アメリカ先住民研究におけるジェンダーとセクシュアリティ

Gender and sexuality within Native North American societies had long been neglected in historical studies until recent years. This is because there has been a substantial limitation in the availability of historical documents on Native North Americans. Accessible documents are usually those of Europeans or Euro-Americans since most Native North Americans were nonliterate. Because of this limitation, those documents often include cultural misunderstandings and biases toward Native North Americans. Besides this limitation of documents, scholars’ attitudes toward Native North Americans had also been a problem. Many scholars, especially historians, tended to see heterosexual native men as representatives of Native North American societies when they studied natives. For that reason, most historical studies had not paid enough attention to the roles and statuses of women, gender relations, gender fluidity, and diverse sexualities within native societies. To conquer those problems of studies on Native North American gender and sexuality, historians and anthropologists have made great efforts to reevaluate the limited non-native documents, including historic anthropological field notes, especially in a newly developed academic field known as ethnohistory. Today, many historical, anthropological, and ethnohistorical studies reveal diverse gender relations and sexualities in various native communities before and after European　and Euro-American colonization. In this article, I review the rich fruits of those Native North American gender and sexuality studies.