816940

book-review2019
FER0010.1177/0141778918816940feminist reviewthemed book review

themed book review

Feminist Review

critically sovereign:
Issue 121, 92­–93
© 2019 The Author(s)
Article reuse guidelines:

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DOI: 10.1177/0141778918816940
https://doi.org/10.1177/0141778918816940
www.feministreview.com

sexuality and feminist

studies

Joanne Barker, ed., Duke University Press, Durham, 2017, 288pp., ISBN: 978-0-8223-6365-1, $25.95 (Pbk)

Critically Sovereign: Indigenous Gender, Sexuality and Feminist Studies firmly places indigenous gender and sexuality
studies at the core of Native American and Indigenous studies. Revealingly, Joanne Barker’s edited anthology opens
with a dedication ‘To all the Murdered and Missing Indigenous Women and Gender Nonconforming Individuals … May
all our relatives find peace and justice’. The declaration is dire; the political stakes are the well-being of indigenous
lives and futures. That state and interpersonal violence are deeply entwined is a shared tenet of both transnational
and Native feminist thinking and organising. Critically Sovereign considers the structures of ongoing gender-based
and sexual violence against indigenous people and lands within the US and Canadian settler states, and calls for a new
field formation within Native American and Indigenous studies.

Joanne Barker’s introduction maps an institutional history, from the late 1960s student movements onwards, of the
newly minted field of ‘Critical Indigenous Gender and Sexuality Studies’ (CIGSS). Structured thematically, the
anthology coalesces around three foci: key terms in CIGSS, Barker’s ‘polity of the indigenous’ and cultural
representation. The anthology is an exploratory mapping and convergence of overlapping but distinctive frameworks
of queer Indigeneities and Native feminisms. Methodologically, Critically Sovereign presents a cultural studies
approach to environment, law and media refracted through stories about the past and radical visions of the future.

Melissa K. Nelson’s chapter ‘Getting dirty’ is a sensual foray into indigenous futurism and eco-erotics, the joining of
indigeneity and sexuality through ecology. She proposes ‘getting dirty’ as a means of expanding indigenous intimacies
to include the land and ‘getting in touch with our trans-human animalness’. Both Jodi A. Byrd and Mark Rifkin queer
notions of indigenous family, desire and identity through an examination of formative case law in the occupied United
States. Byrd’s ‘Loving unbecoming’ weaves together a Supreme Court case and Afrofuturist Samuel Delany’s ‘Aye, and
Gomorrah’, tracing the ‘Native-as-transit’ through discourses of desire, reproduction, race and disability within the
context of US law and its imaginary. Rifkin’s chapter ‘Around 1978’ analyses two canonical cases in federal Indian law
built around a shared heteronormative terrain of indigenous identity and kinship formations. Rifkin argues that such
a foundation forecloses possibilities for true indigenous political sovereignty. Contributions from Mishuana Goeman
and Jessica Bissett Perea engage place-making and intergenerational healing. In ‘Ongoing storms and struggles’,
Goeman examines Linda Hogan’s Solar Storms (1995), arguing that settler discourses of time and space are about
containment rather than connection. She explores intimate and state violence against three generations of American
 themed book review    121  93

Indian women through a multi-scale analysis of body, land, community and nation state. Perea’s contribution,
‘Audiovisualizing Inupiaq men and masculinities’, emphasises the importance of sonic dimensions for indigenous
cultural productions. She contours the complexities of sonority and Inuit masculinities through an analysis of films
about Native Alaska. Kehaulani Kauanui and Jennifer Denetdale re-examine public memory and queer intimacies
within the Hawaiian Kingdom and the Dine Nation respectively. Kauanui’s chapter examines the legal and political
discourses around sex, love and marriage within the Hawaiian sovereignty movement. She focuses on the transformative
efforts of queer, feminist and mahu Kanaka Maoli pushing against the heteronormativity of state and nationalist
logics of marriage. Denetdale’s ‘Return to the Uprising at Beautiful Mountain in 1913’ centres upon the case of Little
Singer, state violence in New Mexico and the efforts to sanitise narratives of Dine resistance and expansive notions of
family and sexuality within the Dine nation—specifically, polygamy.

In many ways, this volume is a follow-up to Joanne Barker’s anthology Sovereignty Matters (2005). The previous collection
had a more global framework and invited artists and community organisers as contributors. In contrast, the authors
included in Critically Sovereign are leading scholars in Native American and Indigenous studies. Thus, the compact volume
focuses on academic formations and indigenous politics within the context of US and Canadian settler states.

Even so, as an inherently transnational project, Critically Sovereign offers a strong addition to scholarship or
graduate-level coursework engaged with global feminisms. The anthology builds upon other collective contributions
such as ‘Native feminisms engage American Studies’ (Smith and Kauanui, 2008), Theorizing Native Studies (Simpson
and Smith, 2014), ‘Decolonizing feminism’ (Arvin, Tuck and Morill, 2013) and Queer Indigenous Studies (Driskill et al.,
2011). Critically Sovereign also complements special-edited issues of the journal Decolonization, which often features
activists, artists and rising early career scholars expanding queer and feminist indigenous frameworks (Yazzie and
Risling Baldy, 2018). Overall, Critically Sovereign provides a timely entry point into the seismic stakes and shifts within
Native American and Indigenous studies.

Kirisitina Sailiata
UCLA

references
Arvin, M., Tuck, E. and Morill, A., 2013. Decolonizing feminism: challenging connections between settler colonialism and heteropa-
triarchy. Feminist Formations, 25(1), pp. 8–34.
Barker, J., ed., 2005. Sovereignty Matters: Locations of Contestation and Possibility in Indigenous Struggles for Self-Determination.
Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press.
Driskill, Q-L., Finley, C., Gilley, B.J. and Morgensen, S.L., eds, 2011. Queer Indigenous Studies: Critical Interventions in Theory,
Politics and Literature. Tucson: University of Arizona Press.
Hogan, L., 1995. Solar Storms. New York: Scribner.
Simpson, A. and Smith, A., 2014. Theorizing Native Studies. Durham: Duke University Press.
Smith, A. and Kauanui, J.K., 2008. Native feminisms engage American Studies. American Quarterly, 60(2), pp. 241–249.
Yazzie, M. and Risling Baldy, C., 2018. Indigenous peoples and the politics of water. Special issue of Decolonization: Indigeneity,
Education & Society, 7(1), pp. 1–214.