The Erotic in Contemporary Native Women’s Poetry in Canada

Abstract

The Erotic in Contemporary Native Women’s Poetry in Canada Jennifer Andrews (bio) The erotic . . . “forms the bridge between the spiritual and the political.” . . . It is creation of a connection between an embodied self and the world in which that self exists. —ROBERT WARRIOR Native women’s love poetry and erotics are so invisible, so far back in the closet, that they are practically in somebody else’s apartment. —CHRYSTOS IN “RED HOT TO THE TOUCH,” Anishnaabe poet, editor, and publisher Kateri Akiwenzie-Damm argues for the need to “bring the erotic back into Indigenous arts” by depicting Aboriginal female sexuality, in particular, in a celebratory fashion (113). She eschews long-standing stereotypical depictions of Indigenous woman as passive objects of male exploitation and violence, especially as inflicted by white Western men as part of the ongoing project of colonization. Akiwenzie-Damm has collected and edited a groundbreaking collection of Indigenous erotica from writers of both sexes living in Canada, the United States, Australia, and Aotearoa (New Zealand) titled Without Reservation: Indigenous Erotica. She has also contributed to Drew Hayden Taylor’s Me Sexy: An Exploration of Native Sex and Sexuality, a provocative and compelling compilation of essays and creative work on Indigenous sexualities. More recently, Playwrights Canada Press published Two-Spirit Acts: Queer Indigenous Performances, a trio of performance scripts that include Muriel Miguel’s Hot’n’Soft, which first premiered in Toronto in 1991 and explicitly depicts “lesbian erotica” (xxi) by eschewing what Daniel Heath Justice has called the “sexaphobic settler regime” (208). And an essay in the just-published volume Indigenous Poetics in Canada, Anishnaabe poet and scholar Waaseyaa’sin Christine Sy describes the impact of many of these publications on her own work, highlighting how Akiwenzie-Damm and other Native writers of the erotic have inspired her to explore “our sexuality and sensuality, our way of writing our life force” (189). Despite this growing body of primary texts, relatively little critical attention has been paid to the popularity of Native erotica as manifested in the work of Indigenous women and especially poets within Canada. [End Page 134] This silence is not surprising, given that writing erotica is perceived as especially risky for Native authors who remain marginalized, regardless of their sexual orientation, within the nation-state. In “Decolonizing the Queer Native Body,” Chris Finley explains that while “Natives, and lots of other folks, like sex,” they “are terrified to discuss it” because it may endanger the speaker or writer by unearthing “the colonial legacies of sexual violence” (32) and their ongoing impact on tribal peoples. The structures of colonialism in Canada and the United States, as Mark Rifkin outlines, historically depended—and in many cases, still do—on the enforcement of “compulsory heterosexuality” (2011b, 5) to ensure the perpetuation of a fundamentally white, Christian, patriarchal form of nationhood, one in which any Indigenous “emotional and bodily sensation,” especially those which challenge established institutions of governance, is strategically discounted or ignored (2012, 27). Within this framework, Native women are useful for one purpose: to bear children, whose white fathers will ensure their racial integration. Conversely, Indigenous men are unacknowledged as subjects in their own right or they are feminized to induce their complicity. As Finley points out, “It is not only Native women who are (hetero)sexually controlled by white heteropatriarchy, for Native men are feminized and queered when put in the care of a white heteropatriarchal nation-state” (35). Paradoxically some of the most important recent critical interventions in the field of queer theory continue to rely on a “primitivist notion of the indigenous as the space of free and unfettered sexuality that allows the white queer citizen to remake his or her sexuality” without actually forging relationships of solidarity with Indigenous peoples when it comes to their “land struggles” (Smith, 49). For all the promise of queer theory’s desire to represent marginal populations, the colonization and erasure of Indigenous peoples remains a fundamental problem. Likewise, Andrea Smith notes that in much contemporary ethnic and queer of color work, Indigenous subjects who attach themselves to a land base or insist on “nationalistic identifications” rather than that of the diasporic or Mestizo subject are perceived as...