Doubters and Dreamers
January 20th, 2011
ISBN 0816529272 (ISBN13: 9780816529278)
Doubters and Dreamers opens with a question from a young girl faced with the spectacle of Indian effigies lynched and burned “in jest” before UC Berkeley’s annual Big Game against Stanford: “What’s a debacle, Mom?” This innocent but telling question marks the girl’s entrée into the complicated knowledge of her heritage as a mixed-blood Native American of Koyangk’auwi (Concow) Maidu descent. The girl is a young Janice Gould, and the poems and narrations that follow constitute a remarkable work of sustained and courageous self-revelation, retracing the precarious emotional terrain of an adolescence shaped by a mother’s tough love and a growing consciousness of an ancestral and familial past.
Living the Spirit
August 15th, 1988
ISBN 031230224X (ISBN13: 9780312302245)
Nîtisânak
September 30th, 2018
ISBN 0994047177 (ISBN13: 9780994047175)
How do you honor blood and chosen kin with equal care? A groundbreaking memoir spanning nations, prairie punk scenes, and queer love stories, Lindsay Nixon’s nîtisânak is woven around grief over the loss of their mother. It also explores despair and healing through community and family and being torn apart by the same. Using cyclical narrative techniques and drawing on Nixon’s Cree, Saulteaux, and Métis ancestral teachings, this work offers a compelling perspective on the connections that must be broken and the ones that heal.
Asegi Stories: Cherokee Queer and Two-Spirit Memory
April 7th, 2016
ISBN 0816530483 (ISBN13: 9780816530489)
In Cherokee Asegi udanto refers to people who either fall outside of men’s and women’s roles or who mix men’s and women’s roles. Asegi, which translates as “strange,” is also used by some Cherokees as a term similar to “queer.” For author Qwo-Li Driskill, asegi provides a means by which to reread Cherokee history in order to listen for those stories rendered “strange” by colonial heteropatriarchy.
A Generous Spirit: Selected Works by Beth Brant
September 30th, 2019
ISBN 1771336854 (ISBN13: 9781771336857)
A Generous Spirit: Selected Work by Beth Brant collects the writing of Beth Brant, Mohawk lesbian poet, essayist, and activist. During her life, Brant's work gave voice to an often unacknowledged Two-Spirit identity, and today, her words represent continued strength, growth, and connection in the face of deep suffering. A Generous Spirit is Brant's portrait of survival and empathy at the intersection of Native American and lesbian experience. Edited by noted Native poet and scholar Janice Gould, A Generous Spirit recounts and enacts the continuance of her people and her sisters with distinct, organic voices and Brant's characteristic warmth.
Full-Metal Indigiqueer: Poems
November 14th, 2017
ISBN 1772011878 (ISBN13: 9781772011876)
Using binary code and texts from classics of the English language such as Edmund Spenser's The Faerie Queene, Joshua Whitehead unravels the coded "I" to trace the formation of a colonized self and reclaim representations of Indigenous texts.
When Did Indians Become Straight? Kinship, the History of Sexuality, and Native Sovereignty
January 27th, 2011
ISBN 0199755450 (ISBN13: 9780199755455)
When Did Indians Become Straight? explores the complex relationship between contested U.S. notions of normality and shifting forms of Native American governance and self-representation. Examining a wide range of texts (including captivity narratives, fiction, government documents, and anthropological tracts), Mark Rifkin offers a cultural and literary history of the ways Native peoples have been inserted into Euramerican discourses of sexuality and how Native intellectuals have sought to reaffirm their peoples' sovereignty and self-determination.
