Vulva earrings by Tashina Makokis, made with moosehide, pink moonstones, Swarovski crystals and 'a landing strip' of beaver fur. (Tashina Makokis/Instagram)
Posted on 04/09/2022 5:21:23 AM PDT by Loyalist
Not everyone would be willing to confess their sexual secrets to a room full of strangers. That's where Kim TallBear and her Indigenous erotica event, Tipi Confessions, comes in.
"I confess: my first lesbian experience was with a white person. Even if she couldn't give any land back, she did give me many orgasms," says TallBear, reading an anonymous confession written and submitted by an audience member at a show during Toronto's 2019 Queer Film Festival.
The crowd hoots, hollers and cheers.
Tipi Confessions is a live theatre event, with its co-creators and hosts reflecting on sexual desire and sex positivity through an Indigenous lens. Alongside sexy storytelling and performances, the night is punctuated by the anonymous audience confessions.
Some confessions are all about the laughs. Others, about being vulnerable.
"I confess, I have often had sex more for others' pleasure than my own. This bothers me," read co-founder Tracy Bear at a 2015 event in Edmonton, eliciting a sympathetic "aww" from the crowd.
TallBear, who is an Indigenous scholar of science, technology and sex at the University of Alberta, created Tipi Confessions in 2015, with Bear and Kirsten Lindquist, as a play on the Texas show Bedpost Confessions.
"I think that it provides people an opportunity to sit there in an audience, of sometimes a few hundred people, and realize that we all have these awkward, difficult, hurtful, challenging and joyful moments that we can bring into a conversation about sexuality," TallBear told Unreserved's Rosanna Deerchild.
And they're not the only ones exploring this. Indigenous creators across several artistic disciplines are rediscovering and reclaiming their sexuality through their work — sometimes for fun, other times as a direct response to the effects of colonialism.
That work could take the form of Kanina Terry's Hide Babes Calendar, featuring pinup photos of Indigenous men and women in sexy outfits made of moose or deer hide — a style she dubs "bushoir."
"Our bodies are sacred. And I think having a beautiful, soft, sacred hide next to them is … for me, it's just such an amazing feeling," said Terry, who is Anishinaabe-kwe from Lac Seul First Nation in Ontario.
Or Edmonton artist Tashina Makokis, who makes earrings resembling vulvas out of moosehide strips, Swarovski crystals — and thematically appropriate beaver hair.
Indigenous erotica in literature
It's a more diverse landscape compared to when author and publisher Kateri Akiwenzie-Damm first started looking for Indigenous erotica more than 20 years ago.
At the time, she was surprised to find almost none. When she asked writers she knew about the topic, most realized it wasn't even on their radar.
"I'd see a light bulb go off over people's heads when I broached the subject. They would ... start to realize, like, 'Why am I not writing about it?'" she said.
"But when I actually started talking to people, you know, it was just welcomed. People really wanted to have those conversations."
The result of those conversations was Without Reservation: Indigenous Erotica, a collection of poetry and prose by Indigenous writers around the world including Canada, the U.S., Australia and Aotearoa (New Zealand).
Akiwenzie-Damm said she sought out a wide diversity of content for the collection, but she wasn't interested in submissions that were mostly about dominance or violence.
"I was really looking for positivity [and] for positive reflections of Indigenous people loving each other," she explained.
TallBear shares that sentiment, saying that one of the influences behind these stories is a need to break free from the legacy of colonialism, including residential schools in Canada — which erased cultural memories of all kinds.
"When we talk about sex and Indigenous people, it shouldn't just be trauma," TallBear said. "It shouldn't just be that it was turned into a weapon of violence by the settler state and all of its horrible institutions. It's also a way to share joy and power among each other and our intimates."
TallBear has researched how European settlers forced their views of gender, marriage and property on Indigenous populations as part of their assimilation efforts.
"For them, the heads of households can only be men. Marriages are supposed to be monogamous and heterosexual, and they're supposed to last forever" — a far cry from some First Nations cultures, she explained, where polyamorous or LGBT relationships were common.
Settlers unfamiliar with these kinds of relationships either described them as "sexually promiscuous" or strange — and didn't attempt to learn or record much else about them.
"We're missing a lot from the archive, because they wrote down what they saw and they weren't ... capable of seeing everything," TallBear said.
Reclaiming old traditions to build new ones
Terry's path to the spicy side of photography began when she reconnected with a family tradition that had been previously lost.
In 2017, she attended a hide tanning workshop in Thunder Bay, Ont. The craft used to be passed down through Terry's family. But the generation that was forced to attend residential schools, including Terry's mother, was never afforded the opportunity to learn that skill — and all the cultural knowledge that goes with it.
That workshop set Terry on the path to becoming a skilled hide tanner herself. A few years later, she hit a moment of inspiration during an outdoor photoshoot while wearing lingerie and hide.
