Here is Queer!

  Hello everybody, how are you doing? I bet you couldn't wait for my new post. And as I appreciate you very much, here I come with which will be almost the last theme discussed in the rez.

Today we are going to be dealing with homosexuality and homosexuality in native culture. Homosexuality is in this case represented by Emily Dictionary, who after leaving her house enrolled a motorcycle band. This band, called the Rez Sisters, had a leader, Rosabella Baez, Rose who was Emily's lover, as she tells Marie-Adele, “I loved that woman, Marie-Adele, I loved her like no man's ever loved a woman.” ( 97)

Sadly, Rose killed herself because of “how fuckin' hard it is to be an Indian in this country.” (97). But Emily gives us more clues about Rose and what drove her to suicide, “She was always thinkin' real deep. And talkin' about bein' a woman. An Indian woman.” (97)

If you remember we were talking about this some entries ago, about how native women colonized in two ways, one for being native and also for being women. Now imagine, how can it get any worst? Well, being gay.

So these women are now colonized in three different ways: Native, women, lesbian. Great.

This is a very interesting topic in which we can see how a dominant culture can destroy what it touches to the very roots.

Traditionally in many native American cultures, as it is the case of the Cree nation, there were people called two-spirits. They did not conceived the gender roles with have in our culture, for them the opposition man-woman didn't exist. To make it clear to us, two-spirits would be gays, lesbians and transsexuals, and basically anything in between.

The native tradition tells that these people were gifted because they carried two spirit, male and female and were revered and honored by their tribes. Women could marry other women and so men could marry other men. This type of gender identities have been reported in over 155 tribes in North America.

Two-spirit people held high positions in their societies, they were basic components in their social structures, being visionaries, healers, shamans and care givers.

It all seemed to be going just fine, until the colonizers came. When the first Europeans came to stay (French and English mainly), the existence of these two-spirit community was seen as a threat to them. First because it was against the Christian believes and morals and also because they were the spiritual leaders of the tribes. So, those Natives wearing skirts had to be gone, and so the persecution started, a persecution that has lasted until today, after their existence has been denied and almost destroyed.

Two-spirits unions were quite common

Thanks to that and the cultural assimilation that natives suffered, the two-spirit tradition has become that dirty secret nobody talks about in Christmas, being even rejected in their own communities.

This is one of the issues Highway explores in The Rez Sisters, being himself gay and very concern about the situation of queer native people. Taken from the essay “ Learning New Tricks: Re- Imag(in)ing Community in the Two-Spirited Writing of Tomson Highway” (this essay appears in following book , Dickinson, Peter. Here is Queer: Nationalisms, sexualities and the Literatures of Canada. By Peter Dickinson, University of Toronto Press, 1999) critic Sheila Rabillard, points out that “Highway's drama seems to invite the audience to see the opposition between the genders as a hurtful condition analogous to – if not the product of – the sufferings brought about by White colonization.” (180)

Emily has to face that situation when she goes back to Wasaychigan, the rejection of those around her. But before that, it is important to acknowledge that two-spirit is a broader concept than just sexual orientation or gender. And Emily fits perfectly into that category, she has been in love with Rose and after that she is pregnant with Big Joey's child, something that does not represent any type of problem for her. She is unconsciously fighting against the dichotomy imposed by European tradition.

According to Walter Williams and his book The Spirit and the Flesh, “post-contact and , in particular, post-independence regulation of sexual diversity and gender variance among various Indigenous cultures by white European settlers was accompanied by a decidedly nationalist fervour.”

Natives have been deeply affected by these process of colonization , that is the case, for example, of Veronique, a deeply religious (catholic, as a matter of fact) woman who in the quarrel scene shouts at Emily, “You have no morals at all. You sick pervert. You should have stayed where you came from, where all the other perverts are.”(45)

Veronique is clearly referring to her relationship with Rose (she comes from San Francisco, so... yeah, you do the math), and even though her traditional heritage wouldn't condemn Emily's relationship, she has assimilated the morals, believes and culture of the colonizer. Another author, Gary Kinsman, in The Regulation of Desire: Sexuality in Canada, argues that “ [a] crucial part of the subjugation of … Native peoples was the destruction of their erotic, gender, and social life and the imposition of European social and sexual organization … This story of extreme cultural, social, and physical violence lies at the roots of the Canadian State.” (178)

Colonization has done such a good job, that it has even destroyed one of the most important pillars in the creation and survival of Native culture. Not only has it denied the existence of these people, but it has made the Natives themselves believe that the people they honored for being special creatures, are nothing but perverts that should be destroyed. Inevitably, this situation has brought a new cultural collision, first with the white dominant culture, and then in the core of the Native life, making people fight one another.