ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on unpacking work surrounding gender and sexuality and on moving towards an understanding of how we can begin to dismantle normative ways of thinking around gender and sexuality in the past. It aims to narrow the focus to the specific approaches we might take to examining gender and sexual diversity archaeologically. Structuralist approaches to anthropological and archaeological research are created by western academia and are in turn consumed by western academics. While social scientists have long recognized gender and sexual diversity in Indigenous North American cultures, this understanding has rarely been on Indigenous terms. Due to the growing discourse surrounding gender complexity and nonbi-nary genders, some archaeologists have begun to consider the possibility of exploring multiple genders materially using a variety of approaches. There is relatively little to draw off of in the realm of archaeological discourse that addresses gender and sexual diversity.
