2
Brown Queer and Trans Bodies at the Impasse of Diaspora and Indigeneity
Impasse: a situation in which no progress is possible, especially because of disagreement; a deadlock: the current political impasse.
—New Oxford American Dictionary
What might it mean to dwell in the impasse, in the seeming deadlock, of diaspora and Indigeneity? And, contra Oxford, what kinds of “progress”—or, futurity—are possible under the conditions of impasse? To the extent that progress and futurity imply mobility and movement to an elsewhere, dwelling—staying in-place—may, by contrast, seem a regressive or passive strategy. Colonial and capitalist assumptions about dwelling might evoke property ownership and normative forms of kinship. But when our practice of dwelling centers Indigeneity—what is then opened up?
Multidisciplinary South Asian diasporic artist Vivek Shraya dwells in the impasse in her 2016 book of poetry titled even this page is white, which includes multiple poems exploring and acknowledging her complicity in anti-Blackness and settler colonialism, and of which half the author royalties went to the Native Youth Sexual Health Network.1 In “indian,” she reflects on the practice of Indigenous land acknowledgment that often happens at the start of academic, activist, and art events:
Is acknowledgement enough?
I acknowledge I stole this
but I am keeping it social justice
or social performance
what would it mean to digest you and yours and blood and
home and land and minerals and trees and dignities and legacies
to really honour no
show gratitude no
word for partaking in violence in progress.2
The poem reflects on the paradox of performing solidarity through land acknowledgment while simultaneously benefiting from occupation. It indexes the limitations of land acknowledgment as a performance of solidarity that fails to ever completely capture one’s complicity in ongoing colonial violence.
Shraya’s poem captures some of the conundrums that are at the heart of this chapter: What, really, does it mean to “be in solidarity”? Does the recognition or acknowledgment of other forms of structural violence fundamentally alter the way that we see and narrate our own experiences of pain and trauma? Does an awareness of the mutual imbrication of disparate struggles in and of itself break apart the impasse? In other words, given what we know about the historically constituted and sedimented entanglements of violence that structurally position groups in oppositional ways, is it more nuanced understandings of those entanglements that are necessary here? Consciousness-raising, for example, has been a vital strategy within feminist movements for understanding one’s social position within systems of oppression and exploitation, and enabling the collective building of emancipatory projects.3 Yet feminist consciousness-raising focused on strengthening a common cause. To what extent does a strategy such as consciousness-raising help when it comes to thinking through deep entanglements, nonequivalence, and the incommensurable? What is the common cause of the moment? Or: how might we imagine shared political horizons under the context of diffuse and disparate struggles?
While this chapter does not address all of these questions, I begin to scratch the surface by meditating on the limitations of awareness. I turn to the work of Shraya and writer/artist Shani Mootoo in order to reflect on how they register the attachments to settler-colonial landscapes and aesthetics that persist in spite of their political commitments to Indigenous solidarity. I focus particularly on works by Shraya and Mootoo that take up the question of land: Mootoo’s didactically oriented early 1990s experimental films A Paddle and a Compass and Wild Woman in the Woods, which critique white settler-colonial tropes of land and wilderness by inserting queer Brown bodies into them; and Shraya’s 2021 photo essay “Legends of the Trans,” which pays disidentificatory homage to Tristan Ludlow, Brad Pitt’s character from the 1994 film Legends of the Fall. I consider Mootoo and Shraya alongside one another in order to emphasize their different strategies—one that deploys Brown queer bodies to disrupt and interrupt violent constructions of nation and land, the other that imbues Brown trans bodies with care and joy in order to critique embodied violence—and to draw attention to the ways their works register the de facto separation of body and land. This experiential disentanglement is one source of diasporic/Indigenous impasse. In his relational analysis of Black and Indigenous studies, Mark Rifkin similarly describes the distinct orientations between the two fields/movements in terms of flesh and land, or “a contrast between a focus on the violence of dehumanization through fungibility and occupation through domestication.”4 For South Asian diasporic subjects such as Shraya or Mootoo, neither fungibility nor domestication in these senses quite describes the particular forms of racialization they experience. However, while the racial trauma of non-Black people of color may not be explained through dehumanization through fungibility, it is felt on the body and experienced as dehumanizing. The bifurcation of body/land remains, and structurally generates diasporic attachments to settler colonialism.
Both Mootoo’s and Shraya’s work emerge from queer/trans Black, Indigenous, and people of color (QTBIPOC) communities in Canada (including Toronto, Edmonton, Calgary, and Vancouver), and specifically queer South Asian diasporic communities that have come into formation in relation to Indigenous decolonization movements.5 As noted in the introduction, since the 1990 Oka Crisis, South Asian Canadians have had continual conversations about diasporic relationships to Indigenous self-determination, particularly vis-à-vis the queer South Asian diasporic festival Desh Pardesh. More recently, queer and trans of color communities in Toronto continue to reflect on these questions, as evidenced by the mutual support between Black Lives Matter Toronto and Indigenous organizations and by the conversations documented by Marvellous Grounds, a project mapping queer and trans of color geographies in the city.6 If Shraya or Mootoo displace and erase Indigeneity in (some of) their work, then, it is not for lack of knowledge. Rather than indicting the propensity of either as individual artists to gravitate toward settler imaginaries, I want to probe further to consider the structural relation that generates that gravitation and furthers the impasse between diaspora and Indigeneity. I note this particularly because of Shraya’s and Mootoo’s activist lineages. This suggests that there is something else happening to create this repeated erasure, which I locate in the disjuncture between diasporic and Indigenous strategies of critique and survival.
This disjuncture is intelligible in terms of the debates on nation and nationhood across queer of color/diasporic and queer Indigenous studies. To be sure, queer of color and queer Indigenous studies share critiques of the modern nation-state, identifying the way in which gender and sexuality have been sites for the enactment of the racial-colonial violence that defined settler states, like the United States and Canada, as well as imperial centers. Racialized and colonized Others were figured as sexually deviant, with their lack of respectability distancing them from bourgeois whiteness.7 Family and kinship structures emerged as key sites for the regulation of racialized-colonized bodies. In Aberrations in Black, Roderick A. Ferguson describes how this naturalization of heteropatriarchy by the capitalist nation-state has been taken for granted by Marxism, liberal pluralism, and Black revolutionary nationalisms, such that, for example, the family remains the site of rescue from capitalism’s wreckage.8 He introduces queer of color critique, by contrast—a historical-materialist framework that refuses to separate capitalism from its entanglements with race, gender, sexuality, ability, and class—in order to expose how naturalized heteropatriarchy enacts violence through cultural sites such as the family. Ferguson emphasizes the contributions of women of color feminism, particularly Black lesbian feminism, as offering alternate forms of critique “that eschewed nationalism, rather than facilitated it.”9 By “helping to designate the imagination as a social practice under contemporary globalization,” writes Ferguson, “women of color feminism, generally, and black lesbian feminism, particularly, attempted to place culture on a different path and establish avenues alternative to the ones paved by forms of nationalism.”10 I will return to this imaginative practice, and the possibilities it furnishes, in chapter 4.
