The Young Maiden and the Distinguished Warrior

Possibly the strangest chapter in Me Sexy: An Exploration of Native Sex and Sexuality was Kateri Akiwenzie-Damm's “Red Hot to the Touch: WRi[gh]ting Indigenous Erotica."  Akiwenie-Damm began by complaining about the lack of erotica written from a First Nations perspective, a lack she set out to begin righting herself.

I longed for images and stories of love between our people. Love between people I could recognize. Between Indigenous people like the ones I knew. Not the stereotypes and fantasies of Hollywood or those of sexually bored middle-aged American housewives or of white men looking to affirm their virility and dominance – I wanted something true. If I was going to read fantasies about Indigenous men, I wanted them to be like my fantasies, to stir my desire for flesh-and-blood Indigenous men. I wanted them to be about love, not power [110].

Fair enough; a lot of writing has been inspired by the desire to fit just such a niche, and I'd the last to criticize anyone for wanting depictions of stories about "people I could recognize."  I have pointed out certain problems with such projects, however, and in this instance I'm bothered by the racist stereotyping Akiwenie-Damm indulges.  Are "sexually bored middle-aged American housewives" really so different from a sexually bored middle-aged Canadian Anishnaabe woman?  Do all First Nations women have the same fantasies about the same Indigenous men, or will First Nations Harlequins need to be broken into smaller niches, according to nation?  Her assumption that "love" and "power" cover no common territory is also problematic.

But leave that aside.  The proof of the pudding is in the eating, as they say, and Akiwenie-Damm offers up some samples of the kind of fantasies she wants to see. For example, her protagonist meets and nurtures a burning, oozing passion for a young (younger?) Indigenous fellow who's doing some remodeling work for her, building a deck or something:

And she couldn’t help it. She flirted outrageously with him. She was witty. She was fun. She felt the world roll beneath her feet. She could do anything. She would try anything. Charm oozed out of her pores, like honey from a honeycomb. It was beyond her control. She felt madly, crazily alive. She wanted to stand in the middle of Elgin Street and sing his name. She wanted to climb Blue Mountain and hear his name echo back to her. She wanted to walk the Niagara Escarpment and tell every buzzard and crow to call out his name. She couldn’t help it. It was him doing this, not her. It was he who awoke her. It was them, together, who saw sun and stars and moon in each other [112].

I've read a fair sampling of erotica and romance fiction (basically the same thing) by white American women, aimed at the middle-aged demographic Akiwenie-Damm dismisses so lightly, and I don't see any substantial difference between her fantasy and theirs.  Her prose is indistinguishable from theirs, and not up to the best writers in the field.  The only difference is a few adjectives for hair and skin color, plus a few local-color details to provide ethnic authenticity.

To me that's reassuring: people aren't so different from each other after all.  (Remember, however, that differences within groups tend to be greater than differences between them.)  I'm pleased that so little alteration is necessary to produce working erotica for a First Nations woman, but that also means that any white publisher could hire a hack off the street to produce it, and sell it to everybody.  Then I wonder: are white women, let alone white men, allowed to read Akiwenie-Damm's indigenous erotica?  Will we pollute it with our colonialist eyes, read it through the lenses of our hunger for power?  Akiwenie-Damm's essay was published in an anthology primarily meant for white eyes anyway, so I suppose not.  By all means, there should be erotica and other writings for women of all nations, let a thousand flowers bloom.  I'll read some of it, because I can learn from almost anything, but I'll be hoping for better than this.

