News-Letter

Three prominent Native American writers and professors spoke at 10th annual Queer October Symposium Wednesday, Sept. 15.

The event was co-sponsored by the English and Women and Gender Studies departments and organized by English professor Michael Moon.

Presenters included Deborah Miranda from Washington and Lee University, Scott Stevens from SUNY-Buffalo and Craig Womack from the University of Oklahoma.

The speakers discussed not only their professional work in the field of gay and lesbian and Native American studies, but also the personal challenges they face as gay Native Americans.

Event sponsor and Hopkins English professor Michael Moon expressed enthusiasm for this year's symposium speakers.

"I invited Craig Womack and Deborah Miranda here," Moon said, "because they are some of the first writers to be addressing their Native American heritage and their sexuality both in academic writing and in fiction and poetry."

"To discuss both gay identity and Native American identity puts you in a very small space," said Stevens.

"You're adding another "ism' to yourself," he added. "I'm Native American and I'm gay...People are like, "What else are you? Vegan?' No, no, two isms are quite enough for me."

Stevens teaches classes on 17th- century English literature and "Literature of the Encounter," or literature detailing the first contacts between Europeans and Native Americans.

His scholarship has not focused on Queer Studies.

"When I first got the invitation to speak, I was a little surprised, since my work is not necessarily about queer issues," said Stevens.

"I thought, I do write about Native American issues, I am gay...Who talked?"

Though Stevens' professional work has not dealt with the intersection between Native American and gay identities, his personal life has.

"Coming out in the Native American community, you are not necessarily welcomed with open arms," he said. "I think this is due to a sort of Indian nationalism."

Stevens related several anecdotes of nationalistic governments that painted homosexuality as a European, and hence, imperialistic import.

"I have a colleague from Mozambique, and he said that the government tells people that homosexuality comes from Western Europe, it is a perversity, a decadence," Stevens said.

He added that in the Eastern Bloc countries, the governments considered homosexuality a cultural problem.

"[Homosexuality] is a Western decadance at odds with our socialism and our nationalism," Stevens said. "You get that among some Native Americans."

Stevens related the issue of nationalism to his own personal experiences with intolerance within the Native community.

"Queerness is viewed as foreign to Indianness," he said. "My relatives viewed it as an educational issue: They sent me to college, I got a fancy education and now I'm gay."

Womack, a member of the Muskogee Creek tribe, professor at Oklahoma State University and author of Red on Red and Drowning in Fire, read his review of a recent anthology of Cherokee playright Lynn Riggs.

Riggs is most famous for writing "Green Grow the Lilacs," the play that became the Rogers and Hammerstein musical "Oklahoma!"

But Womack said that Riggs's homosexuality is often overlooked in critical reviews of his work.

In the most recent collection of Riggs's work, the word "gay" is never used at all.

"Queer issues are central, not peripheral, to Native issues," said Womack in his review.

Womack suggested that tribes oppose their states' ban on gay marriage in order to stress their independence from their respective state governments.

"I think they should do this, number one, because it's the right thing to do and number two, because it's a chance to assert some sovreignty," said Womack.

"Gay and lesbian issues are front and center to sovreignty issues."

Miranda, a professor at Washington and Lee University, spoke of the difficulties she faced in coming out to herself and to her family and community.

"I came out to myself only 10 years ago, and to my family five years ago," said Miranda.

Miranda had previously married a man and bore his two children before admitting to herself that she was gay.

Miranda said that growing up, she was "ashamed" of her identity.

"Being an Indian woman is a lot of shame, a lot of intensity, a lot of joy for me," she said.

"I tried to forget my Indianness. But when I gave birth and saw my childrens' Indian faces, and saw that they had the same faces I'd seen in old family photos, I became interested in being the most honest person I could be," Miranda said.

A poet, Miranda admits that her poems have provided her with a cathartic quality unavailable to her through other mediums, especially in its less obvious qualities.

"I know that someone will be reading one of my poems at a reading one day and say, "Oh, this is a lesbian poem in code!'" said Miranda."

She continued, "And that's true: I had to hide a lot of my true feelings in my first book [Indian Cartography]," Miranda said. "A lot of it is dishonest, and I struggled with that. The second book that's coming out is a lot more honest."

Miranda's work, both her poetry and her academic essays, deals largely with the erotic in indiginous culture.

"Within the erotic is some sort of survival that has served Native communities very well," Miranda said.

"The erotic is a form of aliveness that doesn't even address colonization."

Miranda added that sexual freedom was necessary for the health of the Native American community.

Native communities, according to Miranda, suffer from "so much suicide and substance abuse."

"That's the story of my family," Miranda said.

"These are people who come out of the mission so traumatized that they don't know how to love: how to love themselves, to love their children."

She added, "We need loving relationships...That's why, in my opinion, if you want to love fifteen genders, go ahead."

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