Attewell, Nadine

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UCLAAmerican Indian Culture and Research Journal TitleSpaces Between Us: Queer Settler Colonialism and Indigenous Decolonization. By Scott Lauria Morgensen.Permalinkhttps://escholarship.org/uc/item/2kf4j0d2JournalAmerican Indian Culture and Research Journal , 37(1)ISSN0161-6463AuthorAttewell, NadinePublication Date2013DOI10.17953Copyright InformationThis work is made available under the terms of a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial License, availalbe at https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/eScholarship.org Powered by the California Digital LibraryUniversity of CaliforniaAMERICAN INDIAN CULTURE AND RESEARCH JOURNAL 37:1 (2013) 200 à à àthis particular fictional conversation is the work of Alexander Posey, a Creek humorist from Indian Territory. Posey’s “Fus Fixico” letters appeared during the early years of the twentieth century in newspapers across the United States and satirized prominent local and national leaders. A closer analysis of Posey’s Indian dialect reveals that it does not echo the halting speeches crafted by many non-Native writers to mock American Indians. It is unclear if the Dawson Record’s editor recognized the humor or political critiques within the reprinted dialogue, and Seeing Red leaves pertinent questions about the usage of Posey’s writings unasked. Nevertheless, the book o!ers an excellent overview of representations of Aboriginals within Canada’s press, and raises the possibility of transnational studies aimed at illuminating the perpetuation of colonial ideologies within newspapers from other former settler societies. Robert D. MillerSan Diego Mesa CollegeSpaces Between Us: Queer Settler Colonialism and Indigenous Decoloniza-tion. By Scott Lauria Morgensen. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011. 336 pages. $75.00 cloth; $25.00 paper.With Spaces Between Us, Scott Lauria Morgensen makes a set of vital contri-butions to the fields of Native studies, (American) queer studies, and settler studies. Rigorous, reflexive, and unfailingly generous, Morgensen develops a critically comparative methodology in order to examine Native and non-Native American queer cultures and politics as these unfold in conversation on a terrain shaped by settler colonialism. Morgensen is concerned to show how modern queer cultures and politics can work to “erase native people and naturalize settler colonialism” even when explicitly antiracist or anticolonial in orientation (3). To this end, he convincingly outlines the workings of a specifically settler-colonial biopolitics that queers Native people while defining queer settler subjects as “a primitive, racialized sexual margin akin to what white settlers attempt to conquer among Natives.” He then goes on to chart twentieth-century manifesta-tions of queer primivitism, in which non-Native queers embrace, rather than flee, the identification of queerness with racialized primitivity (32). One chapter examines the way in which the berdache, originally gener-alized as a figure of primitive sexual and gender diversity by such early twentieth-century ethnographers as Margaret Mead, in the 1970s and 1980s eventually came to ground the claims to recognition of non-Native gay and lesbian anthropologists and gay counterculturalists. In another, Morgensen develops an ethnographic account of the back-to-the-land counterculturalism 201REVIEWSof the Radical Faeries, a movement composed of non-Native (and largely white) gay men who retreat to rural spaces in order to liberate a universally accessible “Indigenous gay nature [in themselves] and integrate it in their everyday lives” (127). Framing indigenous cultures of sexual diversity as at once models for and predecessors to an emancipatory queer modernity, queer primivitisms define queers as non-Natives who supplant indigenous people in inheriting Native traditions, and hence land. As Morgensen observes, queer performances of primitivity, even as they contest the devaluation of Native sexualities, ultimately do so in the service of settler colonialism, in a manner akin to those performances Philip Deloria theorizes so persuasively in Playing Indian (1999). “Impersonating indigeneity and believing in colonial modernity are noncontradictory acts,” Morgensen reminds us, “given that settlers preserve Native authenticity as a history they must possess in order to transcend” (17). Although disturbing “the centrality of white cisgender gay men . . . as hegemonic subjects in the definition of queer modernities on settler colonial terms” is a central achievement of Spaces Between Us, Morgensen, a white cisgender gay man who was trained as an anthropologist, doesn’t only engage in “homework” (xi). Mindful of the importance indigenous thinkers and activ-ists accord “intellectual sovereignty,” Morgensen attends throughout Spaces Between Us to Native and two-spirit sexual knowledges and cultures, practices of community-building, and approaches to transnational activism, for example around issues such as HIV/AIDS. "e e!ect is to center Native ways of knowing and being in the world, countering the depoliticizing narratives of queer primitivism through drawing attention to assertions of Native moder-nity that “denaturalize settler colonialism and disrupt its conditioning of queer projects” (ix). In addition, however, through examining queer Native engage-ments with queer primitivist discourses (thus, for example, Morgensen links the emergence of the term two-spirit to Native frustration with anthropological and counterculturalist popularizations of berdache), Spaces Between Us frames non-Native queer primitivisms as potential sites of, or incitements to, conver-sation between Native and non-Native queers that may force the latter to grapple with the enduring fact of Native sovereignty and their own complicity in its suppression. Describing encounters in which “Native gay and Two-Spirit men answered invitations to collaborate with Radical Faeries by clarifying their di!erences and then applying that work to pursuing their leadership as Two-Spirit people in Native communities pursuing forms of decolonization,” Morgensen wonders whether non-Native queers have been moved thereby to (re)consider their relationship to the colonial project of settlement (152). A book about conversation and the work this entails, Spaces