"It's always just been about, you know, being myself and feeling confident about myself and who I am as an Indigenous woman out in the bush," said Terry.
Terry says a friend who photographed her coined the term "bushoir," and she loved it. Soon, the idea gained momentum. She collaborated with friends and fellow artists to make the first Indigenous Hide Babes calendar in 2021, with a second out now for 2022.
"There's some women, there's some men, there's some awesome hot boys in drag," she said of the 2022 edition.
She also has a non-bushoir calendar out this year for those who are looking to celebrate hide art and fashion in a more G-rated, all-ages context.
Terry has received a lot of positive reactions to her calendars. But the most poignant review might be from her eldest aunt, who wrote her a letter reminiscing about how she used to tan hides when she was younger.
Terry hopes her work helps Indigenous people become more comfortable with themselves and learn more about sex positivity.
And Akiwenzie-Damm shares that vision. "We needed to reclaim that in order to be fully who we are and to recognize that it's beautiful for us to love each other," she said. "It's beautiful for us to love ourselves."
They’re big’uns. For sure.
CC
Sad, just sad.
I see their traveling freak show isn’t booking many calendar dates. Maybe they need to be more explicit.
I could test drive Morningstar ...
where’s Eager Beaver?
Any Inuits wearing freshly clubbed baby harp seals?
“Let’s attack colonialism”
“We’ll start by making up a word with heavy French influence. ‘Bushoir’ has a nice ring to it”
Angry womyn.
In primitive cultures, there are a few outliers but the general understanding i had was that the closest they could claim as "LGBT" relationships was the common practice of polygamous/polygamous relationships... and "polyamorous" means the clan/tribal leaders had multiple wives who were effectively property and could be used as currency. Before the white man introduced the concept of soap and toothpaste to the world (and started using it commonly), sex was limited to vanilla positions for procreation, and maybe some rarely used but limited extra touching ritual stuff.
The rest of their lives were largely unaffected by their naughty bits, and they certainly didn't define their identities by their kinks, which is why their names are things like "Tallbear" and "Soaring Eagle" and not stuff like "Power bottom" or "Lies on many pelts".
I notice that on Facebook they are promoting the “Two-Spirit” homo Indian men dancing together as if it was normal. It was NOT!
George Catlin noticed that among the tribes there were “Dandys” and “Fops” among the tribes. the warriors hated them as they would not fight or hunt buffalo, and their clothes were made of soft goat skins.
When Catlin decided to do a painting of one of these the other chiefs and warriors demanded their own portraits be destroyed because they did not want theirs in the same room as these “fops”.
The publishers, in a preface made it clear these “fops” were the sex perverts of the tribe.
https://user.xmission.com/~drudy/mtman/html/catlin/letter16.html
Casteneda, in his book on Coronado’s exploration of the West said they came upon several villages composed of only “Sodomites”. Men living with other men dressed as women. Obviously the other villagers wanted nothing to do with them.
I’d have gone with “Nanookie.”
Canadian Broadcasting Corporation....
Probably time to disband colonization as represented by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (mandated Broadcasting Act (S.C. 1991, c. 11 ) in favor of a variety of indigenous media in indigenous languages so as to respect the indigenous groups who have been "colonized" by "European" English as a language, with French as "European" ally to said colonization.
After all, we read in Wiki: "Prior to Confederation, the territories that would become Canada were home to over 70 distinct languages across 12 or so language families. Today, a majority of those indigenous languages are still spoken; however, only about 0.6% of the Canadian population report an Indigenous language as their mother tongue."
So this isn't about decolonization perhaps? Maybe it's just about some overweight lesbians claiming "victimization" -- in colonizing European English -- while using colonizing Marxist chitter-chat to victimize their customers?
But the key thing is to decolonize the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, which wants to write about decolonization using colonial languages and colonial technology.
Did she or her ancestors use a tipi? Sounds like cultural appropriation.
That photo.....just a hard no. They can’t possibly think they look sexy, can they?
DE-sexing SEX too...
Vulva earrings by Tashina Makokis, made with moosehide, pink moonstones, Swarovski crystals and 'a landing strip' of beaver fur. (Tashina Makokis/Instagram)
Feces... it’s a medium for them, and forms the basis of what they think passes for a sense of humor. I recall a story where a conservative was said to have scrawled a swastika in a campus bathroom using a turd.
I instantly knew this to be false, as this particular medium is used exclusively by the left. Remember the picture of the guy at the Occupy Wall Street protest ... uh, protesting on the police car? (don’t look, you can’t unsee it).
Yes... filth in general is the medium of the left. This has to be spiritually motivated.
Ready for woke SI swimsuit edition
Little Horse: "You look tired Little Big Man. Would you like to come in my teepee and rest on soft furs? Come and live with me and I'll be your wife!"[Little Horse, left, below]
Squaw Valley
Fur piece
Rapid rider
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