However, as Rifkin has argued, although queer diasporic and queer of color critiques expose the violence of modern biopolitics, they also obfuscate the alternate sociopolitical formations that racial-colonial capitalism has erased and displaced.11 These often fall by the wayside even in the alternate imaginaries of queer and feminist of color work. This is where queer of color and queer Indigenous thought diverge even as they share a mutual diagnosis of the modern nation-state’s violence. While Mootoo and Shraya, for example, are able to account for the nation-state’s violence, this is precisely where solidarity reaches its limit. Queer Indigenous (and Indigenous feminist) critiques of the nation draw attention to the displaced modes of sovereignty that fundamentally critique and challenge racial-colonial capitalism. To be sure, such critiques also name the violence of heteropatriarchy of some formations of Indigenous nationalisms, as does Jennifer Denetdale (Diné) in her reading of the Navajo nation’s support for the U.S. war on terror in the early aughts, and the 2005 Diné Marriage Act, which mobilized particular interpretations of gender, militarism, and tradition.12 Denetdale concludes that “we must be willing to raise questions and interrogate those beliefs and practices that are presented as tradition but, in truth, are meant to uphold American imperialism.”13
Still, if settler colonialism enacted genocidal policies that constructed Indigenous sexualities as perverse in relation to Euro-American ones, it specifically did so by targeting modes of polity and sociality that enabled radical relationalities among people and with nonhuman life and land.14 Mohawk anthropologist Audra Simpson bluntly names this the settler state’s “sovereign death drive.”15 It is for this reason that, as Lisa Tatonetti demonstrates, Indigenous artists and activists’ performance of non-cis masculinities leverage a challenge, not just to gender norms narrowly conceived, but to the mutual imbrication of gender and sexuality with colonization.16 In her analysis of Anishinaabe writer Louise Erdrich, for example, Tatonetti observes that “rather than presenting female masculinity as a stage of stunted psychological growth, the stuff of gender anxiety and bodily horror, [Erdrich] presents female masculinity as a type of affective power constructed in and through relationship.”17 Elaborating on the links between settler bio- and necropolitical violence and attacks on Native sovereignty, Audra Simpson powerfully writes:
An Indian woman’s body in settler regimes such as the US, in Canada is loaded with meaning—signifying other political orders, land itself, of the dangerous possibility of reproducing Indian life and most dangerously, other political orders. Other life forms, other sovereignties, other forms of political will. Indian women in the aforementioned example of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy transmit the clan, and with that: family, responsibility, relatedness to territory. Feminist scholars have argued that Native women’s bodies were to the settler eye, like land, and as such in the settler mind, the Native woman is rendered “unrapeable” (or, “highly rapeable”) because she was like land, matter to be extracted from, used, sullied, taken from, over and over again, something that is already violated and violatable in a great march to accumulate surplus, to so called “production.”18
Sovereignty—a European term emerging vis-à-vis Enlightenment thought—is in fact an inadequate descriptor for the kinds of social relationalities that Indigenous praxes have developed, and that settler regimes targeted for extinction. From the Anishinaabe tradition, Leanne Betasamosake Simpson expansively describes sovereignty (via her Elder, Gidigaa Migizi) as “Kina Gehi Anishinaabe-ogaming,” or “the place where we all live and work together.”19 Linking bodily and national sovereignty, she notes: “My body sovereignty is not subject to attack just because it is an Indigenous woman’s body. My body sovereignty is subject to attack because it exists as a Nishnaabeg political order.”20 L. B. Simpson’s discussion of land pedagogies, moreover—embedded in connections to family, community, and nonhuman life—as integral to the resurgence of Indigenous nation building radically challenges our conceptions of what constitutes the nation.21
I name the diasporic/Indigenous impasse as structural because ignorance, a lack of will, or moral failure alone are not enough to account for these disjunctures. The impasse is easily dismissed as a problem of framing: of perceiving categories such as diaspora, hybridity, and Indigeneity as mutually exclusive when they are not. One could point to how processes of migration and displacement that have been central to Indigenous experiences, for example. As a case in point, Ho Chunk anthropologist Renya Ramirez’s work shows how Native youth moving to urban spaces are diasporic in relation to their reservations. One could equally consider the transnational dimensions of Indigenous politics. As Maylei Blackwell (with Kēhaulani Kauanui) writes, Indigenous feminism is “already transnational due to its Indigenous nation-to-nation commitments, the way it navigates and challenges colonial settler nation-states, and creates alternative relationalities grounded in Indigenous epistemologies that cross multiple national borders and question the colonial constructs of those borders.”22 One might also point to the misuse of categories such as “native” and “indigenous.” For example, in some iterations of postcolonial and diaspora studies, diasporic subjects are framed as hybrid, mobile, and postcolonial against implicitly Indigenous ones who are framed as authentic, rooted in place, and fixed.23 This has perhaps been an unintended consequence of critical studies of diaspora, which have critiqued conservative configurations of diaspora that figure homelands as spaces of purity and authenticity while encouraging diasporic communities to adopt conservative family values and politics as a means of preserving the “original” nation. Critical studies of diaspora have complicated discourses such as these by drawing attention to the imbrications of diasporic formations in heteropatriarchy, caste, and capitalism; in the process they have taken for granted the conservative significations of indigenized homelands. Gayatri Gopinath’s Impossible Desires, for example, describes the conservatism of South Asian diasporic formations that cling to essentialized constructions of authentic homelands characterized by heteronormative family structures; Jasbir Puar correspondingly argues for queer diasporic assemblages that are unmoored from homelands and instead oriented by affective forms of connection.24
Yet, the diasporic/Indigenous impasse cannot only be explained as a problem of imprecise words or categorization, given that there are qualitative experiential differences across these sociocultural formations. I return again to Lily Cho’s instructive formulation of diaspora not as explanatory descriptor but as historically constituted subjective condition. Indigeneity as a critical category is likewise not merely a description, but a particular condition that emerges from histories of colonization, genocide, and dispossession. The conditions of diaspora and Indigeneity are intertwined insofar as they are the products of centuries of pillage and plunder. But they are not the same, and their particularities deserve attention.
Queer relational critique by authors such as Tiffany Lethabo King and Gopinath offers new and promising possibilities for holding onto these particularities while enacting alternate forms of relation, kinship, and affinity.25 In The Black Shoals, King powerfully homes in on tensions in Indigenous sovereignty discourse that queer Indigenous scholarship (and art and activism)—which has critiqued the heteronormativity, homophobia, and transphobia inherited from colonial violence and trauma within contemporary articulations of sovereignty—has identified.26 Billy-Ray Belcourt and Jas Morgan, for instance, argue that the privileging of sovereignty and governance over embodied experience effaces or minimizes the work queer/two-spirit Indigenous peoples must do just to be and exist; to enact, in Gerald Vizenor’s words, survivance.27 Queer/two-spirit and feminist Indigenous critique has in this way done important bridging work that understands problems of land sovereignty and governance as intimately intertwined with the embodied violence that women, trans/two-spirit, queer, and/or nonbinary individuals experience most acutely. Attuned to this experience of embodied violence, King thus reads for resonances across the work of Belcourt, and Black lesbian feminist poet Audre Lorde. Both Belcourt and Lorde, King shows, see promise—the possibility for alternate modes of being and being-in-relation—in the chaos and unpredictability of love and desire.28 For King, the erotic breaks apart the Black/Native impasse.
Gopinath, through her relational readings of Indigenous and diasporic artists Tracey Moffatt, Seher Shah, and Allan deSouza in Unruly Visions, likewise proposes queer diaspora studies and queer of color critique as frameworks capacious enough to capture the distinct histories and experiences that fall under the rubrics of diaspora and Indigeneity. Gopinath specifically suggests that attention to aesthetics opens up a fruitful space for considering diasporic–Indigenous relationality, noting, “The aesthetic practices of queer diaspora demand a pause in thinking of the relation of indigeneity to diaspora in terms of either opposition or equivalence, and to think of it instead in terms of affinities, encounters, and conversations that avoid congealing into fixed political positions.”29 By considering the relation and queer diaspora and Indigeneity in terms of affects rather than the sociopolitical positions generated by forms of structural violence, Gopinath, like King, expands the horizon for imagining connections and forging intimacies.
