Did heterosexuality exist in the Americas before 1492?

[Dr. MB]

According to The Red Nation, it's a violent capitalist construct.

Native people are under constant assault by a capitalist-colonial logic that seeks the erasure of non-capitalist ways of life. Colonial economies interrupt cooperation and association and force people instead into hierarchical relations with agents of colonial authority who function as a permanent occupying force on Native lands. These agents are in place to enforce and discipline Native peoples to ensure that we comply with capitalist-colonial logics. There are many methods and agents of enforcement and discipline. There are the police. There are corporations. There are also so-called ‘normal’ social and cultural practices like male-dominance, heterosexuality, and individualism that encourage us to conform to the common sense of capitalism-colonialism. These are all violent forms of social control and invasion that extract life from Natives and other oppressed peoples in order to increase profit margins and consolidate power in the hands of wealthy nation-states like the United States.

Is heterosexuality something that just didn't exist in the pre-colonial Americas? It's becoming more and more obvious to me that it didn't.

[Dr. MB]

Heterosexuality and homosexuality have obviously existed since time immemorial in the sense that there have always been people who are only interested in sleeping with members of one sex, but people in most societies would have understood those preferences as behavior patterns rather than personal identities prior to roughly the High Victorian era.

Worth noting that two-spirit identity as young Native Americans talk about it today is a "pan-Native" concept that wasn't present in every individual pre-contact society.

It is hardly surprising that anti colonialism thinking perpetuates pan-Native Americanism, as it is naturally a paternalistic concept that view them not as savages who need to be civilized, but weak children who need to be protected.

Many leftists have an intense identification with the problems of groups that have an image of being weak (women), defeated (American Indians), repellent (homosexuals) or otherwise inferior. The leftists themselves feel that these groups are inferior. They would never admit to themselves that they have such feelings, but it is precisely because they do see these groups as inferior that they identify with their problems.