Review of When Did Indians Become Straight?: Kinship, the History of Sexuality, and Native Sovereignty by Mark Rifkin

Authors

Clark D. Hafen, University of California, Riverside

Date of this Version

Fall 2011

Citation

Great Plains Quarterly 31:4 (Fall 2011).

Comments

Copyright © 2011 Center for Great Plains Studies, University of Nebraska.

Abstract

Mark Rifkin's When Did Indians Become Straight? is a thoughtful examination of the complicated landscape that lends itself to answering the question the title poses. Rifkin carefully and methodically scrutinizes the rhetoric of straightness within settler colonialism, highlights the intersection between Indigenous kinship models and conjugal couplehood, and problematizes subsequent nuclear/bourgeois homemaking as the dominant model for "family" within U.S. borders.