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June 25 - June 28, 2025
What does it mean to be Two-Spirit during an apocalypse? What does it mean to search out romance at a pipeline protest—can we have intimacy during doomsday?
Two-Spirit and Indigiqueers are the wildest kinds of biopunks, literally and literarily.
For, as we know, we have already survived the apocalypse—this, right here, right now, is a dystopian present. What better way to imagine survivability than to think about how we may flourish into being joyously animated rather than merely alive?
Our Indigiqueerness has always signalled fatalism in the eyes of colonial powers, primarily the white gaze, from the directed killings of 2S peoples during Western expansion through to contemporary erasures and appropriations of the term Two-Spirit by settler queer cultures who idealize, mysticize, and romanticize our hi/stories in order to generate a queer genealogy for settler sexualities.
“What if we get in trouble?” “What if we don’t?”
I was a brown-eyed Two-Spirit nehiyow with a homemade haircut and marrow-deep longing for the old things that rumbled under the surface of the world.
No more stormy nights of building and destruction. Just life. Slow and hard, driving on. And all around our little family, the whole world fell apart. Piece by piece. It should have been impossible to ignore, but we ignored it anyway.
“Only a white girl could step into a completely unknown universe with the blind faith that everything was going to work out.”
But at what cost? Our brown bodies?
“Kinship is a two-sided coin, Nigig. You always gotta ask yourself, who is being excluded here?”
Instruction inspired by today: Watch those in power carefully.
You are a gift, Winu. And people are often jealous of gifts that are not for them.”
“Remember that the spirits will always be there, and that they will share with you the most sacred of stories,” he whispered reverently.
They sat as she told the stories and repeated the words over and over again. An informal resistance was growing among the prison. One of whispered words from ancestors and spirits, one of listening ears and watery eyes.
“I begged those spirits of yours to allow me to be with you once again,” Bèl whispered sincerely.
