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

Part genealogy, part archival recovery, and part literary and filmic analysis, Lisa Tatonetti’s The Queerness of Native American Literature offers a new perspective on a scholarly subfield within Native American Studies that has recently received a modicum of critical attention. Tatonetti contends that this recent attention highlights a long-standing truth: Native American Literature was, as she puts it, “always already queer” (xii). In order to support this claim, Tatonetti draws on foundational ideas from Native American Studies, queer theory, and critical race and diaspora studies. With theory in tow, she shows, on the one hand, how many Native and non-Native writers and filmmakers have fostered divides between LGBTIQ₂ and reservation communities and between identification as non-straight and Native. On the other hand, she shows how several two-spirit and queer Native writers have contributed to Native American literature since the so-called Native American Renaissance. This latter group of writers, she argues, have aided in the healing of colonial traumas or, as Beth Brant puts it in Tatonetti’s epigraph, helped “merg[e] the selves that colonialism splits apart.”

Tatonetti’s first chapter provides a genealogy of late twentieth-century Native American creative writing and criticism, which illustrates how Native American and gay and lesbian literature and their fields of studies have alternatively effaced and embraced each other in the last four decades. Tatonetti lays out this relationship in a way that offers hints for upcoming writers and editors as she discusses the history behind prose and poetry by a range of authors and elaborates on the effects of canon formation. Readers who already know about both fields may find this first chapter to be a rehashing, and those interested in in-depth literary analysis may wish for this genealogy to be structured around an anchoring author or work.

The second chapter provides focused, contextualized literary analysis. Tatonetti reads the 1970s poetry of Maurice Kenny (Mohawk) in the publication Fag Rag in a way that will make many readers think differently about Kenny’s oeuvre, gay periodicals of the era, and queer Native literary history. Tatonetti is right to refer to this chapter as “an archival recovery that functions as a re-membering of the 1970s” (27). Tatonetti’s readings of Kenny’s poetry are particularly revealing because she reads the poems based on their context: the publication’s predominantly white-oriented images and articles. This chapter also illustrates how Native queer poetry, if properly contextualized, can help us productively problematize settler theories. For instance, in her reading of Kenny’s “A Night, A Bridge, A River: (Beneath Brooklyn Bridge)” (1977), Tatonetti shows how, in celebrating queer culture and questioning the bridge as a symbol of settler progress, Kenny’s poem is a crucial addition to the theory of queer utopias charted by José Mun˜oz from Walt Whitman to Samuel Delany.

Tatonetti’s third chapter offers six brief readings of Louise Erdrich’s novels. In these readings, she shows how Erdrich’s “erotic, familial, and communal relationships” queer hetero-normative imaginaries (69). She follows this discussion of Erdrich’s fiction with a short chapter on three films by Native and non-Native filmmakers—Big Eden (2000), Johnny Greyeyes (2000), and The Business of FancyDancing (2002)—selecting these particular films because they contain queer Native characters. In her persuasive readings of the films, she argues that each work, in its own way, fails to depict the complexity of either queer or Native values and, as a result, suggests that queerness and indigeneity are irreconcilable. While this chapter might seem to be an odd addition to a book that defines literature in the first chapter as poetry and prose fiction, Tatonetti uses her close readings of these films to underscore subtle symptoms of Native and LGBTIQ₂ uneasiness with and effacement of the Other. The impression she creates, however, is that poets and novelists have been helping to “merg[e] the selves that colonialism splits apart...