Indigiqueer

Hey, Matika. How you doing? Hi, Aindry and. (laughs) So where are you in the world today? I'm in Kumia Country. The sun is shining and the weather is sweet and I'm heading to Hopi this weekend. And then over to visit some Pueblo friends and then heading out to Lawrence. I'm doing a mural with some kids up there. I'm super excited about that. So I'm just on the go, keeping it pushing. How about you? Still hanging out here in Wampanoag and Narragansett lands in Rhode Island. And then next week I'll head up to Toronto for a conference and then I'll be in Kumia lands for a bit after that. So we're both as per usual all over the place. Are you gonna come to Coachella? (laughs) I wasn't planning on it but if you need the hipster head dress police happy to help with that. (laughs) Oh my gosh, we should be the designated hipster head dress police for Coachella. Oh, I would hate that. The numbers of head dresses have been going down lately. But anyway. (laughs) What do we have going on on this episode today? Today we're talking with Joshua Whitehead and Billy Ray Bell Courts. There are Northern relatives, there writers and thinkers and you think you're going to love them. Yeah, I mean I'm so excited that we got to have this conversation and I also think it's important, especially for our non-native listeners that we call attention to the fact that these guests are from north of the border. But this is something that we in Indian country don't really recognize that imposed border and really see the folks who are indigenous to this land to what some communities refer to as Turtle Island is that we're all relatives. I'm someone who has really curated my Twitter follows online to include folks from indigenous communities all over the world. And so I feel like I have so many amazing, amazing folks from what is currently known as Canada on my feet every day. And sometimes I feel like I have a much more intimate knowledge of Canadian politics than a lot of folks here in the US. And while our experiences with settler colonialism obviously are different, we share so many similarities. So our guests today were folks that I first encounter through Twitter and mostly because all of the folks in Canada that I follow would periodically be totally geeking out over their new work and sharing clips of them reading their work or Billy Ray talking about his experiences as a road scholar, they've just been all over my timelines for a long time. So I was so excited that we got the chance to snap them up when they were in Washington at the same time we were recording and have this really cool conversation with them. Joshua Whitehead is a jiboi and cre from the Pegas First Nation located in Triti One territory and is two spirit in Digiqueer. You can find him at the University of Calgary in Triti Seven Territory obtaining his PhD in English. Joshua is a poet and a writer but most importantly, Joshua is a storyteller. The power of his storytelling launched him into the forefront of the literary scene. His poetry collection, Full Metal in Digiqueer, is indeed, as he says, a viral song is a round dance, as a jingle dress is medicine. His debut novel, Johnny Appleseed, braids together human experience into a tight understanding of indigeneity and queerness. Billy Ray Belkourt is from the Drift Pile Cree Nation and is a PhD student in the Department of English and Film Studies at the University of Alberta. As a road scholar, Billy Ray went to the colonizer's land to obtain his masters in women's studies, which highlighted the role of indigenous women in social resistance movements. His work has been widely published and acclaimed in magazines across Canada. His debut poetry book, This Wound is a World, splits the self wide open and merges into space and place an Indian time. His forthcoming work, Indian Coping Mechanisms, Notes from the Field, is a synesthesia made into polyphonic poetry, prose, and digital art. [MUSIC PLAYING] [SIRENS] Sorry. [LAUGHTER] [MUSIC PLAYING] All my relations. Welcome. Welcome. Welcome. [LAUGHTER] So the podcast that we're producing that you're currently guest on is called All My Relations. And we decided to choose that topic because we've been thinking about our relationship-based identities. And our identities are defined by our relationships with ourselves, our relationships with our family, our clan, our ancestors, and our relationships with land and water. And so we're really interested in the ways that indigenous communities around the world really are still connected to that relationship-based identity. And so if you could just introduce yourself with that in mind in your traditional way, or how you would to a large group of people with yourself, your family, your clan, your purpose, that would be really meaningful to us. Yeah, so Tonset, Tomahua, hi, my friends. I'm Joshua Whitehead, as was said earlier. And I've been thinking about relationality a lot. Specifically, some working on a new book of work, tentatively titled Making Love With The Land. So Leanne Simpson has an essay in her book, as we've always done, Land as Pedagogy, which is groundbreaking, and it's amazing. It's so beautiful. One of my favorite pieces of writing. What I've been trying to do recently is call myself less of a berry picker, more of a hunter. [LAUGHTER] Just kidding. Yeah, I love a mess. I try to be like, right-storeg all the time. But thinking about the land itself as yes as pedagogy, but specifically I come from Manitoba. Manitoba Winnipeg was the birthing place of two spirit as a term in 1990 at the third intertribal annual gay lesbian conference. And then also the pre-word for Manitoba is Manitoba Pao, which means the straight of the spirit, straight as in terms of the river's meeting there. So what I've been thinking about recently is, OK, when what ways is the land itself already kind of holding what we reconsider now, queer pedagogy's? How does the land hold our stories as two-spirit peoples, or as queer indigenous peoples, or as trans-indigenous peoples? And those