"Often times," writes Native playwright Drew Hayden Taylor, "there's no better way of investigating a nation than through its amorous adventures" ('Naked Came the Indian: Aboriginal Erotica in the 21st Century', 37). Certainly, the political paradoxes of North America's psyche are brought into sharp relief by sex, whether in celebrity scandals or Puritan policymaking. But Taylor isn't referring only to the nation of America, but its many Nations (and those of Mexico, Canada, Australia, and Aoteroa). Taylor's article opens "Indigenous erotica is political," a quotation from writer Kateri Akiwenzie-Damm, whose anthology Without Reservation: Indigenous Erotica sets out a politics that rewrites 1960s sexual liberation on Indigenous terms. Akiwenzie-Damm's book, and the work of the authors she includes, is not available in Barnes and Noble, and has yet to make Nerve.com's required reading list. All of the books I discuss have to be sought out, because the mainstream has not become a safe place for these writers to swim yet. They are worth seeking out. White Australian academic Germaine Greer, in her controversial new book Whitefella Jump Up, argues that non-Aboriginal Australians should be learning from Aboriginal communities, not only about land rights, but about the traditions and ways of life necessarily attached to the land. Indigenous erotica has a similar claim on our attention: many writers connect sexuality to a spiritual practice that respects people and land, and seeks to build a community of loving, desiring equals. While never hiding the scars of history, Indigenous writers use erotic writing to suggest new ways of coming together that could heal by celebrating difference.

The energy, anger, passion and humour running through Without Reservation make no room for New Age bullshit appropriated from Indigenous traditions. But even in the most caustic stories, sexual healing triumphs. Richard Van Camp's story, 'Let's Beat the Shit out of Herman Rosko!' is as dynamically different from a self-help book as its title suggests. Herman Rosko is a university-educated sex therapist who returns to the rez where he grew up. His "sexual ninja" wisdom pleases some, and pisses off others - especially Clarence, whose ex-girlfriend is now Herman's lover. Rather than mocking Herman (who speaks poetically) and celebrating Clarence, who is knowledgeable about Dogrib tradition, the story allows all the characters to speak their minds, as well as passing on some tantalising ninja wisdom. The narrator, Grant, has to choose between his loyalty to his friend Clarence, and his desire to please his girlfriend. His solution is a model one: insist that Clarence get his "Indian ass" to Herman's talking circle, so that he too can get in on expanding the practice of pleasure, and drop his anger.

Pleasure cannot, and does not, mitigate anger entirely. The lived experience of genocide, racism, misogyny, homophobia and transphobia find their voices too - sexual pleasure becomes a protest against the dominant forces that would ignore or destroy it. Many of the best known, most powerful Indigenous writers speak out from and against multiple oppressions, often identifying as Two-Spirit, a pan-Native term used to encompass lesbian, gay, bisexual, intersex, transvestite and transgender identities, as well as specific Native sex/gender identities, as discussed in Sue-Ellen Jacobs' Two-Spirit People. Chrystos, Menominee author of four books of poetry that balances startling eroticism with sharp-tongued social insight, records the complex interactions of her Native and lesbian identities. In the introduction to In Her I Am, she notes of her double life: "I live on a razor... ([but] Indian Country is becoming less homophobic faster than Lesbianism is coming to understand, rather than appropriate, Native spirituality and culture)" (7-8). She speaks forthrightly about racism and s/m phobia in the lesbian community, detailing the complexities of individual sexuality, which cannot exist without political, as well as personal, awareness. In 'Against,' she explores

                        your skin red under my hand against every 
                        political principle we both hold you want
                        me to spank you & I do
                        ...
                        Out of our bruised lives should come some other way
                        This forbidden hand this deep memory this connection
                        for which I've no explanation against a wall of right
                        that would define us as victim/aggressor (24)

Spanking calls up both personal memories of childhood abuse, and a cultural history of genocide. Beyond that, there is a social framework which seeks to define participants in s/m play as "victim/aggressor," despite the consensuality of the scene. Chrystos' language itself, full of wordplay and sexy metaphors, becomes the only possible "explanation" as she ends the poem by punning on "[d]esire red & raw."

