Can the Other of Native Studies Speak?
by Billy-Ray Belcourt
Revolution will come in a form we cannot yet imagine
– Jack Halbertstam [1]
Like Judith Butler, I want to begin with a beginning. [2] At a session during the 2015 gathering of the Critical Ethnic Studies Association in Toronto, Dana Wesley asked panellists, panellists who were bent on teasing apart the matterings – indeed the matter of – the future for Indigenous peoples, if queer, trans, and two-spirit life would dwell inside that imagining. The question was answered with silence, posited in and as the negative space against which that world would, like this one, be demarcated. Perhaps the question was incoherent; the asker, and the life-forms she pointed to, could not be recognized as selves who could indeed question. Perhaps we wouldn’t, she answered. It was as if the question hadn’t been asked at all.
That negative space, something of a surrounding, to use Heidegger’s language, binds together queer Indigenous peoples not properly peopled in a purely metaphysical realm. The surrounding is where life is lived by those for whom the world isn’t theirs, and, in this, are blocked from dwelling “in the overtness of being.” [3] These are queernesses that exist outside the traditional and the identitarian borders of indigeneity, ones that the past cannot make sense of because they emerge in the most unexpected places. It is in the unthinkability between queer and Indigenous that some of us stage our lives. We are both nothing and everything at the same time.
This is for those for whom the past has never safely held up their world.
by Dallas Hunt
With the recent announcement that Mad Max: Fury Road has been nominated for ten Oscars, including Best Picture and Best Director, the film has gained renewed interest. While the movie has been critically dissected ad naseum, being hailed simultaneously as both a “feminist masterpiece” and a film (mostly) devoid of Indigenous peoples and people of colour, I want to take a different, though related, approach to the film’s politics, focusing specifically on the way it may reproduce colonial tropes of Indigenous disappearance.
The movie’s director, George Miller, who has a real possibility of taking home the Best Director prize in February, has called the film “a western on wheels.” Miller is not alone in designating the film in this way, as several high-profile critics have done the same. Indeed, with the “circle the wagons” and wagon trail imagery of the film, it is by no means a stretch of the imagination to view it through this lens.
by Kyle T. Mays, PhD
Introduction, Or Why I’m Mad
I write this piece with anger, outrage, and a love for humanity. I am angry because Governor Rick Snyder should be prosecuted as a criminal to the fullest extent that the law allows. I mean that. I am outraged because the people of Flint don’t have access to a basic human right: clean water. In spite of it all, I am also more in love with humanity because people on the ground are helping out where their state has failed them. I want to repeat: Governor Rick Snyder should face criminal prosecution. Flint is a majority Black city and the lack of clean water is a blatant form of environmental racism. Period.
However, two perspectives that I have seen in my social media disturb me. First, Native folks passively dismissing the #FlintWaterCrisis by saying things that amount to: “Well, Native people have dealt with the lack of water rights and the poisoning of our land for decades, so this is not new.” For instance, the Navajo Nation in the Southwest of Turtle Island has its own water crisis, with 40% lacking access to clean, running water. The lack of clean water goes back to World War II, when the U.S. engaged in practice bombings near Navajo Land. This past summer, the Gold King Mine released some 3 million gallons of contaminated water into a river that led to three states, including New Mexico, in which a part of the Navajo Nation resides.Therefore, I can understand why some Native people would argue that the issues facing Black residents in Flint are not new, and that everyone should pay closer attention to Native water issues on Native land. I am equally disturbed by how Black folks continue participating in the discourses of settler colonialism by rarely, if ever, acknowledging that Flint (and other places) is still Indigenous land, essentially stating, “this issue is anti-black because white folks like Governor Snyder is racist.” Both points are true, but the framing is unnecessarily limiting. Given my positionality as a Black/Anishinaabe person, I have a duty of sorts, to speak on the issue.
