Introduction

In deciding to do a special issue of Intertexts on gender, culture, and literature in Indigenous North America, we were interested in exploring the intersection of gender(s) and culture(s) in the literatures of Indigenous North America and we were particularly interested in papers that might problematize how we use those various terms in our scholarly, artistic, and activist work. Our call for papers posed a variety of possible questions—How have literary texts portrayed the destructive impact of colonialism on indigenous gender relations? How do gender and genre relate? How do we critique gender in texts, knowing that cultures are forever changing? Are contemporary Indigenous films responsive to gender studies conversations? How are presentations of the self, the body, the story en-gendered by and in the texts discussed? What forms, presentations, and embodiments of genders are available in certain historical times or in certain Native spaces that may not be available in non-Native spaces? How have Indigenous authors used their writings to claim sovereignty, not just over land, language, and what might be more readily recognized as political issues, but also over the political issues of gender and sexuality? How do contemporary Two-Spirit people write about their cultural selves, their worlds (urban and rural), and their visions for the future?—but we were interested in other explorations of the intersections of genders, cultures, and literatures as well.

While we recognize the range and scope of questions as impossibly broad, we hoped to elicit essays that self-consciously engaged the intersections between "indigenous" and "gender" in provocative ways. Some of the questions we originally posed are taken up in the essays that follow. Deena Rymhs explores the work of Secwepemc-Okanagan author Garry Gottfriedson focusing on the ethos of cowboy life and the complications and contradictions embodied in the term "Indian Cowboy." By looking at the cowboy figure not only in the writings of Gottfriedson, but also in the works of other artists and writers who challenge the meanings usually posited in that iconic Western figure, Rymhs poses intriguing questions about the performance of masculinity in different cultural and historical contexts, the complicated desires that shape various gender identities, and the ways in which both rodeo and poetry can serve as sites of performance, improvisation, and uncertainty. The authors and artists she discusses create works in which presentations of the self, the body, and the story en-gendered by and in the texts and the artworks challenge us to rethink our own relationships to our bodies, our selves, and our cultures.

In "'Saying the Padre had grabbed her': Rape is the Weapon, Story is the Cure," Deborah Miranda not only looks at the destructive impact of colonialism on indigenous gender relations, but also asks us to question, along with James Clifford, who is the author of field notes, and how can we find elements and acts of narrative resistance by the indigenous subjects in the notes of ethnographers. Scholarly attention to such details can lead to an expanded depth of storytelling and an imagined voice that would otherwise not be "heard." She centers her piece on a 1935 field note which tells the story of a priest who raped a young Indian woman at the Carmel mission one hundred years earlier. While the anthropologist was interested in collecting coyote stories and language lessons, Isabel Meadows told a story "illustrative of the corruption of authority and power by Europeans, and the vocal resistance of an Indian woman." Her story of the Indian woman who revealed that the father had grabbed her becomes, as Miranda argues, "a historical microcosm of rape as a primary tool of colonization, but more impressively, an example of storytelling as indigenous survival strategy." Miranda convincingly reads this story as a "hyperglyph" (a term she borrows from Paula Gunn Allen), a spot that, when touched, then reveals layer upon layer of meaning. Miranda unpacks those meanings in her article, from the taking of Native women during the expeditions of Columbus, to the history of indigenous women in California, with the complex layers of meaning embedded in the missions, the monjerias, and the joyas, in order to locate the story of...