There are many terms to refer to them – Indian, Native, First Nations, Indigenous, and Tribal peoples – because their experiences relate to a plurality of power relations that vary across colonial experiences. Indigenous peoples are as diverse as the processes of colonisation they continue to endure. There are an estimated 370 million Indigenous persons in 90 countries over 5000 nations that speak thousands of languages. This chapter sheds light on the value of Indigenous diversities for non-Indigenous worlds.
Indigenous sexualities are embedded in the impossibilities of epistemological translation. The problem is not only that the global sexual rights regime cannot account for the place of desire in pre-colonial societies it is also that discussions of Indigenous sexualities in English risk being anachronistic and misrepresentative. Mark Rifkin (2011) asks when Indian became straight because heterosexual vocabulary is as inappropriate to understand Indigenous worldviews as the binary imagination. The idea that a person is homosexual, for instance, stems from contemporary assumptions of sexual identity and is only possible after the invention of homosexuality (Katz 2007). Queer debates do not travel well, whether in space or in time. Indigenous sexualities defy contemporary LGBT and queer frameworks. It is not these idioms that are untranslatable, but rather the cultural and political fabric they represent. The spectrum of Indigenous sexualities does not fit the confined Western registries of gender binaries, heterosexuality, or LGBT codification.
The meanings of gender roles and sexual practices are cultural constructions that inevitably get lost when they are decontextualised in cultural (and linguistic) translation. Indigenous queerness is also invisible because sexual terminologies are lost in translation. They surprise because they express sexual diversity in non-modern places. Indigenous homosexualities provoke chuckles because they disrupt expectations of modernity. Sexual freedoms, in turn, are associated with global human rights, secular modernity, and Western cosmopolitanism (Rahman 2014 Scott 2018). In Indians in Unexpected Places, Phillip Deloria (2004) explored cultural expectations that branded Indigenous peoples as having missed out on modernity. This is partly because Indigenous peoples are imagined as remnants of the past, whereas sexual diversity is associated with political modernity. Yet Indigenous experiences are rarely perceived as a locus of sexual diversity. But if native terminologies referring to same-sex practices and non-binary, fluid understandings of gender existed before the emergence of LGBT frameworks, why are indigenous experiences invisible in international sexual rights debates? Language shows that Indigenous queerness, in its own contextual realities, predates the global LGBT framework. In other words, Indigenous sexualities were never straight: ranging from cross-dressing to homo-affective families, they are as diverse as the peoples who practice them. Non-monogamy is the norm among the Zo’é peoples in Amazonia and in the Ladakhis in the Himalayas. The Māori term takatāpui describes same-sex intimate friendships, and since the 1980s it is the term used alongside the term queer. In Hawai’i, the māhū embrace both the feminine and masculine. In Juchitán, Mexico, muxes are neither man nor woman, but a Zapotec gender hybridity. Sexual diversity has historically been the norm, not the exception, among Indigenous peoples.
This is an excerpt from Sexuality and Translation in World Politics.