Discourses surounding death and conquest serve as a way to remind the Native of their inevitable expectation of their death, biopolitical logics are advanced through sexualization, racialization, and the gendering of colonial and non-colonial subjects

Histories of biopower deeply affected Native people’s relationship to the body and to sexuality. Being surrounded by discourses of death, annihilation, and conquest, embedded in almost every popular image of Native peoples, negatively affects Native peoples’ self-esteem, contributing to numerous personal and collective challenges. Most images of Native peoples produced by popular culture are of Pocahontas or Sacajawea. Typically, these Native women are placed within narratives that would have them betraying their race and sacrificing themselves and Native lands for their love of white men. Looking at repetitive images of Native bodies ripped apart physically, mentally, spiritually and sexually by settler colonialism reminds Native peoples that the inevitable expectation for them is death. How can Native peoples feel good about their bodies and sexuality when these are the dominant images and historical facts of their lives? Conquest requires learning a new set of rules for intimacy. Despite these negative images, Native peoples continue to survive and feel sexual desire.

Natives, and lots of other folks, like sex but are terrified to discuss it. For many tribes, this shame around sex started in the boarding schools, and sexual shame has been passed down for generations. Native communities have adapted silence around sexuality to survive the imposition of colonialism in the United States. While the silence around sex and sexualities in Native communities is in some respects similar to that found in mainstream U.S. society, this attitude of silence has dire consequences for Native peoples, because of the relationship of sexuality to colonial power. Colonialism constitutes biopolitics, which marks the Native for death because of the biological and political threat they pose to the U.S. nation-state. Biopolitical logics are advanced through sexualization, racialization, and the gendering of colonial and non-colonial subjects. Sexuality is difficult terrain to approach in Native communities, since it brings up many ugly realities and colonial legacies of sexual violence. As Andrea Smith argues, sexual violence is both an ideological and a physical tool of U.S. colonialism. Because of this reality, there is a high rate of sexual abuse in Native communities. Non-Native pedophiles target children in Native nations because there is little chance of perpetrators being brought to justice or caught by tribal police, since non-Natives on tribal lands are not bound to the same laws as Natives. Historically, and arguably in the present, Native women have been targeted for medical sterilizations. In some Native nations, tribal councils have adapted heterosexist marriage acts into their tribal constitutions. All of this proves that the hyper-sexualization and dehumanization of Native peoples negatively affects Native communities. The response to these horrific crimes has often been silence both by the victims and Native communities as a whole. Native nations have also made laws concerning sexual abuse and rape, so conversations regarding inappropriate behavior of sexual expression do occur in Native nations. The problem is that conversations about safe and fun sex rarely happen because conversations about sex usually only focus on what sexual behaviors are wrong and bad. Sexuality cannot be repressed because it is everywhere. Yet the relationship between colonial power and normative discourses of sexualities is not a part of these dialogues. Heterosexism and the structure of the nuclear family need to be thought of as a colonial system of violence.