I am suggesting an examination of the cultural expression of love in an effort to build the foundation of Two-Spirit sexual sovereignty and erotic survivance. Sexual sovereignty is a direct challenge to settler colonialism and heterocentric idealism, which fail at understanding how Indigenous communities experience gender and sexuality. Sexual sovereignty is also a claim that Two-Spirit bodies have a right to identify with gender and sexual orientation fluidity and the physical acts of intimacy, pleasure, and sex as an extension of decolonization and a return to Indigenous roles, identities, and practices that existed prior to first contact. Erotic survivance is an extension of Vizenor’s (2008) work and creates space for Two-Spirit people to share and express how their sexuality (gender, orientation, practice) has been an important aspect to their story of survival. Further, erotic survivance is the stories, poetry, prose, songs, dances, medicine, art, activism, and gatherings Two-Spirit people and communities engage in to celebrate their resiliency, survival, sexual expression and sexual sovereignty.

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Two-Spirit literature encompasses colonization (Morgensen, 2011; Rifkin 2011; Smith, 2011), HIV/AIDS (Vernon, 2001; Jolivette, 2016), historical analysis (Roscoe, 1987, 1996, 2005; Trexler, 1997, 2002), spirituality (Roscoe and Burns, 1988; Brown, 1997), and poetry/prose (Gunn Allen 1988; DinéYazi, 2015; Livingston, 2017; Pico, 2018) and music (Kuhn, 2006, 2010; Enos, 2015).

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I am curious to investigate how Two-Spirit people (some of whom may consider themselves, identify, behave, or relate to others in ways that place them outside of the dominant cultural narrative around sexuality and love) experience love, and the related concepts of intimacy, pleasure, and sex. Through this work, which will address both my personal and political goals there is also a decolonization of sexuality studies that occurs, not only for the sake of Two-Spirit people, but other marginalized and oppressed identities as well.