Doubleweaving Two-Spirit Critiques: Building Alliances between Native and Queer Studies

One of the strongest aspects of emergent queer of color critiques is their ability to employ a multiplicity of tactics to decode nationalist (both colonizing and colonized) strategies. Yet the absence of Native peoples and histories in formulating these emergent theories should give us pause. The fact that Native people and an analysis of ongoing colonialism for Native nations have largely been left out of queer of color critiques points to a major rupture in these theories. Native people, then, must disidentify with the very critiques that claim to be decolonial and counter hegemonic interventions for queer people of color in order to build viable theories for Native communities. Drawing on the Cherokee basketry tradition of doubleweave, in which two independent yet interwoven designs result, this essay asserts the necessity of Two-Spirit critiques that centralize Native peoples, nations, identities, land bases, and survival tactics, and invites an alliance between Native studies and queer studies through doubleweaving theories that can strengthen our theories and practices.