I use polyamory as a stepping stone to critique the imposition of compulsory monogamy and State-sanctioned one-on-one lifelong marriage by the settler colonial State. In Indigenous Studies and Indigenous communities we are always complaining about blood quantum and tribal citizenship rules, the colonial imposition of blood and racial ideology, and those kinds of exclusions, but going hand in hand with that was the imposition of monogamy and marriage, solo-marriage not plural marriage like my ancestors hadâwe were non-monogamist. The colonists divided up the collective Indigenous land-base into 160 acre allotments that they gave to the head of household, which was always a man, and he could get 80 acres for his wife and 40 acres for each child. So here you have this imposition of heteronormative settler sexuality and family structure onto the land.
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All of this stuff came together so I don't understand how we can go after blood quantum and private property without going after monogamy and marriage. And so, many of us in Indigenous communities are so bought in, which leads to the next thing: that our sexuality has been made deviant. It has been made deviant the fact that our ancestors engaged in plural marriages, that they might had have same sex relations. If you look at the historical and anthropological record and our oral histories, Indigenous communities throughout the Americas had same-sex practices, had multiple genders, not this gender binary stuff that the colonizers imposed on us. And it was a site of tremendous violence, I mean they tortured and murdered people who engaged in same-sex practices. They made these practices illegal, they told us that we were sexually deviant and we have deeply absorbed this into our own psyche. It's not only the church that has done this, the state has told us this, and science has told us this. There are scientists at the turn of the Twentieth century assuming gender binaries, assuming heterosexuality as normal and good, and everything else is deviant.
This is one of the things that non-critical polyamorists do, they just have some vague notion where they blame the church. Those polyamorists donât understand monogamy and nonmonogamy within a structural analysis of racism and settler colonialism. It isnât just the church, it's the state, science and the church all working together in a settler structure to impose these violent gender binaries and compulsory monogamy and marriage practices onto us. And so, my own polyamory is a way of living the life I want to live, but also critically examining on a daily basisâI guess I do auto-ethnography on myselfâwhat people are pushing against when they are doing polyamory. I think a lot of polyamorists deep down have some of the same resistance that I have but they don't have the theoretical language, they don't have the politicization that I have to actually blame the settler State for this problem, because settler colonialism doesn't only harm Indigenous Peoples, it harms all of us, and itâs devastating the planet.
Kim Tallbear, âKim Tallbear: The Polyamorist That Wants to Destroy Sex,â interview by Montserrat Madariaga-Caro, translated from Spanish for The Critical Polyamorist: Polyamory, Indigeneity, and Cultural politics in the US and Canada
Tallbearâs critical framework for polyamory conveys the extent to which the personal (i.e., embodied and private relations) is always already political and economic (and religious and scientific and medical and so on), by which I mean that our notions of love are inextricable from historical and cultural backdrop in which love transpires. Here, Tallbear speaks about polyamory in relation to historical Indigenous understandings of intimacy and gender as a way to interrogate why monogamous practices interrelate withâand even to upholdâthe racist and genocidal history of settler colonialism. The imperative here is to remain critical even in intimate spheres. Pair with Elizabeth Povinelliâs thoughts on another distraction (martial language around the Covid-19 pandemic) from necessary political work.