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  • Sovereignty, the Queer Condition
  • Scott Lauria Morgensen (bio)
When Did Indians Become Straight? Kinship, the History of Sexuality, and Native Sovereignty> Mark Rifkin. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011. viii + 436 pp.

In When Did Indians Become Straight? Mark Rifkin shatters expectations that a non-Native scholar will argue for the inclusion of "Indians" in queer studies by instead holding himself and the field accountable to Native sovereignty. Rifkin's compelling accounts of literary texts and historical cases from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries decidedly demonstrate that the history of sexuality in the United States is conditioned by Native sovereignty and by colonial efforts to contravene it. We learn that the "coalescence in the United States . . . of the ideal of the nuclear, sentimental family" traces an "imperial hegemony that helped legitimize the exertion of settler state authority over indigenous peoples and territory" (47). In contrast, interrelationships of Native peoples, land, and governance—what Native theorists critically redefine as kinship—show that what is "at stake in the racialization of native peoples . . . is not just their reduction to a subordinate population within the codes of citizenship . . . but the consolidation of a familial norm that elides native kinship structures which challenged the jurisdictional imaginary of the incipient settler state" (48). Rifkin's indispensable contribution frames the queer history of the United States as a colonial history of heteronormativity defining Native-settler relations, with Native sovereignty presenting a critique of heteronormativity to which queer studies must respond.

Rifkin's intervention follows two arguments. First, we encounter the techniques whereby settler heteronormativity addresses "anxieties over how to cohere national territoriality in the face of the continued presence of indigenous peoples" (98). One technique hails Native people with "the bribe of straightness" (23) by ameliorating colonial violence if Natives mask the nonheteronormativity that threatens the subject of settler modernity. Second, Rifkin links this process to settlers seeking liberation by adopting a sexualized "Indianness" of their imagining that erases Native governance. Colonialism thus invents heteronormativity not [End Page 416] merely to control Native peoples but to produce settlers as subjects who require authority over Native difference to attain sexual modernity. Rifkin's arguments develop within meticulously detailed cases that will benefit scholars, while they still merit translation into language that will address and inform broader audiences. Rifkin's queer critiques significantly advance theories of settler colonialism and Indigenous governance. He correctly names Native sovereignty as a target of the biopolitics of the modern racial state and suggests that biopolitics is an elision of the geopolitics of Native sovereignty and of settler societies that displace it (47-48). While in a recent article Rifkin examines geopolitics in relation to the work of Giorgio Agamben, the term's unindexed usage in this book invites closer attention to its compatibility with the intricacies of Michel Foucault's theory of biopolitics.1 A powerful implication of Rifkin's argument is that instantiating heteronormativity in Native nations follows the "recognition" of Native self-governance by settler states (182-83). If heteronormativity as colonial governmentality produces the self-governed Native subject compatibly with what Elizabeth Povinelli calls the "autological" subject of liberal modernity, then here we meet a strikingly queer extension of Glen Coulthard's critique of "recognition" in which Rifkin centers heteronormativity for Indigenous governance to contest.2

Among Rifkin's more unsettling messages for queer studies is his rendering of Native sovereignty along "the topology of kinship" (208). Addressing "what happens when the rhetoric of 'kinship' is taken as indexing a history of indigenous-settler struggle rather than as merely describing particular arrangements of home and family" (11), Rifkin revisits David Schneider's work to transcend both its citation justifying gay and lesbian kinship and critically queer rejections of family and marriage. Instead, Rifkin asks how Native governance displaces kinship's association with "blood" to specify relations of Native people to nations and lands while disrupting settlers' intention to replace them. Queer studies then must study kinship among all who seemingly bear no relation to Native sovereignty while answering Native critics who argue that all subjects in settler societies do in fact bear this relation. Reading works by Beth Brant and Craig Womack, Rifkin argues that their responses to colonial violence...

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