stories are there. And I like perhaps I've been thinking less of language and of those stories less as forgotten, but more just kind of foregone. They just seem to be kind of unearthed, refound, reclaimed. So I've been thinking about, OK, what does it mean for a two spirit to grow up in the streets of the spirits? What ways is the straight never straight? And what ways does water teach us how to be our own best queerness? And how does water hold two spirit stories? So it's really kind of central around Manitoba, around the prairies, it's already kind of being archives of two spirit and it's just hard to kind of find those stories again. I love that. Tansan into Tansic, Beleri Belkornitsi-Gasan, Matatika Cp, Otsinia. I'm from the Drophopalk Green Nation, which is in 3D8 territory in northwestern Alberta. I am a PhD student, as was mentioned, my family has a sort of spirit of living that is localized to the reserve, to 3D8, the vast majority of my family is there. And 3D8 Driftpile, Lesley Slavlake, which is the body of water that sort of frames that area, both in my mind geographically but also theoretically. And so my writing, I would argue, is place-based to the extent that I'm trying to think through how the north, Northern Alberta is a place that is very much circumscribed by history. But because of the absence of a rigorous kind of political literacy, then many people can think themselves outside of that history. So perhaps my work, if there were a governing question, it would be, what is it to be born into a past while at the same time, illegible to it? And I enter that in a similar way as Josh, which is through the entangled categories of gender, sexuality, race, place. Yeah. And you kind of touched on this in your answer. But I often get a lot of questions about the language that we use to identify ourselves whenever I'm doing big talks. And I know this happens for my ticket too. People are always like, well, what are the words we're supposed to use to refer to indigenous peoples or whatever the-- what's the term? And I know both of you think a lot about the language that you use to identify yourselves in terms of-- to spirit queer and dig a queer or whatever it is. So I'm wondering if you could share with us the language that you used to identify yourself in those ways and why those choices are important to you. - Mm-hmm. Well, I suppose my mind is a mouthful. (laughing) Joshua Whitehead is an OG creed to spirit and dig a creed member of Pegas First Nation, which intimidates some people in conferences like feel like. (laughing) But I use both terms because I like to spirit that it kind of calls me back into my indigenous 80 as much as indigenous peoples tried to call my queerness or push me out of indigenous spaces because of my queerness. So that calls me home. Again, it's Winnipeg, it's Manitoba. That's the kind of weird comments from. - This is. - So yeah, for me, I always seem to kind of revolve and gravitate around that term. Because it's kind of a means of kind of being living in both worlds simultaneously, unabashedly, sexily and powerfully. I love that. (laughing) I just let put the pizza on. - I love that. - But at the same time, it's I think kind of revolving around terms of sovereignty, terms of reconciliation in Canada. And I don't think it's fully developed within kind of linguistic and kind of modes of identity that are specific to indigenous peoples. So like the term two spirits, many indigenous nations and linguistic systems have words for two spirit. That is just kind of the overall pan term that was made. But right now, what I see is a lot of specifically in Canada, a lot of homophobia, transphobia, a lot of misogyny, that places, headsets men for primarily in the middle in the vulnerable center, right? And right now with reconciliation, there's this move to return to tradition, this move to return to ceremony, and this kind of move to kind of heal. Which are powerful gestures, yes, but who I see being placed in these circles is primarily men, heterosexual cisgendered men, which kind of leaves indigenous peoples who are queer trans or two spirit on the peripheries and the sidelines. And Bill, you talked about this in your interview with Abelig Jessica Johnson, Prism of thinking about, okay, we're too focused on the good effects, who are we kind of leaving as you said, I think in the terrain of bad effects. And you say that's mostly indigenous women, two spirit queer trans peoples. So I like to use the word two spirit, but right now I think it's not fully developed enough to kind of place us into indigenous worlds without having to be pained, harmed, removed, or dispossessed entirely. So this had moved towards tradition again, this return to tradition, if you ever can do such a thing, return to ceremony, are so kind of wrapped up within neo-colonial modes of thinking that there's no space for two-spirited peoples. So I can see why a lot of indigenous peoples don't like the term two spirit because it's so kind of rooted in settler colonialism, and in patriarchy, misogyny, et cetera. So I like to also use a digit queer, which is just kind of a braiding of the two, which I didn't coin, people say I did, I'm not coin this, it's just-- - You popularized it. (laughing) - Thank you, you're a cut kind. - Yeah, you're a cut kind. But it was just kind of floating in kind of digital spaces on and social media, so I was like, I was gravitating towards that. It works like a hyperlink, you can click it, and you just kind of meet amazing two spirit peoples. But I like the term because it's a contemporary mode of thinking for indigenous peoples, because at least within Cree, we never had words for queer, these ways of being, and these identity categories were just normalized. So Chelsea Val, who writes a lot about this, and Sotis Leansson, and thinking about indigenous queer and normativity. So we never had words like queer. We had certain terminologies, which would address how one lived their life, how they presented, how they enacted it in