[2] The neg’s understanding of decolonization is flawed- the 1ac is a necessary to reject the polarization of indigenous women as either overly sexual or nonsexual beings to avoid settler violence. We must endorse the permutation as a a sex positive and queer praxis to energize queer and indigenous women to embrace their state of existence.

A queer, indigenous, sex positive reading offers a larger frame to critically analyze settler-colonialism and Native peoples’ response to conquest. Often Native peoples are represented as hypersexualized and as desiring white people. As Shari Huhndorf has argued, little work in Native studies has been done on visual representations of Native peoples in popular culture even though that is where most of the narratives of Native peoples are distributed. In other words, fictional historical accounts of Native peoples are the dominant mode of representation, yet these have little to do with actual living and breathing Native peoples. Native peoples are always placed in the past and not in the present or future. Most representations of Native peoples involve periods of first contact between settlers and Native peoples; rarely are Native peoples represented pre-contact or post-conquest. Sacajawea and Pocahontas have gained a mythological status as a result of these types of representations. However, Pocahontas and Sacajawea are presented as caricatures and not as Native women who were loyal to their Native nations. The idea of Native people and Native political issues existing in the present disrupts the primary representations of Native peoples as fictional characters from history. I focus on representations of Native peoples in popular culture because many of these images circulate un-interrogated. The analyses that do exist lament the sadness and tragedy of these representations, but alternative “positive” representations respond to colonial sexual violence portraying Native peoples as asexual to protect them from heteropatriarchy and settler-colonialism. A queer Indigenous reading of popular culture places Native peoples in the present and offers sex positivity as an alternative to desexualizing Native communities. After all, as history shows, desexualizing Native peoples has not helped us escape the sexual violence inherent in the heteropatriarchal logic that is the foundation of settler colonialism.

Violence. Death. This is what awaits Native peoples in modernity. Love. Hope. These feelings are also part of the Indigenous experience in Native America. As a queer Native woman who belongs to the Colville Nation, I am passionate about my work on sexualized cultural representations of Indigenous peoples that have been informed by colonial narratives, heteronormativity, and death. By investigating the iconography of popular representations of Native people, my dissertation documents how Native peoples have been historically and culturally sexualized through media like films, coins, statues, and plays. I critique and ultimately challenge how dominant U.S. popular culture sexualizes Native bodies as culturally (and therefore racially) unable to conform to white hetero-reproductive norms. I argue that the white colonial body politic constitutes Natives as dispensable bodies and populations through the queering of indigeneity, a process that changes across different historical contexts. Native peoples have been “queered” through colonial logics of sexuality by making Natives appear sexually aberrant from white settlers and therefore in need of paternalistic care by heteropatriarchy. This move to queer Native Americans maintains settler colonialism in several important ways: the queering of Natives is a crucial part of how they are constructed as unable to manage their land and resources. Unable to fulfill the role of householder, Native peoples fall under the management of white heteropatriarchy instead. These images support narratives of settler colonialism that erase the violence of conquest. Native peoples have internalized and/or rejected these representations of settler colonialism through writing poetry, becoming alcoholics and drug addicts, performing Native theatre, producing and directing Native films made by and for Native peoples, committing suicide, laying sad on their couch watching hours of television, etc. In other words, Native peoples continue to live with these representations of death and grapple with the ongoing effects of settler-colonialism. Some Native nations have responded to these images by desexualizing Native communities and conforming to heteronormativity, passing anti-gay marriage laws, and enforcing a structured silence around sex, all in an attempt to avoid the violence of settler-colonialism. This response has meant the exclusion of queer Native peoples and has not allowed either Native peoples or Native studies to take sexuality seriously as an analytic of study. As an alternative to heteronormative and desexualized readings of representations of Native peoples in popular culture, I use sex positivity as a framework and explore queer possibilities for articulating Indigenous nationhood, sovereignty, and self-determination.