And yet there is a crucial difference here that cannot be ignored: the Indigenous erotic—as evidenced across the work of writers including Beth Brant (Mohawk), Daniel Heath Justice (Cherokee), Kateri Akiwenzie-Damm (Anishinaabe), Deborah Miranda (Esselen and Chumash), and Carole LaFavor (Ojibwe), among others—is fundamentally tied to land.30 While such writers, observes Lisa Tatonetti, “build off Lorde, they extend her theory by constructing an erotic that focuses on an embodied sense of Native history, land, and sovereignty. . . . Native peoples’ relationships with and understandings of land and tribal responsibility therefore play key roles in an Indigenous erotic.”31 Queer and two-spirit Indigenous writers and artists grapple not only with the embodied experiences and affects generated by colonial and racial violence but also with the intertwined forms of violence wrought on body and land.
Thus, while I am excited and moved by both Gopinath’s and King’s visions, I also want to sit—linger—with the impasse of diaspora/Indigeneity. Although connection seems vital in the face of the colonial strategy of divide and conquer, I wonder: Where might the impasse take us? Though impasse or limbo might feel risky or even terrifying, might dwelling in the impasse help forge more resilient relations? I highlight Gopinath’s and King’s interventions here because I want to make clear that my goal in this chapter is not oppositional to theirs; rather, I am insisting that queer affect, sensations, and aesthetics rupture, but do not necessarily destroy, the impasse. Though the impasse does not make relations impossible, dismissing the impasse may impede them. I dwell in this impasse not out of despair (as the next two chapters of this book demonstrate), but out of a desire to better understand its production and sustenance. I follow Mishauna Goeman (Tonawanda Seneca) here, who, drawing on Noelani Goodyear-Ka’opua, suggests that “many settler discourses (and Native discourses affected by settler notions of time and space) proceed with the conception of body-contained and land-contained entities.”32 She powerfully argues for settler-colonial critique that is attentive to the interconnections of body and land:
If the aim of settler colonial studies is to confront colonial structures, it must consider an investigation of embodied practices in settler societies beyond the way that settler knowledge represents the indigenous as absent. Settler colonial theory needs also to be accountable to how bodies move through spaces and the scales of space set up through imposed criteria—or a logic of containment. Furthermore, embodied practices must move beyond a notion of the body as individual, private and moving independently as a fixed entity. Instead, the body is often written on in both historical and geographical ways.33
To illustrate her theorization of “how bodies move through spaces and the scales of space set up through imposed criteria,” Goeman turns to Chickasaw writer Linda Hogan’s 1994 novel, Solar Storms. She identifies three scales on which body operates in the novel:
the individual bodies of [the protagonist, mother, and grandmother] and of the community that stands in for the social body; the individual and her relationship to the land that literally sustains us; and the social body of the Native community and the national bodies of the United States, Canada, and Quebec. Rather than thinking of these scales as disconnected, we need to think of the social processes that “freeze” them.
Indeed, as Cherokee scholar Daniel Heath Justice has noted with respect to Indigenous literature, relationship is integral here.34 It is particularly the second scale that Goeman observes—of the body in relation to land—that diasporic art and criticism engages less consistently and frequently and that introduces a disjuncture between the diasporic and Indigenous condition. This is the impasse in which I will be dwelling.
Vivek Shraya: Brown Trans Femme Corporeality, Contained Land
Vivek Shraya, a trans/femme/bisexual-identified South Asian artist, was born in Edmonton, Alberta. She moved to Toronto in her twenties, where she began her artistic career and spent fifteen years as the positive space coordinator at George Brown College.35 In 2018, she took up a creating writing assistant professorship at the University of Calgary.36 Prolific and multidisciplinary, Shraya counts among her projects musical albums, films, photography, poetry, and novels that investigate gender, sexuality, race, and spirituality. A running thread across her work is the question of what it means to inhabit the intersections of these identities and their concomitant pain, pleasure, and complexity. Her online presence has been integral to her success: although, like many other artists in Canada, Shraya draws from public sources of funding (“Legends of the Trans” was supported by the Canada Council for the Arts, for instance), her website—which includes access to many of her works—and social media engagement have enabled her to extend her reach outside of traditional institutions like museums, galleries, and university libraries. Shraya’s work foregrounds her activist commitments, which often appear in the form of direct and explicit statements, but those commitments are also uneven and contradictory, as suggested by her role as brand ambassador for MAC cosmetics and Pantene shampoo.
I focus here particularly on Shraya’s strategy of amplifying Brown trans/queer corporeality and life, and what this consequently means for Indigenous relations. If Shraya, as emblematic of many diasporic artists, is unable to fully account for land, this is because land/land relations are not constitutive of the diasporic condition—and specifically, the trans/queer diasporic condition—in the same way that they might be for Indigenous condition: Indigenous mobilizations of the erotic are distinct from diasporic ones. As a trans artist, Shraya’s work is particularly attuned to the bio- and necropolitical circulation of racial violence and thus amplifies the diasporic/Indigenous impasse I aim to elucidate.37
Shraya’s work responds to her own experience as a queer/trans Brown femme. It is a response to necropolitical violence, as her website’s About page implies when it states that it is “the digital archive for a living trans artist of colour.”38 If, as C. Riley Snorton and Jin Haritaworn observe, “globalized homonormative and transnormative political projects” extract value from trans of color death, Shraya amplifies her vitality across her work.39 Whereas anti-trans violence is often excessive and spectacular, or, as Eric Stanley describes it, purposefully “overkill” in order “to do violence to what is nothing,” Shraya emphasizes her corporeality, and on her terms, not on the terms of dominant national or popular discourses.40 In an interview with media scholar Nicole Morse, she says of her social media selfies: “I think selfies have been a way for me to reclaim the gaze or return the gaze back to me. It’s one of the only times that I can essentially own the gaze, and certainly it has been pivotal in my coming out as trans.”41
Beyond her selfies, the reclamation and return of gaze reverberates across Shraya’s works. If, following Stanley, perpetrators of anti-trans violence communicate the disposability and inherent violability of trans bodies through excessive, gratuitous harm, Shraya’s oeuvre, which focuses particularly on dazzling trans embodiment, homes in on this bodily experience of transness. Across her website, we see Shraya, Shraya, and more Shraya. She wears stylish outfits, sports flawlessly coifed hair and makeup, and gazes defiantly across the screen. The photographs particularly emphasize her hair and face. She wants the audience to see her fully, and she creates the terms and conditions for that looking. Whereas, as Nael Bhanji observes, trans of color bodies are made hypervisible through death and memorialization, Shraya is hypervisible through vivification.42 The excess and spectacularity of her work suggest that it is not for the benefit of the settler nation or of normative conceptions of beauty. In contrast to popular trans femme figures such as Caitlin Jenner, who traffic in their ability to pass, Shraya dwells with her Brown queer trans beauty as is. While most of her looks are high-femme, neither does she shy away from sporting facial hair when performing in projects such as How to Fail as a Popstar. As Morse asserts, “Within a world that marks queer, brown transfemininity as not only undesirable but abject, Shraya’s act of directing her look toward herself is not merely a practice of self-love in the present. Instead, the directionality of the look, and the iterative act of repeatedly staging the look toward the self, points toward [Brown, transfeminine] futures.”43
Witness Shraya’s recent works, including her promotion of the “Vivek Forever” T-shirt, commemorating Shraya’s twenty-year career, and her play How to Fail as a Popstar, with its accompanying music video “I’m a Fag 4 U.” Shraya boldly and pleasurefully inserts herself into pop icon-dom. In the soft-lit “Vivek Forever” video promo, for instance, she channels Madonna as she sings and dances in a shoulder-padded, sparkling baby-blue minidress as a crowd of male-signifying admirers surround her. In “I’m a Fag 4 U,” the title of which riffs off Britney Spears’s 2001 single, “I’m a Slave 4 U,” she adopts an early 1990s hip-hop aesthetic (Figure 9). The video begins with black-and-white documentary-style interviews with Shraya and two collaborators (Rodney Diverlus and Phil Villeneuve), each reflecting on the first time they heard the word fag; Shraya then reflects on reappropriating the term, and the video moves into music-video mode that features Shraya, Diverlus, and Villeneuve each dancing on the streets of downtown Toronto. As the music crescendos, the video eventually shifts to full color. Shraya, Diverlus, and Villeneuve appear together for the first time in the video, and Shraya appears in a new outfit—out of the “Wham” style baseball cap, single earring, and denim shorts-jumpsuit to a glamorous femme look with an 1980s-style dress, long blonde hair, and frosty makeup. Land and landscape are not absent from these works (or, in many of Shraya’s other works) but serve as the backdrop, the setting, for the amplification of queer trans bodies.44 In “I’m a Fag 4 U,” Shraya and her collaborators purposefully and pleasurefully take up space in a public urban setting where they might otherwise experience homophobic and transphobic violence; the “Vivek Forever” promo is similarly unabashed in the way that it takes up urban public space. In response to the excessive character of anti-trans violence, these works are excessively bold, playful, and pleasureful. If the urban can be the container for violence, then Shraya removes and replaces that violence with queer and trans beauty.