ceremonies and in traditions, and in labor forms of working. So I like, right now, in "Digie Queer," because it removes us from the mob anthropology of kind of two spirit peoples were revered, or that past tense use of it all the time to place us into kind of this imprisoned past. It puts us in the contemporary moment, it gives us futures. So I like to kind of think of in "Digie Queer," as the vehicle, or the momentum, or the energy that's driving to spirit. Because right now, I think two spirit stuck in kind of a stagnant mode. And it requires, I think, new contemporary emerging writers, such as Billy Ray, Ariel Twist, Gwen Bennoi, to kind of theorize, OK, where is this going, and where do we want it to go to, and what kind of past pain, traumatized, and hurtful, is it kind of coming out of? And how do we kind of transform those negative effects into perhaps not only survivable ones, but ones that kind of procure a future to you? Yeah. Yeah, that's one of the first things I think of when I hear "Digie Queer," or these ideas of futurisms. And that feels very much of right now, and also of what can be. So I really like it. Thank you. And I identify as Queer, and I have both to do with my sexual life, but also my performance of gender, which is sort of more non-conforming. And I'm interested in thinking about how to corrupt the codes of masculinity, what it means for someone like me, to still use him pronouns, the like. And I identify as Queer and not to spirit, because I think I'm too much of a post-structuralist, and to spirit. But I do absolutely recognize that to spirit is a very charismatic and attractive category, because it's, for many youth in particular, the first time that they're able to interpolate themselves into an identity that is at its core indigenous. So it does have a kind of harm reductive and culturally reclinative sort of function to it. And I think my queerness also is anchored to my personal history, how I, in my early teenage years, began to conceptualize my identity. And that was partly through theory in the university when I was undergraduate in women's studies classes and in other literary theory courses. And that helped me understand one sexual life is a kind of performative, because it brings something about in the world. And what is brought about is, of course, disruptive and co-coffinous. Because you brought up the power of theory in being able to illuminate some of those things that we've been experiencing and know, but haven't necessarily seen reflected back to us, you both are such radical, innovative thinkers and are also in the spaces of academia that are very opposite in many ways of that, though we can find those amazing pockets of where things are happening. I'm also a scholar who went through the whole PhD thing is now a faculty member. So I would love to hear just about your place in these academic spaces and how you think about it, how you think about the role of theory in your own work that exists outside of academia, and just how you deal with the day-to-day of being in these super white colonial spaces. Because I still struggle with it a lot. So yeah, we'd just love to hear about those thoughts. How I deal with it? Why I'm here, I came to get a pack of American spirit cigarettes. [LAUGHTER] It's difficult. It's exhausting academia. I'm like, OK, what does it mean for me as an Ojibwe creed to a spirit person to want to write for my communities using basically theory, which is great, but it's not accessible. So like, OK, what does it mean for me to write an essay that's going to become a published piece in So-and-So's Journal? Who is that? That's not accessible to the everyday person. It's not a quotidian. I think this is where creative arts and restore telling comes in is to be able to take theory, digest it, but then regurgitate it in a way that's accessible at everyday language that's steep, perhaps, in oral histories of, at least with me, with creed speaking. I'm the creed linguistics system. So it's to take theory. I think this is my job as an academic, is that theory is so fundamental to decolonial strategies, but it's a strategy that's made by and for the few. So my role and my responsibility, I think, as a creative writer or a storyteller, is to take that, put them into stories that are familiar and put them into modes of writing or forms that are familiar, but accessible. So I'm trying to do that. I don't know how successful I'm being, but the university, like going into the university or academia, asks for you to do two things, I think, to obliterate your indigeneity at times, because you're usually the only indigenous person in that space. There's usually very limited if any indigenous faculty, you become the native informant of all indigenous topics. So in a sense, you have to kind of other hyperperform your indigeneity or obliterate it, because it's just too much exhaustive work. You'll go home at the end of the day, and you'll need to hibernate like Moscow for all of winter. But at the same time, I feel like it crafts you and asks for you to become a queen to go to, to consume unneedlessly almost, to kind of create these lists that you need to consume and then master. And so it's just has this weird way of you having to take ownership over knowledge, which is and which isn't always yours. knowledge, perhaps which is redundant. I don't need to reread the canon, but I was forced to do so. So it's just asking you continually to craft lists or modes of being or modes of categorization, and then to keep consuming them continually over and over and over. So for me, like that doesn't work for me. I think it's kind of an outdated way of breeding and being, and kind of coming to terms with whatever this means to be a master of something, or to be an expert, any type of topic. Expertise and knowledge aren't always in bound-in books. So I think there are alternative ways to do it, and I don't think that it needs to continually require constant consumption on the part of us as academics. Consumption, most times, of our