Native American
Nature Poem
May 9th, 2017
ISBN 1941040632 (ISBN13: 9781941040638)
Nature Poem follows Teebs—a young, queer, American Indian (or NDN) poet—who can’t bring himself to write a nature poem. For the reservation-born, urban-dwelling hipster, the exercise feels stereotypical, reductive, and boring. He hates nature. He prefers city lights to the night sky. He’d slap a tree across the face. He’d rather write a mountain of hashtag punchlines about death and give head in a pizza-parlor bathroom; he’d rather write odes to Aretha Franklin and Hole. While he’s adamant—bratty, even—about his distaste for the word “natural,” over the course of the book we see him confronting the assimilationist, historical, colonial-white ideas that collude NDN people with nature. The closer his people were identified with the “natural world,” he figures, the easier it was to mow them down like the underbrush.
Spaces between Us: Queer Settler Colonialism and Indigenous Decolonization
November 17th, 2011
ISBN 0816656339 (ISBN13: 9780816656332)
We are all caught up in one another, Scott Lauria Morgensen asserts, we who live in settler societies, and our interrelationships inform all that these societies touch. Native people live in relation to all non-Natives amid the ongoing power relations of settler colonialism, despite never losing inherent claims to sovereignty as indigenous peoples. Explaining how relational distinctions of “Native” and “settler” define the status of being “queer,” Spaces between Us argues that modern queer subjects emerged among Natives and non-Natives by engaging the meaningful difference indigeneity makes within a settler society.
Sovereign Erotic’s: A Collection of Two-Spirit Literature
October 1st, 2011
ISBN 0816502420 (ISBN13: 9780816502424)
Two-Spirit people, identified by many different tribally specific names and standings within their communities, have been living, loving, and creating art since time immemorial. It wasn’t until the 1970s, however, that contemporary queer Native literature gained any public notice. Even now, only a handful of books address it specifically, most notably the 1988 collection Living the Spirit: A Gay American Indian Anthology. Since that book’s publication twenty-three years ago, there has not been another collection published that focuses explicitly on the writing and art of Indigenous Two-Spirit and Queer people.
Becoming Two-Spirit: Gay Identity and Social Acceptance in Indian Country
October 1st, 2006
ISBN 0803271263 (ISBN13: 9780803271265)
The Two-Spirit man occupies a singular place in Native American culture, balancing the male and the female spirit even as he tries to blend gay and Native identity. The accompanying ambiguities of gender and culture come into vivid relief in the powerful and poignant Becoming Two-Spirit, the first book to take an in-depth look at contemporary American Indian gender diversity. Drawing on a wealth of observations from interviews, oral histories, and meetings and ceremonies, Brian Joseph Gilley provides an intimate view of how Two-Spirit men in Colorado and Oklahoma struggle to redefine themselves and their communities.
Pukawiss The Outcast ( Fiction)
January 16th, 2014
ISBN 1627986472 (ISBN13: 9781627986472)
When family complications take Joshua away from his fundamentalist Christian mother and leave him with his grandfather, he finds himself immersed in a mysterious and magical world. Joshua’s grandfather is a Wisconsin Ojibwe Indian who, along with an array of quirky characters, runs a recreated sixteenth-century village for the tourists who visit the reservation. Joshua’s mother kept him from his Ojibwe heritage, so living on the reservation is liberating for him. The more he learns about Ojibwe traditions, the more he feels at home. One Ojibwe legend in particular captivates him. Pukawiss was a powerful manitou known for introducing dance to his people, and his nontraditional lifestyle inspires Joshua to embrace both his burgeoning sexuality and his status as an outcast.
Disintegrate/Dissociate
May 7th, 2019
ISBN 1551527596 (ISBN13: 9781551527598)
In her powerful debut collection of poetry, Arielle Twist unravels the complexities of human relationships after death and metamorphosis. In these spare yet powerful poems, she explores, with both rage and tenderness, the parameters of grief, trauma, displacement, and identity. Weaving together a past made murky by uncertainty and a present which exists in multitudes, Arielle Twist poetically navigates through what it means to be an Indigenous trans woman, discovering the possibilities of a hopeful future and a transcendent, beautiful path to regaining softness.