In her work, Chrystos honors the spectrum of sexuality by insisting on the importance of difference in counteracting compulsory heterosexuality. She states: "I claim this land I celebrate our outlaw lust There are no weeds - only plants whose flowers or taste we dislike" (81). Erotic diversity is presented by these writers as (becoming) central to contemporary Indigenous culture. "With dominant sexuality today created by the media, religion, and the government," argues Taylor, "Aboriginal sexuality is different and it is travelling back to the supportive role it once had towards sexuality in its various forms, from Two-Spirited people to fetish or leather" (39). This embrace of what Western sexual thinking sees as extreme, or non-normative practices, is evident in Without Reservation: this is an anthol-orgy, unmarked by divisions or explanations. Chrystos' poem 'Hot My Hair Smells of Your Cunt' (from In Her I Am) follows on the hot heels of Van Camp's randy Dogrib boys. This is not only a politics of inclusion, but of community. Just as Herman creates a talking circle, bringing sexuality out of secret spaces, and as Chrystos laughs about her neighbours' complaints about the volume of her lovemaking, so the publishing of Indigenous erotica argues that sexuality is public. Sexual community should not act as exclusion zones for those who exist on the margins of dominant sexuality (the queer community, the s/m community), but should recognise the inherently participatory, shared nature of healthy sexuality. 

Chrystos, Taylor, Akiwenzie-Damm, and Driskill, challenge us to recognise the interdependence of our sexual choices and our social/political situations. They foreground, in order to erase, the stigma and silence attached to complex and highly politicised areas of sexual experience. Their courage in speaking out is strengthened by the necessity of doing so. Colonialism - through religion, education, disease, sexual abuse and cultural dominance - divorced many Indigenous cultures from traditional practices, which included communal understandings of sexuality. The Two-Spirit movement, and Two-Spirit writers, have been among the most active in speaking out against this, and in recovering connections between tradition and the present day. As Chrystos describes, Two-Spirits encounter dangerous prejudice from all sides. Driskill writes elegiacally, but also erotically, of a racist homophobic murder, invoking the very sexuality that the murderers feared: "You too hot in bones man / You rough elegant ghost man / You once alive man / burn me / to the sky" ('Love Poems for Billy Jack', 31). Ghosts haunt this book, never ethereal but rather earthly, because they are part of the spectrum of desire. This honesty cuts through the barrier of history to address a white lover: "you are here / because so many of my people / are not" ('Map of the Americas', 2). There is a razor-fine balance here as well - but one that will not cut off any consensual sexual desire, although loving "burns with history."

Driskill, a Cherokee writer and anti-oppression activist, identifies as Two-Spirit and trans, using the pronoun s/he to reflect this. S/he insistently builds community - with the dead, with the land, with other writers whose queerness marks both their difference and their similarity. Burning Upward Flight includes 'Names - a performance poem by Qwo-Li Driskill and Tsi-ge-yu/Sarah Sharp', also available on the CD Poet Tongues On Fire: Radical Queer Voices. Here, Driskill's voice interweaves with that of a "dyke son... tough bitch" who takes the Cherokee name Tsi-ge-yu to include and move beyond the English appellations that are inadequate to describe her completely. Indigenous writers using the coloniser's tongue refuse to be colonised by it. Whether they take the path of Reinventing the Enemy's Language, as Joy Harjo and Gloria Bird entitle their anthology of Native women's writing, or choose to include Cherokee (in Driskill's case), Menominee (Chrystos), Anishnaabe (Akiwenzie-Damm) or Mvskoke (Harjo) words and phrases, each writer expresses Indigenous community through his/her tongue.

