When Did Indians Become Straight?

Abstract

How have discourses of sexuality shaped depictions of native identity, and how have ideas about kinship been central to these ongoing struggles over the character and contours of native peoplehood? This book is the first study of its kind in its exploration of the complex relationship between contested U.S. notions of sexual order and shifting forms of Native American political representation. Offering a cultural and literary history that stretches from the early nineteenth century to the early twenty-first century, it demonstrates how U.S. imperialism against native peoples over the past two centuries can be understood as an effort to make them “straight”—to insert indigenous peoples into Anglo-American conceptions of family, home, desire, and personal identity. It shows how attempts by non-natives to cast native cultures as a perverse problem to be fixed or a liberating model to be emulated both rely on the erasure of indigenous political autonomy; reciprocally, it illustrates how native writers in several periods, in response, have insisted on the coherence and persistence of native polities by examining the ways traditions of kinship and residency give shape to particular modes of governance and land tenure.

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