Figure 9. Vivek Shraya dances in the city; screenshot from “I’m a Fag 4 U.”
Yet it is precisely this focus on the body—the body extracted from its other relations—that generates a disjuncture between diaspora and Indigeneity. I want to listen to the aporia that this strategy creates. Shraya herself is aware of this: in the poem “amiskwacîwâskahikan” from even this page is white, she makes note of how one’s preoccupations with one’s own struggles cloud over possibilities for seeing others. amiskwacîwâskahikan, which translates into English as “Beaver Hills house,” is the Cree word for Edmonton.45 Shraya writes:
so preoccupied
with my own displacement
didn’t notice
i was displacing
you
gave myself
a white name
adam in place of
divek civic ribbit
didn’t bother to learn
yours46
Shraya astutely identifies how in tending to one’s own injuries, one easily and unwittingly forgets those of others. While Shraya writes here in the past tense, suggesting that she has since learned from these omissions, reading this poem alongside her other work ironically provides a frame for seeing how these omissions continue to manifest. Solidarity reaches its limits: having experienced the land as container for violence, Shraya—like many diasporic subjects—takes for granted that land is there to be emptied and refilled. This is the framework of “land as container” that Goeman cites. Shraya feels the violence, but does not necessarily think, feel, or understand the land, except perhaps as container. Divorced from the body, the land is not a living, dynamic source of the erotic. One might draw a comparison here, for example, to two-spirit Ojibwe writer/activist Carole LaFavor’s mobilization of her embodied knowledge of sexual violence and HIV/AIDS to also advance an argument for Indigenous health sovereignty.47 To quote two-spirit Opaskwayak Cree educator and activist Alex Wilson, “Bodily sovereignty is inseparable from sovereignty over our lands and waters. It means that we are reclaiming and returning to traditional understandings of our bodies as connected to land.”48 The conceptualization of land as container, by contrast, is embedded in settler imaginaries, perpetuated as it is by settler policies that, as Goeman notes, transformed land from a place of storied, intergenerational connection and relation into privatized property.49
This disjuncture subsequently surfaces more acutely in Shraya’s photo essay “Legends of the Trans,” which ran from October 18, 2021, to February 6, 2022, at Calgary’s Akimbo gallery, with a simultaneous opening on her website. “Legends of the Trans” takes inspiration from Legends of the Fall, a western epic that follows a family of three brothers and their father in rural Montana, spanning from the early to mid-twentieth century. However, the film and Shraya’s “Legends of the Trans” photoshoot share a location: Calgary, traditional territories of the Blackfoot Confederacy (Siksika, Kainai, Piikani), the Tsuut’ina, the Îyâxe Nakoda Nations, and the Métis Nation (Region 3). In Legends, Pitt portrays the youngest brother, Tristan, who is the most “wild” of the three cowboys, connected to nature and the more-than-human, and to Native communities and customs. More so than the other characters, Tristan straddles the line between “savagery” and “civilization”; he embodies the “regeneration through violence” that Richard Slotkin argues characterizes the myth of the American frontier, wherein, to successfully clear the frontier for civilization, the cowboy must match or outdo the savagery of the “Indian.”50 Unlike the John Wayne cowboy of classic westerns, however, Tristan’s savagery is a gentle or “noble” one.
Like Shraya’s other work, the “Legends of the Trans” photo essay is stunning. Across the twenty-two photos comprising the series, we see Shraya posing like Tristan in ethereal green landscapes, mimicking classic shots from the film. Some of these are close-up frames of Shraya’s face, a green or blue bindi visible on her forehead; others are wider shots emphasizing her full figure against the landscape (Figure 10). As in her other recent projects, like the documentary/music video “I’m a Fag 4 U,” hers is less a project of critique than an attempt to recuperate the violence wrought on Brown femme trans bodies.
The photos in “Legends of the Trans” particularly emphasize Pitt/Tristan’s long blonde hair, intertextually linking this photo essay with Shraya’s earlier focus on hair in projects such as the short story collection God Loves Hair. In an interview with Calgary radio station CJSW podcast The Almanacs, Shraya muses about growing hair long enough to fulfill this fantasy of portraying Tristan. Yet, similar to the Brown protagonists of Wild West that I discussed in chapter 1—who align themselves with the cowboy’s perceived outsider or outlaw status—Shraya identifies not so much with Brad Pitt’s peak white masculinity but with the rebellious, nonconforming, queer elements of Tristan’s cowboy character.
Figure 10. Shraya as Tristan in “Legends of the Trans”; photo by Zachary Ayotte, courtesy Vivek Shraya.
In some respects, “Legends of the Trans” mirrors Shraya’s earlier photo essay “Trisha,” in which Shraya restages vintage photographs of her mother, mimicking her clothing, expressions, and gestures. In the accompanying text, Shraya reflects on coming to terms with her mother’s choices resulting from interpellation into cisheteropatriarchy—and the hurt and sadness those choices caused Shraya—while also expressing admiration for her mother. As in “Trisha,” in “Legends of the Trans” Shraya pays loving homage to a role model: as the accompanying text suggests, Shraya found solace and pleasure watching Tristan as a thirteen-year-old trans child, particularly where other role models were a rarity. Shraya’s performance of Tristan (and, in the earlier photo essay, her mother) corresponds to the practice of disidentification, as theorized by José Muñoz:
Disidentification is about recycling and rethinking encoded meaning. The process of disidentification scrambles and reconstructs the encoded message of a cultural text in a fashion that both exposes the encoded message’s universalizing and exclusionary machinations and recircuits its workings to account for, include, and empower minority identities and identifications. Thus, disidentification is a step further than cracking open the code of the majority; it proceeds to use this code as raw material for representing a disempowered politics or positionality that has been rendered unthinkable by the dominant culture.51
As a strategy of disidentification, Shraya posing as Tristan exposes the signifiers of cisheteronormative (white settler) masculinity that construct the cowboy as hero—and Pitt as heartthrob and object of desire—while at the same time resignifying Pitt/Tristan as a genderqueered object of identification and longing, by amplifying Tristan’s nonconformist characteristics. However, what about those meanings that might remain opaque, even for Shraya? Muñoz’s theory works from the assumption that all encoded meanings are available to the artist (or recoder). The assumption is that the artist’s standpoint enables them to see encoding meanings that may not be immediately apparent to those occupying more dominant social locations.
