9

You remind me of the way Richard Wagamese talks about the libraries as such a refuge for him. Would you say the books you read when you were young were an escape or a point of connection, or both?

I spent the days after school or even during school—most of my childhood—locked up in the library, reading everything.

I read a lot of C.S. Lewis and Tolkien and then I found Le Guin. Inspired by that reading, I did a lot of genre work in my childhood and my teens. My childhood was a tutelage of librarians and reading. Books are my refuge, especially libraries.

It’s a bit of both, escapism and connection: escape from the everyday into worlds that were rich and fantastical, also broken, but with possibilities for refuge and enhancement and success and love and thriving. I was so in tune with those books where the protagonist would succeed against all obstacles, even in a post-apocalyptic war-torn world or in Le Guin’s world of changing sex and bodies, the kemmering.²

Looking back now, as thirty-three-year-old Josh, I realize I saw myself in those books.

I didn’t know at the time, but I was connecting, having fibres of paper also attaching to tendrils of Joshua’s identity.

I’ve seen myself in books without having the language or terminology to explain why I’m so attached to these queer figures or cyborgs or mutants. Now, looking back, that work was so formative to me becoming a Two-Spirit person and writer. I got to escape into a wormhole and be devoured and devoid of all things around me, and in that space of nothingness, there was all things—which made the experience so rich and formative.

Identity

noun (Who You Are)

1) a person’s name and other facts about who they are. See also: identity parade; identity theft

2) the fact of being, or feeling that you are, a particular type of person, organization, etc.; the qualities that make a person, organization, etc. different from. See also: brand identity; gender identity; identity crisis; identity politics

noun (BEING THE SAME)

1) the fact of being or feeling the same

adjective

1) showing or proving who someone is. See also: identity card

noun (PERSON)

1) who a person is, or the qualities of a person or group that make them different from others.

noun (MATHEMATICAL STATEMENT)

1) an equation (= mathematical statement) that is true for every value given to a variable (= number that can change)

noun (BUSINESS ENGLISH)

1) the reputation, characteristics, etc. of a person or organization that makes the public think about them in a particular way:

2) who a person is, or information that proves who a person is, for example, their name and date of birth. It also suggests that traditional ways of telling the story overlook what sustains ordinary folk intent on finding religious meaning and identity.

Collocations These are words often used in combination with identity: 1) aspect of identity 2) civic identity 3) collective identity: This consciousness is historically grounded, giving recognition and value to a form of society and collective identity which predates the nation-state.³

Two-Spirit is an Indigenous term for those who may be seen, from within Western epistemologies, as not conforming to ideological ideas of gender, sex, sexuality, and/or communal roles. Two-Spirit folks may embrace part, or all, of its entailing ideas: sexuality (inclusive of LGBTQ+), sex (inclusive of trans and intersex folks), gender (inclusive of non-binary, gender non-conforming, and bigender peoples), and communal roles (inclusive of those who, precontact, may have been women partaking in warfare or men partaking in childrearing, or now, with Two-Spirit people being at the forefront of decolonizing Indigenous sexualities through language and ceremonial revitalization and/or land/water protection activism (see Standing Rock’s Two-Spirit Camp or Ontario’s Land Back Camp’s Two-Spirit Safe Space).

To me, as Joshua, I like to say: “What does Two-Spirit mean? I know. And I don’t know. The body remembers, the blood knows, it has a memory like water does. But it’s also untranslatable and unknowable in English translations as well as, although not all nor always, contemporary under-standings of sexualities. To animate 2S like a necromancer to fit cleanly and neatly in the pre-sent is a violent reanimating of our ancestors (see: the consistent revival of We’wha during June Pride and Indigenous History months). The language though, not so much, because language never dies, but a body does, a human does—we can reanimate the language, bring it back, but it can’t be preserved in temporal amber. It needs to mutate and change. Hence Indigiqueer. Hence, not knowing and knowing. That’s the whole damn point to me. That’s the whole futuristic key of Indigenous sexual, and by relation, environmental sovereignty because to be undefinable is to be unknowable to colonial powers—that’s radical freedom. In my opinion, at least.”

I discovered myself as I removed myself from the world.