Introduction

GLQ

Volumn 16, Issue 1-2, 2010, Pages 5-39

  Justice, Daniel Heath ^a   Rifkin, Mark ^a   Schneider, Bethany ^a  

^a NONE

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 77249164740     PISSN: 10642684     EISSN: 15279375     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1215/10642684-2009-011     Document Type: Review

References (87)

1. See George Chauncey, Why Marriage? The History Shaping Today's Debate over Gay Marriage (New York: Basic Books, 2005).
2. Some notable court cases include Carcieri v. Salazar 129 S. Ct. 1058 (2009);
3. Plains Commerce Bank v. Long Family Land (2008);
4. and Sherill v. Oneida 125 S. Ct. 1478 (2005).
5. For an overview of contemporary federal Indian law, see David E. Wilkins and K. Tsianina Lomawaima, Uneven Ground: American Indian Sovereignty and Federal Law (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2001).
6. Native peoples were declared to be "domestic dependent nations" in Cherokee Nation v. Georgia (1831).
7. See Jill Norgren, The Cherokee Cases: The Confrontation of Law and Politics (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1996).
8. See Jennifer Denetdale, "Carving Navajo National Boundaries: Patriotism, Tradition, and the Diné Marriage Act of 2005," American Quarterly 60 (2008): 289 - 94;
9. Jeffrey S. Jacobi, "Two Spirits, Two Eras, Same Sex: For a Traditionalist Perspective on Native American Tribal Same-Sex Marriage Policy," University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform 39 (Summer 2006): 823 - 50;
10. and Christopher L. Kannady, "The State, Cherokee Nation, and Same-Sex Unions: In Re: Marriage License of McKinley and Reynolds," American Indian Law Review 29 (2004 - 5): 363 - 81.
11. See also Daniel Heath Justice's essay in this issue.
12. For a prominent example, see Senator Rick Santorum's appearance on "Fox News Sunday" in August 2003, www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,93646, 00.html (accessed April 25, 2009).
13. As Sharon Holland notes in her afterword, the essays tend not to address black queer studies per se, but the critique they offer also can be extended to the givenness of the settler-state in that scholarship. For a stunning collection of this work, see E. Patrick Johnson and Mae G. Henderson, Black Queer Studies: A Critical Anthology (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005).
14. For examples of Native feminist critique of hetero-patriarchal configurations of nationhood, see Joanne Barker, "Gender, Sovereignty, and the Discourse of Rights in Native Women's Activism," Meridians: Feminism, Race, Transnationalism 7 (2006): 127 - 61;
15. Reyna K. Ramirez, Native Hubs: Culture, Community, and Belonging in Silicon Valley and Beyond (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007);
16. and Andrea Smith, Conquest: Sexual Violence and American Indian Genocide (Cambridge, MA: South End, 2005).
17. For examples of the shift to transnationalism in queer studies, see Arnaldo Cruz-Malavé and Martin F. Manalansan IV, eds., Queer Globalizations: Citizenship and the Afterlife of Colonialism (New York: New York University Press, 2002);
18. Gayatri Gopinath, Impossible Desires: Queer Diasporas and South Asian Public Cultures (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005);
19. Martin F. Manalansan IV, Global Divas: Filipino Gay Men in the Diaspora (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003);
20. and Jasbir K. Puar, Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007).
21. On the vexed process of federal recognition, see Renée Ann Cramer, Cash, Color, and Colonialism: The Politics of Tribal Acknowledgment (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2005);
22. Eva Garroutte, Real Indians: Identity and the Survival of Native North America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003);
23. and Allogan Slagle, "Unfinished Justice: Completing the Restoration and Acknowledgement of California Indian Tribes," American Indian Quarterly 13 (1989): 325 - 45.
24. For examples, see "Queering Native Literature, Indigenizing Queer Theory" in Studies in American Indian Literatures 20 (2008): 1 - 75.
