The Queerness of Native American Literature

Lisa Tatonetti. The Queerness of Native American Literature. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2014. isbn 978-0-8166-9279-8. 277 pp.

In her introduction to The Queerness of Native American Literature, Lisa Tatonetti situates her book as "both literary map and critical lens" (ix). She links together queerness, Indigeneity, and relationship, "whether such affiliations are acknowledged or ignored, (re)claimed or disavowed" (ix). Tatonetti's book examines how Native American writers such as Maurice Kenny (Mohawk), Janice Gould (Koyoonk'auwi Maidu), and Louise Erdrich (Anishinaabe) and films by Sherman Alexie (Spokane / Coeur d'Alene) and two non-Indigenous filmmakers provide differing ideas about queerness in Indigenous literature and film.

Tatonetti, who coedited Sovereign Erotics: A Collection of Two-Spirit Literatures with Qwo-Li Driskill (Cherokee), Daniel Heath Justice (Cherokee), and Deborah Miranda (Esselen/Chumash), astutely notices that the rise of the study of Native literature as a scholarly field and the publication of early queer Indigenous texts occurred at roughly the same time. I appreciate her assertion that writing by Two-Spirit, gay, lesbian, bisexual, trans, and queer (2glbtq) people "can evade anticipated literary trajectories by failing to fulfill the ancestor-centered, buffalo-littered, landscape-focused expectations of Native writing" (29). But Tatonetti was surprised to discover that those images are still important to Indigenous writers, including 2glbtq writers. While these images can fall into the cliché of the Hollywood Indian, Indigenous writing doesn't have to be either ancestor centered or urban but can be both at the same time.

Using archival materials, Tatonetti chronicles Mohawk writer Maurice Kenny's writings in 1970s gay newspapers and magazines such as Fag Rag. As Tatonetti notes, Kenny's work is an important intervention...