Don’t You Savage Me: Explicit Lesbian Romance Featuring Aboriginal Women

By Giselle Renarde

In “Don’t You Savage Me,” bestselling author of the Rainbow Award-winning novel The Red Satin Collection has bundled together six lesbian love stories featuring Indigenous characters.

There’s a little something for every taste, from the sticky-sweet romance between a cop and the girl next door in “Cuff Divers” to the intense heat of “Sugar Bush.” Rusidan learns about her girlfriend’s heritage in “Traditional Inuit Throat Singing” while Emma encounters a legend come to life in the historical romance “To Dream of Her True Love’s face.” A group of girls leave Jansey utterly exhausted in the charming bondage story “Knowing the Ropes.” Charm or no charm, Dina can’t resist rodeo rider Leslie Goosemoon in “Leslie Goosemoon Rides Again.”

All royalties earned by the author on sales of “Don’t You Savage Me” will be donated to charitable organizations allied with Indigenous women in Canada.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Giselle Renarde
• Release date: Jun 20, 2014
• ISBN: 9781311402202

Giselle Renarde

Giselle Renarde is a queer Canadian, avid volunteer, and contributor to more than 100 short story anthologies, including Best Women's Erotica, Best Lesbian Erotica, Best Bondage Erotica, and Best Lesbian Romance. Ms Renarde has written dozens of juicy books, including Anonymous, Ondine, and Nanny State. Her book The Red Satin Collection won Best Transgender Romance in the 2012 Rainbow Awards. Giselle lives across from a park with two bilingual cats who sleep on her head.

Book preview

Introduction

I’m writing this introduction after witnessing a spectacular concert during the Luminato Festival in Toronto. I’ve long been a fan of Inuk throat singer Tanya Tagaq, and her reclamation of the 1922 documentary film Nanook of the North was nothing short of a masterpiece. The piece was commissioned by the Toronto International Film Festival and featured Tagaq throat singing live on stage while the 79-minute silent film was broadcast behind her. And in case that wasn’t enough of a life-altering experience, Buffy Sainte-Marie opened for her!

All in all, the evening put me in just the right mood to express my gratitude to you for buying this book. It also served as a reminder of the amazing things that can happen when we celebrate Aboriginal women. Unfortunately, as an overall society, we don’t do enough of that. More often than not, we do the opposite.

I chose the title Don’t You Savage Me as a play on the on the song Don’t You Sweetheart Me. I swapped out Sweetheart to kick at the common use of Savage in traditional romance titles. I’ve never been much of a romance reader, to be honest, so I was shocked when I started spotting hoards of backlist titles from popular romance publishers that characterized Indigenous people in this way. As savages.

You probably knew when you bought Don’t You Savage Me that I’ll be donating all royalties I earn to charities allied with Aboriginal women in Canada. I figured this way we could raise funds for the benefitting charities a lot faster than if I were to donate only a percentage. Also, it sometimes leaves a bad taste in my mouth when I see companies patting themselves on the back for giving away portions of proceeds. You’re either going to agree with me, here, or think I’m totally paranoid, but sometimes it seems like the corporation is riding the charity’s coattails. They’re using that connection to sell products and strengthen their brand image. And, hey, maybe that’s a valid marketing technique, maybe all’s fair in love and business, but the last thing I want is to come across as sleazy and self-serving.

That’s why I decided to create Don’t You Savage Me as a book whose sole purpose in life is to raise money. Now, why put together a collection of lesbian erotic romance shorts featuring Indigenous women?

Well, one day I was looking through previously-published stories on my hard drive and I noticed a theme. Traditional Inuit Throat-Singing, Sugar Bush, Cuff Divers—over the years, I’d written a lot of shorts about Aboriginal women. I’ve written longs too (in my award-winning lesbian novel The Red Satin Collection, Regan struggles with the idea of identifying as 2-Spirit while celebrating Christmas with her transgender girlfriend’s family), but for this anthology, I decided to stick with shorts. I could also have included heterosexual stories, like my novellas Tangled Roots and Monstrous Obsession, or my cross-dressing cowboy threesome Friends of Dorothy, but I figured I had enough lesbian tales that I could stick to a very specific theme.