Re-invented Traditions: Ain't Nothing Like the Real Thing

Before I criticize Drew Hayden Taylor's anthology Me Sexy any more, I want to praise the best piece in it, the final one, "First Wives' Club: Salish Style" by Lee Maracle.  For one thing, the writing feels embodied.  Despite all the prattle by the other writers about how First Nations don't apply a body/spirit divide to sex, most of them write about sex like white people.  (Not that I'm in any position to point fingers there: I am a white person.)  In a way, that's only to be expected.  Against all the queer-theory academics who say they're gonna write about queer embodiment (following Foucault's exhortation to think and write about bodies and pleasures -- which, weirdly, he seemed to think were somehow pre-theoretical -- writing doesn't produce a body; at best it's a projection of a body.  Writing isn't pleasure (though the act of writing, like reading, can be pleasurable): it's a shadow or at best an evocation of pleasure.  I think that instead of trying to make writing less intangible, we should recognize it for what it is and rejoice that we have such a useful tool.  No matter what theoretical tools you apply, though, writing about bodies and pleasures produces only more texts.  The best cookbook, with the most delicious-looking full-color photographic illustrations, still won't nourish you.  In the end you have to set aside representations and cook and eat, or make love.

Still, some writers give me the impression of not trying to pretend they don't have bodies, and their writing evokes bodies and pleasures in such a way that it seems fair to call it embodied.  Most of the writers who bring this off are female; I'm thinking of Joan Nestle, for one.  Lee Maracle is another, maybe because (like Nestle and the other writers I'm thinking of) she's older, apparently about my age.  Her sense of humor, which also stands out in the collection, helps too.  Try this anecdote from her contribution to Me Sexy:

As a young person my chiefs asked me to organize the youth and encourage them to attend the first all chiefs’ conference in Kamloops, B.C. So I called a youth gathering to be held at the local Indian Friendship Centre in Vancouver, notified all the young people I knew and made a presentation on behalf of the not-quite-fully-formed Union of B.C. Indian Chiefs. It was 1968, the year the skimpy, sexy T-shirt came on the scene for young women. I was wearing one. Along with my skimpy T-shirt I had on a pretty snug pair of jeans and no bra (it was the sixties). An elder from Saskatchewan named Ernest Tatoosis came up after my talk and complimented my speech. After a pregnant pause he added, staring at my cleavage (small though it was), “But maybe you should dress more traditional,” and he pointed at my shirt. I knew what he meant. He was well known for scolding women for wearing sexy clothing. “Real Indian women wore dresses, long dresses, covering their legs and buttoned to the neck.” I suddenly remembered a picture of a group of First Nations men dressed in Western pants, shirts, and sporting little mini-skirts and holding old rifles. Should I tell him that I will wear a long dress buttoned to the neck if he wears that mini-skirt? He probably wouldn’t get it. “You’re right,” I answered instead, and I removed my shirt.

Cree women apparently wore long dresses (deerskin) before Europeans arrived and traditionally covered their bodies pretty much head to toe. What Tatoosis did not know was that, prior to the arrival of the good Oblates, Salish women did not wear shirts during the summer or at a good old bone game.

In this era of Aboriginal Studies, there is a tendency to red-wash or clean up our past before passing on our traditions, and sometimes it gets cleaned up in accordance with someone else’s current morality. I am not advocating a return to the old lahal games practices, in which women sang and danced half-naked, enthusiastically cupping and bouncing their beautiful breasts in an attempt to distract the other team, but we should know a little about who we are before we become someone else’s idea of who we should be [172-3].

In Craig Womack's Red on Red (Minnesota, 1999), he complains, "It is way too premature for Native scholars to deconstruct history when we haven't yet constructed it" (3).  As I wrote before about his complaint, deconstruction really isn't the issue.  I've heard similar complaints from African-Americans and some of my Homo-American brethren as well when they are confronted with anti-essentialist arguments.  It doesn't really matter what you replace it with: the standard -- traditional? -- academic approach to history is seriously flawed, not just in content and European bias but in method.

I wonder what Womack would make of Lee Maracle's story.  When Native peoples are under attack, when (as an elder Womack quotes put it) "We may look like Indians, we have the color of an Indian, but what are we thinking? What are we doing to our own children who are losing their language, their own ways?" (55), shouldn't Maracle have held her tongue and covered up, instead of insulting an elder to his face in public?  Shouldn't she have reined in her rebellion until the First Nations were safe and secure again?  Shouldn't Native women be supporting their men instead of tearing them down?

