictions and more importantly, their own voices. This is the answer to the subjectless critique, an intervention, an authentic narrative by and for native peoples.

The editors/contributors to this collection emphasize the use of Native epistemologies to create a space for critical analysis, methodologies, and Indigenous literature. In this way, the ideas of Queer Studies or a critique of such a discipline rests on authenticity even if it is in a hostile or heteronormative environment. Communities of Indigenous Peoples must also address their own relationships with GLBTQ2 members, as well as the construct of heterosexism.

 Kameha`iku