Decolonizing Sex

All My Relations’ “Decolonizing Sex” features Sisseton Wahpeton Oyate scholar Kim TallBear in a conversation about what she calls critical polyamory. The episode begins with sex and intimacy, but its deeper question is how settler colonial society organizes marriage, family, property, sexual fidelity, and the individual body as if they were natural facts.

The episode is valuable for a feminist resource archive because it places sexual politics inside Indigenous relational ethics. TallBear does not reduce intimacy to personal choice or identity labels. She connects it to land ownership, the nuclear family, Christian marriage, colonial governance, and the distribution of care.

It also offers a method: think freedom from relation rather than from isolated individual sovereignty. Decolonization, in this account, does not only occur at the level of land and state power. It also takes place in everyday arrangements of intimacy, parenting, co-residence, separation, commitment, and community responsibility.

For readers interested in the overlap between Indigenous feminism, queer theory, and body politics, this episode is an accessible entry point into a difficult theoretical terrain. It also cautions non-Indigenous listeners against romanticizing Indigenous kinship as a lifestyle alternative; the point is to understand its relation to colonial violence, land, and collective responsibility.