Maeve: Hi, I’m Maeve Marsden and you’re listening to Queerstories. This week, Joshua Whitehead is an Assistant Professor at the University of Calgary and he is the author of Making Love with the Land, full-metal indigiqueer and Jonny Appleseed all of which have received a litany of accolades and awards. He is also the editor of Love after the End: An Anthology of Two-Spirit and Indigiqueer Speculative Fiction, which won the Lambda Award in 2021. He performed this story at Sydney Writers Festival.
I am from Turtle Island and I heard it’s reconciliation week next week. So from one Indigenous person from Turtle Island to the Indigenous peoples here, thank you, I see you and I love you.
Shoot, Shovel, and Shut-Up.
I am eulogiac.
I was first invited to Rideau Hall, the official residence of the Canadian Monarch in the capital of Canada: Ottawa, in 2016. I won the beloved Governor General’s History Award for my poem “mihkokwaniy” which is a poem that details the murder of my Dene/Cree grandmother in the 1960’s (which was the beginning of Canada’s Sixties Scoop, much akin to Australia’s Stolen Generation). My senses, overloaded. Like the heated Valyrian knife of Rhaenyra Targaryen that foretells the song of ice and fire—I too stood ablaze in glyph and syllabic. They tell me that I sound ancient when I speak to you of the Anishinaabeg (Ojibwe).
Velvet. Oak. Teak. Cartilage.
What an exhibition to be enveloped within. There is a photo of my mother and I wearing that same velvet, draped around the baroque—such profundity twisted up in the knots of our smiles. In another instance, a photo is taken of me in front of the portrait of Queen Elizabeth II. Pageant of class, hands in a prayerful stance. I have come here to bury my grandmother with poetics. “Denied any history of their own, it was the fate of ‘primitive peoples’ to be dropped out of the bottom of human history in order that they might serve, representationally, as its support…the point at which human history emerges from nature”. Posited on this ledge of modernity and history, the Hall a tomb of conquest. A curation of story the nation tells itself to stratify. Decadent and profane. I might dare you to entomb me—which isn’t so much a dare as it is the truth of imperial ideology. Would my grandmother be carried with such ferocity and grace to her death chamber among her ancestors as Elizabeth was? Who stood vigil at her autopsy table?
Find a bell jar to house the almonds of our amygdala.
“Shoot,” he proclaims in bush and vigilante—Anthony Bilodeau yells before murdering Métis hunters, Maurice Cardinal and his son Jake Sanson. pâskisikewin might be the shot I take to gift the murdered a space of remembrance. I need you to remember that a headstone is a luxury. “We hung our dead in trees”. Effigies of birch. “All the trees in the world are going to fall sooner or later. But not on us.” pâskîw of the blanket of takwakin, we are ready for our snow bath—the time for story and snag arrives.
kisik, look to her, I want for trees to fall upon us. Might this too be vigil? pahkihtin kimistik miyaw tâwikiskawêw nimistikwan—bite into my bark the stories of revival. Crunch into the hardwood of this scaffold the prayers of sweat and stone. For all stones know a weeping song.
Immemorial memorial.
niya pâskinam wakîc pâskisikan ekwa nîyanân paskiswaw pakwâno-moniyaw âcimowinak. masinahikâsiw.
This is how I wrote a eulogy: you don’t need to be godly to be goodly.
September 6, 2021: my uncle is struck by a car and dies instantly.
June 15, 2022: my last remaining maternal uncle is found dead on his bed.
Both times I am in Toronto, Canada. Both times I am with a partner (although different). Both times I let mourning engulf me. I climb the CN Tower. Atop its needle, I light a cigarette. Emblazed, I pour across the city core dreams of wild tobacco and sweet smoke. Become an arrowhead. Knocked, I bow into the sky and pierce the heart of a thunderbird. Which is not to say I am deadly in my musings. I want to touch the thorax of god. Nestle in her bone cage. Cite creation in a thunderstorm. Spill from caruncle and divine rallies for these losses.
