Introduction: Gender and Indigeneity

This special section on ‘Gender and Indigeneity’ highlights important new work by scholars from Australia, Aotearoa/New Zealand, Canada, Mexico and Hawaii. Together they challenge understandings of gender, sexuality, nature, land and bodies imposed under conditions of colonisation, and they do so by highlighting histories and ontologies not framed by the presence of colonising powers. At the same time, these authors also point to the inherent limitations in White Western feminist thinking around gender as an analytical category, thinking tied all too frequently to the same Enlightenment ontological and epistemological traditions and the same binary logics that sustained the control and exploitation of Indigenous peoples and their lands.