Love after the End. Группа авторов
with military tanks and thunderous gallops? What does it mean to be distanced under the weight of colonial occupation and relocation? It’s a story we know all too well. We find one another in the cybersphere, hyper Rez sphere, in the arenas of dreamscapes and love grounds. We emerge in pixel and airwave, and we have never lost the magic of our glamour within such a vanishing act; we’ve always controlled the “I” of our narrativized eye. I suppose I note these ruminations in order to announce: Two-Spirit and Indigiqueers are the wildest kinds of biopunks, literally and literarily.
Originally, the project was designed to be geared toward the dystopic, and after careful conversations, we decided to queer it toward the utopian. This, in my opinion, was an important political shift in thinking about the temporalities of Two-Spirited, queer, trans, and non-binary Indigenous ways of being. For, as we know, we have already survived the apocalypse—this, right here, right now, is a dystopian present. What better way to imagine survivability than to think about how we may flourish into being joyously animated rather than merely alive?
When I think about the trajectory of queer literature, primarily queer young adult literature, I take note of the longevity of its breadth, and within that trajectory it wasn’t until 1982 when Annie on My Mind by Nancy Garden sprung onto the stage with a queer Bildungsroman that we witnessed our first “happy ending.” Sara Ahmed, in her blog post “Queer Fatalism,” writes of fate and the fatal as being imbricated with categorizations of queer inasmuch as “queer fatalism = queer as fatal.” Within Indigenous ways of being with the term “queer” that we now have braided into our linguistic systems, we are well aware of the fatalism of queerness from the docking of expansion on Turtle Island in 1492—a small marker in the longevity of our temporalities. One example I can give is George Catlin, an American painter who “specialized” in portraits of Indigenous peoples across the Plains in an attempt to “save” them through memorialization. His painting Dance to the Berdache depicts what he calls a “berdache,” an outdated and offensive term that has since been removed from our lexicons and replaced with Two-Spirit in 1990, being celebrated and brought into community. Upon witnessing a Two-Spirited person cohabitating harmoniously within their peoplehoods, Catlin announced, “This is one of the most unaccountable and disgusting customs that I have ever met in Indian country … I should wish that it might be extinguished before it be more recorded.”
Our Indigiqueerness has always signalled fatalism in the eyes of colonial powers, primarily the white gaze, from the directed killings of 2S peoples during Western expansion through to contemporary erasures and appropriations of the term Two-Spirit by settler queer cultures who idealize, mysticize, and romanticize our hi/stories in order to generate a queer genealogy for settler sexualities.
I, too, write this during the massive global climate strike, the onslaught of colonial consumption bringing about the end of the world, the era of Trump and Trudeau’s proposed pipelines, and the newly cresting wave of Two-Spirit, queer, trans, and non-binary writing in the nation-state we call “Canada.” These, I believe, go hand in hand: destruction and the thrum of collective singing. Hence, utopias are what we have to build, and build now, in order to find some type of sanctuary in which we and all others can live—there is no plan or planet B for us to turn to.
In nêhiyâwewin we have the word “nîkânihk” for “in the future,” and within that word is “nikânah,” or “put her/him in front.” Here, within this collection, we have done just that: we have put Two-Spiritedness in the front, for once, and in that leading position we will walk into the future, in whatever form that may take, together, hand in hand, strong, resilient, extraneously queer, and singing a round dance song that calls us all back in together. I bring forward this short, concise history in order to say: we have lived in torture chambers, we have excelled under the weight of killing machinations, we’ve hardened into bedrock—see how our bodies dazzle in the light?