The settler-colonial meanings of Legends of the Fall, for instance, might have been opaque to Shraya. On the one hand, just as even this page is white includes explicit declarations of support for Indigenous solidarity, these questions loomed for Shraya as she worked on “Legends of the Trans”:
When people talk about Alberta, there’s this sort of redneck stereotype that’s projected here. And after living here for a few years, I actually find it really frustrating because I think every time we project that onto this place, we a) erase the history of who this land belongs to, and b) I think we also invalidate the lives of people of colour who live here and queer people who live here and trans people who live here. Those are some of the things that I was thinking about in relation to this project.52
Yet, despite this stated intention to consider “the history of who this land belongs to,” I am left wondering where to read that history in “Legends of the Trans,” and how to make sense of its absence. When the photo essay exhibit opened at Calgary’s Akimbo gallery, Shraya simultaneously made the essay available on her website. One can mimic the exhibit experience in the website version by playing an audio clip of the film soundtrack while viewing the photos and reading the accompanying text. The combination of orchestral music and ethereal photographs along with the all-caps serif font of the text creates a mythos-like aesthetic. The text recounts Shraya’s experience relating to Tristan as a young trans teen: “Tristan wasn’t like the other boys and neither was she.” The penultimate paragraph reads:
Tristan sought kinship and meaning beyond his blood and whiteness. Tristan loved the wilderness—they were matched in their unpredictability. This is actually what frightened her about nature: it never felt as serene as it looked surrounding him. But she did find solace when she conversed with the sky and imagined one day the wind would agree to be her lover like it was for Tristan. Tristan loved horses and horses loved Tristan back. Tristan was a hunter, and was eventually hunted. His friend, One Stab, described him best: “He had always lived in the borderland anyway, somewhere between this world and the other.”
This paragraph provides a clue as to how to read Indigenous absence in the exhibit. The “kinship and meaning beyond his blood and whiteness” ostensibly refers to Tristan’s friendly relations with Cree people—including his marriage to Cree woman Isabel Two, with whom he has two children—that the film amplifies through narrator and supporting character One Stab, a Cree man and longtime friend to the Ludlow family (portrayed by the late Cree actor Gordon Tootoosis). Such an indigenizing strategy mirrors the film Dances with Wolves, in which U.S. army captain John Dunbar, portrayed by Kevin Costner, befriends the Lakota Sioux. By the film’s conclusion, the Sioux claim they see Dunbar not as a white man but as a fellow Sioux warrior, whom they anoint as “Dance with Wolves.” In Legends, Tristan’s rebelliousness and connections with nature are likewise linked to an honorary Indigeneity that this character clinches vis-à-vis marriage and friendship, affirmed by One Stab’s narration. The extent to which Shraya also exposes the original film’s indigenization of that nonconformity—and hence Pitt/Tristan as ultimate American—is unclear.53 Shraya’s (dis)identification with Tristan potentially echoes Scott Morgensen’s theorization of queer indigenization. In his ethnography of the California Radical Faeries community, Morgensen shows how white queer settlers perform indigenization by situating themselves within a universal “queer” lineage that positions Indigenous communities as originary queer ancestors to contemporary white queers.54 By portraying Tristan as a kind of genderqueer hero—and in particular, by conflating those characteristics of Tristan that the original film deems proximate to Indigeneity with genderqueerness—Shraya implicitly celebrates a settler strategy of white assimilation and metaphorical Native displacement, enacting a form of regenerative violence in the process. The Indigenous nations who have traditionally lived and moved across Calgary—the Siksika, Kainai, Piikani, Tsuut’ina, Métis, and Îyâxe Nakoda Nations—fall to the wayside. Paradoxically, then, the exhibit brings into relief the very problems with performing solidarity that Shraya calls out in her poem “indian.”
As noted earlier, the photo essay not only takes up this strategy of foregrounding and celebrating trans beauty but also combines this with a strategy of disidentification that is implicitly indigenizing. It is useful here to take stock of the differences between “Legends of the Trans” and Shraya’s earlier photo essay “Trisha.” In the latter, Shraya disidentifies with the heteropatriarchal ideologies framing her mother’s life while exposing and admiring the “joyfulness and playfulness” that old photographs of her mother exude. Yet, in “Legends of the Trans,” Shraya’s disidentification amplifies Tristan’s latent indigenization. It is the film’s indigenization of Tristan that removes him from the register of dominant white cisheteromasculinity, and it is precisely these indigenized characteristics that Shraya identifies with—and which remain latent in her interpretation of the character. There is, moreover, another kind of erasure insofar as Shraya’s trans femme identification with Tristan, a white settler, relies on symbolically analogizing anti-trans violence with intrasettler violence. In the film, Tristan loses his brothers and lover to exceptionally violent deaths; Shraya ostensibly identifies with that loss as a trans person who has lost trans community members: in the “climax” of the photo essay Shraya’s poses become meditative, culminating in photos in which she is crying. The accompanying text echoes these themes of violence, grief, and injustice:
But [Tristan’s] efforts to protect and provide were in vain because people he loved suffered violent deaths. Committed to upholding what he believed was fair, he often turned to vengeance. [Shraya] too craved justice, and [Tristan] showed her that maybe the only way to get it was to fight for it.
Here, Tristan’s losses are analogues for Shraya’s queer/trans loss, and Tristan’s drive for justice is analogue for Shraya’s. This is perhaps the inverse of what Treva Ellison, Kai M. Green, Matt Richardson, and C. Riley Snorton observe when they remark that “though the popular representation of fabulousness and the crises of the trans subject are represented primarily by Black transwomen and transwomen of color, the field of transgender studies, like other fields, seems to use this Black subject as a springboard to move toward other things, presumably white things.”55 There is also the silent grief of Indigenous loss—particularly as Tristan in the film, and Shraya in the photo essay, move through Native land. In Shraya’s case, Brown femme trans grief is paradoxically made more whole through its relation to white settler grief. What does it mean to grieve trans lives on Indigenous land, under the structuring conditions of anti-Blackness, if anti-trans violence is made intelligible in relation to violence among white settlers? In other words, the anti-trans violence that Shraya’s photo essay brings to the surface is made legible and human to audiences through its relation to Tristan/Pitt. It is not so much that Shraya renders Indigenous or Black lives ungrievable, but that in Shraya’s adulation of Tristan/Pitt, those losses remain ungrieved, enfolded as they are within the structural violence of racial capitalism and settler colonialism that consigns Black and Indigenous peoples to death. It is for this reason that Eva S. Hayward ponders how “trans negativity” might “help expose how the order of the subject, and the matter of ontology, are what make black trans women, in particular, vulnerable to violence? Trans negativity turns against liberal (white) transgender projects about visibility, accessibility, and progressivism, to expose how these political logics are predicated on racialized humanism.”56 If Shraya’s presentation of Tristan’s grief as comparable to trans grief relies on a humanizing move, then those consigned to death within modern conceptions of the human remain the constitutive Others of that humanization. The loss of Black life remains ungrieved. So too do the losses of Indigenous bodies and political orders, specifically the Siksika, Kainai, Piikani, Tsuut’ina, Métis, and Îyâxe Nakoda Nations on whose traditional territories settlers built the city of Calgary. Solidarity, again, reaches its limits.
