Intersecting Discourses on Race and Sexuality: Compounded Colonization Among LGBTTQ American Indians/Alaska Natives

Abstract

This article examines discourses on race and sexuality in scientific literature during the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries in context of U.S. settler colonialism. It uses a theoretical and methodological intersectional perspective to identify rhetorical strategies deployed in discursive representations salient to lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, Two-Spirit, and queer American Indians and Alaska Natives. These representations reflect a context of compounded colonization, a historical configuration of co-constituting discourses based on cultural and ideological assumptions that invidiously marked a social group with consequential, continued effects. Hence, language is a vector of power and a critical vehicle in the project of decolonization.

Keywords:

• American Indians/Alaska Natives
• Native Americans
• sexuality
• LGBTTQ
• (de)colonization

Acknowledgments

I wish to thank the following in support of this research: Dr. Gayle Rubin for her pioneering contributions and scholarly expertise, Dr. Ruth Dunkle for her unwavering scholarly support, and Ms. Sophie “Egeelana Tungwenuk” Nothstine, Inupiaq Elder originally from the village of Wales, Alaska, for her inspirational spirit of love and authenticity—Quyaana! I am also grateful to the many reviewers of this article and funding from the National Institute on Aging Grant T32-AG000117.

Notes

1. U.S. settler colonialism is defined and discussed in the next section of this article.

2. The term queer is often credited as originating with Teresa de Lauretis in the early 1990s; it is a contested term with a history of complicated semantic meanings; for example, it has been deployed as a derogatory label and as a re-appropriated label salient to those with marked variation along a sexuality–sex–gender continuum; it has been deployed as an umbrella term for other identity labels along this continuum as well as a function of resistance to identity categories altogether (see Jagose, 1996; Kirsch, 2000; McConnel-Ginet, 2002).

3. “A variety of terms are used interchangeably for Native North Americans, among them Indian, American Indian, Native, aborigine, indigenous people, First Nation, First People, and First American. The search for a single name, however, has been unsuccessful. In the United States, the term Native American has been used but has fallen out of favor recently because anyone born in North or South America may claim to be a Native American. The term American Indian is currently in favor, despite its misnomer; Indian still carries the stigma of its bestowal on tribal groups by European explorers who were searching for the Indian subcontinent of Asia. As such, the term fails to define the originary status of pre-Columbian American peoples. That the Inuit, Yupik, and Aleut peoples of Alaska consider themselves distinct from other indigenous North American peoples compromises the term American Indian even further, as these groups do not wish to be called Indian. Thus, when generalizations of the entire group are necessary, it is preferred to use the terms American Indians and Alaska Natives” (Hodge & Fredericks, 1999, p. 269).