The stories in this collection enumerate the beauty, care, deadliness, and majesty of Two-Spirited folx from a variety of Indigenous nations. Take, for example, Gabriel Castilloux Calderon’s “Andwànikàdjigan,” which tells the story of Winu and Bèl, two îhkwewak, who etch markings onto their bodies in order to become “memorizers,” or living archives while captive. In a tender moment, “they kissed like the world was ending, but really, wasn’t it already over …?” Find here the reprisal of David A. Robertson’s character Pyper in “Eloise,” a story that plays with cyberpunk elements—Neuromancer’s digital realm meets the interactivity of Ready Player One. This is a story where The Gate, a virtual world brought about through a downloadable application, condenses a fantastical life into a series of minutes—here, The Gate reads like an inverse type of conversion therapy used as nostalgic reparative work for mourning, love, and the dying. In Kai Minosh Pyle’s “How to Survive the Apocalypse for Native Girls” we are given a primer through three powerful characters: Migizi, Shanay, and Nigig—in this story we find a wonderful gifting, weaving, of Afrofuturism with Indigenous futurism as a way of simultaneously holding ancestors and descendants in the same palm and are taught to “watch those in power carefully.” In jaye simpson’s “The Ark of the Turtle’s Back” we witness the destruction of Earth, one imbricated by the “International Water Ration Act of 2167,” and a voyage where buffaloes and life forms are terraformed onto a new planet within our star’s hospitable zone. Find here a planet uncolonized, one helped to develop wherein we are made to question “how do we build a relationship with [a] new planet? … I would assume like all consensual relationships: we ask them out.” In Nazbah Tom’s “Nameless” we see the connection between Jennifer, an enby counsellor, and K’é, a Traveller who can move between this world and the next—here, Tom’s story reminds me of Leslie Marmon Silko’s novel Ceremony, as we learn how kinship transcends time through K’é, who works to call ancestors home. In Mari Kurisato’s “Seed Children” we are introduced to the “Children of the Light,” cyborg NDNs who battle their enemies and work together to be transplanted into a new hospitable world, the “Rose Dawn,” through a seed spaceship known as the “Great Tree.” Kurisato’s deployment of synth or cyborg bodies weaves wonderfully with queer Indigeneity inasmuch as we ponder the ethics and morality of what governs the right of a person, or people, if they are augmented with metal or, more specifically, queered through steel. In Darcie Little Badger’s “Story for a Bottle” we find a floating city, “New America,” with a rogue operating system named Olivia—I’m reminded here of the film Her, as Little Badger peppers the story with heartfelt and existential conversations between humans and AI. In Adam Garnet Jones’s “History of the New World” we are brought into a world on the brink of collapse, and the only saving grace being a haven known as the “Rainbow Peoples’ Camp,” where “a group [of NDNs] raised a rainbow flag with a warrior head on it.” Lastly, in Nathan Adler’s “Abacus” we are introduced to the titular character, a bio-computing AI and Ojibwe rat, and Dayan, a seventeen-year-old Anishinaabe human, both of whom fall in love through their avatars in “ve-ar.”
I’d like to end with a short story of my own. While visiting my homeland this past summer in Manitoba, Peguis First Nation, I visited an auntie, a medicine woman, to ask for bear root and bear grease for my travels home. The past summer being one of many tribulations for my body, spirit, and mind, I found myself in desperate need of maskihkiy. While I was sitting with her, she asked me who the bear grease was for; it is primarily a medicine to heal and alleviate the body of its pains attributed to such things as fibromyalgia, arthritis, and chronic pain. Although I usually “butch” my femme-self up when visiting home for fear of being ostracized or worse, I told her it was for a friend of mine. And although this auntie and I are not close in terms of our personal lives, she knew what I meant when I said “a friend”: “For a loved one?” she asked, and I bowed my head and nodded. She knew that this maskihkiy was for a partner, lover, caretaker of mine for whom I, in turn, needed to reciprocate that same care during a time of extreme bodily duress. She knew the medicine was for a queer, at the time, nicîmos. She just giggled to herself, went into her storage room, and we traded thanks, tobacco, and hugs.
While we waited for our uncles to finish their cigarettes and chatter on the porch, she asked me if I had harvested any maskihkiy recently. I told her I had picked some sage and juniper in Manitoba just a week before, but I’d had a hard time finding what I needed