Brittany Sobolewski
9/28/2014 10:36:57 pm
Wasn't sure where to post so I'll post this here. The poems by Qwo-Li Driskill were different in comparison to a lot of the other readings we've had before. Poems show the artistic side of a people in comparison to essays and critical readings. The poem "Map of the Americas" by Driskill was a very intimate look inside the culture of the Native culture. The story being told was that of the loss of a people and the creation story. The body becoming the land just as in our earlier reading we read about the falling woman with the earth on the back of a turtle. This poem goes into intimate detail involving touch and reaction making it romantic but then it becomes sad when the narrator talks about genocide. It's as if the author of this poem is discussing and telling this story from beyond the grave. As a reader of this poem we become the person doing the exploring of the narrator's body. The poem makes us as reader's feel a sense of guilt for doing what we are doing.
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Merrilee Brown
9/29/2014 01:33:22 am
Merrilee Brown
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Timothy Morrison
9/29/2014 08:15:57 am
At the heart of these three pieces from Driskill is, I think, a discussion about identity. The concept of identity itself is immense to ponder, bit I believe Driskill narrows his examination down to that of Gay Native people in the twentieth century. He emphasizes the twentieth century, too, and I think this works to help establish a sense of newness and individuality for the “Two-Spirit” distinction. Accompanying his writing is a feverish tone of passion, which feels very well placed, as he is representing a virtually unheard of minority within a larger minority. The GLBQ community has grown- albeit very slowly- in the United States within the last twenty years. There seems to be a much more accepting perspective of homosexuality within the millennial generations. Of course, they still face an overwhelming amount of social turbulence, and it is interesting to hear the voice of someone who embraces their identity.
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Elizabeth Grillo
9/29/2014 11:34:19 am
It is so interesting that Indigenous Two-Spirit/GLBTQ people are using Native American and tribally centered teachings to help people understand gender and sexuality and to critique queer phobia and racism. I had no clue that this was even a thing. “Radical Two-Spirit cultural work in the United States and Canada during the late twentieth century cleared a path for Two-Spirit people to form our own modes of critique and creativity suited for Native-focused decolonial struggles. While our traditional understandings of gender and sexuality are as diverse as our nations, Native Two-Spirit/GLBTQ people share experiences under heteropatriarchal, gender-polarized colonial regimes that attempt to control Native nations.” These different critiques make an argument for Native American gender and sexuality against colonial powers. I think it is very interesting.
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stephanie papasodero
9/29/2014 12:06:40 pm
After reading Double Weaving, I realized that I was part of the Eurocentric views of placing Two-Spirit Native Americans as part of colored or black queer studies. I am ashamed of it, but I never give Native people their own group and place them in the one group with anyone of color. I grew up in a society that if you are not white then you are colored and all colored people have the same religious beliefs, skills, political views etc. The only people that seemed to matter were the white people and those were the people we focused on learning about their history. At an early age we need to start learning that not all colored people are from the same places and they don’t have the same languages, religious views, etc. and they are their own people and every culture deserves their own place in history. When thinking about Native American people, I never once thought about the gay community of Native American people or the Two-Spirit Native Americans as they liked to be call, because I have never once heard of this being a part of their culture even though it doesn’t have to be heard of to be a part of their culture but it does not seem to be a common topic. After reading this article, I found out why I did not hear about Two-Spirit people and it is because Two-Spirit people are combined with queer of colored critiques. Race and gender cannot be understood in this country if native people, native nations, and native bodies are “unseen”. Native people need to be another group of color that queer critiques need to include. By not including them, they are receiving a message that they are not of importance and their culture has no impact on current day society. I don’t know what is worse, to belittle someone or act as if they never exisisted to begin with. People of color and Euro-Americans both are complicit of unseeing native people and they forget about native people in the stories they tell or for that matter don’t tell. Being Two-Spirit determines the qualities that define a person’s social role and spiritual gifts, not their genital activity, which is very different with the way our society views it today.
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Caitlin Seddon
9/29/2014 12:52:34 pm
This article focuses on race, gender, sexuality, colonization and decolonization. It has an interesting view of “bringing Native studies and queer studies into critical conversations, or what Malea Powell calls “alliance as a practice of survivance,” Our hope for these emergent critiques lies in the thought that perhaps a turn in queer studies to articulate more carefully issues of race and nation, (Qwo-Li Driskill, 70). I thought this was interesting because we discussed the meaning of survivance last week, surviving while trying to resist. Native American simply want to survive, just as any culture does. At the same time they want to hold on to that culture, thus they might practice something in private, trying ever so hard to hold on to themselves.
