Getting Dirty: The Eco-Eroticism of Women in Indigenous Oral Literatures

This chapter provides an account of the numerous stories of Indigenous women falling in love with nonhuman, or “other than human,” beings, including animals, plants, stars, and even sticks and rocks from a diversity of gendered identities. It explores what these stories reveal about women’s desires and how these desires have been marginalized and subsumed under colonial social forces and Christian ideologies. Using a mixture of writing styles, including analytic essay, creative nonfiction, and personal narrative, the chapter examines the meaning of pansexual relations and how these stories are used by Indigenous women as inspiration for various activist movements for environmental justice, women’s health and healing, and food sovereignty.