own people's, of our own literatures, right? Where is the kind of healthy medium between the two? And I don't know, I don't know if it's always 50/50 right now, it feels like it's more 20/80, but trying to find that is, I suppose, what I'm trying to do. But for me, it always kind of returns to this idea of storytelling and creative writing. [Music] For me, I'm not in my community all the time anymore. You know, like I grew up in Swinamish. I grew up in Tlaelope, but I'm often on the road, you know, and when I left and went to school, when I was 17, I didn't come back for seven years. I was in South America, I was in Europe, I was traveling all over the country, but I was still writing about my home lands, because it feels fundamental to who I am. And it also is terrifying for me to write about Native America when I don't have my auntie there at every moment to read it. And so how do you navigate that and feel confident about writing about something that maybe people at home are like, you know, how do they respond? And how do you do that? Hmm. I'm so the new book that I'm working on is following on the heels of Fullmetal and of Johnny. And the work that I'm doing is similar, but it's veiled differently. So the new book is a lot of creative nonfiction, writing about kind of mental health and queer and digin-80, and how we navigate that and what causes that. So this piece is on insomnia, depression, it's going to be a piece on suicide, eating disorders. First one, it's scary to not have a mask that I can put on where Johnny is performing Johnny or my character, Zoa, performs in Fullmetal. This one is just like me speaking as a person rather than through a character, which is terrifying in itself. But at the same time, okay, like thinking about why am I writing about these topics. Again, a lot of people in my family who are deceased, I'm writing about again continually. So I've been thinking of like, what ways is my writing always and continually an act of mourning? I feel like thinking about ways in which I'm trying to resummon those who have passed in my life into ways that I can come to terms and cope with their death because the person that people I'm writing about are my great- my great-grandmother, my grandmother, my father's side who was murdered in the 60s, which I talk about in Fullmetal. And then also about my aunt who passed away. So my aunt was, she was a paraplegic, she was in a car accident on the rez, she was a older van, I was paralyzed from the neck down for seven years, and then she got sick, based on kind of something type of infection. It was later kind of revealed that it was her doctor's kind of misdiagnosis and medication that killed her, even though that won't be admitted. So she passed. And I've never had the chance to mourn my grandmother, either my grandmother, my grandmother was taken from me before I was born, but the other one passed when I was doing my masters and my aunt passed when I was here when I was in Calgary. So like academia and studies and kind of everyone's like, you need to go to post-secondary, it's going to change your life, have pulled me from those spaces and have never given me the ability to mourn them. So I'm continually returning to sites of pain, trying to reanimate these peoples and so I can kind of come to terms with that because I haven't. Writing is mourning, but writing is kind of an ethical mourning. So I'm just trying to like, I think wrestle with this idea, okay, what are the ethics of mourning and how does that effect and affect the body? What I'm trying to do is perhaps think of what Johnny's cook him to just him and Johnny Appleseed towards the end of the novel when she said she's like giving him this kind of mental projection or this lesson where she says, "A humiliation is just a humility you love so much are transformed." And I'm really trying to think with inquiry because we have animations rather than gender and we animate things that are non-human, such as rocks, skies, but those are entities and kin to us. So in what ways can we make pain something animate and a kin? Can we make, can we think of pain as kin? And in that way it's going to be made love to and in that way it's going to be transformed, right? In what ways does pain become material when it's a book? Because that's a tangible thing you can touch that right? And what ways does pain become material, right? And how can you manifest the immaterial into the material? And thinking about the ways through perhaps Nahiawi and or the pre-language of how to transform something painful into something manageable. It's not going to be perfect, it's not going to transform into this kind of completely inverse healing object or healing medicine, but there are ways in which that can be shifted and changed. So that's just kind of the project that I'm working on right now. I'm trying to do it as quickly as I can because there's so many, there's like, I have my one of my sister cousins is suicidal because of her mother and there's just like mad depression in the family and all across Terrell Island, it's just like youth suicides are so extremely high because these are topics that we don't talk about, perhaps they're as you would say in the kind of terming of bad effects, right? So really trying to like think of them at bad effects or the things that hurt as kin, I think it's important. That was beautiful. Yeah. Like can we just collectively cry? I know. And like that yeah just the idea of like writing through these painful things as a way of mourning, of dealing with it, of processing it, I think is what I do a lot in my work as well. So I think what's interesting there is you're writing not to disappear with pain, but to like inflex it and to not try to sublimate it into something else. So I think it's really important. Thank you. Haven't really heard it conceptualize in that way. I want to talk about gallstones and healthcare. And I actually am really interested in what all of you have kind of your take on that, but I want you sort of to introduce that