A Two-Spirit Journey: The Autobiography of a Lesbian Ojibwa Cree Elder
May 3rd, 2016
ISBN 0887558127 (ISBN13: 9780887558122)
A Two-Spirit Journey is Ma-Nee Chacaby’s extraordinary account of her life as an Ojibwa Cree lesbian. From her early, often harrowing memories of life and abuse in a remote Ojibwa community riven by poverty and alcoholism, Chacaby’s story is one of enduring and ultimately overcoming the social, economic, and health legacies of colonialism.
Two-Spirit People: Native American Gender Identity, Sexuality, and Spirituality
July 1st, 1997
ISBN 0252066456 (ISBN13: 9780252066450)
This landmark book combines the voices of Native Americans and non-Indians, anthropologists and others, in an exploration of gender and sexuality issues as they relate to lesbian, gay, transgendered, and other "marked" Native Americans. Focusing on the concept of two-spirit people--individuals not necessarily gay or lesbian, transvestite or bisexual, but whose behaviors or beliefs may sometimes be interpreted by others as uncharacteristic of their sex--this book is the first to provide an intimate look at how many two-spirit people feel about themselves, how other Native Americans treat them, and how anthropologists and other scholars interpret them and their cultures.
Changing Ones: Third and Fourth Genders in Native North America
June 17th, 2000
ISBN 0312224796 (ISBN13: 9780312224790)
In many Native American tribal societies, it was not uncommon for some men to live as women and some women to live as men. In this land, the original America, men who wore women’s clothes and did women’s work became artists, ambassadors, and religious leaders, and women sometimes became warriors, hunters and even chiefs. Same-sex marriages flourished. Berdaches—individuals who combine male and female social roles with traits unique to their status as a third gender—have been documented in more than 150 North American tribes. By looking at this aspect of non- Western culture, Roscoe challenges the basis of the dualistic way most Americans think about sexuality and shakes the foundation of the way we understand and define gender.
Settler Common Sense: Queerness and Everyday Colonialism in the American Renaissance
June 1st, 2014
ISBN 081669060X (ISBN13: 9780816690602)
In Settler Common Sense, Mark Rifkin explores how canonical American writers take part in the legacy of displacing Native Americans. Although the books he focuses on are not about Indians, they serve as examples of what Rifkin calls “settler common sense,” taking for granted the legal and political structure through which Native peoples continue to be dispossessed. In analyzing Nathaniel Hawthorne’s House of the Seven Gables, Rifkin shows how the novel draws on Lockean theory in support of small-scale landholding and alternative practices of homemaking. The book invokes white settlers in southern Maine as the basis for its ethics of improvement, eliding the persistent presence of Wabanaki peoples in their homeland.
Not Vanishing
December 1st, 1988
ISBN 0889740151 (ISBN13: 9780889740150)
Passionate, vital poetry by acclaimed Native American writer and activist Chrystos addresses self-esteem and survival, the loving of women, and pride in her heritage.
Two Spirit People
May 13th, 1997
ISBN 1560230894 (ISBN13: 9781560230892)
Two Spirit People is the first-ever look at social science research exploration into the lives of American Indian lesbian women and gay men. Editor Lester B. Brown posits six gender styles in traditional American Indian culture: men and women, not-men and not-women (persons of one biological sex assuming the identity of the opposite sex in some form), and gays and lesbians. He brings together chapters that emphasize American Indian spirituality, present new perspectives, and provide readers with a beginning understanding of the place of lesbian, gay, and bisexual Indians within American Indian culture and within American society.
She Walks for Days Inside a Thousand Eyes: A Two-Spirit Story
December 1st, 2008
ISBN 0888013264 (ISBN13: 9780888013262)
In she walks for days inside a thousand eyes (a two spirit story), Sharron Proulx-Turner combines poetry and history to delve into the little-known lives of two-spirit women. Regarded with both wonder and fear when first encountered by the West, First Nations women living with masculine and feminine principles in the same body had important roles to play in society, as healers and visionaries, before they were suppressed during the colonial invasion. she walks for days inside a thousand eye (a two-spirit story) creatively juxtaposes first-person narratives and traditional stories with the voices of contemporary two-spirit women, voices taken from nature, and the teachings of Water, Air, Fire and Mother Earth. The author restores the reputation of two-spirit woman that had been long under attack from Western culture as she re- appropriates the lives of these individuals from the writings of Western anthropologists and missionaries.
