IN MY EARLIER DESIGNS as a writer, I learned to story-tell through ekphrasis. In this I think I am like many writers who have undertaken workshops only to look to painting for inspiration. Because ekphrasis is a rhetorical exercise, one in which an artist relates to another medium by describing its aesthetics, form, or thematic essence, the act of ekphrasis is therefore one of relations, a contract of kinships.
One of the first painters I ever sought to respond to was William Kurelek, a Ukrainian-Canadian artist and writer who often painted the prairies as embodying rather horrific idyllic sensualities. Much of his work revolves around Manitoba, primarily Stonewall, which is in the same Interlake district as my hometown, Selkirk. There are two paintings in particular that haunt me to this day: This Is the Nemesis and When We Must Say Goodbye. You, perhaps, may recognize some of these visual inspirations in my works. The earliest poems in my collection full-metal indigiqueer emerge from my fascination with the apocalypse and warfare and, in their chrysalis stages, were birthed in the atomic centre of Kurelek’s nemesis, which can be seen huffing into a truffle on the horizon of his painting. In When We Must Say Goodbye, a lone woman sits on driftwood, staring sullenly at her feet in the centre of a wide-panning depiction of a beach at rest—a scene recalled in my novel Jonny Appleseed, where the titular character and his lover Tias survey each other’s bodies and ponder the ethics of loving even while mourning for the ironic goodbye that will come between them.
I owe a great debt to Kurelek—but that verb, “owe,” always cinches me. If ekphrasis is a relationship, then how do we navigate said kinship through the exchange of debt? How do I remunerate the painter? And how is debt like a tome—or, if considered through the lens of literature, through the desire to canonize, should I say tomb? I often play “find the hidden NDN” in art crafted upon Turtle Island—from Kurelek’s Indian Hitchhiking from Saskatchewan Series #2 through to the painting of “e pluribus unum,[1] mitakuye oyasin,[2]” in the horrific Netflix film about a cutthroat art critic, Velvet Buzzsaw. Then these relations become indebted, as Indigeneity within them becomes entombed, or surfaces for aesthetics while actual Indigenous peoples remain dislocated from the form of the artistry.
Recently, I watched Spider-Man: Homecoming and something caught my attention in the film’s opening scene, which features Michael Keaton as the emergent antagonist, the Vulture, having a conversation with his ally Michael Chernus, a.k.a. the Tinkerer. They are holding a portrait of the Avengers drawn by a youth. “Things are never going to be the same now,” narrates Keaton. “I mean, look at this, you got aliens, you got big green guys tearing down buildings. When I was a kid, I used to draw cowboys and Indians.” He is quickly corrected by Chernus: “Actually, it’s Native Americans.” Keaton’s character takes a brief reprieve to amusingly look at him before he asks, “Tell you what, though, it ain’t bad, is it?” Chernus’s character agrees, “No, yeah, kid’s got a future,” to the dismay of Keaton, “Yeah, well, we’ll see I guess.” I was drawn to this scene for its attempt at playfulness regarding Indigeneity, adolescence, and futurisms. The scene pans to the crumbling building of the Avengers Tower from the vantage point of a gentrified New York building. We then see Keaton’s team excavating an alien structure that looks akin to a fossilized carcass, something that predates their arrival by some time, something Indigenous to its own land base and to its own world, a fossilized carcass that they dissect in order to create militarized bioweapons and nanotechnologies.
This scene rings too true to the current state of Indigeneity on Turtle Island, our literatures, and the buffering of an amalgamated Canadian canon. Literature as an augmentation is the decadence of anthropology, the end result(s) of excavation and its institutional grants, and the glamorized tales of fossil fuels and land/bodies made into literary technologies. I think of my young nêhiyâw cousin who watches these films religiously, who dresses up like these superheroes and aspires to be them through play and the imaginative. I think of Chris Hemsworth, the actor of the popularized Thor, who appropriated Indigeneity in order to “play Indian” during a Lone Ranger–themed party. I wonder what kind of mirrors are being crafted, and for whom? What is it that people think Indigeneity looks like? What is interpolated for them psychically when they swish that word around their mouths, when the syllables spring from their tongues? I think, that’s paleontology: from cannibalizing the Huron to calling for a prize on how best to excavate/appropriate.