for the listener that doesn't know why I would bring up gallstones. Right. So in 2016 I did a TED Talk called gallstones and the colonial politics of the future. I think if I was thinking more entrepreneurial, I would have called it how I got gallstones at 20 or something that just catches more people's eyes. Anyways, since 19 I had these late night episodes in which my body felt like it was like rebelling against me. And I had them quite steadily until about 21 when I had the worst episode ever. So my pain that I thought I was actually dying and for whatever reason I still didn't call the ambulance, I drove myself to the hospital in Edmonton. I remember being crouched to about half my size and like using a wall to pull myself through the hospital to get to the emergency room. And it was about 6 a.m. December 21st if I'm remembering correctly, 2015. And so I do the normal thing which is checking with the triage center. They ask me some questions. They direct me to the lobby where I sit down and I noticed there's a few other white dudes in the emergency room. They're very seamlessly moved from triage to the doctor's care. And because my pain is so intense, I actually can sit down and so I'm laying down on the floor and moving around a lot and then two security officers are called to tell me to sit still or they'll remove me. And so what I how I respond is by just going into the bathroom and sort of walking around until my name is called and then the doctor comes, gets me, pulls me to a room to make sure I'm not lying about my pain. And once he determines what I'm not, I'm like three or four hours later diagnosed with gallstones. And it was quite shocking to him because most people don't get diagnosed with gallstones until they're 40s. But I remember reading this one statistic that like opposite 80% of native people will have gallstones during their lifetime. And there are some tribes in the US in particular, I think in New Mexico where like almost all of the native women there get gallstones. So very immediately I knew that I was in the thick of a kind of historical process. And that my body very clearly wasn't mine. I didn't have sov or control over it. And I remember as a teen I always felt this sense that I had to jam pack all this living as much living as I could because I didn't think that I could last that long. And perhaps that's why I sort of have lived the sort of life that I've lived at 23, 24 because I'm sort of subconsciously I still am modered by that for your. Yeah I had the same fear. I By the time I was 25, I'd been to like every continent. I graduated from school when I was like 20 years old because I was convinced that I wasn't going to make it past 25. Because so many of my friends had died. And it's just a very real experience. I went to a very small school. And when I was a freshman in high school, we started school with 19 Indians in my class. And only two of us graduated. And half of them had died by the time we were 21. So it's not an illegitimate fear. And the health care experience, when I was reading that, this morning, really resonated with me because last week one of my cousins passed away. And one of my really close cousins. And a week before that, she had gone into the doctor and had such severe pain. And then the doctor's refused to give her any sort of pain medication. And then we're still unsure of the outcome. But allegedly, there was pain pills that have caused like three or four different overdoses on my rest in the last two weeks. And so there's this very real connection to health care and our favorite people dying. And that falls very much in line with the racism and the colonialism that we're fighting against and the ways it affects our lives and our bodies. And I've never been able to write about that in the way that you talked about healing through writing or I just haven't ever found the courage to do that. So I appreciate you talking about health care and the way that affects our work. And I'm wondering, have you also had that experience? Or are you Adrian? And did I talk about that? In terms of my health care and myself. Yeah, or your family or your community? Well, I'm going to add fuel to the fire. I also had gallstones. Got it. I had my gallbladder removed. You've got your bale. They are the same person. I was just shocking. I think my full family has a history of health care. My father was a 60-scooper survivor, went to residential schools and day schools in and out of Alberta and Manitoba, was then in and out of youth imprisonment, I suppose, or incarceration because of foster cares. And then because of this longevity of history, a history of substance abuse, alcoholism, ended up having cancer twice. His kidneys were removed. A quadruple bypass. And every single time that I've kind of-- I was younger. But when we would kind of go with him to these spaces, you can see the kind of contrast of treatment between himself as a visible indigenous person, and how he was treated, and how he was kind of medicated and diagnosed, was radically different than folks who were just literally sharing the room beside him, right? But I think the most important thing that kind of navigates my life right now is my mother. So she has fibromyalgia. And she kind of lives raccoon pain on a daily basis. She said to me, she's like, I've never had a single moment in my life for the past 20 years, where I wasn't in consistent pain. And I'm trying to wonder-- OK, I'm trying to think about the ways in which the body and pain, specifically through her example, are always in a constant mode of undoing in a constant mode, perhaps of losing the control of one's body, and a constant means of always being continually racked with pain. And what does that mean? How does one navigate the world like that? So that's a mode of thinking that's always kind of in the back of my mind, because I see-- when I go home, I see her. She folds laundry. Her hands are sore for three days. She just text me today saying her water broke. She had to kind of vacuum the