Me Sexy. Compiled and edited by Drew Hayden Taylor. Douglas & McIntyre, 192 pp, $22.95, hardcover

In the preface to the anthology Me Sexy: An Exploration of Native Sex and Sexuality, editor Drew Hayden Taylor recounts how a vice-chief of the Assembly of First Nations once approached him at a powwow and asked him when he was going to write about “something important, like self-government”. Taylor, widely known as a comic writer whose previous collection, Me Funny, was an excoriating blend of politics and humour, responded by asking 10 people at the same powwow whether they would rather read an essay on self-government or an essay on Native sexuality. “I don’t have to tell you what answer I got,” he writes.

But, ha-ha, here’s the irony: with contributions from the likes of Tomson Highway, Lee Maracle, Gregory Scofield, Makka Kleist, and Kateri Akiwenzie-Damm, as well as from Taylor himself, Me Sexy demonstrates just how intimately entwined issues of sex and sexuality are with the notion of governing oneself.

Daniel Heath Justice argues that “To take joy in our bodies—and those bodies in relation to others—is to strike out against five-hundred-plus years of disregard, disrespect and dismissal.” And Tomson Highway will make readers squirm and laugh in equal measure in “Why Cree Is the Sexiest of All Languages”, as he maps the hilarious gap between mainstream and Cree attitudes toward sex. He recounts a letter he wrote to a friend in his mother tongue: “All right, you stinky cunt. Drive to Montreal right away together with that old bag of yours (my Cree friend’s gay lover) or I’ll never fuck you again!”

“You see?” says Highway, addressing the reader. “In English, it is horrifying. It makes your hair stand on end.…In Cree, among friends, it is hysterically, thigh-slappingly, gut-bustingly funny. Even the sexist bent of the remark is completely absent. How does one explain this phenomenon when one has to cross the frontiers of human language?”

Me Sexy offers perspectives to argue with, to laugh at, and to cry over. And in the aftermath of every essay in this keenly intelligent tome is, in one way or another, about the importance of Native people claiming control of their own sexuality—in their lives, in their stories, and in their imaginations.