Of course not.  The hard part about living in the world is that you have to do everything at once -- recover the past, invent the future, and balance the present -- and this task is all the harder for oppressed groups struggling for survival.  Being embattled is no excuse for falsifying the past, though, or imposing irrelevant restrictions on your fellows in the present.  I don't know whether Ernest Tatoosis got his prudery from Christian missionaries or the parallel mindset in Cree culture, though what an amazing coincidence that his ideal woman's outfit sounds so suspiciously Victorian.  But it doesn't matter: why should Maracle have dressed "more traditional"?  How would it have helped her as an (evidently very effective) organizer?  His phrase "real Indian women" gave the game away: as though Maracle wasn't a real Indian woman.  Every divisive stumbling block ever thrown into the path of an organization has been justified by someone as being necessary, and for the group's own good, when it's more likely they sprang from someone's neurotic compulsions: notice again Tatoosis staring at Maracle's cleavage.  There's no principle for deciding the question in advance, but I do think people need to be more skeptical of such moves.  I think Maracle made the right response in that moment, though I'd love to hear more about Tatoosis' reaction, and I wish more of the writers in Me Sexy had her attitude.

The Intelligent White Person's Guide to First Nations Sexuality

I've begun reading Me Sexy: An Exploration of Native Sex and Sexuality (Douglas & McIntyre, 2008), edited by Drew Hayden Taylor, and I have a question about the opening paragraph of the Introduction:

When I told people I was thinking about putting together a book about the world of Native sexuality, the two comments I got back most often were: (1) "That will be a short book" and (2) "Isn't that a contradiction in terms?"  Usually these comments were said with a knowing smile, but I knew there was a grain of social belief buried deep within.  And I thought, "If only they knew..." [1]

Okay, two questions, actually.  One: who are the "people" who made these comments?  Were they "Natives", or were they "whites"?  I think it makes a difference in how to take their comments, since they could be taken as self-mocking humor in the former case.  Two: I'm going to assume that they were white (or "Last Nations," as they're known in Canada), since the book as a whole is directed at a non-Indian audience, a sort of guided tour whose point is that we whites are the ones who are hung up about sex because of our Western binaries and our Christian culture, while Natives are closer to nature and in touch with their bodies and not uptight about sex, but also their sexuality is infused with the spiritual and the Sacred.  This stance puts the book into a double bind, since such stereotypes are also a standard part of white propaganda about non-whites... But I digress.  My second question is: Are people really that clueless, to think that any group of people doesn't have a lot to say about sexuality?  Oh hell, I know they are.

So Me Sexy, which I'm about two-thirds of the way through as I write this, is probably marginally more self-aware than a live sex show for tourists in 1950s Trujillo-era Havana, since the discussion of sexuality in arty and academic sectors of North American Anglophone society has come some little distance in the past sixty years.  The writers included come mostly from those arty and academic sectors, after all, so their discourse is mostly ironic and knowing, and it's also self-conscious and didactic, to let the reader know that the sexy talk is just a come-on for the chalk talk that is to follow, which is for our own good.  But then it's also reminiscent of the medical/social framework that pornography used to use as a defense against prosecution: this is not just a dirty book but a serious educational exploration of problems of sexual adjustment in our society today.  (As I recall, even as late as the early 70s, Deep Throat began with a disclaimer to advise the audience that it was really about an ordinary woman's quest to achieve a healthy sexual adjustment.)  The subtitle of the book underscores the ambiguity, which I'd like to think is intentionally ironic: An Exploration of Native Sex and Sexuality -- so our handsome, hawk-eyed (or proud, beautiful, raven-haired) Native guide and interpreter will lead us into an uncharted wilderness of the human heart and naughty bits.