water out of the carpet. And she's like, I probably won't be able to move for three days after this. So I'm just trying to kind of conceptualize that and think about the ways in which the body is in consistent modes of pain. So descriptive of what it is to be native. I think that's exactly what it is. That's what I was thinking too. Well, and then-- so in your TED Talk, you talk about those ties to colonialism and settler clonials and through this experience. And could you talk about that a little bit too? And the ways it affects our bodies. Yeah. I think that part of how I tried to connect my gallstones to the cloniality of the world was through this ever-present sense that the body wasn't perhaps the key container for political life. And that it sort of-- it wasn't a place where I could enact a kind of tribal or indigenous sovereignty in Josh's mom's case where there's always the chronicness sort of being pulled out of your body is so politically pressing. It's profoundly disturbing. That is not anomalous in native communities. And I remember reminded of some of the work of Dr. Janet Smiley, who's a critical health studies researcher and a doctor in Toronto. She has been in the news quite frequently over the past few years for her ability to quantitatively show that doctors across the board, across the country, differentially treated and treat native people. And I think too, but I feel most racialized in a hospital. Or in a doctor's office. And I will often joke about trying to dress as bougie as possible when I'm so sick, because I want to try to signify my way out of their stereotypes. But in my experience is different because I am a white-coding woman. So when I walk into these spaces, I am coded as a white woman, and so I don't get that racialized experience. But I have dealt with so many health issues that I feel come directly from my historical trauma. My experience is of being a native woman. And I'm literally sitting here right now waiting for a phone call from my doctor to know if my cervical cancer came back. So it's like-- And every woman in my family, all of my aunties on the native side, everyone's had a hysterectomy. Everyone has had their womb removed from them very early on in their life for various ailments and reasons. So when I washed your TED Talk, and when we're thinking about these ideas of the body and the relationship to colonialism, it's so real. And so many ways, both the visceral experience of being a marked native person in those spaces, but then also what we carry with us that is from those spaces in that past and everything. So I think, yeah, both Matika and I this morning, when we were thinking about talking with you. There's so much going on. This is so good timing. [MUSIC PLAYING] We are going to take a moment to listen to Billy Ray recite some poetry and then talk through it a minute. So just have a listen. Love and heartbreak are fuck buddies who sometimes text each other at 10 in the morning. Today, love asks, is this what the living do? As he tries to shit, but can't, because he doesn't eat in a fiber or exercise regularly. It's the little things that'll kill me. He adds, heartbreak responds, ignoring the first message. You emptied your body into the floorboards of me. They creak when I am lo and lean. If I am a haunted house, then let's make up a theory of negativity that notices the utopian pulse of sad stories like ours. Well, fuck, love types of. He deletes it. He sends a selfie with the caption, how is this for a theory of negativity? Heartbreak laughs true, he quips. Love doesn't respond right away. He thinks there is something queer about leaving loose ends untied. Love is a native boy from Northern Alberta, who decided almost everything he does is an attempt to repair the brokenness of being that is indigeneity. Last month, love fucked a security guard in the basement of a parakeed at midnight. Walking the door behind love to security guard joked, don't worry, I'm not going to kill you or anything. Love wonders if it is the possibility of being killed that parly animates his desires. That's fucked up. Heartbreak tells love when love tells him the story. Love hypothesizes that the parakeed basement might be a metonym for the world. Heartbreak thinks that loud, how do you know in the world is not that basement anymore? Thank you. Can you ask them some? [APPLAUSE] Beautiful. Would you like to talk a little about what you were thinking as you were writing that or was you going through in your own life? Yeah, I will say that that was supposed to be the first poem in the book. Okay. But I got moved to the second, which was not my choice. Because I think that it frames the project, which is one of trying to determine how to live in these bases where it seems all of the logics of the seller state are manifesting. So in that parcade basement, I felt that I was very much a kind of over-determined subject. That everything from my survivability to my desirability were incredibly circumscribed. And that it wasn't actually a joke that don't worry I'm not going to kill you. It was a kind of confession that that could happen. Yeah, it's just such a powerful description, I think, of the always already possibility of our dying or being killed in. And I think what the book in general does is attempts to show that it is in the realm of sexual life where the world is made and unmade, where it's won or lost. It's like a timer. I think that's probably a good place to ask. Josh, what I wanted to talk with you about in terms of having you read a little bit of your writing is slightly different. So if you'd like to share a poem or read something, that would be amazing as well. But I wanted to talk about the Lambda Literary Award and that beautiful letter that you wrote for listeners. Well, Josh, I'll let you tell the story of what happened with that. And then if you'd like to read a portion of that, I would love that. Sure. So the Lambda Literary Awards are kind of a prominent award categorization within the US for LGBTQ peoples. So I