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Qwo-Li Driskill. Asegi Stories: Cherokee Queer and Two-Spirit Memory. Tucson: U of Arizona P, 2016. isbn 78-0-8165-3048-9. 210 pp.
Prominent Cherokee poet and critic Qwo-Li Driskill is an important voice in queer Indigenous studies. To name just a selection of hir writing, Driskill's work includes the foundational 2004 essay "Stolen from Our Bodies: First Nations Two-Spirits/Queers and the Journey to a Sovereign Erotic" and the coedited 2011 companion texts Queer Indigenous Studies: Critical Interventions in Theory, Politics, and Literature (U of Arizona P) and Sovereign Erotics: A Collection of Two-Spirit Literature (U of Arizona P), along with three books of poetry: Walking with Ghosts: Poems (Salt P, 2005), Book of Memory: Honor Poems (Dragonfly Rising P, 2002), and Burning Upward Flight (Dragonfly Rising P, 2002). Driskill's first monograph, Asegi Stories, furthers hir powerful intervention into queer Indigenous and Two-Spirit studies.
The term asegi (asegi udanto/udant[i/a] / udantedi, "strange heart" / "spirited"), one of multiple Cherokee terms for Two-Spirit people, functions as the methodological framework for Asegi Stories (6). Rejecting the possibility of reclaiming any sort of untainted knowledge of Cherokee past(s), Driskill instead undertakes a researched return to and reimagining of pivotal moments in Cherokee history, looking for asegi possibilities. Comprised of an introduction, epilogue, and five chapters, Asegi Stories thus takes part in a process of "re-storying," which Driskill defines as "a retelling and reimagining of stories that restores and continues cultural memories" (3). To do so, the text weaves interviews, archival documents, literature, and personal experience into what Ohlone/Costanoan-Esselen/Chumash writer Deborah Miranda might term a decolonial mosaic.
In the introduction, which is divided into six "splints," Driskill recounts the memory of hir first encounter with queer Indigenous literature (Chrystos's...