As a non-native person writing in a U.S. context, I feel that I often approach ethical questions related to indigeneity with a bit of embarrassment. Reflecting on that embarrassment, it seems that this sense comes from two distinct directions. One of those directions involves a sense of powerlessness when it comes to thinking about reparation and remedy. After all, on any list of the crimes against indigenous people, one will find the following: enslavement, land theft, forced removal, genocide, and neglect—to say the least. In the face of these generational evils, how does one go about reparation, especially when I myself—though a descendant of slaves whose ancestors were trafficked here—am a settler on this land? The embarrassment that comes from the other direction has less do with powerlessness than with an unease about our performance of grief surrounding the crimes against indigenous peoples. At least, this is how I feel when we offer land acknowledgments. On the one hand, when I’m feeling least pessimistic, such acknowledgments seem to negotiate a collectively experienced sense of futility. It’s like saying, “What’s done, however unconscionable, is done. We must take note of this. Hopefully a path towards a just outcome will reveal itself. Amen.” And, on the other hand, when I’m feeling, well, most pessimistic, I feel like such acknowledgments take on the realm of the voyeuristic. In these moments, we observe the pain that indigenous communities have gone and are going through; we absorb it; we feel like we have fulfilled a sort of duty; and then we discharge it faithfully— like the responsibility to go to the holocaust museum in Jerusalem or in Washington, DC.
To be clear, I don’t want to argue against offering land acknowledgments. Rather, instead, I want to make a point, one that I think encapsulates the evil of settler colonialism: as a consequence of remaining on these lands without the intention to substantively grapple with the nature of native sovereignty over these same lands, we as settlers still benefit (and sometimes in disproportionately extravagant ways) and native communities, for their part, continue to experience loss, and sometimes irreparable loss. That’s the ethical problem. In this brief reflection, I want to make one recommendation about how we think about cultivating solidarity as a Church amidst the evil of settler colonialism—a recommendation that comes by way of thinking alongside queer theory’s indictment of the heteronormative imaginary.
To make this point, it will be helpful to recall one of the most infamous campaigns in both U.S. and Canadian history, the Indian Education Program. Inaugurated in 1819 with the Civilization Fund Act, the Act encouraged the activities of “benevolent societies”—think organizations like Christian Churches and the Federal government—to provide education for Native Americans with the goal of making them suitable for, as the act specifies, “civilization.” Towards the end of the century, this would lead to the existence of the infamous boarding school system, which at its height in the United States included more than 526 government-funded (and often Church-run) Indian Boarding Schools. These schools were places of emotional and physical abuse, with boarding school operators using tactics such as beatings, starvation, and the relocation of children hundreds of miles away from their homes, in order to enact one of the most famous mottos of the school system, “Kill the Indian, Save the Man.” Between 1869 and 1960, hundreds of thousands of native children were removed from their homes and families where they were punished for activities like speaking their native language or dressing in ways reminiscent of their native culture. [1]
An underexplored dimension of this process of dehumanization is the role that heteronormativity has played in rendering thinkable the various actions taken by the U.S. government. This claim may strike one as a bit strange if one thinks of heteronormativity only as a synonym for something like a system that rewards opposite-sex attraction. But as Mark Rifkin describes in his monograph When Did Indians Become Straight?, heteronormativity refers less to “attraction between men and women or the conditions of reproductive intercourse per se than to a social formation in which coupling, procreation, and homemaking take on a particular normative shape exemplified by the nuclear family”(7).[2]When this perspective on heteronormativity is taken into account, one can see how judgments about native communities’ capacities for governance were decided on the basis of whether they approximated heteronorms. One prominent example to give here involves policies undergirding Indian Boarding Schools. Indian Education policies were ostensibly aimed at cultivating “individuality” among the indigenous, but, as Rifkin also notes, such attention on cultivating individuality ends up obfuscating attention away from the sort of household—the nuclear family—that facilitates the production of such an individual. The Dawes Act, for its part, was aimed at deconstructing tribal lands in order to distribute allotments of land that would subsequently be passed down along heteronormative household lines. As Rifkin notes,
Productive individuality presupposes the installation of a political economy in which land tenure, subsistence, and residency have been reorganized in ways that break down extended social networks and break up shared territory and in which affective ties have been rerouted from various larger communal formations to the nuclear family (150).
The nuclear family thus becomes an icon of civilization itself, so much so that scholar Arnold Krupat in Ethnocentrismcalls the federal Indian policy a romance plot in which heterosexual marriage and the establishment of the nuclear family is regarded as the “culmination of the education/civilization process” (147). If the gift of contact with the white heterosexual is civilization, then heteronormative discourse becomes an alibi justifying the imposition of the settler colonial state.
What might Christians take away from observing this relationship between heteronormativity and the white settler state, one that recognizes the disenfranchising effect that heteronormativity exerts upon claims of native sovereignty? In a phrase, it’s recognizing that Christian commitments to heteronormativity may be among the hindrances standing in the way of indigenous justice. At the dawn of colonization, reproduction of heteronormative lifestyles was regarded as a proximity to civilization. How do we as a Church continue to hide from view alternate ways of organizing our society when we hold the nuclear family—which is not that old, by the way, and can hardly be called biblical—as sacrosanct?[3]What if we saw certain native ways of building kinship as offering us different ways of imagining intimacy and, therefore, governance? One example here is the practice of Kola relationships, something that we see among the Dakota people. These relationships, rather than creating kinship based on blood lines of reproduction, generate kinship based only upon mutual affection. Love may be all that’s needed to make a family, after all—an observation that, following, Nancy Polikoff, should lead us to organizing society’s familial benefits not alongside marriage as much as it should be oriented around any familiar configuration that builds and sustains economic and emotional interdependence.[4]
To add a concluding word here, I want to reiterate something that I said at the outset. The matter of contesting settler colonialism is complex. One path I’ve suggested towards such contestation involves recognizing the connection that claims about the putative “naturalness” of the nuclear family (and the robust individualism that supports it) have to the continued deferral of the project specifically of indigenous justice. In this space, I’ve attempted to show how that relationship unfolded historically with the original inhabitants of North America. However, the significance of such a history can bring along with it a powerful lesson for the present. Such a history, for example, could recast contemporary calls to “defend the family” as more than mere heteronormative invocations around how sex and gender should be organized in a society. Instead, knowledge of such a history renders more visible the historical violence that resides in calls for such defense today, and it can also render more visible alliances that rest between the political organization of any given society and the sexual regimes that give that society its coherence.
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[1] National Native American Boarding School Healing Coalition, “US Indian Boarding School History, https://boardingschoolhealing.org/us-indian-boarding-school-history/.
[2] Mark Rifkin, When Did Indians Become Straight? Kinship, the History of Sexuality, and Native Sovereignty (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011). All parenthetical citations below are from this text.
[3] See, for example, Kathy Rudy Sex and the Church: Gender, Homosexuality, and the Transformation of Christian Ethics (Boston: Beacon Press, 1998).
[4] Nancy Polikoff, Beyond (Straight and Gay) Marriage: Valuing All Families Under the Law (Boston: Beacon Press, 2008).