Words from Native tongues often name the most intimate and erotic experiences. These frequently have no exact equivalent in English - a subtle comment on the impoverishment of our vocabulary, either literal or metaphorical, to describe healthy sexuality. Taylor comments, "Métis writer Maria Campbell has said often how intrinsically saucy the very language of Cree can be. What would normally be an uninteresting sentence in English would come to life in some risqué manner when translated to Cree" (38). Campbell is in a position to know: most Métis grow up speaking English (or French) as well as Cree, as part of their mixed-blood inheritance. This sweet sauciness is evident when Métis poet Gregory Scofield addresses his lover in 'Ceremonies' (Without Reservation, 41 & Love Medicine & One Song, 91). 

                      I heat the stones 
                      between your legs, 
                      my mouth, 
                      the lodge where you come to sweat.

The poem insists on both the sensual and the sacred as they combine in the lover's body, and when, in the last stanza, Scofield comes to address his lover (who could be male or female), he says "nîcimos, for you / I drink the blessed water." A footnote translates the Cree word as "sweetheart or lover." The English words cannot seem to encompass both emotional intimacy (sweetheart) and sexual desire (lover) as the Cree word can. The sense of a community of love, in all its varieties, is implied by the use of this single word in a poem otherwise expressed in English - although the ceremonies described, such as the sweat lodge, color the poem as effectively as does the use of Cree. Here is difference, and difference is hot.

Scofield, author of three collections of poetry, and a powerful autobiography Thunder Through My Veins: Memories of a Métis Childhood, is the subject of an article by Driskill entitled "Call Me Brother." As a Two-Spirit writer, Scofield is Driskill's brother across lines of nation (Scofield is Canadian, Driskill American), Nation (Scofield is Metis and Cree-speaking; Driskill is Cherokee, "also of African, Irish, Lenape, Lumbee and Osage ascent" as he writes), and sexual identity (Scofield is a male-identified bisexual, Driskill a transfag). When Driskill calls Scofield "brother," s/he is referring, in part, to Scofield's poems where the desired body is not marked by sex/gender, but addressed - in the most erotic of voices - as "you." To hear how erotic both Cree and Scofield's spoken voice are, the musicality of his poems being central, listen online to "Beneath the Buffalo Robe," a radio show he co-wrote with Akiwenzie-Damm on Indigenous erotica.

Scofield's third book of poetry, Love Medicine and One Song: Sâkihtowin-Maskihkiy Êkwa Pêyak-Nikamowin, is dedicated to "Kim and Dean, my inspiration." The gender-ambiguous names refer to Scofield's long-term female and male partners respectively, who blur into each other in the 'you' of many of the poems. In 'Night Train,' however, towards the end of the collection, Scofield writes:

                      Tonight
                      I am in dual love, no
                      I am in love double: 1 + 1 = 3
                      counting him, her and me, and

                      if you added
                      his perfect lips, her perfect arms
                      multiplied my heart, counted 
                      all the sensations
                      I subtract and divide ...
                      my skeleton would stretch
                      a love song from here
                      to eternity. (99)

The poem reworks one of the most famous love poems, Sappho's "He seems to me a god," in which the female poet sees her female lover talking to a man, and loses her senses one by one because of the woman's unattainability. In Sappho's poem, 1 + 1 = -1, as the poet loses herself on the outside of the heterosexual conversation. Scofield's poem perceives no such exclusivity. His bones become a love song to the varieties of desire, and his community of lovers "multiplie[s] his heart" rather than dividing it. He doesn't need terms like bisexual and polyamorous to describe its negotiations and celebrations. 

