Queer Critique and Federal Indian Policy

Many American studies scholars are familiar with the landmark decision of the U.S. Supreme Court in Johnson v. McIntosh, 21 U.S. (8 Wheat.) 543 (1823), which held that private citizens could not purchase lands from Native Americans. The case is the first in what has come to be known as the “Marshall Trilogy,” named after Chief Justice John Marshall, which also includes Cherokee Nation v. Georgia and Worcester v. Georgia. The trio is a staple in nearly every case relating to the question of tribal nations’ exercise of self-determination. In McIntosh, the court laid out the foundations of the “doctrine of discovery,” which created the concept of “aboriginal title” to land but denied Indian tribes the same rights to land as the European colonizers because under the Law of Nations based on this doctrine, Indians are “an inferior race of savages.” As Native legal scholars have pointed out, the court perpetuated a racist judicial language of Indian savagery to define Indian rights.¹ And, as McIntosh remains authoritative precedent in contemporary case law, the language of racial inferiority still undergirds U.S. federal Indian policy that undermines Native sovereignty.

For some, it may at first seem surprising to relate this legal history with the history of sexuality, but Mark Rifkin’s brilliant new book makes the connection utterly persuasively. When Did Indians Become Straight? Kinship, the History of Sexuality, and Native Sovereignty, Rifkin’s second monograph, explores the complex relationship between contested U.S. notions of normality and shifting forms of Native peoples’ governance and self-representation. In the title of the book, he asks the question “when did Indians become straight?” to suggest that “straight is something that native peoples might be (forced to) become,” which “opens the possibility that they may have been, and still may be, something else” (313). The book deals with the topic through a literary lens focused on historical materiality, not fixated on literary form. Rifkin, a non-Native scholar, examines a wide range of texts (including captivity narratives, fiction, government documents, and anthropological debates) to produce an interdisciplinary cultural and literary history that shows both how Euro-American discourses of sexuality have included Native peoples in ways that degrade indigenous social formations and how Native intellectuals have written back to reaffirm their peoples’ sovereignty and self-determination.

Rifkin’s book features Native writers in several different periods whose interventions have insisted on the “coherence and persistence of native polities by examining the ways traditions of residency and social formations that can be described as kinship give shape to particular modes of governance and land tenure” (8). However, he does not offer kinship systems as a privileged model of contemporary sovereignty; instead, he marks how the enclosure of Native peoples into what he terms “Euramerican discourses of sexuality” provides a central matrix through which the sphere of politics is defined. He asserts that this “kind of queer analysis that extends beyond discussion of the policing homoeroticism and gender expression, then, can aid in developing an immanent critique of the dimensions and effects of imperial superintendence, foregrounding the role of discourses of sexuality in U.S. regulation of what will count as native governance, as well as the related self-censuring that can guide native representations of tradition and sovereignty” (25). In grappling with the questions of sexual and gender expression as he addresses the use of the discourse of tradition, he identifies and theorizes how Native peoples reckoned with what he theorizes as “the bribe of straightness,” a dynamic that “includes arguing for the validity of indigenous kinship systems (Native family formations, homemaking, and land tenure) in ways that make them more acceptable/respectable to whites, disavowing the presence of sexual and gender practices deemed perverse within Euramerican sexology” (23). He explains that “in this way, the circulation of practices and principles as tradition can engage in processes of (hetero)normalization even as it may challenge other historic...