And as Alex Mell-Taylor writes this morning in Prism & Pen, European colonizers began another kind of witch hunt almost as soon as they arrived in North America, keeping it up practically to the present moment.
They began to ruthlessly persecute indigenous people (often women) for gender and sexual diversity. Make no mistake, the first anti-queer witch hunts did not start in the late 19th or 20th centuries as many claim.
The witch hunts started in the 17th century as colonizers targeted Two Spirit Native Americans and other Native Americans who violated European ideas about sexuality and the gender binary. Indigenous women with “loose” sexual values were used to whip up hysteria.
https://medium.com/prismnpen/americans-have-been-panicking-about-queer-people-since-before-america-existed-bcfd039ad3cd?sk=6b318a06eab462d92d1da5c4ba724c43
Right up into living memory, Native American children have been snatched from their homes and stolen from their families — either adopted out or sent to harshly punitive Christian (mostly Catholic) schools to change their values.
The motivation for doing so has almost always included disgust at native sexual mores, often queer mores by traditional European values.
Even today, native children can face being snatched from their families by moralizing government officials. It's not rare at all, though it's much more common in the United States in states led by Republican officials, who often make no bones about the supposed superiority of traditional Christian sexual values.
I'm reminded of the awesome young Canadian artist Jayli Wolf, who sings hauntingly about the harm she and her indigenous father suffered:
