Queer Indigenous Studies

POLS 620
Megumi Chibana

Driskill, Qwo-Li, Chris Finley, Brian Joseph Gilley, and Scott Lauria Morgensen, eds. 2011. Queer Indigenous Studies: Critical Interventions in Theory, Politics, and Literature. University of Arizona Press.

Queer Indigenous Studies is a collection of essays to address theoretical conversations that intersects indigenous, gender, sexuality, and identity. It is a very important work that articulates multilayered colonial power over indigenous peoples. Taking decolonizing methodologies that aim to construct theories from “the everyday knowledges and intellectual histories of Indigenous peoples across time, space, and culture (4),” Driskill et al. reject discourse to categorize Indigenous GLBTQ2 people as sexual minority.  Driskill et al. criticize heterosexism and the nuclear family structure as “a colonial system of violence” that has controlled and repressed Native understandings and attitudes toward sexuality.  The book argues that race, gender and sexuality are not a mere category of people’s identity analysis; rather, they are “logics of colonial power (33).”

The book approaches to logics of colonial power from various ways.  Compiled essays of this book were contributed by interdisciplinary and transnational authors with identities and positionalities including Native, non-Native, feminist, mix-blood, Two-sprit, etc. 

I liked the way how Morgensen takes his unsettling positionality as non-Native queer anthropologist.  Reflecting his interaction with Two-Spirit organizations, Moregensen proposes his own decolonizing methodologies and calls for more dialogues among Two-Sprit people and non-Native queers.  Aiming to non-Natives, Moregensen tells “if they wish to learn about Two-Spirit people, they can commit first to self-reflexively studying settler colonialism as a condition of their own and Two-Spirit people’s lives (122).” 

This sentence struck me because it seems to tie with themes and questions from last week’s readings on settler colonialism.  How one positions in intellectual and social activism on the top of logics of intersected colonial powers is a very important to address in decolonizing methodologies.  As an indigenous person to Okinawa but as a settler in Hawaii, I always find myself pondering how to approach indigenous issues in Hawaii.  Besides engaging in conversations among indigenous peoples, what are or can be overarching goals that indigenous peoples have been seeking?