I don’t know if I see it all that often.
That we’ve become our forebearers dreams?
I suppose were walking contradictions.
And what beautiful metaphors we’ve become.
I want to find beauty in the world and translate that into joyful storying. My published work up until this point in my life has become a eulogy for the dead. My epigraphs a violent graphing. “Do you think your fathers are watching? That they weigh you in their ledgerbook? Against what? There is no book and your fathers are dead in the ground”. I am here again for my touring of Making Love with the Land. A materialized formulation of my mental warrings. I share story with audience. It appears they have learned from this new story. And yet, I am wracked with anxiety. Struggle to catch my breath. Sweat on stage. Pores too crying. A publication is meant to be celebratory, and I lament. I find myself reading Cormac McCarthy’s The Road again. I remember what Leanne Simpson and Maynard taught me, “Not all world endings are tragic”. I find joy in the apocalyptic—a survivor unto my own, personally and ancestrally—I am a final girl in this colonial slashing. I write into the margins—Papa do you hear me too? Boy, might I take a turn at fathering?
I just want to be beautiful
But you are. You already are. Look at you.
I don’t mean beauty in the sense of skin.
I can feel the pain of your histories when you speak to me.
Why do you thank me for human decency?
I want to be a beautiful wrecksite.
I want to be beautiful in the sense that when I come across a wound it emanates.
Like when pain becomes not a beacon but a blazing?
I want the hurt to see in me a tenacity that over defines the word ‘harmed’
I let his you become me: “Can you do it? When the time comes? When the time comes there will be no time…Hold him in your arms. Just so. The soul is quick. Pull him toward you. Kiss him. Quickly”. Such so, I have already done it. I have split the skull of nation with a rock and found naught but a book-to-tax reconciliation and my name as deduction. Cormac is a catharsis. The abysmal, greyed book is enlightening to me. I want to know why?
My body is a border between myself and the world, not a vehicle.
That is the problem.
I am elegiac.
A BIPOC queer gives a land acknowledgement during Calgary Pride 2022. I think he gives more of a land claim in all honesty. I am guest to a vogue ball—inside the history of Black queer NYC. The acknowledger orates, “We thank Indigenous people for sacrificing themselves”. I am standing in the background wearing a beaded red-hand medallion—a symbol of our missing and murdered. I dissipate outside of history.
No power owns us. There is only the privilege of being with us.
Stop trying to sound like a writer and write.
I am romanticized by it too all the time. Do we ever move out of our monogamy with animating death as our fuelling desire? I guess for me as I’ve noted for you: it’s been in my refusal to dance with death and to want to find intimacy and joy and love beyond the maw of desire masquerading as serration. If we eat each other like alpha predators then not much is left, in my opinion. This is why I feel I cannot inherit the tragedy of gay history; why it disbars me from its holograms. 1969 is my yesterday. I want my voice to reach back, at least a week, if not more. There isn’t much echoing being done. The forests are all clear-cut. My queerness must mean more than vulturing a decayed and decades old carcass. I wonder what other possibilities exist for us beyond being ghost and relic?
The “history of sexuality is a ‘history of western desire’”
Echo eulogia:
[mamihci]mowewin: a eulogy, to dignify, congratulate.
[mâmihk]: downstream, down river
[mâmihchi]: please him, make him proud
[mamihkowiw]: s/he is still bleeding
Silence hurts my ears. I find its presence in my proximity a harmful form of kinship. I am far too familiar with white noise in the quotidian. I crave the sounds of song and croak. My electricity stops working for an evening. I call my dog into the bed. I rest my head near his. He places paw upon head. Instinctively, he knows, to pull me into his crook of leg and chest. The world is full of noise to him, this world and the fourth. His heartbeat is a welcomed song and I regress into a wombstate.
God. Has anyone ever rested more wholly than when we were children in the backseat of a car at night drifting off to the audible but imperceptible chatter of our parents hushed voices?
Come and rest in this conciliatory symphony.
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