Between Us itself proceeds by putting queer studies and Native studies in produc-tive conversation. It is clear that Morgensen is deeply committed to the AMERICAN INDIAN CULTURE AND RESEARCH JOURNAL 37:1 (2013) 202 à à àmethodological, conceptual, and political endeavors of both fields, to which the book makes significant contributions. In drawing attention to the specifically colonial dimensions of American queer primitivist modernities, Spaces Between Us builds on other work in queer studies by scholars such as Jasbir Puar and Siobhan Somerville that track the articulation of projects of sexual discipline with American projects of race-making, nation-formation, and empire-building. In inviting queer settler subjects, white and non-white alike, to contemplate their complicity with settler colonialism in conversation with Native subjects, Morgensen extends the work of scholars such as Bonita Lawrence to read sexu-ality as among the sites where projects of race-making articulate with colonial governance projects in settler nations like the United States. At the same time, the book promises to reshape the field of (American) queer studies through interrogating its most cherished investments (in the experience of dislocation, for example) as conditioned by a largely unexamined investment in the project of settlement. While Morgensen is not alone in making this critique—there is the work of Andrea Smith, as well as queer white Australian scholar Damien Riggs’ 2006 monograph Priscilla, (White) Queen of the Desert—it is one that bears repeating. As an account of the ways in which Native queers engage not only with non-Native queer people, discourses, and agendas, but with each other, Spaces Between Us contributes in exciting ways to a growing body of work in Native studies that takes as its focus Native LGBTQ2 lives, cultures, intellectual work, and political e!orts. "at at least three books on these subjects have been published in the last two years, including a collection of creative work entitled Sovereign Erotics (2011), suggests the vibrancy of queer indigenous studies. Perhaps as importantly, Morgensen’s work testifies to the critical role Native studies approaches can play in showing how the logics of settler colo-nialism a!ect all who are subject to the settler state, answering Smith’s vision of a Native studies whose “scope of inquiry” is expanded by “positioning Native people as producers of theory and not simply objects of analysis” (“Queer "eory and Native Studies,” 2010, 43). "ere is no question that more scholars in more fields must recognize their accountability to indigenous frameworks and knowledges, which, as Aileen Moreton-Robinson claims in her 2004 essay “Whiteness, Epistemology, and Indigenous Representation,” have much to o!er critical accounts of settler colonialism. Does this then mean that Spaces Between Us is a work of Native studies? My question is animated not by chauvinism, but by conversations within the field of Native studies about the nature and scope of its distinctive project, as well as by the ethical spirit of the book itself, which insists on the importance of acknowledging di!erences where they exist, and not always in order to bridge them. Concluding Spaces Between Us, Morgensen suggests that while non-Native queers may be drawn 203REVIEWSinto conversation with Native queer and two-spirit people, “that will follow, and depend on, their having demonstrated a prior and sustained commitment to start and end their day elsewhere, in the normatively non-Native spaces where they pursue the work of unsettling settler colonialism” (229–30). "is statement might be taken to suggest that (some of ) the work of unsettling settler colonialism must take place in a separate disciplinary space from, if in conversation with, Native studies. But does thus di!erentiating the work of unsettling settler colonialism from the project of indigenous sovereignty strip Native studies of its critical edge, as Chris Andersen warns in “Critical Indigenous Studies” (2009)? Do books like Spaces Between Us more (un)comfortably inhabit the joins between fields? Of course, to suggest that Native studies approaches might shed light on a more diverse array of analytic objects than is currently assumed is not to say that there is no longer any need to “study Natives.” It seems churlish to ask that a book so carefully inclusive in its comparatism should do still more. And yet, reading Spaces Between Us underlined for me the need for scholars to continue to think critically about the work involved in facilitating conversation amongst indigenous people, especially across national lines. In discussing the e!orts of the National Native American AIDS Prevention Center to “coordinate Native North Americans with Kanaka Maoli in Hawai’i,” Morgensen notes that “Two-Spirit’s North American pantribalism met its geographic specificity . . . when Kanaka Maoli partners had to argue the distinctions of Hawaiian culture” (210). It may be that this process ultimately a#rmed Kanaka Maoli speci-ficity. It nonetheless matters that it was Kanaka Maoli who bore the burden of explanation, as marginal to mainland configurations of indigenous sexual identity, reminding us that indigenous-indigenous encounters too take place across di!erences of power created, deepened, and sustained by the exigen-cies of settler (here, American) nation-building. As M$ori literary critic Alice Te Punga Somerville observes, “not only [do] historical colonial contexts a!ect contemporary Indigenous-Indigenous relationships,” determining, for example, which indigenous peoples are likely to be in conversation with which, but “the nation-states within which we are subsumed also a!ect our respective mobility,” determining, for example, which indigenous people are likely to be heard at which international conferences (“"e Lingering War Captain,” 2007, 36). "e di!erence these di!erences make must be grappled with, not wished away. I look forward to reading work that attends as thoughtfully to the conditions, logics, limits, and promise of indigenous/indigenous conversation as Morgensen does to conversations amongst Native and non-Native queers in Spaces Between Us.Nadine AttewellMcMaster University

Spaces Between Us: Queer Settler Colonialism and Indigenous Decolonization. By Scott Lauria Morgensen.

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