Shani Mootoo: Queer Brown Disruption, and Its Limits
Shani Mootoo, like Shraya, is a prolific multidisciplinary artist: a novelist, poet, and visual artist. Mootoo’s works examine themes of violence, desire, displacement, and belonging. While she began her career in the 1980s as a painter and video artist, Mootoo gained critical acclaim as a writer; her 1996 novel Cereus Blooms at Night was shortlisted for the prestigious Scotiabank Giller prize in Canada, and her subsequent novels have received similar accolades. Born in Dublin, she grew up in Trinidad and moved to Vancouver at age nineteen; she has also lived in Toronto, New York City, and elsewhere in southern Ontario. She currently teaches creative writing at the University of Guelph.57 Mootoo’s experimental documentary A Paddle and a Compass (1992) and campy short Wild Woman in the Woods (1993) are among a small collection of films she directed in the 1990s. Mootoo worked on these while participating in “Race and the Body Politic,” a 1992 residency for artists of color at the Banff Centre for the Arts.58 Although the Banff Centre for the Arts is a nonprofit organization, it funds its residencies through state sources at both the federal and provincial levels, including the Canada Council for the Arts. The residency took place at a time in the late 1980s and early 1990s when BIPOC artists’ advocacy led to the creation of state-funded support and resources for their work. The intention of “Race and the Body Politic” was to support individual artists in the exploration of race, politics, and identity in their projects, a directive that Mootoo follows but also subverts as she draws attention to the structural violence of racism and colonization.59
A Paddle and a Compass and Wild Woman in the Woods are purposeful meditations on the exclusions and elisions of white settler nationalist constructions of land and landscape. They reflect a longer preoccupation with land; in her website bio she states that “an ongoing interest concerns the tensions between the landscapes of Trinidad and Canada.”60 As filmmaker and critic Richard Fung notes, “Her work reveals a preoccupation with place and displacement.”61 In a series of paintings from 2015 to 2016, for example, Mootoo presents landscapes of southern Ontario in ways that reflect her diasporic Trinidadian sensibilities, noting, “They are a study of the flora of the Southern Ontario landscape, and attempt to ‘see’ this landscape, but to render it without losing my Trinidadian ‘accent.’”62 In Cereus Blooms at Night, she engages the colonial discourses of natural history to meditate on how colonial norms inflect the present.63 Her 2020 novel, Polar Vortex, which is set in a snowy rural Canadian town, likewise reflects on desire, violence, and intimacy in the context of the fantasy of escaping from the city to “the country,” and was inspired in part by Mootoo’s own move from city to rural life.64 Whereas Shraya’s work is about feeling and experiencing her Brown trans body as rejoinder to racist, anti-trans violence, Mootoo in these films, as in much of her work, considers the problem of diasporic exclusion and directs her critique toward white Canadian settler culture. She engages the queer diasporic body as an instrument of disruption in service of such a critique, reflecting a pattern across her work of engaging her own experience to intervene into broader debates and conversations. As Fung writes, “The ‘I’ [her films] deploy is not a transparent, unmediated subject; rather it is a strategic device in which the artist performs her ‘self.’ In putting her image and voice into her work, Mootoo carries on a longstanding tradition of self-reflexive performance in Canadian experimental video.”65 Yet Mootoo’s purposeful foregrounding of land paradoxically registers the same diasporic/Indigenous impasse as Shraya’s, suggesting again that this impasse is generated neither through ethical shortcomings nor through problems of categorization, but through historically constituted difference.
Cowritten and directed with video and installation artist Wendy Oberlander, the ten-minute short A Paddle and a Compass was filmed in Banff, Alberta. A resort town and major tourist destination, Banff is located within Canada’s first national park. In 2016 the Canadian government settled an ongoing land dispute with the Siksika Blackfoot nation, whose ancestral lands—known to settlers as “Castle Mountain”—were incorporated into the park without consent or compensation in 1908.66 As the film begins, we hear gentle waves, birds, and then muffled, happy-sounding voices over a black screen. The camera eventually reveals a group of middle-aged South Asians standing on a dock who are preparing to step into a canoe (Figure 11). Mootoo, who is off-camera, informally interviews them; all agree that it is unusual to see Brown folks in this outdoorsy setting. Their presence at Banff potentially gestures to multiple histories of erasure and exclusion: the unmarked graves of the thousands of Chinese workers who died during the construction of the transcontinental railroad; the Japanese Canadians who until the late 1940s were barred from entry west of the Rockies following their internment during World War II; the restrictions on Black and Chinese men accessing bathing pools at Banff in the early twentieth century.67
From this preface, which immediately sets up a focus on the exclusion of Brown immigrants from dominant constructions of white Canadian place and nationhood, the film switches primarily to narration—mostly by Mootoo, but occasionally interspersed with Oberlander’s—overlaid onto shots of Alberta’s Lake Louise, the Rocky Mountains, and canoers on the water. These images of the outdoors simultaneously situate Mootoo, Oberlander, and their film project, while the conspicuous absence of either Mootoo or Oberlander from the frame invites the audience to think about the construction of settler landscapes as alienated and devoid of humans. Their co-narration extends this invitation, as it encourages the audience to think about uneven and differential relationships to land and nation as constructed through race, gender, and colonization.
Figure 11. South Asian canoers at Lake Louise; screenshot from A Paddle and a Compass.
Oberlander’s voiceover, for example, communicates a relationship to the outdoors that is mediated by white settler-colonial histories. As the camera pans across different mountain formations, some snowy, some green and tree-lined, she reminisces about adventurous relatives scaling tall mountains in Europe and Canada and wonders whether her mother worries about her when she climbs the Rockies. Oberlander also utters the film’s last lines, which explicitly draw attention to settler colonialism: “I grew up singing the Canadian version of ‘This land is your land, this land is my land. From Buona Vista to Vancouver Island, from the Arctic Circle to the Great Lake Waters, this land was made for you and me.’ I wonder if Woody Guthrie ever saw the Canadian Rockies, and I wonder whose land this really is.”
Against this direct and explicit white settler relationship to land, Mootoo’s narration presents one more complicated and ambivalent, as she focuses on her encounters with the Canadian landscape and outdoor culture as an immigrant from Trinidad. She begins, however, by foregrounding her desires for the settler pleasures she encountered through the Sears Roebuck catalog as a child in Trinidad. Gesturing to the entanglements of U.S. militarism and settler imaginaries—echoing Sunny Lee’s Cowgirl from chapter 1—she recalls that American friends from the U.S. naval base in Chaguaramas would loan Mootoo’s family the catalogue so that they could order items through their privileges.68 She muses that for her, the most exciting part was the advertisements for outdoor camping gear, often attached to images of happy heteronormative family life, even as she must have been alienated by the American setting of pine trees, green lakes, and bluish-white, snow-capped mountains—similar to the Banff Rockies landscape we see flash across the screen. Recounting an experience mimicking the catalog’s images, she brings into relief the casual circulation of colonial discourse and her bare registration of it as a child: “One Christmas, I got an orange-colored cotton tent with an image of a cowboy roping a horse stenciled in black on one side, and a Native American’s head on the other. Every day for a while, I set up the tent on our front lawn. The hibiscus fence and [inaudible] palm were my backdrop.”
