Spaces between Us Quotes

“Such narratives were recalled in Canada in 2009 amid public-health responses to the H1N1 epidemic, after federal agencies delivered to rural northern Native communities vaccine and face masks accompanied by unmandated body bags. Outraged community health leaders deplored this as a sign that the very agencies charged with protecting them had given up and were being readied for their deaths. Here, an epidemiological reading that public-health measures cannot prevent epidemic in rural northern Native communities appears as the rationalizing logic of a settler colonial biopolitics.”
― Scott L. Morgensen, Spaces between Us: Queer Settler Colonialism and Indigenous Decolonization

“Heteronomativity defines all queers as problematic to the racial norms of white settler society, but white queers retain a capacity to redefine whiteness in queer form and on that basis claim national belonging.”
― Scott L. Morgensen, Spaces between Us: Queer Settler Colonialism and Indigenous Decolonization

“This history shows that progressive gay and lesbian politics negotiated its white origins—at first primarily masculinist, but ultimately in a more feminist form—by attempting to be inclusive of gender and race differences in a historically white political model and space. NGLTF”
― Scott L. Morgensen, Spaces between Us: Queer Settler Colonialism and Indigenous Decolonization

“By the 1990s, non-Native queer popularizations of berdache changed in response to Native queer and Two-Spirit activism. Native queer people in the United States and Canada represented Native histories and their lives in counterpoint to berdache, and instead proposed Two-Spirit identity.”
― Scott L. Morgensen, Spaces between Us: Queer Settler Colonialism and Indigenous Decolonization

“By arguing that folk knowledge has proven true, white gay men—citing counterculturist thought and affirming it in conversation—assert that an Indigenous gay nature comprises their sexual and spiritual heritage. In the early pages of RFD, a passage from European paganism to a global and transhistorical indigeneity answered white gay men’s settler colonial inheritance by making them more like Indigenous people than the settlers they otherwise represent. Making indigeneity their truth performed settler modernity by incorporating, embodying, and yet transcending indigeneity when asserting their belonging on stolen land. In RFD and among its readers, such realizations arose in conversations on an ancient and spiritual Indigenous gay nature, inspired by and inspiring of the object berdache. Early”
― Scott L. Morgensen, Spaces between Us: Queer Settler Colonialism and Indigenous Decolonization

“Settler colonialism is a primary condition of the history of sexuality in the United States. Settler colonialism is present precisely when it appears not to be, given that its normative function is to appear inevitable and final. Its naturalization follows both the seeming material finality of settler society and discourses that frame settlers as “those who come after” rather than as living in relationship to Native peoples in a colonial situation. The denaturalization of settler colonialism thus must address social relationships and tales of Native disappearance.”
― Scott L. Morgensen, Spaces between Us: Queer Settler Colonialism and Indigenous Decolonization

“Knowing European manhood’s boundaries to be porous and needing reinforcement, and meeting Indigenous possibilities that threw such boundaries into question, early conquerors invoked berdache as if assigning a failure to differentiate sex to Indigenous people, but they did so to define sexual normativity for them all. Thus, if colonial observers invoked berdache to mark Indigenous difference, the aim was to teach both colonial and Indigenous subjects the relational terms of colonial heteropatriarchy.”
― Scott L. Morgensen, Spaces between Us: Queer Settler Colonialism and Indigenous Decolonization

“For instance, the relationality of “Native” and “settler” invokes intimacies among Native and African diasporic peoples in opposition to and in complicity with settlement: as Native peoples rejected, or practiced, African enslavement; as free blacks participated in settler conquest or joined Natives in resisting; and as Native and black peoples had to debate their ancestral relationships in relation to the hegemony of a white-supremacist color line. Yet, while conditioned by these complex histories, solidarity and kinship ties among Native and black peoples have not been erased as a potential site for challenging white-supremacist settler colonialism.43”
― Scott L. Morgensen, Spaces between Us: Queer Settler Colonialism and Indigenous Decolonization

“I resituate Puar’s account to argue that in a white settler society, queer politics produces a settler homonationalism that will persist unless settler colonialism is challenged directly as a condition of queer modernities.9”
― Scott L. Morgensen, Spaces between Us: Queer Settler Colonialism and Indigenous Decolonization

“Non-Natives live in relation to Native people—whether or not they know this, whether or not they recognize that Indigenous peoples exist—as though Native lands, societies, or cultures were theirs to inherit, control, or enjoy.”
― Scott L. Morgensen, Spaces between Us: Queer Settler Colonialism and Indigenous Decolonization