Making Love with the Land
Creators: name: Whitehead, Joshua
Publisher: name: Arts
Year: 2021
Subjects: subject: Literature
subject: Literature--English

description: Making Love with the Land is a project that seeks to braid together nêhiyâwewin with our understandings of the land as a living entity (thought of outside of Western conceptions of the human and non-human). We are accountable to our understandings in order to garner lessons from which I can use to speak to issues of mental health, body positivity, and 2SQness (Two-Spirit, queer Indigeneity). This project is a practice in thinking inherently Cree and queer to read the land as an archive of story, one that, if we think of language as forgone rather than forgotten, unearths stories of queerness not only in the past but in the present and the future. The project is specifically set within Manitoba, whose Cree name is mânitôwapow meaning the “strait of the spirits” and several sites in Alberta (such as Writing-on-Stone, Head-Smashed-In, Banff, Mohkinstsis, the Dover Hills, Edmonton, Chief Mountain, and the Milk and Bow Rivers). Winnipeg was the city that coined Two-Spirit in 1990 thereby I want to read Manitoba as a specifically queer Indigenous nationhood and ask: what does it mean to come from a strait that isn’t straight? What does it mean to be peopled into the world from a fork that creates post-contact nations, peoplehoods who deploy sex as ceremony, as survival, as resistance (i.e. the creation of the Oji-Cree and Métis nations)? And what does it mean to be a 2SQ Oji-Cree visitor in the homeland of the Blackfoot?Weaving together time, form, intertext, and voice, I aim to survey the land as an Indigiqueer kin—one who stories 2SQ people into the world and always has, one who holds our creation and what I’d call (re)creation stories, and one who talks like a kokum (grandmother) to embolden and heal us. Within nêhiyâwewin (Cree linguistics) we do not engender the world, we animate it, and we hold within our linguistic systems terms for those who embody fluid genders, sexes, and sexualities. In fact, “queerness” is not a term our tongues contained, this terminology is a Western invitation. I then ask, if mental health and queerness are animated, and if pained, do they become something we can transform, make love to?Making Love with the Land seeks to investigate how we, as 2SQ peoples, survive history as peoples forever ghosted into the peripheries and how colonialism impacts our bodies emotionally, physically, and spiritually. Conceptions of 2SQness are almost always mentioned in the past tense: Two-Spirit peoples were revered. The goal of this manuscript is two-fold: to one, remove 2SQ peoplehoods from the maw of anthropology, ethnography, queer settler desires, and autogenocide; and two, to project 2SQness into a futurity that acknowledges the traumas and tribulations we must endure in order to survive. The project is crafted as a non-fictive and non-linear story in order to foster a dialogue and disrupt the boundaries between what we might consider the essay and confession. It is my belief that all modes of oration and writing are storytelling, be them philosophical, theoretical, prosaic, poetic, and/or confessional—I want to bring them together and imbue them with nêhiyâwewin in order to explore their similarities and their connectivities. I feel this short but dense style of writing speaks to the current momentum of Canadian literature as seen in all of our recent award categorizations for writing. Short is powerful but it also highlights, perhaps, who is reading, how literature is shaped by technology, how social media interrupts rhythms. This multifarious, erratic mode trains us to read in bursts but also to write aphoristically, to weigh a line of poetry or a paragraph of prose with meaning. I see this in Terese Mailhot’s Heart Berries, Billy-Ray Belcourt’s A Brief History of my Body, Darrel McLeod’s Mamaskatch, and Tanya Tagaq’s Split Tooth. Furthermore, biotexts and biowriting I believe are at the forefront of storytelling right now too as the personal, especially for BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, peoples of colour) and queer writers, cannot be disassociated from the writing—bodies magnetize, be them bodies of text or memory. It is also my belief that critical theory is of the utmost importance to decolonial and anti-oppression strategies but is wholly inaccessible to those outside of the academy. Thereby, my work seeks to synthesize and digest theory and reproduce it creatively, to take academic jargon and animate it as a character.