This Bridge of Two BacksMaking the Two-Spirit Erotics of Community Sophie Mayer (bio) Talking Circles: Going Public with Indigenous Sexualities Esselen/Chumash poet Deborah A. Miranda’s 2002 groundbreaking essay “Dildos, Hummingbirds, and Driving Her Crazy” begins with a conversation about the erotic in a classroom—a conversation about private or intimate matters in a public space. In a graduate class on women’s erotica at the University of Washington, Miranda found herself “Searching for American Indian Women’s Love Poetry and Erotics,” which gives her essay its subtitle. Her professor first denied the existence of Native women’s erotic writing, and then, when Miranda materialized “volumes of the stuff,” the instructor excluded it on the basis that there was no critical treatment (135). Miranda’s essay focuses on a specifically lesbian Indigenous erotics in the work of Menominee poet Chrystos. Her emphatic making public—in the sense of literary publication and political declaration—of private desires (as linked to national identity) lies at the heart of my essay. Her essay places her own poetics of Indigenous sexuality in a community or continuum that includes Chrystos, Muskogee Creek poet Joy Harjo, and Anishinaabe poet Kateri Akiwenzie-Damm, a communitarian model of imagining both literary and erotic culture that provides the methodology of this essay and that is emblematized in Miranda’s essay by a utopian project: an anthology of Indigenous erotica being collected by Akiwenzie-Damm. [End Page 1] Akiwenzie-Damm’s anthology Without Reservation: Indigenous Erotica was published in 2003, its historical proximity to Miranda’s essay suggesting a zeitgeist. Indeed, it includes many of those same voices that Miranda quotes—and many others. Akiwenzie-Damm’s anthology contains—or rather, can barely contain the energy of—Indigenous writers from Turtle Island, Aotearoa (New Zealand), Australia, and the Pacific Islands, all speaking of and from the specifics of an Indigenous experience of sexuality. The erotics of the anthology are therefore implicit in the act of collecting and moreover in the collection’s structure: unlike traditional anthologies where work is grouped by theme and each author’s work lies chastely alone with itself, Without Reservation is an antholorgy. There are connections from work to work, but no teleological narrative; writers may have several pieces in different locations in the anthology, and in each place, our reading of their work is affected by that of the writers who lie on either side of them. This pattern of distribution also awakens the reader’s active desire: if you like Gregory Scofield’s work, you either have to seek him out across the book or wait, tantalized, for his reappearance. Scofield, a Métis poet who copresented “Beneath the Buffalo Robe” on CBC Radio with Akiwenzie-Damm, is one paradigmatic figure for this antholorgy, as his work is literally “without reservation,” weaving bisexual desire and the urban rez into evocations of traditional medicine songs scented with muskeg. The shifting pronouns in his poems—“you” is sometimes “he,” sometimes “she,” sometimes both or neither—act as a model for the overall structure of Without Reservation, in which heterosexual, same-sex, bisexual, transsexual, and pansexual narratives and images are set alongside one another. By including a number of well-known writers, such as Chrystos, whose work has previously been read through the term “two-spirit” (by Sue-Ellen Case among others), alongside pieces that explore desires and bodies considered non-normative by dominant culture, written by writers who do not self-identify as queer or two-spirit, Akiwenzie-Damm mobilizes an Indigenous sexuality that forms a spectrum opposed to the dominant binaries of gender and sexuality. [End Page 2] As a transnational, as well as pansexual, anthology, the collection does not recognize imperialist nation-states but rather Indigenous national affiliations. In so doing Without Reservation heeds Andrea Smith’s call in Conquest that to address Indigenous sexuality is to multiply decolonize: the lands overtaken by white settlers; the sexual Puritanism, capitalism, and heteronormativity that necessarily accompanied colonization and that continue as the dominant cultural form in postcolonial societies; and the Indigenous cultural and social histories overwritten by self-serving missionaries and politicians and further obfuscated by well-meaning academics who believed the words...