When Did Indians Become Straight?explores the complex relationship between sexual mores and shifting forms of Native American self-representation. It offers a cultural and literary history that stretches from the early-nineteenth century to the early-twenty-first century, demonstrating how Euramerican and Native writers have drawn on discourses of sexuality in portraying Native peoples and their sovereignty.

Table of Contents

INTRODUCTION; 1. Reproducing the Indian: Racial Birth and Native Geopolitics in Narrative of the Life of Mrs. Mary Jemison and Last of the Mohicans; 2. Adoption Nation: Catharine Maria Sedgwick, Hendrick Aupaumut, and the Boundaries of Familial Feeling; 3. Romancing Kinship: Indian Education, the Allotment Program, and Zitkala-; 4. Allotment Subjectivities and the Administration of "Culture": Ella Deloria, Pine Ridge, and the Indian Reorganization Act; 5. Finding "Our" History: Gender, Sexuality, and the Space of Peoplehood in Stone Butch Blues and Mohawk Trail; 6. Tradition and the Contemporary Queer: Sexuality, Nationality, and History in Drowning in Fire

Reviews

"When did Indians become straight? When we started pretending to be, with and without the help of those who would straighten us. Let's stop pretending or let's get crooked and pretend something better. Let's read Mark Rifkin's book that combines the best of historical inquiry, literary/theoretical analysis, and thinking outside straight lines in ways that confront us with the power of deviant views of familiar, and some unfamiliar, texts and policies." --Craig Womack, author of Drowning in Fire

"Mark Rifkin's When Did Indians Become Straight? provides an exciting and astute account of the relation between the erosion of Native sovereignty and the 'straightening' of sexualities in the history of the U.S. as settler-nation, from James Fenimore Cooper to Leslie Feinberg and Craig Womack. This is a major contribution to a meeting of the waters between Native Studies and Sexuality Studies." --Michael Moon, Professor and Director of American Studies, Emory University

"In asking 'When did Indians become straight?', Mark Rifkin isn't simply being provocative: he's setting the critical foundation for what is undoubtedly the most incisive, well-researched, respectful, and thoroughly engaging study of sexuality and gender in American Indian literature, and one of the best works of criticism in the field in recent years." --Daniel Heath Justice, Associate Professor of English, University of Toronto

"The ideas contained in Rifkin's book are fresh, provocative, and vital to understanding the American past, present and future." --LeftEyeOnBooks.com

"When Did Indians Become Straight? is a groundbreaking study of the uses of the native in the making of critical theory and national belonging."--Elizabeth A. Povinelli, Professor of Anthropology & Gender Studies, Columbia University