was awarded or nominated, sorry, shortlisted with full metal and digiquir under the trans poetry categorizations. So I was like, okay, two things are happening here. You're kind of using two-spirit and using it in ways that Mr. Wrecked its meaning. And two, you're interpolating me as fans because of the quickly Googled or used Wikipedia to tell you what two-spirit means, masculine and feminine spirits, thereby they must be trans. So I was like, okay, I need to maintain an ethics of relationality between myself and my communities and myself and my allies. Some of my best friends and my most serious people in the world are trans. And so I had some conversations I spoke with Gwen Benoway, Kai Cheng, Tom Vivek Shuaia, to ask, okay, like, what do I do? Because I knew that the trans categorizations have recently been made within the last seven years by trans women of color. You can win technically without having to self-identify. Your characters can perhaps be trans. But for me, that feels like a cheap win. That is not my space to take. Many spaces have been taken from me so I cannot take a space from them. So I withdrew the letter trying to be as humble as I could be, as I was very honored to be a part of that. But there is also that point to a kind of a vanishing point within their own award categorizations. That two-spirit don't fit. Maybe you should start it. Right. So that was kind of the whole basis around that. Yeah. Oh, it's so powerful and bold and meaningful. And I think it's really, for me, it's very humbling to watch another person go through that process because we're very rarely recognized for our work at all and silenced in the media. And, you know, like, I find it's very hard for us to find funding and to find spaces. And so to make that very bold move was just inspiring for me. So thank you. Thank you. Well, I think literature is a type of accountability too. I'm accountable to my characters. It's the same with Johnny. I'm accountable to my communities. Pegasus First Nation, my larger communities, I'm accountable to two-spirit queer trans people like so that I need to be accountable at all times and portray an ethics of care for those. So I think that is for me the epitome of what literature should be doing. Is crafting worlds, but crafting. That's the way. So did you want me to read a bit from this? I haven't returned to this in so long. Okay. Maybe I'll just start with this. There are words for people like me with a Nahia waywin, words like Napaewi, Skwei, we thought, a man who dresses as a woman, I Skwei, Kha'ad, Napaewayat, a woman who dresses as a man, Ayakweu, a man dressed, living accepted as a woman, and Inapeka sought a woman dressed, living accepted as a man. These, of course, are taken from Chelsea Bao. And they may not be all terminologies for what you may call "queerness" within indigenous world views. But they are the ones that I've been gifted and storied from folks such as Chelsea Bao and storytelling with my other kin. If there are more or if I have these wrong, I apologize. Settler colonialism has taken so much from our mother tongues. With the Nahia waywin, we divide language into categorizations of animate and inanimate rather than masculine and feminine, and it is through that we hold ourselves accountable to all of our relations, of which we include things deemed inanimate by Western ways of being and knowing. Full metal in digiqueer is born with that language in mind. My narrator, Zoa, is a cybernetic virus that is agender, asexual, asexed because queerness is not a word we know, we know relationships and accountability and our birth into our communities knowing our role and how it is we must contribute. I am an atachimo, a storyteller, and I know our role and how it is we must contribute. A making space for indigenous folks whose languages and identities do not fit within those paradigms of queerness. My narrator embraces fully the fluidity that two S.Q allow but doesn't fully embody either or nor do I. To put it in the easiest sense for Western languages to understand, I live my life as a gay, and not as a trans and indigenous person. I see my trans brethren and sister who have paved the way for these trans categorizations to be included, recognized, honored, and valued within Lambda, and only recently I add, and I love them all the more for it. To be a trans woman and furthermore to be an indigenous trans woman is a fight I do not know, cannot know, and do not seek to further violate and delimit. I stand by my trans kin fully and I, having lived through the intergenerational trauma of missing and murdered indigenous women and here I'll add girls and two spirit peoples, the 60s Scoop Day Schools Transracial Adoption, know in my heart and spirits that I am not a proper candidate for this award. After much talk with my communities and kin, I have come to the conclusion that I must withdraw my name and stories from this wonderful nomination because it is not my space to occupy. I am not an occupation being a story I know all too well. Shade, I love this moment too. It's cast all the shades. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Man, I just love listening to Josh Reed, that letter. I think it's so powerful and I think this whole conversation, I feel so grateful that we got to have it with Josh and Billy Ray. That letter breaks me wide open. I've listened to this recording of him reading that letter. I don't, a couple dozen times now and every time it brings tears to my eyes, it's so beautiful. I think one thing that kind of comes up for me in listening to that episode that we didn't really touch on was this a little bit more about this term, two-spirit. Matika, I know that you have spent some time like with the two-spirit powwow out in California and like doing some film work around that. Could you tell us a little bit about that work that you've done? I was invited to the two-spirit powwow bates, the Bay Area American Indian two-spirit powwow in San Francisco. I was just so inspired by the experience that I put