Red-Boning: Come and Get Your Love

This work weaves together the sonographs of three audio files: a traditional Dakota love song representing courtship and the multiplicity of Dakota gender identity; a relatively contemporary “snagging” song (“Come and Get Your Love” by the Native band Redbone); and a recording of myself having postpartum, menstrual sex, focused not on penetrative intercourse but on mutual pleasure and creative (as opposed to procreative) sexual acts.

“Red-Boning” brings a hint of levity to the serious work of re-examining our traditional “red bones” for the purposes of collective, spiritual, and sexual liberation.

Several designs are generated in the digital quill-working: the spine/river/starry road down the center; horned figures on the edges linking the strength, fecundity, and social structure of the Bison to our People; numerous ancestors and faces opposite; and between the faces and horned figures, a phallus wrapped in the vaginal canal, illustrating the (pro)creative powers of sex.