Throughout the history of European colonization of the American continent, which continues today, European visitors and settlers have produced records of their encounters with Indigenous Peoples they regarded as nonheteronormative or queer. Native people have decried the ways such documentation lends itself to cultural misrepresentation and appropriation. In 1990, a group of LGBTIQ+ identified Native American and First Nations people coined the autonym Two-Spirit to insist on Indigenous Peoples’ sovereign rights of self-determination, self-definition, and self-naming. Contemporary Native communities use Two-Spirit as an umbrella term that references gender-expansive Indigenous traditions and identities that exceed colonial logics. This chapter focuses on Two-Spirit/queer Native authors who create literature by and for Two-Spirit people, thus representing the past, present, and imagined future of queer Indigeneity. Proposing that decolonization movements to reclaim queer(ed) Indigenous “gender” traditions and revitalize Indigenous languages are interrelated, this essay reads works by Two-Spirit authors who incorporate Indigenous languages into their writing.

This chapter explores the histories of transgender expression, identities, communities, and activism globally in both premodern and modern eras. Histories of settler colonialism, slavery, war, and imperialism have transformed the terms and conditions by which people of transgender expression and experience understood themselves and were perceived by others. While an abundance of archival records chart widespread practices of “transing” gender globally, a complex web of factors influenced how a given community or individual defined, understood, and judged such efforts. Race, religion, region, culture and class are some of the key contextual forces that gave meaning to trans and gender variant sexualities throughout history. A wide range of concepts have been used to describe and make meaning of gender variant people throughout history, from two-spirit, hijra, and third gender to the more recent transgender, nonbinary, gender expansive. Many other terms that have been used throughout history were deemed derogatory by those individuals and/or communities to which they refer at the time or have since been determined to be derogatory by later generations looking back. This creates a fundamental tension for everyone writing these histories between the importance of recognizing the past on its own terms and the importance of not further perpetuating harm against a long-stigmatized group.

For nearly a century now Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Trans, Intersex, Queer, and/or Two-Spirit Indigenous writers have addressed the ways the intellectual sovereignty of their lives and art strengthens understandings of Indigenous nationhood. This chapter considers how and why these intersections of queerness and sovereignty have informed the fast-growing canon of queer Indigenous literatures in English. To do so, it examines the rise of queer Indigenous activism and health sovereignty work in HIV education alongside the history of queer Indigenous literatures in what is currently the U.S. and Canada. Looking across the work of writers like Beth Brant, Carole laFavor, Craig Womack, Daniel Heath Justice, Deborah Miranda, Gwen Benaway, Billy-Ray Belcourt, M. Carmen Lane, Tommy Pico, and Joshua Whitehead, the chapter highlights the range and breadth of sovereign embodiments from the 1960s to 2020 and argues that in the present day queer sovereignty holds a radical promise for Indigenous futures.