25. The term Métis is a vexed one in Canada, as there are different and sometimes conflicting definitions depending on the contexts and relevant authorities. (The lowercase métis is sometimes applied in the case of those with mixed Native and non-Native ancestry, but not always, thus adding to the confusion.) The Métis National Council (MNC) - which represents those Métis with the strongest cultural, linguistic, and geographic distinctiveness - insists on a very narrow definition, applying only to those people descended from ancestors granted land or scrip under the Manitoba Act of 1870 or subsequent Dominion Land Acts. (The MNC also acknowledges those with documented historical community recognition, primarily from those in the Red River settlement of contemporary Manitoba.) More broadly, the Native Council of Canada and Congress of Aboriginal Peoples recognize those with cultural and historical Métis roots, although they need not necessarily be from the prairie provinces or necessarily reflect Red River cultural practices. (This would be the definition used by most Métis in Ontario.) Adding to the confusion are various legal definitions of the Canadian nation-state, such as those Indians who missed signing treaties and didn't officially gain status and some who were enfranchised by getting a university degree (and thus lost status) or, with women, marrying out, losing status and becoming, to the Canadian government, Métis. (Bill C-31 reversed this situation for some Métis, who then became status Indians.)
26. The Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) Confederacy, commonly known today as the Six Nations, was originally composed of five linguistically and culturally connected peoples: Mohawks, Senecas, Oneidas, Onondagas, and Cayugas. The Tuscaroras joined the Confederacy in 1722.
27. Peter Martyr, quoted in Jonathan Goldberg, "Sodomy in the New World: Anthropologies Old and New," in Fear of a Queer Planet: Queer Politics and Social Theory, ed. Michael Warner (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), 4.
28. Quoted in Peter Herman Sigal, Infamous Desire: Male Homosexuality in Colonial Latin America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 144 - 45.
29. Rayna Green, "The Pocahontas Perplex: The Image of American Indian Women in American Culture," Massachusetts Review 27 (1975): 698 - 714;
30. Smith, Conquest; and Jonathan Goldberg, "Sodomy in the New World: Anthropologies Old and New," in Warner, Fear of a Queer Planet, 3 - 18.
31. Beatrice Medicine, "Changing Native American Roles in an Urban Context and Changing Native American Sex Roles in an Urban Context," in Two-Spirit People: Native American Gender Identity, Sexuality, and Spirituality, ed. Sue-Ellen Jacobs, Wesley Thomas, and Sabine Lang (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1997), 153.
32. Brian Joseph Gilley, Becoming Two-Spirit: Gay Identity and Social Acceptance in Indian Country (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2006), 27 - 28.
33. This is hardly an undocumented history, and interested readers will find many books to choose from in pursuing it. Good overviews include Wilkins and Lomawaima, Uneven Ground; Francis Paul Prucha, The Great Father: The United States Government and the American Indians (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1986);
34. and following, as I do not, into the twentieth century, Vine Deloria, American Indian Policy in the Twentieth Century (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1992).
35. Of course non-Native queers have been implicated in the process of settlement, and radical queers have been invested in romanticized notions of Indianness to assist utopian community building. See, for example, Scott Morgensen, "Arrival at Home: Radical Faerie Configurations of Sexuality and Place," GLQ 15 (2008): 67 - 96.
36. Edwin Williams, The Addresses and Messages of the Presidents of the United States, Inaugural, Annual and Special, from 1789 to 1846 (New York: Walker, 1846), 174.
37. This general principle played itself out differently in different nations, and with different implications for women's cultural power. For a Cherokee example, see Theda Perdue, "Women, Men, and American Indian Policy: The Cherokee Response to 'Civilization,'" in Negotiators of Change: Historical Perspectives on Native American Women, ed. Nancy Shoemaker (New York: Routledge, 1995), 90 - 114.
38. Williams, Addresses and Messages of the Presidents, 431.
39. "Cherokee Nation v. Georgia (1830)," in Documents of United States Indian Policy, ed. Francis Paul Prucha (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1990), 59.
40. Quoted in Daniel McCool, Susan M. Olson, and Jennifer L. Robinson, Native Vote: American Indians, the Voting Rights Act, and the Right to Vote (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 4.