The book, in all its beauty, becomes Sâkihtowin-Maskihkiy, the love medicine Scofield seeks to se/cure his relationship with Dean, whose frequent disappearances structure the narrative. It ends with a song in English and Cree, where Scofield calls on the spirits of the four corners to help him find his nîcimos. When you hold the collection in your hands, you hold an offering, a prayer, and you can't help but be included in the 'you' that courses so generously through these poems. The question for readers - especially non-Native readers like myself - is how to "honor this," how to take pleasure without leaving politics behind. The poems and stories themselves offer the best possible guides. In the same way that they speak openly of consensuality and the contract of respectful sexuality, so they offer examples of fraught conversations between desire and history. "[O]ur lovemaking is disjunctive," begins Witi Ihimaera's 'Dio Mi Potevi (The White Man is My Burden, London, 30 June, 1998)' (Without Reservation, 95-6). Ihimaera, Maori author of Whale Rider, imagines sex with a white lover as itself an act of "decolonisation, decoding, dismantling / of your hegemony, neck, breastplate, / thighs your unprotected whiteness." Ihimaera uses the language of academia - the white man's burden - to describe (in orgasm) his lover's body, and the reader's expectations. Coming is a "semiotic rupture" not only because it makes his white lover vulnerable, but because it points to the lack in English to describe pleasure except in the most technical terms.

To speak differently is to love differently, and vice versa. Indigenous erotica is political, but it brings something unexpected to idea of the political: sensuality, emotion, desire. Not despite, but because of, a bloody and oppressed history, Indigenous writers speak up/from their sexuality, determined to bring pleasure into the political arena and beyond. Even mourning for the crimes of racism and homophobia, these writers remind us of the sensual physical world that those who commit these crimes fear. Driskill's book ends with 'Chantway for FC,' an elegy for Fred 'FC' Martinez, a Diné Two-Spirit youth beaten to death in Cortez, Colorado in June 2001 (Burning Upward Flight, 44-7). Martinez' death did not create protests on Capitol Hill as did the death of Mathew Shepard just over the Colorado state line, but it did create this poem - and as this work finds readers, it may have more effect than protests by touching the heart (and other body parts) with love as well as rage. The poem emerges "[f]rom the heavy debris of loss" to end - and what better way to end -

                        It is finished in beauty
                        It is finished in beauty 
 

Works Cited 

All Canadian titles available from Toronto Women's Bookstore and from Amazon..

Akiwenzie-Damm, Kateri and Gregory Scofield. "Beneath the Buffalo Robe." Play streaming audio at CBC First Voices.

Akiwenzie-Damm, Kateri, ed. Without Reservation: Indigenous Erotica. Wiarton ON: Kegedonce, 2003. 

Chrystos. In Her I Am. Vancouver BC: Press Gang, 1993.

Driskill, Qwo-Li. "Call Me Brother: Two-Spiritedness, the Erotic, and Mixedblood Identity as Sites of Sovereignty and Resistance in Gregory Scofield's Poetry" in Janice Gould and Dean Rader, eds. Speak to Me Words: Essays on Contemporary American Indian Poetry. Tucson: U. Arizona P., 2003. 223-234. 

Burning Upward Flight. Duwamish Nation [Seattle]: Dragonfly Rising, 2002. Available from dragonflyrising.com

Greer, Germaine. Whitefella Jump Up. London: Profile, 2004. Available from Amazon

Ihimaera, Witi. Whale Rider. 1987. NY: Harcourt, 2003.

Jacobs, Sue-Ellen, Sabine Lang and Wesley Thomas, eds. Two-Spirit People: Native American Gender Identity, Sexuality and Spirituality. Urbana: U. Illinois P., 1997.

Planting Seeds Collective Action Project. Poet Tongues on Fire: Radical Queer Voices. Available from pscap.org.

Scofield, Gregory. Thunder Through My Veins: Memories of a Métis Childhood. Toronto: HarperCollins, 1999.

 Love Medicine and One Song: Sâkihtowin-Maskihkiy Êkwa Pêyak-Nikamowin. Victoria BC: Polestar, 1997.

Taylor, Drew Hayden. 'Naked Came the Indian: Aboriginal Erotica in the 21st Century' Spirit 2 (Spring/Summer 2003). 37-39.