[MUSIC] My name is Billy-Ray Belcourt, and I am from the Driftpile Cree Nation in northwestern Alberta. I am completing a Bachelor of Arts Honors in Comparative Literature and I'm the President of the Aboriginal Student Council, and a 2016 Rhodes Scholar elect. So, I would say that gender identity as it plays out in contemporary Indigenous communities is attached to a very sturdy, gender binary that is organized around the supposed knowability and fixity of male and female as qualifiers and as identity categories such that life can't be lived outside that binary. But, we know that there are Indigenous peoples who identify as queer or trans, two spirit or gender nonconforming in that their lives and worlds aren't organized around these two categories. And that oftentimes magnetizes violence, both discursive, but also physical because they, I guess, subvert that status quo. And that's also because a lot of ceremonies and teachings and gender roles in communities, that are said to be traditional, are also attached to this very rigid gender binary. And I think that also emerges from this assumption, or I guess historical, almost misreading of the past as a past, a pre-contact past that was also very devoted or attached to the gender binary. And so we oftentimes hear normative discourse about pre-contact Indigenous communities having these similar gender roles for men and women and that we talk about this third category of individuals, oftentimes referred to as two spirit, who sort of, I guess, diverted that gender binary but still lived within it, right, so they could be assigned male at birth, and then adopt female roles. And even that language itself is very limiting in the kinds of identities and lifes that can be lived. And so I think it is our task in the present to sort of reconcile with the stubborn newness of some forms of identity that attach themselves to sexuality and to gender in very non-normative ways with our sort of need in Native Studies but also in communities to, I guess, revive the past and to reckon with those teachings because I think that there is a lot of queer, trans, two spirit Indigenous people, who are pushing us outside the boundaries of I guess the knowable, insofar as we're I guess bringing new kinds of identities and sort of subjectivities and ways of knowing into Indigenous communities that I think will be better off for us. [MUSIC] The gender binary refers to the organization of life around maleness and femaleness, and that life can't be lived outside those two categories. And that those two categories also have very obdurate, knowable ways of knowing and being in the world. And so gender nonconforming refers to those individuals and collectivities that dream up modes of being in the world that exist outside the gender binary. That, I guess, flow between sometimes male and female, or that imagine entirely new and radical ways of embodying gender that we haven't been able to yet conceptualize. In queer theory when we use the term normative we use it in a way that organizes particular kinds of themes of living, patterns of thinking, cultures, publics, institutions that reproduce, to put it simply, a so-called status quo. So, within that status quo is the things that have happened supposedly because they've always been like that, right? And so queer theory I guess piggybacking from Foucault has pushed us to think about the history behind the things that have supposedly always been like that, right? Because we know that things always emerge from particular social, political, economic contexts. And so, to think against the normative, we have to turn to things that are emerging in the present, that don't cohere under the sign of the ordinary or the normal. And to turn to, I guess, patterns of thinking that go against the grain, if you will. So we know from our archives and oral stories and written records and imagery that there were people in pre-contact, Indigenous societies that, I guess, were queer or who transgressed the gender binary. Who adopted gender roles that weren't normally assigned to people with their kinds of bodies, and that this does push us to think about how we can live differently in the present, insofar as some Indigenous communities have adopted homophobic and transphobic sentiments because of the work of colonization and Christianization. And there is this imperative not merely to unearth those, I guess, non-normative gender roles, because I think there is a trap of turning to the past in order to fix the present because we can't actually mimetically know that past again and a lot of us didn't experience that past. And though it can be something we make recourse to in order to get through the day that it's much more complex than that. And that knowing that pre-contact Indigenous societies did do things queerly does not mean that they do that still in the present, and also does not mean that we have to simply revive those practices that we have to actually give space for new modes of queerness to exist and flourish in Indigenous communities. So as a queer Indigenous person, I have borne witness to kitchen table conversations, to ceremonies, to political meetings that have very aggressively reproduced the gender binary, that have reproduced homophobic transphobic sentiments, and that does take a toll on you as an individual. And for a long time, I was actually planning to hide my identity to just, I guess, play the game if you will to⦠[MUSIC] sort of turn to my community, but only in a way that wouldn't be harmful to me. But then I realized that Indigenous communities weren't always like that, that these violences are political, they have a history that there are structures animating them that is a product of colonization and residential schools in that we can live differently. So my work now, both literary, academic, and activist has been to push Native communities, reserves in particular, to have these hard conversations. Because there are a lot of people, especially youth, who are now taking up identities that we can't easily make sense of with the vocabularies that we have in the present, that we oftentimes borrow from the past. In that, this is a life or death matter, in that a lot of gender-nonconforming and queer, Indigenous youth are taking their lives because they experience so much violence in their communities, and that we do need to really think hard about how we can make, I guess, good relations with people that we don't know how to easily conceptualize. Right? Indigenous feminism is an intellectual and political movement that is emerged from the thinking and writing of Indigenous women, who were speaking out against violence in Native communities. Against forms of politicking that, though operating under the guise of objectivity were actually quite damaging to Native women and to queer Indigenous peoples, in that we sensed out this need in Native Studies and in our organizing to talk specifically about the forms of violence and experiences and realities that Native women and queer, trans, two spirit Indigenous peoples experienced because the tools, both academic but also political, that we had up until, I guess, the 1990s, weren't actually getting at these kinds of experiences of the world that were definitely gendered and that were absolutely queered, and that Native men who were straight weren't experiencing. And that we also saw that Native men were taking up a lot of leadership roles in our communities that there was this very sturdy warrior discourse that was attached to men and to masculinity that foreclosed the possibility of Native women's leadership, of queer, trans, two spirit Indigenous peoples' leadership and so Indigenous feminism as Isabel Altamirano put it, is about making a different future because we know that we lived differently in the past and that there were matriarchal communities that apportioned leadership roles and political action to Native women and so Indigenous feminisms is about doing things differently for those for whom life in the present is actually quite wretched, is taxing and is a product of gendered and queered forms of colonialism. So in my work, I operationalized the term queer Indigeneity because I think that queerness brings with it a radicality and semantic promiscuity, if you will. Which is to say that queer cannot be known in advance, that it is about the refusal to be normative and that, to not desire what you're supposed to desire, actually brings about entirely new ways of being in the world. And then Indigeneity is also a kind of political analytic that we take up in Native Studies to refer not merely to the flesh of Native peoples, but to the way that Indigeneity operates as a signifier of sorts. That it means specific things. That it refers to specific epistemologies and ways of being in the world, in that States as well have attributed specific characteristics and histories to Indigenous peoples. And so, when I combine the two, I am trying to reconcile with the existence of Native peoples who cannot be easily conceptualized through the gender binary, through historiography, through attempts to revitalize the past and the present. And to say that this is more, actually, than just about gender and sexuality, but about entire politics and vision for the future and survival strategies as well to survive a present that doesn't want us to; and so my work is about, I guess, not just surviving the present with what we've got, but, building a future in which queer Indigenous peoples, trans Indigenous peoples, two spirit peoples, can flourish as such. [MUSIC]