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Jacob Jarred
9/29/2014 08:59:53 pm
Of the readings, I chose to begin with “Double-Weaving: Two Spirit Critiques.” Now, considering I myself am a gay man, I thought delving into the concept of two-spiritedness might be interesting. What I got from it, however, was quite the opposite. The author argues a very dull point over a vast number of pages. He/she is trying to assert that the LGBTQA Natives have been completely looked over as a people, and need to be more strongly addressed in queer studies. They manage to tie all of this back to rhetorical sovereignty, as do a lot of our texts. In my opinion, I don’t think queer studies focuses on or should focus on racial inclusion/exclusion, as the author hopes for. Rather, I feel as though queer studies focuses on being queer, and not so much being of a certain ethnicity. Overall the article was kind of whiney and very much redundant, not something I expected nor hoped for in reading this article.
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Brittney Melvin
9/29/2014 09:38:17 pm
In “Double Weave”, Qwo-Li Driskill explores the relevance of GLBTQ people within a tribal community. This piece is interesting because it explores yet another aspect of native life that the white men exploited. The author employs the word “Two-Spirit” in order to represent the native concept GLBTQ people have within them the power of both the female and male spirit. He states that this term “is a challenge not only to the field of anthropology’s use of the word berdache, but also to the white-dominated GLBTQ community’s labels and taxonomies.” (72-73) This is a concept I never considered before, although I think it is very relevant. I understand that homosexual/trans people go through many difficulties and obstacles throughout their lives, but racial differences among this group can also deeply affect the way others look at them. I had never heard of accounts of native homosexual groups or of this term at all. I never considered that since Native Americans and their historical significance and identity are typically not well represented, Native American “queer” groups would be ignored on an even larger scale. The image of the double-woven basket represents the differences and unique elements of native culture. Therefore, the author is establishing the significance of the Two-Spirit identity within the culture of the Indigenous.
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Ronaldo Fontes
9/29/2014 10:50:56 pm
Ronaldo Fontes
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Casner Parfait
9/29/2014 11:42:51 pm
Casner Parfait
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Abbie DeMagistris
9/29/2014 11:45:01 pm
For this response paper I chose to first focus on the poems of Qwo-Li Driskill. One reason being that we have yet to approach Native culture through poetry (with the exception of a few other poems) focusing mainly on native stories or essays. For me, there is a different emotion given when reading a story through a poem-its makes you feel the emotions being portrayed deeper.
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Zack Teixeira
9/30/2014 10:02:16 am
Zack Teixeira
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Timothy Morrison
10/1/2014 04:10:14 am
Leslie Marmon Silko’s “Interior and Exterior Landscapes” contributes a wealthy amount of insight to these ongoing themes of identity, storytelling, and land. Her examination of land is particularly intriguing. She details an arresting understanding of the ways we think about land. The word land itself feels immensely weighty, as it represents not only physical ground, but everything else that comes with it. Land includes everything, from the ground to sea or to a tree. Accompanying this is the overwhelming amount of sentiment and importance that we as human creatures attach to it, and I think this is what Silko is briefly exploring. She writes “The dead become dust, and in this becoming they are once more joined with the Earth Mother” (Silko 27), and that “A rock shares this fate with us and with animals and with plants as well” (27). It is a basic sentiment, but she serves to remind us of the significance of our own mortality and its connection to land. This conversation of land seems guided by the theme of connection, or attachment. We are literally beings of the land around us, and this bond is inseparable.
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Nicholas Machado
10/1/2014 10:20:43 am
I turned a hard copy of this in, but just wanted to post it to make sure I keep up with my online postings.
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Jenna Pelissier
10/2/2014 02:15:16 am
Upon completing the assigned readings for today, my favorite piece – the piece that stuck out to me more than the others – would unquestionably be one of Qwo-Li Driskill’s poems: “Map of the Americas.” Through the evocative use of language, imagery, and emotional allusions, Driskill creates a strong paralleling bond between the land and its history. She even utilizes concrete (or shape) poetry within this piece, in which the typographical arrangement of her words on page 10 is arranged in such a way that it visually represents North and South America. This was a beautiful way to further tie her body to the land – visually and figuratively. In this portion of the poem, she exquisitely describes the arrangement of her body curled up and sleeping upon a bed, and how each part of her body represents a different geographical feature of the Americas.
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