The Erotics of Sovereignty: Queer Native Writing in the Era of Self-Determination by Mark Rifkin (review)

Mark Rifkin’s most recent study of queer Native writing situates itself within a discourse on gender and sexuality that has grown to prominence over recent years. His purpose in The Erotics of Sovereignty: Queer Native Writing in the Era of Self-Determination (2012) is not to further the understanding of a culturally embedded practice but rather to redefine the very idea of self-determination in light of an understanding that the personal is both transpersonal and political. Central to Rifkin’s project is a question raised by Louis Owens two decades ago in Other Destinies: Understanding the American Indian Novel (1992): who counts as a real Indian? Rifkin seeks to answer this question by posing another: what counts as a real tribe? He is clearly not satisfied with the pat answer that makes federal recognition and blood quantum the index of American indigeneity.

Instead, Rifkin seeks a broader definition linked to sovereignty unconstrained by settler colonial values, notably marriage, homemaking, and the nuclear family. Queer sexuality, outside of the constraints of heteronormativity, offers a model for a new vision of sovereignty, which could encompass an idea of peoplehood even in the absence of a communal land base. In his heavily theoretical text, Rifkin links representations of sexuality in the work of four queer Native writers—Qwo-Li Driskill, Deborah Miranda, Greg Sarris, and Chrystos—to possibilities for extending sovereignty and recognizing Native identity in situations where sovereignty has been foreclosed or denied by the US government.

Beginning with the Cherokee, tribal enrollment has enforced a heteronormative vision of tribal identity through bourgeois domesticity on individual allotments and blood quantum traced through nuclear families. Rifkin uses Jacques Derrida’s concept of hauntology to explain how Driskill’s poetry registers Cherokee identity through its connection to a history of diaspora, dislocation, and silence, even though Driskill’s Cherokee ancestors were never registered on the Dawes Rolls, and he cannot become a registered member of the tribe. While the body serves as the site of continuing struggle, making present that which previously had no material form, words themselves become ancestors marked by the traumas of settlement. Ancestry must be understood as an active relationship rather than “the heteroreproductive transmission of racial substance” (66). Ultimately, according to Rifkin, Driskill’s work suggests the possibility that the Cherokee future may lie not in genetic or cultural transmission but in a “collective memory that registers as Cherokee experience the structure of feeling produced in/by diaspora” (67), while peoplehood inheres in “shared experiences of intimacy with each other and with the space they occupy” (81).

Rifkin deploys psychoanalytic ideas of mourning and melancholy to explore both Miranda’s poetry and Sarris’s novel Watermelon Nights (1998). Miranda’s Esselen people were officially declared extinct by the federal government, and descendants are now attempting to fulfill the arduous requirements for recognition through the Federal Acknowledgement Process, with no certainty of the outcome. Rifkin reads Miranda’s corporeality as enclosing everything Native—land, prayers, and language—that would otherwise vanish. While marriage with its procreative and homemaking responsibilities replicates the dynamics of colonialism and reveals a body mapped within a patriarchal and privatizing economy, nonnormative sexuality allows for anti-mapping: placemaking through desire that is not determined by maps. Rifkin does, however, caution that this is a response, not a solution, to Native displacement. In the creation of storied space, loss once again becomes a condition of possibility.

Sarris’s Graton Rancheria recently achieved the federal recognition sought by the Esselen people, and Watermelon Nights showcases not only the tight genealogical structure that must be maintained to meet federal requirements for proof of bloodedness but also the varied attitudes within the community toward regulating desire, whether female or homosexual. Shame makes itself visible through blanks in the genealogical chart representing the unnamed fathers of children born from the violence of rape or the...