Ep. 47: Letting Go of Shame, Keeping the Orgasms: Indigenous Erotica as Resistance with Dr. Tenille Campbell

This is the episode that will make listeners laugh, blush, heal, and rethink everything they were taught about love, shame, and who they’re allowed to become.In this electric and tender conversation, Dr. Candace Manitopyes connects with with Dr. Tenille K. Campbell, a Dene, Métis, poet, photographer, PhD holder, auntie, and unapologetic storyteller whose work has cracked open space for Indigenous women, femmes, and queer folks to reclaim desire without shame. Tenille shares the raw, often hilarious journey that shaped her groundbreaking book #IndianLovePoems: on heartbreak, sex, vanilla surprises, 12-hour dates, threesome confessions, and the slow, sacred unlearning of colonial purity culture. Tenille and Candace trace how healing pleasure ripples outward into parenting, intergenerational cycles, and the ways daughters, nieces, and femme relatives now move through the world with softness, boundaries, and emotional fluency their Ancestors could only dream of. They speak about queerness as ancient, relational, and culturally rooted; something that has always existed in our stories, despite colonial attempts to suppress it. And through humour, honesty, and unmistakable auntie energy, they remind listeners that choosing self-respect is lineage work, reclamation, and love.-Relentless Actions1. Take out a journal and name one belief you were taught—by family, religion, school, or society about sex, pleasure, gender, or self-worth. Then rewrite it in your own words, from your own truth. Let it become a declaration of who you are now, not who you were told to be.2. Practice one act of softness that you were once taught to fear. This could be resting without guilt, saying no without apology, taking a sensual photograph for your own eyes, or letting someone care for you without shrinking. Choose something small but real, and signals to your nervous system that safety and pleasure are allowed.Relentless Refections1. What parts of my intimacy—emotional, relational, or erotic—are still shaped by someone else’s fear, and what would it mean to return those fears to their origin? 2. Who am I becoming as I choose myself more often? When I say yes to my truth, my boundaries, my pleasure, my softness, who do I turn into? And how does that person change the lineage behind me and the future ahead of me?Relentless Resources1. #IndianLovePoems by Dr Tenillie Campbell, book 2. Stolen From Our Bodies: First Nations Two-Spirits/Queers and the Journey to a Sovereign Erotic by Qwo-Li Driskill, an academic articleSend Us a Text with Your Thoughts or Questions!Join the RIW Patreon Community RIW WebsiteMusic Produced by Award-Winning Anishnaabe DJ Boogey the Beat