a little film together and then the film picked up a bunch of positive reviews. People were super excited to see that kind of work in my project. Then I was invited to the International Transgender Film Festival to show that film and I was invited to several other two-spirit gatherings around the United States to go and photograph and do some storytelling. So we ended up putting together this whole exhibition and part of my work has been focused on photographing people that identify as two-spirit in Indian countries. So we've put together an exhibition of about 50 pieces now and that was just showing on Capitol Hill in Seattle. It's currently not showing anywhere but the response was really shocking for me. I was not familiar with the violence that our two-spirit relatives experience. It wasn't until I would be in a public location showing the film and talking about that experience and telling stories from those communities that people would get up and they would leave in the middle of my talk when I would start talking about two-spirit rights. others would like giggle and turn away and make strange faces and others would tell me that I didn't have a right to be having that conversation and it became this very polarized experience for me and so I it was around that time that it became very clear to me that that I needed to do more of that work and become a better ally you know I I know some of the like from the twospirits.com website I looked up some of the statistics that this is from from up north but they say that like 60% of two-spirit women have experienced homophobia and their communities 73% of two-spirit women want to know how to protect themselves from abuse we know that that our two-spirit relatives experience the highest rates of domestic violence sexual assault and and these like terrible reports of homophobia in their communities and so I mean just the other day I was doing this I was interviewing some people here in these communities and I was asking them about you know two-spirit identity and traditional understandings of two-spirit identity and and I sort of got a talking to from this grandma about our confused millennials you know like we need to get our get our lives together and stop being so confused you know and this is a person who experienced violence herself both from the Catholic church going to boarding schools and and forced assimilation practices and so you know in some ways it's not surprising for us to in our communities to you know that our many of our elders are still you know very homophobic and and you know like I don't want to argue with with the grandma so I didn't but you know but I also feel like maybe we're not confused as millennials about our gender identities maybe we're just finally safe enough to have conversations and to return to or or if that's even possible like Joshua says but you know to have the opportunity to reopen those traditional understandings just listening to you talk about that and like the power of being able to identify as two-spirit to a lot of folks in our communities and of course like this is not a term that everyone uses or even likes I think it's something that holds a lot of power for certain individuals but hearing those stories and I know like watching the video that you made at the Bates Powell and everything like there's so much power in it and then that's why it really bothers me when non-natives use this term to refer to themselves so there are like organizations and people who refer to themselves as two-spirit when they are non-indigenous people and to me that is an active cultural appropriation that is taking something that was created by and for our community and using it in a way that it was not created for with the system of power around it and I think that it's important for non-natives to recognize that history and the importance of this term for folks from these communities and respect that and respect that boundary that they should not necessarily be crossing you know maintaining a two-spirit identity in our communities means that you know there had to have been for those individuals are coming out and a process of trying to find belonging and acceptance in their communities and sometimes that was an easy loving process but for most you know most of the two-spirit people I've had the opportunity to interview they talk about that experience in a very in a way that was very traumatic and so there's been this fight to maintain the right to use that language and to become that person to identify that way and and I just don't think that it's appropriate for us to to use that word out of out of these indigenous spaces. I agree. I just wanted to offer a huge widow and thank you to our guests to Joshua Whitehead and Billy Rae Bell Court for spending time and talking story and sharing with us it was so awesome to get to talk with them. We've learned so much from you Joshua and Billy and we love you so much thank you so much for for coming and spending time with us and Adrian will keep Twitter stocking you. Yeah and I think Billy Rae's book Indian coping mechanisms has a release date of I think it's September 13th so it'll be coming out soon. And can we just shout out our indigenous scholars real quick? Isn't it Adrian like one in 10,000 indigenous people go on to get a PhD and how profoundly powerful it is that these two are doing that work it's really a beautiful thing and I'm and I'm so proud. Yeah I love it I love geeking out with other native scholars it makes me really really happy. This conversation about appropriation is something that we are going to continue more in depth on the next episode. Yeah tune in to have a conversation with us. It's a whole conversation dedicated to culture filtering also known as native appropriations. Something I know a little bit about. You are going to have the opportunity to hear from the master herself. Dr. Adrian Kean on cultural appropriation. Get excited people it's about to get real. Thanks. I'm Antica. I was cracked myself up. My relations.