Presenter: Joel Ekdahl
Mentor: Kirby Brown, English and Native Studies
Oral Presentation
Major: English
Queer Indigenous critics Lisa Tatonetti and Gabriel Estrada criticize Sherman Alexie’s The Business of Fancydancing for upholding the rural-urban binary, and for defining the Spokane reservation as “a landscape emptied of gay people” (Tatonetti 173). They argue that this binary panders to a white-washed form of multicultural theory whose focus on the fragmented, alienated, urban subject erases the particular circumstances of indigenous decolonization. This divide, they argue, forecloses the recovery “of dynamic Two-Spirit traditions and communities” and thus fails to establish a critique that is both queer and indigenous (Estrada). However, by reading Alexie’s Spokane Reservation as an absolute cultural domain, Tatonetti and Estrada’s criticism occludes Alexie’s engagement with the continuing process of colonization. Alexie utilizes the unique relationship between Seymour Polatkin, Aristole Joseph, and Mouse to explore the diverse issues of reservation poverty, alcoholism, white voyeurism, and internalized Native heteronormativity. Alexie, instead of focusing on Two-spirit revitalization, resists the temptation to essentialize indigenous queer theory by locating critique at the level of personal desire. Focalizing my analysis around Seymour Polatkin, I will argue that his poetry bridges his personal desire to obtain positive recognition while also critiquing colonialism through the stories of his reservation.