This paper examines Canada’s Indian Act and documents official colonial efforts toward making heterosexuality compulsory in First Nations communities. The first part of the paper establishes critically the broad range of gender and erotic diversity in First Nations communities prior to European contact. The second part explores racist, patriarchal and heterosexist knowledge and how they worked to regulate those preferring same-sex intimacies. The paper endorses a move away from treating race, gender and sexuality as separate or mutually exclusive categories of experience and analysis toward recognizing these configurations as a system of relations. It proposes de-marginalizing the intersection of race, gender and sexuality in current theories of state formation and First Nations research.