Once I’d assembled my stories, the worry and self-doubt set in. I realized Sugar Bush was the only one wherein both my characters were Indigenous. Would readers find it off-putting that, in the five others, my Aboriginal character falls for a woman outside her own culture? Is there enough diversity, generally? There’s only one polyamorous story, for instance: Knowing the Ropes. Is gender represented too narrowly? Only one of these stories (Leslie Goosemoon Rides Again) features a transgender woman.

Should I have made a concerted effort to include stories with more gritty content? Are these ones too sunny? Is the reality of life today represented accurately enough? Wait… one of these stories (To Dream of Her True Love’s Face) isn’t even set in today’s world, or any real world—it mixes historical fiction with legend. Maybe it doesn’t fit with the other contemporary pieces.

Are these stories too urban? Is there an okay mix of Inuit, First Nations and Métis characters? Wait… are there any Métis women in this collection at all? I don’t remember! Oh God, I should just pack it in. Forget it! No anthology to see here. I’ll just move on to the next project and pretend this never happened…

But that wouldn’t help anyone, would it? First off, we wouldn’t raise any money that way. And, with the staggering number of missing and murdered Aboriginal women in this country, if you’re reading this you already know something needs to be done. So if there are gaps in this collection (and there are gaps, certainly), let that be a call to action: to the act of representation.

Don’t You Savage Me is by no means a complete and accurate portrait of all Aboriginal women who love women. It’s a collection of six stories, plain and simple. This is not the be-all and end-all, but I hope it will inspire, in many readers, a taste for more. And I hope you’ll go out and find other stories by other authors to round out the spectrum.

Giselle Renarde

If you’ve written or read a book, story, play—anything—that features Indigenous women who love women, please let me know! There’s a Canadian focus to this collection because I’m a Canadian writer, but I’d love to hear about Indigenous-focused fiction from around the world. You can find me on Twitter @GiselleRenarde. I would love to share the fiction you love with my followers.

Sugar Bush

Every time I step off that boat, Nanaate wraps her arms around me, hugs me tight. From somewhere in the background, her husband Rick asks the same question, year after year: How is life among the heathens?

It’s a joke, sure, but I never thought it was too funny. That’s what Europeans used to write the white men, the missionaries and officials, back when they first settled the island. The heathens. That’s what they called us, back then. Heathens.

Nowadays, you got lots of white people living on the island, and everybody gets along pretty well. I’d say we got the best track record in the whole country for getting along.

Life is good, I tell Rick, because that’s what you say when you only talk to someone once, twice a year. Can’t complain.

Rick judges me for leaving the island, for leaving our home and our people. And for leaving Nanaate, too, because he knows how dear we are to one another. Rick told me once that Nanaate cries for a week every time I leave. That surprised me, big-time. I don’t think I’ve ever seen Nanaate cry, and we’ve been precious to each other for as long as I can remember.

They drive me to their farmhouse from the ferry dock. There’s hardly any snow on the ground, not like when we were kids. When we were kids, the ferry wouldn’t even be running this late into December. The lakes would have been iced over in thick sheets.

Rick says he can’t imagine life without a vehicle, and I tell him you don’t need one in the city. I get around on foot, or by subway. Taxi, if necessary.

You could ride a bike, Nanaate says, and I realize this is the first time she’s spoken since I stepped off the ferry.

I’m riding shotgun while Nanaate is hunched in the back beside a toddler’s car seat. Her eyes gleam, communicating so much more than her words have said.

Bikes are dangerous. This is chit-chat, meaningless. Our eyes are having a whole other conversation. The city won’t commit to infrastructure for them, for bicycle lanes. Cyclists get hit by cars all the time, get killed. It’s bad.

Nanaate smiles.

It’s less than a half-hour drive, but my heart swells all the way. The island will always be my home. And