I take a cue from my Two-Spirit cybernetic trickster, Zoa, and learn to re-augment my body: transgressive, punk, Indigiqueer. I place myself into the film, Oji-Cree in NYC, and look up at that crumbling Avengers Tower in glee. I watch the structure come apart at its seams, laugh, think, “Yeah, that kid does have a future and you’ll be the one to see.” Tell those vultures, by which I mean wendigo, that they’re colour-blind—that big green guy tearing down buildings is the mihko mistahâpêw, Red Hulk, tearing down structures and institutions. If Indigeneity is a vanishing act, it’s one we’ve perfected to ghost ourselves into the future, just ask Frenchie, Jared Martin, and all those Two-Spirit hero(in)es who learned to live and love beyond body, space, and time. Here I am attaching those loosened minerals to my skin to emerge a diamond-crusted NDN, full-metal and vicious in the light. I am not a whole thing, I am a web of fractures living in my brokenness; web like okimâw apihkêsîs, trickster spider who spun the original world-wide-web, all sticky with feeling and smooth as a weathered pebble.
Connection is a technology Indigeneity perfected.
I turn my eyes to Kent Monkman, a queer Cree painter whose drag alter ego Miss Chief often appears in his paintings. As a Two-Spirit Ojibwe-nêhiyaw femme-nâpew I energize myself in the ecosystems of Monkman’s depictions. Often, in Monkman’s paintings, we are shown a hyperfeminine Cree nâpew in lingerie, or draped with HBC blankets, in the downtown north end of Winnipeg or in parliament in Ottawa. The Chase[3] and Seeing Red are some of my favourite paintings because they call me into myself: someone who sees himself in the femininity of nêhiyaw ayâwin on the often hypermasculine and heteronormative streets of Winnipeg. I ask myself if I owe a debt to Monkman too—and, if so, how does that inform or rupture our relationship with each other?
I identify as Two-Spirit, which means much more than simply my sexual preference within Western ways of knowing, but rather that I am queer, femme/iskwewayi, male/nâpew, and situated this way in relation to my homelands and communities. I state this because queerness, or settler sexualities, has stolen so much from Two-Spiritedness—I am sovereign through what sovereignty calls me. Often, when I meander through an art gallery, I am overcome with feelings of obliteration—first, because I find that “hidden NDN” and remember that a museum is a scaffold that has executed relationality; and second, because I am bombarded by figures of femininity that bulge with boisterous beauty yet are beheaded in this catacomb. I find my femininity in fragments: here Mona Lisa’s cheek on the floor, pinked with berry blush; here, pearl earrings and an earlobe sliced in half; here I come across the hem of a gold-leaf gown by accident; and here the sun hat of a woman distorted into disorder. And I wonder if what we consider the beauty of femininity is always laced with the sadistic. But I leave the cata-gallery feeling fulfilled because I too swell in the pubis, and here I am never asked to placate that largeness.
Maybe I tell you all this simply to ask: How am I in relation to myself? How am I indebted to my self? How do I subject myself to subjecthood? Perhaps I walk around an amalgamation, a symbiosis, of iconographies that I, myself, have Indigenized? Perhaps I am a nemesis, by which I mean the Greek nemein—or, giving what is due? How do I, as a femme-nâpew, survive the self that has normalized obliteration? Where is the “I” in the atomic nucleus of my warring ethics?
As an overweight child, I used to confess to manito that I wished they had made me a woman so I could jingle with haughtiness—self-determination becoming haute couture through the image of many of my aunties, who have been wonderfully rotund. I have waged combat with myself over why I call myself Two-Spirit instead of gay or queer; and I have had conversations with myself about what it means to paint myself ceremonially as femme. I do not call myself Two-Spirit to signify a romantic idealization of queer Indigeneity; I do it because I, and by extension this name I call myself, come from the red silk of the Red River. I do not perform femininity in order to quantify my queerness; I do it because there are days when I feel more feminine than masculine, and my femme-ness has always been more aggressive within me—and a tool I have often relied upon when navigating the corridors of institutions. I love my body, by which I mean my selves. I need to tell you that. It goes without saying that loving one’s own Indigeneity is always a political act. And I write about my body in order to celebrate it, because all art is voyeurism. But still my body in its femme-ness often betrays me, and when I leave the gallery I am forced to ponder the ethics of such an owing and owning.
Which brings me back to artistry—for here, after all, I have been saying that my body is a tapestry. Maybe I cling to ekphrasis to make an emphasis: I own a body worth owing. And perhaps I cling to art that is raked by destruction, reveals the surreal in real—which isn’t so surreal after all, when we are faced with the earth dying and our futures maimed. I find excellence in interiority because my body is a marshland. And I find innovation in inward diving: Just what in hell is worth living for, in the moulding of bodies that are continually dying?