41. Quoted in McCool, Olson, and Robinson, Native Vote, 3.
42. See Mark Rifkin, "Romancing Kinship: A Queer Reading of Indian Education and Zitkala-Sa's American Indian Stories," GLQ 12 (2006): 27 - 59.
43. The Fifteenth Amendment did not go down easily everywhere. Several states, including New Mexico and Arizona, still continued to deny Indians the right to vote, and court cases need to be filed in order to extend the amendment to them. See Donald Fixico, Termination and Relocation: Federal Indian Policy, 1945 - 1960 (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1986);
44. and Kenneth R. Philp, Termination Revisited: American Indians on the Trail to Self-Determination, 1933 - 1953 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1999).
45. The Dawes Act exempted most of the tribes in Indian Territory, including the Five Civilized Tribes, from allotment; they were included under the Curtis Act (1898).
46. See Smith, Conquest; and Tim Giago, Children Left Behind: The Dark Legacy of Indian Mission Boarding Schools (Santa Fe: Clear Light, 2006).
47. Ulysses S. Grant, "Second Inaugural Address," in A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents, 1789 - 1897, 10 vols., edited by James Daniel Richardson (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1896 - 99), 7:222.
48. Grover Cleveland, "Inaugural Address," in A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents, 1789 - 1897, 10 vols., edited by James Daniel Richardson (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1896 - 99), 9:391 - 92.
49. See, for example, Lee Edelman, No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004);
50. Kathryn Bond Stockton, "Growing Sideways, or Versions of the Queer Child: The Ghost, the Homosexual, the Freudian, the Innocent, and the Interval of Animal," in Curiouser: On the Queerness of Children, ed. Steven Bruhm and Natasha Hurley (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004);
51. and Elizabeth Freeman, "Packing History, Count(er)ing Generations," New Literary History 31 (2000): 727 - 34.
52. See, for example, José Esteban Muñoz, "Cruising the Toilet: LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka, Radical Black Traditions, and Queer Futurity," GLQ 13 (2007): 353 - 67.
53. Gerald Vizenor, "Aesthetics of Survivance: Literary Theory and Practice," in Survivance: Narratives of Native Presence, ed. Gerald Vizenor (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2008), 1.
54. Where Indians have not been mentioned, they have been implied in the century and more since Cleveland's speech. As usual, you can find Native people in their conspicuous absence from narratives about national origin. From Robert Frost's remarkable sleight of hand in his reading of the "The Gift Outright" at John F. Kennedy's inauguration, in which he claims that "the land was ours before we were the land," to Obama's comfortable statement that "we settled the West" (and I don't think he was referring to his own Native ancestry here), a pretty and Indianless vision of the expansion of the United States is often evoked at these events.
55. Joseph P. Lowery, Inaugural Prayer, voices.washingtonpost.com/ inauguration-watch/2009/01/transcript-of-rev-lowerys-inau.html (accessed March 15, 2009).
56. Rifkin, "Romancing Kinship."
57. See Craig Womack, Red on Red: Native American Literary Separatism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999);
58. and Womack, Drowning in Fire (Tucs on: University of Arizona Press, 2001).
59. See cfp.english.upenn.edu/archive/2003-03/0167.html (accessed January 4, 2009).
60. For examples of the ways non-Native queer theoretical work seems to found itself on displacing intergenerationality, see Lauren Berlant and Michael Warner, "Sex in Public," Critical Inquiry 24 (1998): 547 - 66;
61. Edelman, No Future; and Judith Halberstam, In a Queer Time and Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives (New York: New York University Press, 2005).
62. For more capacious accounts of queer temporality, see Elizabeth Freeman, The Wedding Complex: Forms of Belonging in Modern American Culture (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002);
63. Heather Love, Feeling Backward: Loss and the Politics of Queer History (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007);
64. and Christopher Nealon, Foundlings: Lesbian and Gay Historical Emotion before Stonewall (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001).
