This week we are rebroadcasting our interview with Dr. Kim TallBear originally aired in February of 2020.

Intimacy and sexuality is the soil that gives rise to creativity, pleasure and the regeneration of new life. As mainstream understandings of sex, marriage, and family continue to shift, Dr. Kim TallBear highlights how the colonial project of nation-building disrupted the vitality of Indigenous kinship by imposing heteronormative monogamous marriage and the nuclear family structure. How have these constraints bred hyper-sexualized, paradoxical and fetishized beliefs that degrade relationships, the wellbeing of communities and the land? How do the forces of settler state biopolitics and multiculturalism continue to shape population in the colonial mold?  By unraveling the doctrines of scarcity and separation, we are challenged to shatter pervasive beliefs of boundaries, binaries, and taboos within our relations.

Kim TallBear is Associate Professor, Faculty of Native Studies, University of Alberta, and Canada Research Chair in Indigenous Peoples, Technoscience & Environment. She is also a Pierre Elliot Trudeau Foundation Fellow. Dr. TallBear is the author of Native American DNA: Tribal Belonging and the False Promise of Genetic Science. TallBear earned her PhD from the University of California, Santa Cruz History of Consciousness program, a Master’s in City Planning from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and a B.A. in Community Planning from the University of Massachusetts, Boston. She is a regular commentator in US, Canadian, and UK media outlets on issues related to Indigenous peoples, science, and technology. Building on her research on the role of technoscience in settler colonialism, Dr. TallBear also studies the colonization of Indigenous sexuality. She co-produces with two other Indigenous women the Edmonton-based sexy storytelling show, Tipi Confessions. She is a citizen of the Sisseton-Wahpeton Oyate. She was raised on another Dakota reservation, that of the Flandreau Santee Sioux Tribe and also in the Twin Cities of Minneapolis and St. Paul. She tweets @KimTallBear and her work can be found on her research website www.IndigenousSTS.com. 

Dr. TallBear’s enlivening perceptions echo from the personal to collective, inviting thrilling possibilities to open ourselves to many nourishing forms of relating to one another. Dr. TallBear and Ayana confront western science’s continued appropriation of Indigenous sexuality, ancestry, and creation while unearthing our universal desires for love and belonging. Let us rekindle more generous and sustaining forms of intimacy that flow beyond the bounds of coupledom, embracing all of our kin alike. 

♫ The music featured in this episode is “Goodbye Captain Lee” by M83, “The Kids Are Having None of It” by Frazey Ford, and “Row” by Frase.

References & Recommendations

Explore Dr. Kim TallBear’s academic research and creative projects:

Follow @KimTallbear & @Indigenous_STS on Twitter

Visit kimtallbear.com, Indigenous Science, Technology & Society & SING Canada

RELAB “research-creation” projects grounded in making “good relations.”

The Critical Polyamorist blog 

Tipi Confessions sexy storytelling, performances, & anonymous audience confessions.

Books and Articles 

“Making Love and Relations Beyond Settler Sex and Family” from Making Kin, Not Population, Kim TallBear

Native American DNA: Tribal Belonging and the False Promise of Genetic Science, Kim Tallbear

Caretaking Relations, Not American Dreaming, Kim TallBear

Importance of Being Monogamous: Marriage and Nation Building in Western Canada to 1915, Sarah Carter

Undoing Monogamy, Angie Willey

The Logic of Sufficiency, Thomas Princen 

Decolonization is not a Metaphor, Eve Tuck and Wayne K. Yang 

Playing Indian, Philip Deloria

Scholars, theorists & performers

Donna Haraway
Adele Clarke
Sandra Harding
Alexis Shotwell
Beth Stephens
Annie Sprinkle
Melissa K Nelson
Audre Lorde
David Delgato Shorter
D.H. Lawrence