In the experimental poem “Map of the Americas” (2005), Two-Spirit poet and scholar Qwo-Li Driskill (Cherokee descent) articulates a decolonial queer critique of US settlement with its attendant gendered violence and attempted extermination, while symbolically inscribing the queer body back onto the land: “My chest the plains / and hills of this land My spine / the continental divide / my heart drums the / rhythm of returning / buffalo herds…” (Driskill 2005: 10). This poem reflects the ethos of an emergent field of inquiry: the indigenization of “American” notions of geography and land. This field encompasses settler colonial critique, literary deconstruction, cultural geography, and queer indigenous theory. This paper argues with these recent indigenous theoretical innovations in anti-colonial criticism (such as Barker 2017; and Driskill 2010) and argues that the literary (poetic, fictional, and autobiographical) narratives of re-territorialization offer important challenges to the eliminatory logics of settler colonial narratives of landscape and environment (see e.g. Morgensen 2011; and Wolfe 2011). Furthermore, the paper analyses how Two-Spirit and queer Cherokee/Tsalagi poets and authors, such as Kim Shuck, Sarah Tsigeyu Sharp, Michael Koby, and Indira Allegra, poetically and imaginatively resist settler colonial erasure, “dream away borders,” and insist on (re)mapping (Goeman) and indigenizing disparate traumatic topographies. Thus, reclaiming psychic or imagined territories as an act of healing becomes articulated to material indigenization of territories by imagining indigenous survivance and futurity.

Works Cited
Barker, Joanne. Critically Sovereign: Indigenous Gender, Sexuality, and Feminist Studies. Duke UP, 2017.
Driskill, Q. L. “Doubleweaving Two-Spirit Critiques: Building Alliances between Native and Queer Studies.” GLQ, 2010, doi:10.1215/10642684-2009-013.
Driskill, Qwo-li. Walking with Ghosts. Salt Publishing, 2005.
Goeman, Mishuana. “(Re)Mapping Indigenous Presence on the Land in Native Women’s Literature.” American Quarterly, 60.2, 2008, pp. 295–302.
Morgensen, Scott Lauria. “The Biopolitics of Settler Colonialism: Right Here, Right Now.” Settler Colonial Studies, 1.1, 2011, pp. 52–76.
Wolfe, Patrick. “After the Frontier: Separation and Absorption in US Indian Policy.” Settler Colonial Studies, 1.1, 2011, pp. 13–51.

Marianne Kongerslev (PhD, University of Southern Denmark, 2016) is Assistant Professor of Anglophone literature and cultural studies at Aalborg University, Denmark. She has previously carried out research on Native American literature, US popular culture, gender studies, and critical race studies, and she has previously taught US cultural studies at Copenhagen Business School, University of Southern Denmark, and Aarhus University. From 2014-15, she was visiting student researcher at UC Berkeley. She recently started researching spite and precarity in US literatures and culture, in a project funded by the Carlsberg Foundation.

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My paper would fit in both stream 3 and 7, so I am open to be included in either, should my proposal be accepted.