Moving forward to the present, Mootoo recounts a phone call to her parents in which she presses them for information about Trinidad, asking to find out about the longest river and the highest mountain. Her father points out that she has begun speaking in superlatives: “Canada has the tallest freestanding structure.” Her father’s observation suggests that an epistemological shift has taken place as Mootoo attempts to relate to Trinidad in terms of the settler scale she has internalized in Canada, one concerned with metrics, measurement, and the management of landscapes. Yet, there is another layer of erasure here as Mootoo implicitly figures herself as foreign to Canada and indigenous to Trinidad. If Mootoo is indigenous to Trinidad, then what of the Arauca, Garini, Nepuyo, Shebaio, and Yaio peoples that Columbus encountered in 1498?69 Mootoo’s indigenized claim to Trinidad is an instantiation of what Shona Jackson describes as “creole indigeneity.”70 Jackson employs this term in the context of the Caribbean to describe the way in which the laboring capacities of enslaved Black people and indentured Brown workers became the paradoxical locus for their assertions of national belonging and independence. She writes:
Despite having been in the Caribbean islands for at least 6,000 years and in the mainland territories for twice that length of time, Indigenous Peoples have largely faced the substitution of cultural representation for political power. In contrast, the descendants of enslaved and indentured peoples hold a greater degree of cultural and political power, with better access to capital.71
While A Paddle and a Compass meditates on the problems of Canada’s settler nationalism, Trinidad thus remains an indigenized site of de facto authenticity.72 Mootoo self-consciously reflects on such a construction of Trinidad in dialogue with fellow Trinidadian artist Richard Fung:
It intrigues, and infuriates me that my fifth generation family is not in touch with local bush remedies, barks of trees, teas from plants, that your mother has passed on to you, and that your mother knows how to speak patois, while none of my family for as far as I could remember knew more than a word here and there, and that one tying up the tongue on its torturous exit. I wonder where is the “creolised” part of the, or rather, my, Hindu Indian identity. When a phrase in patois glides out of your mouth I admit to a feeling of having been robbed of authenticity, a feeling that I don’t remember having had in Trinidad, but experience here, in Canada.73
Mootoo observes here an indigenized experience of Trinidad that she wishes she could share with Fung, one that she feels entitled to. However, as Jackson cautions, this material and symbolic displacement differs from processes of white settler states such as Canada or the United States:
Displacement and objectification of Indigenous Peoples is a complex part of the new material and ontological relationship that blacks and Indians developed to the land under colonialism, and it cannot strictly be understood through the terms of white settler colonial paradigms such as those of North America.74
The reflections that Mootoo shares with Fung about being both Trinidadian and Trinidadian-Canadian register the complexity and contradiction at the nexus of settler colonialism, postcolonialism, globalization, and multiculturalism: she becomes an Indigenous Trinidadian in relation to Canadian settler multiculturalism that indigenizes white settlers as the rightful contemporary inhabitants of Canada. As Bruno Cornellier and Michael Griffiths write, contra Canadian multiculturalism’s promises of equity and inclusion, “Liberal multicultural policies act comparably across multiple sites and spaces as avenues for the reinstitution of dispossession.”75 Being in Canada’s settler multicultural landscape that indigenizes whiteness while displacing Indigeneity and excluding all other nonwhite Others compels Mootoo to locate herself as indigenous to somewhere else.
The fourteen-minute Wild Woman in the Woods is set in the snowy Canadian Rockies. In contrast to the more direct address of A Paddle and a Compass, it playfully disrupts audience expectations about land, bodies, and the settler nation even as it registers the impasse of diaspora/Indigeneity. The film’s prologue is set to classical Indian music; we see images of various objects, including fruit and candles, that the film reveals to be part of an altar. As Mootoo—playing Pria, a fictional version of herself—pays her respects, she awakens the goddess Durga. Durga, a major deity in Hindu scripture, is revered as a mothering figure who protects against evil, and she appears in Wild Woman as a protective, guiding force for Pria.76
The screen darkens after this initial scene, and the film’s more linear narration begins, as Pria learns that her romantic prospect Tara is getting married. We see Pria making an offering at the altar again. In a subsequent scene, she meets Alexis, a white friend who speaks about skiing in the hills nearby. Pria’s face registers shame and embarrassment as she tells Alexis, “I don’t really know how to ski. Actually, I never learned.” Alexis then invites her to a “little day hike . . . up there.” The camera quickly zooms to capture a tall mountain peak in the distance before moving to a close-up of Pria’s nervous and vulnerable face as she suggests coffee instead (Figure 12). Soon after, she catches a glimpse of a colorfully dressed figure sporting an orange sari, red long underwear, and heavy gold jewelry along with a bowler hat and ski boots. They eventually reveal themself to be the goddess Durga (played by interdisciplinary artist Shauna Beharry) (Figure 13). A trickster-like figure, Durga playfully pushes at Pria’s comfort zone and slyly convinces her to cross-country ski over to a campsite with a circle of Brown women doing a dandiya dance with tree branches.77 Like Durga, they are hybrid, inauthentic subjects mixing bright sari fabrics with winter gear. Durga explains to Pria that she lives in the woods with these women and that “we have no roles, and no rules. You simply are as you are: perfect.” Pria eventually loses some of her awkwardness as she meets them and presumably gets ready to join in the pleasure of dancing in the snow. The discomfort she registers in the earlier encounter with her white friend melts away as the snowy white landscape is no longer pristine and inaccessible, but a place inhabited by familiar Brown bodies. The presence of the goddess resignifies the sublime as Brown, queer, and feminist. As the film ends, it shifts to slow-motion and we hear Mootoo in voiceover reciting a poem, which the end credits identify as “Are They Lotuses,” by the lower-caste sixteenth-century Telugu poet Atukuri Molla, known for her rebellious ways: “Are they lotuses, or are they the arrows of Cupid? / Difficult to say of her eyes / Is it the moon, or is it the looking glass? / Difficult to say of her face / Is it a flow of sapphires, or is it a flock of bees? / Difficult to say of her hair.” The closing poem both gives voice to Pria’s wonder and admiration for Durga and the dancing women, and places them in relation to a centuries-old South Asian feminist icon, again anointing the land with Brown femme authority.
Figure 12. Pria’s encounter with Alexis and the mountains; screenshot from Wild Woman in the Woods.
Figure 13. Durga in the woods; screenshot from Wild Woman in the Woods.
