Pubic scarves and earthworm sex: storying Indigenous eroticisms for sovereign relations and futures

ABSTRACT

For Indigenous peoples, being in good relations with land is crucial for our survival, sovereignty, and decolonization. Our relations are our medicine. This essay suggests that through Indigenous eroticisms, we can better maintain our relations with the complex, life-giving and sustaining ecological and cosmological worlds and our accountability to these worlds, such as the lives and humanity of other-humans and more-than-human beings. In doing so, I tell two place-based Mvskoke stories that story erotic engagements between humans and other-humans. These stories illustrate the fluidity of Indigenous imaginations and remind us of how we should be relating to and living with land, which also informs how we might relate differently to other people. Indigenous eroticisms, I argue, function as a political site for decolonization and the reclamation of our bodies, lands, and sovereignties. Indigenous eroticisms imagine otherwise to colonial empire that depends upon the conversion of land into property and colonial binarism such as human/nonhuman and nature/culture, and therefore offer important medicine for sustaining our bodies and spirits as we create and materialize decolonizing worlds and futurities.

KEYWORDS:

• Indigenous eroticisms
• decolonization
• Indigenous knowledge
• Indigenous storytelling
• relationality

Acknowledgements

This essay is for the lands, oceans, and skies; our oldest teachers. I would also like to thank Michael Lechuga and John Ackerman for the invitation to contribute to this forum and for providing critical feedback that sharpened my ideas. Thank you, Kathleen McConnell, for your generous editorial labors, and to the anonymous reviewers who offered their insights. And finally, thank you to the Poarch Band of Creek Indians, and my dear relatives who extended their teachings in kinship. Mvto.

Notes

1 la paperson, A Third University is Possible (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2017).

2 Sylvia Wynter, “Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom: Towards the Human, After Man, Its Overrepresentation—An Argument,” CR: The New Centennial Review 3, no. 3 (2003): 257–337.

3 Wynter, “Unsettling the Coloniality,” 287–88.

4 Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, Translated by Constance Farrington (New York: Présence Africaine, 1963); Walter D. Mignolo, “Sylvia Wynter: What does it mean to be Human?” in Sylvia Wynter: On Being Human as Praxis, ed. Katherine McKittrick (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015).

5 Alexander G. Weheliye, Habeas Viscus: Racializing Assemblages, Biopolitics, and Black Feminist Theories of the Human (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014), 24.

6 paperson, A Third University, 14–18.

7 Lorenzo Veracini, Settler Colonialism: A Theoretical Overview (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010); Patrick Wolfe, “Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native,” Journal of Genocide Research, 8, no. 4 (2006): 387–409.

8 Audra Simpson, Mohawk Interruptus: Political Life Across the Borders of the Settler States (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014), 19.

9 Michael Lechuga, “An anticolonial future: reassembling the way we do rhetoric,” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 17, no. 4 (2020): 382.

10 Melissa K. Nelson, “Getting Dirty: The Eco-Eroticism of Women in Indigenous Oral Literatures.” In Critically Sovereign: Indigenous Gender, Sexuality, and Feminist Studies, ed. Joanne Barker (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017), 233.

11 Kim TallBear, “What's in Ecosexuality for an Indigenous Scholar of ‘Nature’?,” Decolonial Sustainability Laboratory, June 29, 2012, https://indigenoussts.com/whats-in-ecosexuality-for-an-indigenous-scholar-of-nature/.

12 Water Makes Us Wet: An Ecosexual Adventure, directed by Beth Stephens and Annie Sprinkles (2019; Juno Films).

13 TallBear, “What's in Ecosexuality,” p. 5.

14 TallBear, “What's in Ecosexuality,”; Kim TallBear and Angela Willey, “Critical Relationality: Queer Indigenous and Multispecies Belonging Beyond Settler Sex and Nature,” Imaginations 10, no. 1 (2019): 5–15.

15 Audre Lorde, Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches (Berkeley, CA: Ten Speed Press, 1984), 55.

16 Lorde, Sister Outsider, 59.

17 Qwo Li Driskill, “Stolen from Our Bodies: First Nations Two-Spirits/Queers and the Journey to a Sovereign Erotic,” Studies in American Indian Literatures 16, no. 2 (2004): 51–52.

18 Nelson, “Getting Dirty,” 230.

19 Laura Harjo, Spiral to the Stars: Mvskoke Tools of Futurity (Tucson: The University of Arizona Press, 2019), 26, 34.

20 Aman Sium and Eric Ritskes, “Speaking Truth to Power: Indigenous Storytelling as an Act of Living Resistance,” Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society 2, no. 1 (2014): II.

21 Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, Dancing on Our Turtle's Back: Stories of Nishnaabeg Re-Creation Resurgence, and a New Emergence (Winnipeg, Manitoba: Arbeiter Ring Publishing, 2011), 35.

22 Craig S. Womack, Red on Red: Native American Literacy Separatism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999), 97.

23 Nelson, “Getting Dirty,” 252.

24 Joe Sheridan and Roronhiakewen “He Clears the Sky” Dan Longboat, “The Haudenosaunee Imagination and the Ecology of the Sacred,” Space and Culture 9, no. 4 (2006): 365.

25 Nelson, “Getting Dirty”; Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, “Land as Pedagogy: Nishnaabeg Intelligence and Rebellious Transformation,” Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society 3, no. 3 (2014): 1–25.

26 Lechuga, “Anticolonial Future,” 380–81.

27 paperson, A Third University, 27.

28 Ibid., 32.

29 Sandy Grande, Red Pedagogy: Native American Social and Political Thought (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2015), 3.

30 paperson, A Third University is Possible, 37–45.

31 Ibid., 44.

32 Grande, Red Pedagogy, 3.

33 Ibid., 3–4.

34 Loretta LeMaster and Meggie Mapes, “Refusing a Compulsory Want for Revenge, or, Teaching Against Retributive Justice with Liberatory Pedagogy,” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 17, no. 4 (2020), 401–9.