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Indigiqueerness: 4

Indigiqueerness
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“4” in “Indigiqueerness”

4

Someone told me they didn’t know Indigenous folk watched anime! I was like “WHAT?!”

A colour photograph of Joshua Whitehead's Akira tattoo on his front quad. Akira is riding a red motorcycle.

I feel like you work against expectations, including genre expectations, in many ways. For example, you include many popular culture references, which are not always what we have associated with Indigenous literature traditionally. Does the reader need to recognize all these references? You don’t take time to explain them. The reader either gets them or not. Can you talk about your goal with all the references to movies and songs and celebrities and such?

It’s funny. I had this comment made to me a handful of years ago. I’m a fan of anime. I think there’s a lot of sharing between Japanese oral histories and Indigenous oral histories, and full-metal indigiqueer explores that connection.

Part of my idea with pop culture references was that Indigenous characters are sometimes seen as so stoic and hyperbolized to the point that readers imagine we don’t have access to virtual worlds or we’re not pulp culture fiends and not watching the Oscars, which we very much are. I wanted to fuse contemporariness into the vernacular of queer Indigeneity through referen-ces to RuPaul or a B-list film like Deuce Bigalow Male Gigolo.

Indigenous people are always deferred to the past. I didn’t set an age for Jonny. I didn’t want him to have an age. I wanted him to be an avatar too so people can put themselves into his body. He works like a skin you can put on.

The only way readers can tell what era the book is set in is through the pop culture references. There are some I wish I didn’t put in—like snapchat as a sex work app—because it’s very dated now.

A colour photograph of Joshua Whitehead wearing special-effect makeup that makes it seem as though his face is being unzipped from the chin up to reveal a shimmering gold layer underneath. His lips are covered in white jewels.

“What’s missing or fleeting in the world is evidence of other ways of being, of something dawning. . . . This chorus of artist-thinkers taught me to be apprehensive about the tyranny of the material and to daydream about the underbelly of maps, about that which congregates just below the threshold of visibility. Perhaps this romance with the not-yet makes me a bad lover. So be it.

BILLY-RAY BELCOURT

A History of My Brief Body7

I also like to include Cree language without much explanation. I like books that give these insights or language revitalization without explaining. Then when readers get it, it’s an Easter egg. It’s validating. It’s fun to put the work on the reader. Readers don’t get unbridled access to this character’s life; if they want to maintain this relationship while reading, they have to do some of the work. Maybe they even have to get the Cree Dictionary. Or maybe they have to listen to a song. Do some research. Engage. Reading is a very collaborative endeavour.

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