The Queerness of Native American Literature by Lisa Tatonetti (review)

In her introduction to The Queerness of Native American Literature, Lisa Tatonetti situates her book as “both literary map and critical lens” (ix). She links together queerness, Indigeneity, and relationship, “whether such affiliations are acknowledged or ignored, (re)claimed or dis-avowed” (ix). Tatonetti’s book examines how Native American writers such as Maurice Kenny (Mohawk), Janice Gould (Koyoonk’auwi Maidu), and Louise Erdrich (Anishinaabe) and films by Sherman Alexie (Spokane / Coeur d’Alene) and two non-Indigenous filmmakers provide differing ideas about queerness in Indigenous literature and film.

Tatonetti, who coedited Sovereign Erotics: A Collection of Two-Spirit Literatures with Qwo-Li Driskill (Cherokee), Daniel Heath Justice (Cherokee), and Deborah Miranda (Esselen/Chumash), astutely notices that the rise of the study of Native literature as a scholarly field and the publication of early queer Indigenous texts occurred at roughly the same time. I appreciate her assertion that writing by Two-Spirit, gay, lesbian, bisexual, trans, and queer (2glbtq) people “can evade anticipated literary trajectories by failing to fulfill the ancestor-centered, buffalo-littered, landscape-focused expectations of Native writing” (29). But Tatonetti was surprised to discover that those images are still important to Indigenous writers, including 2glbtq writers. While these images can fall into the cliché of the Hollywood Indian, Indigenous writing doesn’t have to be either ancestor centered or urban but can be both at the same time.

Using archival materials, Tatonetti chronicles Mohawk writer Maurice Kenny’s writings in 1970s gay newspapers and magazines such as Fag Rag. As Tatonetti notes, Kenny’s work is an important intervention in the largely white milieu of gay men’s magazines and journals, especially as he is the first known gay Indigenous published author. While Kenny’s writing, particularly his 1976 essay “Tinselled Bucks: A Historical Study in Indian Homosexuality,” had to depend on anthropological accounts, “Tinselled Bucks” is a critical beginning to 2glbtq writing back to dominant conceptions of the Indigenous erotic. Similarly, Tatonetti uses the queer diaspora to discuss how the fluidities of identities and family in Gould’s poetry are active entities that aren’t bounded by linear mappings. In “Waiting for a Miracle,” Gould’s mother wishes her daughter would change her queerness, “take something out / or put something in / to make me right.” Instead of seeing her queerness as a liability, Gould writes: “I keep saying, Mama, / it’s enough of a miracle / for a person to accept herself / the way she is” (157). Building on Jasbir Puar’s “unstable assemblages of revolving and devolving energies,” Tatonetti positions Gould’s mother’s lack of acceptance as territorialization, which is more temporally and spatially fixed than Gould’s dynamic assemblage of diasporic family and sexuality.

In “Queer Relationships and Two-Spirit Characters in Louise Erdrich’s Novels,” Tatonetti queers novels by Erdrich, who may be the most canonical Native American writer. Tatonetti argues that Indigenous texts have always been queer, using several of Erdrich’s novels, including The Beet Queen, Tales of Burning Love, The Antelope Wife, and The Plague of Doves. In contrast to the problematic depictions of queer men in Lesley Marmon Silko’s Almanac of the Dead (1991) and James Welch’s The Heartsong of Charging Elk (2000), The Beet Queen (1986) early on opened up positive portrayals of queer Indigenous peoples, particularly women. Tatonetti uses queer theorists Judith Butler and Jack Halberstam and female masculinity to describe the gay and feminized Karl’s unlikely romance with the masculinized Celestine, an example of Erdrich’s “articulations of queer affiliation through the lens of erotic, familial, and community relationships” (68).

In decided contrast to the centrality of queerness in Erdrich’s texts, the films Johnny Greyeyes (2000), a Canadian film that focuses on lesbians in prison, and The Business of Fancy Dancing (2002), directed and written by Sherman Alexie, which tells the story of a queer Spokane man’s journey home to his reserve for a funeral, fracture Indigeneity and queerness. All...