Lisa Tatonetti – författare

This Music is the final, intimate work of celebrated Koyoonk'auwi (Concow) poet and essayist Janice Gould, completed posthumously by a collective of close friends and literary scholars.Told through lyrical prose poems and personal photographs, this memoir traces Gould's life as a queer/Two-Spirit California Native coming of age in the late 1960s, navigating family, identity, activism, and art. With reflections on her mixed-blood heritage, her experiences in lesbian feminist circles, and her journey as a poet and musician, Gould's voice resonates with clarity, tenderness, and fierce honesty.The book opens with a foreword by Joy Harjo and an introduction from the editorial collective, including an essay by Gould's spouse, Marie-Elise Wheatwind, framing the memoir as both a literary achievement and a loving tribute.This Music is a vital contribution to Indigenous and LGBTQ literatures, offering readers a rare and powerful account of gender, sexuality, and Native identity in mid-century and contemporary America. As the one hundredth volume in the Sun Tracks series, this work honors Gould's legacy while expanding the canon of poetic memoir. Ideal for readers of poetry, memoir, and Indigenous literature, this book will resonate deeply with scholars, students, and anyone drawn to stories of resilience, creativity, and the enduring power of memory.

With a new and more inclusive perspective for the growing field of queer Native studies, Lisa Tatonetti provides a genealogy of queer Native writing after Stonewall. Looking across a broad range of literature, Tatonetti offers the first overview and guide to queer Native literature from its rise in the 1970s to the present day. In The Queerness of Native American Literature, Tatonetti recovers ties between two simultaneous renaissances of the late twentieth century: queer literature and Native American literature. She foregrounds how Indigeneity intervenes within and against dominant interpretations of queer genders and sexualities, recovering unfamiliar texts from the 1970s while presenting fresh, cogent readings of well-known works. In juxtaposing the work of Native authors-including the longtime writer–activist Paula Gunn Allen, the first contemporary queer Native writer Maurice Kenny, the poet Janice Gould, the novelist Louise Erdrich, and the filmmakers Sherman Alexie, Thomas Bezucha, and Jorge Manuel Manzano-with the work of queer studies scholars, Tatonetti proposes resourceful interventions in foundational concepts in queer studies while also charting new directions for queer Native studies. Throughout, she argues that queerness has been central to Native American literature for decades, showing how queer Native literature and Two-Spirit critiques challenge understandings of both Indigeneity and sexuality.

Examining the expansive nature of Indigenous gender representations in history, literature, and filmWithin Native American and Indigenous studies, the rise of Indigenous masculinities has engendered both productive conversations and critiques. Lisa Tatonetti intervenes in this conversation with Written by the Body by centering how female, queer, and/or Two-Spirit Indigenous people take up or refute masculinity, and, in the process, offer more expansive understandings of gender. Written by the Body moves from the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century archive to turn-of-the-century and late-twentieth-century fiction to documentaries, HIV/AIDS activism, and, finally, recent experimental film and literature. Across it all, Tatonetti shows how Indigenous gender expansiveness, and particularly queer and non-cis gender articulations, moves between and among Native peoples to forge kinship, offer protection, and make change. She charts how the body functions as a somatic archive of Indigenous knowledge in Native histories, literatures, and activisms-exploring representations of Idle No More in the documentary Trick or Treaty, the all-female wildland firefighting crew depicted in Apache 8, Chief Theresa Spence, activist Carole laFavor, S. Alice Callahan, Thirza Cuthand, Joshua Whitehead, Carrie House, and more.In response to criticisms of Indigenous masculinity studies, Written by the Body de-sutures masculinity from the cis-gendered body and investigates the ways in which female, trans, and otherwise nonconforming masculinities carry the traces of Two-Spirit histories and exceed the limitations of settler colonial imaginings of gender.