Pubic scarves and earthworm sex: storying Indigenous eroticisms for sovereign relations and futures

Abstract

ABSTRACT For Indigenous peoples, being in good relations with land is crucial for our survival, sovereignty, and decolonization. Our relations are our medicine. This essay suggests that through Indigenous eroticisms, we can better maintain our relations with the complex, life-giving and sustaining ecological and cosmological worlds and our accountability to these worlds, such as the lives and humanity of other-humans and more-than-human beings. In doing so, I tell two place-based Mvskoke stories that story erotic engagements between humans and other-humans. These stories illustrate the fluidity of Indigenous imaginations and remind us of how we should be relating to and living with land, which also informs how we might relate differently to other people. Indigenous eroticisms, I argue, function as a political site for decolonization and the reclamation of our bodies, lands, and sovereignties. Indigenous eroticisms imagine otherwise to colonial empire that depends upon the conversion of land into property and colonial binarism such as human/nonhuman and nature/culture, and therefore offer important medicine for sustaining our bodies and spirits as we create and materialize decolonizing worlds and futurities.