Straight Talk: Two Spirit Erasure as the Price of Sovereignty in James Welch’s The Heartsong of Charging Elk

James Welch (Blackfeet) is widely recognized as one of the luminaries whose works comprise the “Native American literary renaissance” of the late twentieth century, following N. Scott Momaday’s Pulitzer Prize–winning House Made of Dawn. Alan R. Velie includes Welch alongside Momaday (Kiowa), Leslie Marmon Silko (Laguna Pueblo), and Gerald Vizenor (Anishinaabe) as one of “four Indian literary masters.” In 2000 Welch published the last book he would write, The Heartsong of Charging Elk, a novel based on a historical incident in which a Lakota man was left behind by the Wild West Show in late nineteenth-century France. That novel “confirmed [Welch’s] status as one of the major Native novelists of the past forty years” (Krupat, introduction ix). This indisputably masterful novel, however, poses a singular challenge to the writer’s reputation as an author deeply concerned with human rights. That challenge lies at the novel’s violent climax, when gay chef Armand Breteuil rapes the Lakota protagonist, Charging Elk—a rape that Charging Elk counters with murder. This depiction of a predatory gay man is even more troubling given the novel’s concurrent silence regarding Lakota winkte identity.

Craig Womack (Creek) notes a troubling erasure of queer or Two Spirit identities in many contemporary Native American texts, and this particular scene in The Heartsong of Charging Elk provides Womack with some of the clearest evidence of the traumatic consequences of that erasure in the cultural and literary output of twentieth-and twenty-first-century Native authors. Womack describes his visceral reaction as a gay Native man to The Heartsong of Charging Elk’s violent same-sex rape and murder scene. The novel as a whole, he says, “sets up stereotypes, it may subvert them.” But the brutality of the scene in which the novel’s only explicitly gay character rapes the protagonist and is then violently murdered, Womack says, makes him want to “run for [his] life” (“The Fatal” 240).

Nor is The Heartsong of Charging Elk the only notable Native American–authored novel to present such troubling signs of queer erasure. Lisa Tatonetti lists Welch’s novel alongside Silko’s masterpiece Almanac of the Dead, claiming that both novels depict gay men as “the site of seemingly unrelenting evil” (“Sex” 201). In her masterful book on the subject, The Queerness of Native American Literature, Tatonetti identifies a “markedly heteronormative ethos” in “Native newspapers, journals, and literary collections of the Red Power era” (4), an ethos that led to the perception that either there was no queer Native literature being written or the “queer” designator diminished the authenticity of the “Native.” In the cases of Welch’s and Silko’s novels, two of the most strident calls for tribal sovereignty published in the latter part of the twentieth century, that ethos seems to have borne its strange fruit. Tatonetti’s book focuses on queer Native short story and poetry collections and film, genres in which positive depictions of queer Indigenous people are more common, and have been since the 1970s. She notes that these queer Indigenous writers have perhaps been overlooked because of a “scholarly . . . preoccupation with full-length fiction” (2), although she does not expound on the reasons why queer Indigenous authors might be underrepresented in full-length fiction.¹

Mark Rifkin offers a possible diagnosis. He describes what he terms the “self-editing” of nonheteronormative identities from Native texts as evidence of a “bribe of straightness” (164)—an implicit acceptance of the “straightness” imposed by Euro-Western social-sexual norms in order to assert individual and national sovereignty against US colonial claims. That “bribe of straightness” emerges as a revelatory interpretive key to The Heartsong of Charging Elk, in which performances of straight masculinity become the price for legal personhood. Specifically, the novel depicts Charging Elk as the hypermasculine “savage”—the primitive innocent abroad—and that straight masculinity becomes the price of his citizenship. More broadly, the erasure of nonheteronormative identities parallels the erasure of the sovereign Lakota nation; yet just as the Lakota continue to exist, albeit...