Love after the End: An Anthology of Two-Spirit and Indigiqueer Speculative Fiction

by Joshua Whitehead

I have asked myself: Who names an event apocalyptic and whom must an apocalypse affect in order for it to be thought of as “canon”? How do we pluralize apocalypse? Apocalypses as ellipses? Who is omitted from such a saving of space, whose material is relegated to the immaterial?

Like waneyihtamisâyâwin, the nêhiyâw word for queer, as in strange, but it is also defined as uncanny, unsettling; or waneyihtamohiwewin, the act of deranging, perplexing—I find Indigiqueerness a hinterland.

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? How do we procure affinity in a sleeping bag outside of city hall when the very ground is shaking beneath us with military tanks and thunderous gallops? What does it mean to be distanced under the weight of colonial occupation and relocation?

Where will we bury our dead in the New World?

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.

And so things settled between us. 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.

Jesus christ

“Em Callihoo nikawi egwa Thorah Anderson nikawi. Amiskwaciy wâskahikan ochi niya. Tkaronto mêkwâc niwîkin.” Asêciwan thrust out her chin proudly and glanced at me for approval. I nodded back, drunk on the sound of nehiyawewin on my daughter’s tongue.

I ask, “How do we build a relationship with this new planet?” She laughs. “I would assume like all consensual relationships: we ask them out.”

Migizi used to say things like “we are future ancestors” all the time. I think about that a lot.

Phenomenal

everyone is taught in a different way. You can’t say that one teaching is the only correct one, because then you would be putting down someone else’s teaching.

Watch those in power carefully.

I’m writing the truth down here. And the truth is, when you’re a Native girl living in the apocalypse, there’s only so much anyone can protect you from.

I don’t know if or when I will come home. Or if home will even mean the same thing to me once I’ve left.

I don’t know your name. I don’t know who your kin are. But I know you’re worth it, niijiikwe. And I know now that the only way to survive the apocalypse is to make your own world. So let’s get started.

“The boys made fun of Kokomis’ shirt. They said I’m a girl and girls shouldn’t wear men’s clothes. They said I’m wrong.” Her mother crooned. She gently grasped her face. “When you were born, your Kokomis held you in his arms and he looked at me with tears running down his face because he had been waiting his whole life for another îhkwewak like him, and there you were, I gave birth to you, and I was never more grateful for anything else in my life. You are a gift, Winu. And people are often jealous of gifts that are not for them.”

Snaps!!!

Death was her only friend, as she grew lonelier in a city filled with more people than she knew existed.

they kissed like the world was ending, but really, wasn’t it already over, and perhaps within this kiss lay the new beginning?