I checked out Me Sexy after seeing it cited and recommended in several recent books I've read lately by Native American scholars, and I have to say that what bothers me most about it is how Western it is.  I'm not really surprised, since as I say it's clearly written and compiled with a white readership in mind.  The editor remarks that after "a vice-chief from the Assembly of First Nations" asked him, "Have you ever thought about writing about something important, like self-government?" (1) instead of "the dominant culture's perception of Native sexuality", he asked ten people at a powwow "which they would be more interested in reading or thought was more relevant to their lives: an essay on self-government or an essay on Native sexuality.  I don't think I have to tell you which answer I got" (2).  I think that if I were Indian, I'd be interested but disappointed in the writings gathered here, since they were written for the education and titillation of whites, rather than mine.  I dare to say so, though I'm not Indian, because I've seen analogous works "about" gay life but made for a straight audience, such as Philadelphia.  The trouble with such works is that even the intended audience shouldn't trust them, because they're produced with an eye on public relations and Our Image, which is bound to distort the content and the message, so that the target audience believes it has learned more, and come closer to the subject people, than in fact it has.  Does that correct the dominant culture's perception, or reinforce it?

Now, I don't mean that Indians are required to educate, let alone titillate me with the inside dish on their sex lives.  But I do think that any PR exercise such as this has a corrupting effect on the producers as well as on the intended audience, and I speak as one who has been observing and debating this question for decades in my own community.  PR productions by gay people for straight audiences certainly corrupt: the producers and spokespeople may even begin to believe that real Homo-Americans are monogamous, clean and sober, responsible adults -- just like heterosexuals are!  Then they begin to lie, even to themselves, about the less-PR-compliant aspects of their lives -- just as heterosexuals do!  Such PR material lacks a subconscious: it shows selfless, truth-seeking scientists who care only about decoding the secrets of nature and not about Nobel Prizes or fudging data; it shows honest leaders of the Free World intervening humanitarianly to protect human rights in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Libya (or honest leaders of the Soviet bloc protecting Czechoslovakia and Hungary against the depredations of American imperialism); it shows decent Homo-Americans living in ranch homes with white picket fences, saying the Pledge of Allegiance and clamoring at the recruiting offices to serve and defend their country; it shows spiritual but refreshingly raunchy Natives celebrating their sexuality as an embodiment of the Sacred.  Ambivalence and ambiguity, let alone an underside, are neither depicted nor admitted.

So, what to do?  One dilemma any outsider faces is that his or her good intentions will also be suspect: am I really interested in Native sexuality out of human fellow-feeling and acceptable curiosity, or am I a voyeur in search of exotica and an Other on whom I can project the parts of myself I don't wish to own?  I think such questions can only be dealt with face-to-face, not in print.  The editor tells the reader, "Think of [Me Sexy] as a 'How to make love to a First Nations person without sexually appropriating them' type of book" (3), which I think overreaches just a tad.  One of the contributors promises, "Being an Ally Is Sexy!" and offers "five things you can do" (48).  If only it were so easy, so simple.  But I suppose it's nice to be reassured, even if the promises are still for the tourist, sexual or otherwise, who will soon finish the book and be back at home.

Which returns me to my opening question.  Should I assume that American Indian sexuality is Other?  Me Sexy seems to take for granted that I do, and even that I should.  But I don't think I do, except that every other human being is Other to me (as I am to them), and when I read or listen to their words, or come together with them sexually, I'm being invited into their world to learn about them, not just as an individual but as a member of some larger group.  I don't blame Drew Hayden Taylor and his contributors for wanting to keep me at a distance -- there are very good reasons for them to do so, and no one owes anybody else their soul -- but Me Sexy feels less like an exploration than a theme park, a good-natured and professional 21st-century sideshow performance that promises knowledge but delivers something less.  I've been around the block enough to know that there's a lot more to be learned, not just by me but by these writers.