30 - Native American Literatures

Summary

The rise of a recognized body of queer Native American (US) and Aboriginal (Canadian) literatures occurs in the wake of two concurrent political moments rarely spoken of together - the post-Stonewall movement for gay rights and the Red Power era of Native activism. This chapter describes the historical emergence of queer Native literature in the 1970s. Queer Native fiction, like drama and the early women of color anthologies, emerges in the 1980s. Such fiction varies widely in its depiction of Indigenous experiences, ranging from tribal trickster narratives to representations of urban alienation. The first Native novel with a queer Indigenous protagonist is Allen's The Woman Who Owned the Shadows. Although fiction, especially full-length fiction, garners a lion's share of public attention, poetry functions as the cornerstone of the queer Native literary canon. The connections between and among the queer Native women writers can be seen in the common themes and also, at times, style of their work.