Sexuality, Nationality, Indigeneity
January 28th, 2010
ISBN 0822367262 (ISBN13: 9780822367260)
This issue shows how a conversation between the interdisciplinary fields of Native American studies and queer studies can generate more complex and nuanced understandings of the U.S. nation-state, of Native peoplehood, and of the roles culture plays in processes of political expression and identification. Recent bans on same-sex marriage within the Cherokee and Navajo nations suggest the importance of charting the relationship between discourses of sexuality and dominant ideologies of political legitimacy. Exploring how marriage, family, homemaking, kinship, personal identity, and everyday experience are linked to legal institutions and public policy, the contributors investigate the complex interweaving of histories of queerness and indigeneity.
One Bead at a Time
June 25th, 2016
ISBN 1771332654 (ISBN13: 9781771332651)
One Bead at a Time is the oral memoir of Beverly Little Thunder, a two-spirit Lakota Elder from Standing Rock, who has lived most of her life in service to Indigenous and non-Indigenous women in vast areas of both the United States and Canada. Transcribed and edited by two-spirit Metis writer Sharron Proulx-Turner, Little Thunder's narrative is told verbatim, her melodious voice and keen sense of humor almost audible overtop of the text on the page. Early in her story, Little Thunder recounts a dream from her early adulthood, "I stared at these lily pads for the longest time and I decided that there was one part of the pond that had lots of lily pads and no frogs.
A Gathering of Spirit: A Collection by North American Indian Women
October 1st, 1984
ISBN 0932379559 (ISBN13: 9780932379559)
These writings deal with the phrase We are a community. We are a nation. We are alive.
The Zuni Man-Woman
May 1st, 1991
ISBN 0826313701 (ISBN13: 9780826313706)
The Zuni Man-Woman focuses on the life of We'wha (1849-96), the Zuni who was perhaps the most famous two-spirit person (an individual who combined the work and traits of both men and women) in all the Turtle Island Indigenous nations history. Through We'wha's exceptional life, Will Roscoe creates a vivid picture of an alternative gender role whose history has been hidden and almost forgotten.
Black Dove: Mamá, Mi'jo, and Me
May 10th, 2016
ISBN 1558619232 (ISBN13: 9781558619234)
Growing up as the intellectually spirited daughter of a Mexican Indian immigrant family during the 1970s, Castillo defied convention as a writer and a feminist. A generation later, her mother's crooning mariachi lyrics resonate once again. Castillo—now an established Chicana novelist, playwright, and scholar—witnesses her own son's spiraling adulthood and eventual incarceration. Standing in the stifling courtroom, Castillo describes a scene that could be any mother's worst nightmare. But in a country of glaring and stacked statistics, it is a nightmare especially reserved for mothers like her: the inner-city mothers, the single mothers, the mothers of brown sons.
Erotics of Sovereignty: Queer Native Writing in the Era of Self-Determination
April 18th, 2012
ISBN 0816677832 (ISBN13: 9780816677832)
In 1970 the Nixon administration inaugurated a new era in federal Indian policy. No more would the U.S. government seek to deny and displace Native peoples or dismantle Native governments; from now on federal policy would promote “the Indian’s sense of autonomy without threatening his sense of community.” In The Erotics of Sovereignty, Mark Rifkin offers a telling perspective on what such a policy of self-determination has meant and looks at how contemporary queer Native writers use representations of sensation to challenge official U.S. accounts of Native identity. Rifkin focuses on four Native writers—Qwo-Li Driskill (Cherokee), Deborah Miranda (Esselen), Greg Sarris (Graton Rachería), and Chrystos (Menominee)—approaching their fiction and poetry as forms of political theory.