Now Roz (Persian New Year)
by Geraldine King
I was once told to allow the tears to water my soul; that with torrential showers comes bountiful flowers. For many reasons, the horizon of my heart was vaster than could be seen with the naked eye. Although the soil was fertile, and conditions to grow just right, a seven-year drought impeded its ability to blossom with hope. My tears had dried with the passing of an old life. The ducts were cracked around the edges but managed to stay lubricated with the sweat from painstaking labour out in the hot sun with nothing but a trowel and mad determination. I was once told to allow the tears to water my soul. Fuck that. It is now clear to me that the beams of light from your smile are responsible for bringing the rarest of flowers to my garden. Every time you smile, my heart smiles. Beauty blossoms.
Springtime in my heart.
Geraldine King is Anishinaabekwe from Kiashke Zaaging Anishinaabek (Gull Bay First Nation). Geraldine is a Master’s student in the Indigenous Governance Program at the University of Victoria where her primary research interests are centred on Indigenous erotica as viable resurgent governance praxis. Geraldine is the Managing Editor of Intercontinental Cry Magazine, a publication of the Centre for World Indigenous Studies.
Nanabozho Sings Round Dance
by Geraldine King
*Nanabozho steps up to mic and starts drumming softly*
*clears throat*
*winks at head lady dancer*
*Her toothless kokum winks back*
*drumming intensifies*
Wey heyAAAA wa hey yaa yoo
Wey heyAAAA wa hey yaa yoo
Hey ya yoo-oo we heya
Hey ya yoo-oo we heya – ooo
Oh my darling Sky Wo-ma-an
Y U NO answer my textz, weyo
I know you’re on your pho-oone
Coz I saw you ‘like’ 23 pics on Insta-graa-am
Hey ya yoo-oo we heya – ooo
Wey heyAAAA wa hey yaa yoo
Wey heyAAAA wa hey yaa yoo
Hey ya yoo-oo we heya
Hey ya yoo-oo we heya – ooo
Oh my sweet shkabesaabe kwe-eeh!
I searched for you in the bush
I looked for you at bingo, weyo
But all along you were on Facebook
Hey ya yoo-oo we heya – ooo
Wey heyAAAA wa hey yaa yoo
Wey heyAAAA wa hey yaa yoo
Hey ya yoo-oo we heya
Hey ya yoo-oo we heya – ooo
Oh hello my lovely Indian wii-iife, weyo
I was just kidding about those other gii-iirls
You are my one and only, my fried baloney
…HOWAH! PUT DOWN THAT FRYING PAN!
Oweee oooh ahhhhh hey oh oh no no-ooo!
Geraldine King is Anishinaabekwe from Kiashke Zaaging Anishinaabek (Gull Bay First Nation). Geraldine is a Master’s student in the Indigenous Governance Program at the University of Victoria where her primary research interests are centred on Indigenous erotica as viable resurgent governance praxis. Geraldine is the Managing Editor of Intercontinental Cry Magazine, a publication of the Centre for World Indigenous Studies.
Remembering to Forget
by Geraldine King
Sip on my nectar
Is it sweet?
We forgot how to be lovers
When the wells ran dry
When oceans became deserts
When the stars sucked the life
Out of you
Out of me
All we were left with was the moon
Shining brighter than our souls
But dimming our spirits
When you remembered me
You forgot yourself
You allowed ego to overcome
To come over
To cum all over
To culminate in midnight
I hear the crickets snapping their backs
Against your willful thrusts
Their crusty carapaces crackling in the night
Going back to their ancestors
While we honour ours
On this bed of self-regret
Geraldine King is Anishinaabekwe from Kiashke Zaaging Anishinaabek (Gull Bay First Nation). Geraldine is a Master’s student in the Indigenous Governance Program at the University of Victoria where her primary research interests are centred on Indigenous erotica as viable resurgent governance praxis. Geraldine is the Managing Editor of Intercontinental Cry Magazine, a publication of the Centre for World Indigenous Studies.