Like Iyko Day argues with respect to artists Tseng-Ming Chi’s and Jin-Me Yoon’s interventions into U.S. and Canadian settler landscape art, Mootoo in Wild Woman redeploys the perversion associated with perpetually foreign Brown bodies to disrupt and queer white settler aesthetics.78 This perversion corresponds to the romantic anticapitalist discourse that Iyko Day locates within nineteenth-century histories of transcontinental railroad construction: “The Chinese male body in North America was historically constituted as nonreproductive, perverse, and feminized, which was reinforced through legal and extralegal restrictions on interracial intimacies, restrictions on the immigration of Chinese women, and aggressive enclosure in the domestic labor market.”79 Mootoo’s instrumentalization of queered Brown femme bodies equally places pressure on the configuration of South Asian women as intelligible only vis-à-vis heteropatriarchal norms. This was evident, as Enakshi Dua shows, during debates concerning South Asian migration in the early twentieth century, in which discourses of racial purity framing the Canadian imagined community perceived South Asian women as a threat to Canadian nation building. Dua writes that “the gendering of South Asian women as creators of ethnic communities paralleled the gendering of Anglo-Saxon women as reproducers of the nation. However, while the work of Anglo-Saxon women in reproducing the Canadian nation was to be valued, South Asian women were seen as a menace to that same nation—threatening to spawn the kinds of communities that would imperil the nation-building project.”80 Against the purity of white snow that symbolizes national racial purity bound together by normative gender and sexuality, queer pleasure and jouissance in Wild Woman gesture to alternate ways of conceiving of belonging and community. This reflects Grace Hong’s observation that Mootoo’s “relationship to nature is . . . not the normatively masculine one of mastery, but more a displaced identification and kinship.”81
The inclusion of Durga, moreover, interrupts the Christian morality and respectability associated with settler-colonial nationalism. Whereas Christian morals and religiosity provided ideological justifications and imperatives for colonial projects the world over, Western epistemologies have framed non-Western spiritual and religious traditions as savage, barbaric, and perverse.82 Durga’s presence thus resignifies the white national imaginary, and by resanctifying it with another religious tradition, Mootoo dislodges the landscape from its white settler hold. It is important to note here that although Durga in the context of 1990s Canada has a disruptive effect, contemporary right-wing Hindu movements both in India and across diasporas invoke the gender subversions and nonnormativity of ancient Hindu scriptures as a homonationalist strategy for advancing casteist, exclusionary agendas that further entrench Kashmiri occupation while inflicting exclusionary violence over non-Hindu minorities.83 At the same time, Mootoo is Hindu from the Trinidadian diaspora, where lower-caste Indians forcibly migrated as indentured workers. I thus read her mobilization of Durga—particularly a hybridized, inauthentic Durga in ski boots—as far removed from right-wing Hindutva ones.
Still: the place of Durga, a Hindu goddess, in a place storied by Indigenous spirits and ancestors raises questions about how non-Native people of color lay affective claim to land.84 If Durga disturbs Christian settler morality, where does she stand with respect to Indigenous relations? While Mootoo effectively interrupts a white settler imaginary, she leaves muted the Indigenous stories and histories that would respond to the question Oberlander poses in A Paddle and a Compass: “I wonder whose land this really is.” To better emphasize this problem posed by the destabilizing force of Durga—as well as Brown queer bodies—in Wild Woman, it is useful to compare Mootoo’s aesthetic strategies to two-spirit/queer artists such as Kent Monkman (Cree) and Adrian Stimson (Siksika/Blackfoot nation) who also deploy their bodies to disrupt settler-colonial landscapes and identities, but with vastly different stakes. Whereas Mootoo’s work introduces queer Brown bodies as externally rupturing forces, for Monkman and Stimson, the land holds deeply enmeshed entanglements of bodies and violence. To draw on Tatonetti, their works exemplify how “the [Native] body archives Indigenous knowledges.”85 In his series of landscape paintings, Monkman introduces his alter ego—Miss Chief Eagle Testickle, a trickster figure who dresses in flamboyant colors, high heels, and G-strings—into nineteenth-century-style paintings of otherwise pristine and majestic North American landscapes. Miss Chief’s erotically charged presence in these scenes provokes the viewer to imagine the colonial encounter as one complicated by the entanglements of sex, desire, and violence. Nineteenth-century artists such as Thomas Cole, Asher B. Durand, Frederic Edwin Church, and Albert Bierstadt infamously painted large-scale works that romanticized the American landscape in the vein of Manifest Destiny: pristine, majestic, empty, and untouched “nature” awaiting God-ordained preservation and cultivation by Euro-Americans. Such works reinforced the doctrine of terra nullius and the discourses of Indigenous erasure that enabled the violent policies and practices of nineteenth-century U.S. westward expansion. Interrupting this canon, in many of Monkman’s paintings, such as Sunday in the Park (2010), Miss Chief appears as painter, standing in front of an easel with a canvas covered in primitivist-style figures. Sunday in the Park offers a critique of twin art practices that promulgated Indigenous erasure: the aforementioned landscape art, and primitivism, which indulged fantasies of the noble savage stereotype. It also presents a speculative commentary on the queer/two-spirit presence that might have traversed such landscapes: in the painting, long-haired, colorfully and scantily clad Brown-skinned dandies lounge on the grass next to a lake that sits at the foot of towering mountain peaks. As viewers of this piece, we are forced to reckon with how settler discourses of land might have impacted queer or two-spirit Indigenous peoples, with stories and histories that may have been lost.
In his performance art installation The Life and Times of Buffalo Boy, Stimson, a residential school survivor, introduces his alter ego Buffalo Boy, which riffs off the infamous “Buffalo Bill.” As a Blackfoot artist indigenous to the places where Mootoo’s (and Shraya’s) art pieces are grounded, Stimson’s work particularly brings to the surface the impasse that structures diasporic art and film. Just as Buffalo Bill Cody toured his Wild West Show, Stimson tours across Canada, Europe, and the United States with his hybrid cowboy-Indian persona, engaging queer aesthetic strategies such as camp and parody as a means of confronting the multiple forms of pain and violence of colonization. His lavish and outlandish outfit—cowboy boots, sequined cowboy hat, fishnet stockings, bison pelt G-string and corset, fringed leather jacket, white pearl necklace, blue eye shadow, bright red lipstick, and braids—draws attention to the historical presence of queer and two-spirit peoples whose very existence threatened colonial authorities. His performance of the cowboy references his own family history of cow herding (which is distinct from the cinematic cowboy), while his use of bison as costume fabric cites the nineteenth-century slaughter of bison across Canada and the United States. Bison, as Stimson has noted, were the lifeblood of his people, the Blackfoot, and the extermination of the animals was part of a colonial strategy to starve out Indigenous peoples across the North American Plains. Buffalo Boy reappears in Stimson’s oeuvre at different locations, including the annual Burning Man festival in Nevada, and Banff, where he sits in the snow, posing in front of the Rockies. Stimson’s site-specific interventions—undertaken in playful and provocative poses and outfits that appropriate the figure of the cowboy and mash it up with signifiers of queer sexualities and Blackfoot histories—remap Indigenous place and meaning onto settler-colonial space, thereby enacting a reclamation of both body and land that have endured multiple modes of violence (from residential schools to land seizure and resource exploitation, to violence against queer and two-spirit Indigenous peoples). Whereas Mootoo introduces queer Brown bodies as external interruptions to white settler imaginaries, the ruptures that Monkman and Stimson enact are deeply personal and intimate. Their bodies share with the land wounds and scars in the process of repair.
Dwelling in the Body/Land Impasse
The impasse is a terrifying place for social movements looking to build relations, alliances, and coalition. We are comfortable with coming to an impasse with those outside of our movements; with oppressive state regimes, nasty employers, and reprehensible corporations. We expect to find ourselves at the impasse with them. But we are less comfortable confronting the impasses we find ourselves at with ostensible comrades and allies. These impasses may seem minor. And indeed, perhaps they do not always matter.
I came to acknowledge the impasse of diaspora/Indigeneity because I could not ignore the harms flowing from diasporic spaces and people to Indigenous ones. I stay with it out of curiosity and interest, and with the belief that there is something generative here. Shraya and Mootoo’s works, which are differentially attentive to the body, aptly register the impasse of diaspora/Indigeneity. Reading them in relation to Indigenous questions about land, body, and sovereignty invites us to reflect on the costs of enacting repair and healing in the wake of racial violence.
The impasse is structurally produced; it emerges not from mere ignorance or moral failing, but from relationships to land that are incommensurable with one another. Acknowledging the impasse—acknowledging, in other words, the structural circumstances framing diasporic–Indigenous relationality—does not render connection and relation impossible. However, it contextualizes some of the tensions and challenges that might make them difficult or contentious. I stay with those tensions as I move to consider collaboration and relationality in the two chapters that follow.