Agokwe: A Two Spirit Voice
June 26th, 2013
ISBN13 9781301099924
Balance is what is inherent in J. Spencer Rowe’s writing. Rowe leads us to explore and reflect with him the natural and sensitive issues of sex, sexual desires and needs for the Two Spirit people. He also exposes us to some of the unnatural deeds of others, the pain others inflict on each other. His strong usage of imagery describing his upbringing as a Native person adjusting to the western intrusion of culture and the loss. There are many Two Spirit people who have endured this kind of tragedy and feel that they have no sense of voice or expression. Rowe gives those people possibility in his writing. It’s a Creation Story in of itself. Rowe has created an Emotional Human /Two Spirit Manifesto. His remembrance and memory and interaction of the cosmopolitan nature leaves a provocative, stimulating and challenging question for the rest of humanity.
Books for LGBT native american tribes within the United States and Canada
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47,000 Beads (Childrens Book)
January 1, 2017
ISBN13 9780987976383
Peyton loves to dance, and especially at pow wow, but her Auntie notices that she's been dancing less and less. When Peyton shares that she just can't be comfortable wearing a dress anymore, Auntie Eyota asks some friends for help to get Peyton what she needs.
The Queerness of Native American Literature
November 30th, 2014
ISBN 0816692785 (ISBN13: 9780816692781)
With a new and more inclusive perspective for the growing field of queer Native studies, Lisa Tatonetti provides a genealogy of queer Native writing after Stonewall. Looking across a broad range of literature, Tatonetti offers the first overview and guide to queer Native literature from its rise in the 1970s to the present day. In The Queerness of Native American Literature, Tatonetti recovers ties between two simultaneous renaissances of the late twentieth century: queer literature and Native American literature. She foregrounds how Indigeneity intervenes within and against dominant interpretations of queer genders and sexualities, recovering unfamiliar texts from the 1970s while presenting fresh, cogent readings of well-known works.
Onwaachige the Dreamer (fiction)
December 17th, 2015
ISBN13 9781634762779
Off the Reservation: Reflections on Boundary-Busting Border-Crossing Loose Cannons
October 5th, 1999
ISBN 0807046418 (ISBN13: 9780807046418)
In this captivating collection of unpublished and published essays, one of our most important scholars, Paula Gunn Allen, explores the symbiotic relationship between Native American culture and the larger Western world. Through her own history and that of other Native peoples, she searches for a connection that will link the eco-spiritual and implicitly multicultural heritage to the demands of an increasingly global and culturally unilateral community.
This Wound Is a World
September 1st, 2017
ISBN 0826313701 (ISBN13: 9780826313706)
Part manifesto, part memoir, This Wound is a World is an invitation to “cut a hole in the sky to world inside.” Billy-Ray Belcourt issues a call to turn to love and sex to understand how Indigenous peoples shoulder sadness and pain like theirs without giving up on the future. His poems upset genre and play with form, scavenging for a decolonial kind of heaven where “everyone is at least a little gay.”
Indian Blood: HIV and Colonial Trauma in San Francisco's Two-Spirit Community
April 22nd, 2016
isbn: 0295998504 isbn13: 9780295998503
The first book to examine the correlation between mixed-race identity and HIV/AIDS among Native American gay men and transgendered people, Indian Blood provides an analysis of the emerging and often contested LGBTQ "two-spirit" identification as it relates to public health and mixed-race identity. Prior to contact with European settlers, most Native American tribes held their two-spirit members in high esteem, even considering them spiritually advanced. However, after contact - and religious conversion - attitudes changed and social and cultural support networks were ruptured. This discrimination led to a breakdown in traditional values, beliefs, and practices, which in turn pushed many two-spirit members to participate in high-risk behaviors. The result is a disproportionate number of two-spirit members who currently test positive for HIV.