65. For an effort to think queer and Native temporalities together, through the work of Craig Womack, see Bethany Schneider, "Oklahobo: Following Craig Womack's American Indian and Queer Studies," South Atlantic Quarterly 106 (2007): 599 - 613.
66. For accounts of queer diaspora that seem to have little place for indigeneity, see Gopinath, Impossible Desires; Eithne Luibhéid, "Sexuality, Migration, and the Shifting Line between Legal and Illegal Status," GLQ 14 (2008): 289 - 315;
67. Martin F. Manalansan IV, "Race, Violence, and Neoliberal Spatial Politics in the Global City," Social Text, nos. 84 - 85 (2005): 141 - 55;and Puar, Terrorist Assemblages. For further discussion of that particular dynamic, see Smith, this issue.
68. I'm using queer here as a catchall for the longer list noted above, for the sake of brevity. I am not suggesting that the term is either merely neutral or necessarily accepted as relevant by the writers and persons loosely included under the rubric here. In this special issue alone, for instance, Driskill proposes Two-Spirit as an alternative to queer for Native people, but that gesture is equally contested by Justice and Stevens.
69. For varied articulations of this difference, see Scott Bravmann, Queer Fictions of the Past: History, Culture, and Difference (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997);
70. Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of "Sex" (New York: Routledge, 1993);
71. Cathy J. Cohen, "Punks, Bulldaggers, and Welfare Queens: The Radical Potential of Queer Politics?" GLQ 3 (1997): 437 - 65;
72. Lisa Duggan, "The New Homonormativity: The Sexual Politics of Neoliberalism," in Materializing Democracy: Toward a Revitalized Cultural Politics, ed. Russ Castronovo and Dana D. Nelson (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002), 175 - 94;
73. Linda Garber, Identity Poetics: Race, Class, and the Lesbian-Feminist Roots of Queer Theory (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001);
74. and Michael Warner, The Trouble with Normal: Sex, Politics, and the Ethics of Queer Life (New York: Free Press, 1999).
75. See also Beth Brant, Writing as Witness: Essay and Talk (Toronto: Women's Press, 1994);
76. Qwo-Li Driskill, "Stolen from Our Bodies: First Nations Two-Spirits/Queers and the Journey to a Sovereign Erotic," SAIL 16 (2004): 50 - 64;
77. Brian Joseph Gilley, Becoming Two-Spirit: Gay Identity and Social Acceptance in Indian Country (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2006);
78. Sue-Ellen Jacobs, Wesley Thomas, and Sabine Lang, Two-Spirit People: Native American Gender Identity, Sexuality, and Spirituality (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1997);
79. and Deborah Miranda, "Dildos, Hummingbirds, and Driving Her Crazy," Frontiers 23 (2002): 135 - 49.
80. As should become clear from my description below, my choice of terms should not suggest that I am defining one approach as more linked to "identity politics" than the other, nor am I suggesting that a politics organized around identity is necessarily more naive, limited in scope, or exclusionary than other formulations or formations.
81. In fact, I feel that my thinking about how the settler state employs heteronormativity to limit and regulate the possibilities for Native sovereignty has been shaped in immeasurable ways by reading Womack's novel Drowning in Fire. See Mark Rifkin, "Native Nationality and the Contemporary Queer: Tradition, Sexuality, and History in Drowning in Fire," American Indian Quarterly 32 (2008): 443 - 70.
82. Sherman Alexie, Indian Killer (New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 1996), 60.
83. On intellectual and rhetorical sovereignty, see Scott Richard Lyons, "Rhetorical Sovereignty: What Do American Indians Want from Writing?" College Composition and Communication 51 (2000): 447 - 68;
84. Malea Powell, "Rhetorics of Survivance: How American Indians Use Writing," College Composition and Communication 53 (2002): 396 - 434;
85. and Robert Allen Warrior, Tribal Secrets: Recovering American Indian Intellectual Traditions (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995).
86. Vine Deloria Jr., Custer Died for Your Sins: An Indian Manifesto (1969; Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1988), xiii.
87. Gerald Vizenor, Manifest Manners: Postindian Warriors of Survivance (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1994).