Jonny Appleseed

by Joshua Whitehead

My stepdad Roger called me an apple when I told him I wanted to leave the rez. “You’re red on the outside,” he said, “and white on the inside.”

I wish he knew that when an NDN laughs, it’s because they’re applying a fresh layer of medicine on an open wound.

Hell, I played straight on the rez in order to be NDN and here I played white in order to be queer.

My hair is the mediator between my selves, my spirits, my brownness and my queerness, my sexiness and my disgrace, the scar of all our pain.

It turns out that tradition is an NDN’s saving grace, but it’s a medicine reserved only for certain members of the reservation, and not for self-ordained Injun glitter princesses like me.

When you really let yourself feel, well, you end up scaring yourself from all the hurt and pain.

It was then I decided that love sounded more like a full stop than a semi-colon, and I moved too much like water.