Two Spirit Acts: Queer Indigenous Performances
April 15th, 2014
ISBN 1770911847 (ISBN13: 9781770911840)
In this collection of short but powerful two-spirit plays, characters dispel conventional notions of gender and sexuality while celebrating Indigenous understandings. With a refreshing spin, the plays touch on topics of desire, identity, and community as they humorously tackle the colonial misunderstandings of Indigenous people. From a female trickster story centered on erotic lesbian tales to the farcical story about a new nation of Indigenous people called the Nation of Mischief, this collection creates a space to explore what it means to be queer and Indigenous.
Queer Indigenous Studies: Critical Interventions in Theory, Politics, and Literature
March 15th, 2011
ISBN 0816529078 (ISBN13: 9780816529070)
The bold opening to Queer Indigenous Studies invites new dialogues in Native American and Indigenous studies about the directions and implications of queer Indigenous studies. The collection notably engages Indigenous GLBTQ2 movements as alliances that also call for allies beyond their bounds, which the co-editors and contributors model by crossing their varied identities, including Native, trans, straight, non-Native, feminist, Two-Spirit, mixed blood, and queer, to name just a few.Rooted in the Indigenous Americas and the Pacific, and drawing on disciplines ranging from literature to anthropology, contributors to Queer Indigenous Studies call Indigenous GLBTQ2 movements and allies to center an analysis that critiques the relationship between colonialism and heteropatriarchy.
Queer Person
January 1st, 1930
ISBN 0960165207 (ISBN13: 9780960165209)
Relates the experiences of an outcast deaf-mute Indian boy as he grows to adulthood and eventually becomes a great leader.
Two Spirits, One Heart: A Mother, Her Transgender Son, and Their Journey to Love and Acceptance
September 18th, 2012
ISBN 1936833182 (ISBN13: 9781936833184)
In the first book of its kind, mother, educator, and LGBT activist Marsha Aizumi shares her compelling story of parenting a young woman who came out as a lesbian, then transitioned to male. Two Spirits, One Heart chronicles Marsha's personal journey from fear, uncertainty, and sadness to eventual unconditional love, acceptance, and support of her child who struggled to reconcile his gender identity. Told with honesty and warmth, this book is a must-read for parents and loved ones of LGBT individuals everywhere.
Indigenous Men and Masculinities: Legacies, Identities, Regeneration
November 6th, 2015
ASIN B018N2TZ9I
What do we know of masculinities in non-patriarchal societies? Indigenous peoples of the Americas and beyond come from traditions of gender equity, complementarity, and the sacred feminine, concepts that were unimaginable and shocking to Euro-western peoples at contact. "Indigenous Men and Masculinities", edited by Kim Anderson and Robert Alexander Innes, brings together prominent thinkers to explore the meaning of masculinities and being a man within such traditions, further examining the colonial disruption and imposition of patriarchy on Indigenous men.
Walking with Ghosts: Poems
May 15th, 2005
ISBN 1844711137 (ISBN13: 9781844711130)
Written from a contemporary Cherokee, Queer and mixed-race experience, these poems confront a legacy of land-theft, genocide, and forced removal, and resist ongoing attacks on both Indigenous and Gay/ Lesbian/ Bisexual /Transgender communities. Tender, startling, confrontational and erotic, this book honors the dead and brings the survivors back home.
Our Fire Survives the Storm: A Cherokee Literary History
June 6th, 2006
ISBN 0816646392 (ISBN13: 9780816646395)
Once the most powerful indigenous nation in the southeastern United States, the Cherokees survive and thrive as a people nearly two centuries after the Trail of Tears and a hundred years after the allotment of Indian Territory. In Our Fire Survives the Storm, Daniel Heath Justice traces the expression of Cherokee identity in that nation’s literary tradition. Through cycles of war and peace, resistance and assimilation, trauma and regeneration, Cherokees have long debated what it means to be Cherokee through protest writings, memoirs, fiction, and retellings of traditional stories. Justice employs the Chickamauga consciousness of resistance and Beloved Path of engagement—theoretical approaches that have emerged out of Cherokee social history—to interpret diverse texts composed in English, a language embraced by many as a tool of both access and defiance.
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