Critical Response 3

What does it mean to be queer? Native American? Or a women that has never felt feminine? These are the questions that has constantly been a part of my personal narrative all my life. While reading the essays within GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies; Sexuality, Nationality, Indigeneity, I could really identify with the colonization of Native cultures and how that plays into the notion of repression or the invisibility of queerness/Two-spiritness in Native communities and culture to the heteronormative of the western culture.

Growing up I never knew it was okay to be queer. In fact I never knew that there where people in my Native family or community that Identified as queer. I remember being told at a very young age how I was a girl and thus I needed to be more clam, gentle, not as active, I was told to dress a certain way that my clothes were only to be found in the “girl” section of the store. That pink and purple where great colors on me and that wearing dresses made me beautiful. This was always hard for me because I never wanted to be beautiful and I have never felt more uncomfortable then when I was in a dress. It wasn’t until I was an adult, a wife and mother and expanded my relationships outside of just my Native family and community that I met other queer people. People like me who did not fit the heteronormative narrative that was forced on me my whole life; same gender loving folks, people who didn’t fit what society said there gender presentation had to be. Reading VISIBLE SEXUALITIES OR INVISIBLE NATIONS: Forced to Choose in Big Eden, Johnny Greyeyes, and The Business of Fancydancing, put a lot of the struggle I have had with the intersectionality of my Native upbringing and always knowing from a very young age that I was a queer girl, even if I didn’t have the vocabulary.

 In my Native community the main focus is on family and cultural activities and in a lot of spaces the roles of men and women. Thus even now when I am back home I sometimes struggle with how I fit in. I am a women that is not feminine in the traditional sense, I date girls and don’t plan on getting married again anytime in the near future. In cultural dances I don’t want to wear a dress, which is the only option of women. So in a lot of ways when I go back home I feel like I am being asked to leave a lot of me behind, just like explained in The Business of Fancydancing.

But then thinking even harder about the role that colonization plays in structuring my Native community is what stood out to me in the rest of the essays. The hetero-normative “man” and “female” life styles wasn’t the cultural structure of my ancestors. But why was the acceptance of queerness becoming more okay in the dominate culture but still in my Native community the bondage of the oppression imposed is so strong, that I can be myself and more excepted outside of my community and then have to almost completely change who I am in order to reenter it. Thus, using Queer theory parallel to Native studies to explain the colonization of Native people to uncover and analyze the reasons of settler colonialism as effects of all areas of Native life; was something I have been thinking about but not really being able to explain while working on my bio-power map and how I my intersecting identities held different levels of power in different situations in my life.