Looking for the Queer in the Native

In The Queerness of Native American Literature, Lisa Tatonetti sets out to illustrate that “the field of Native literature was always already queer” (xii). She does so through a range of strategies, attending to magazines and printed ephemera, novels, films, and poetry. More than simply locating forms of queer self-expression, in the sense of texts generated by subjects who might be identified as “queer,” the book seeks to suggest that queerness (meaning here challenges to normative modes of sexuality and gender) proliferates in and through forms of Native cultural production from the 1970s onward. The reason for this time span is less causal than (counter)canonical. As Tatonetti observes, the period after the publication in 1968 of N. Scott Momaday’s Pulitzer Prize–winning novel House Made of Dawn has come to be known, following a phrase coined by Kenneth Lincoln, as the Native American literary renaissance, and the book aims to inhabit this rubric in order to refunction it, proposing that we might productively rethink how we approach contemporary Native writing and visual culture by attending to its heretofore underexamined queer traces and trajectories. Doing so aims to track “unruly articulations of queer relationships in now-canonical Native literature” (ix).

At one point, Tatonetti quotes Leslie McCall’s observation that “different methodologies produce different kinds of substantive knowledge” (144), and Tatonetti’s own methodology might be characterized as one of accretion and juxtaposition. Each chapter builds up a range of interpretive objects either to make particular histories visible or to trace representational itineraries across a particular genre or author’s oeuvre. The first chapter establishes a genealogy of “queer Native literatures” by surveying writing from the 1970s onward for examples of the copresence of Native voices and queer topics in gay magazines, Native texts in anthologies of various kinds (including This Bridge Called My Back), drama, fiction, poetry, and scholarship. The next chapter turns to the poetry of Maurice Kenny. It foregrounds his largely overlooked published writing in non-Native magazines (particularly Fag Rag) in ways that center “urbanity, sex, and the overlapping nature of oppressions,” providing queer mappings that fall out of “heteronormative framing[s] of the Native American literary renaissance and Red Power era” (36). Chapter 3 turns to the work of Louise Erdrich, providing a sweeping analysis of appearances of female masculinity, homoeroticism, and other deviations from “the primacy and supposed normalcy of heteroromance” in her many novels (84); Tatonetti shows that “Erdrich represents lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, transsexual, intersex, queer and Two-Spirit (LGBTIQ2) identities as part of the everyday fabric of Native communities” (68). In chapter 4, Tatonetti moves from text to film, addressing how Big Eden, Johnny Greyeyes, and The Business of Fancy-dancing all “segregate Indigeneity from queer sexuality by relegating queerness entirely to off-reservation spaces” in ways that suggest that nonnormative desire must be separated out from questions of sovereignty and Native territoriality (123). The final chapter takes up the writings of Janice Gould, exploring Gould’s representation of her relation to her people’s history and lands across her poetry collections and essays as examples of “Indigenous assemblage” and “queer diaspora”: “Gould’s depictions of family demonstrate that Indigenous ties are not fixed, linear maps strictly bounded by and confined to mission, reserve, or reservation geographies but are instead breathing, active entities capable of transformation and continuance” (147). Tatonetti’s own process of assemblage and apposition works to make clear the scope and significance of varied queer presences throughout Native cultural production from the 1970s onward.

In this vein, though, I wonder about the amount of work she asks queer to do here. The term clearly extends beyond identities based on homoerotic object choice or nondominant forms of gender expression, opening onto the ways a wide range of Native texts challenge (hetero)normalization. However, to suggest that Native self-representations writ large are and have been “always already queer” seems to shift from employing intellectual strategies in queer studies to designating Indigenous artistic production as expressive of an...