daaphotography.blogg.se

Colonial binaries would lead us to believe that the coexistence of trauma and joy is an impossibility for Indigenous peoples, that Indigenous embodiment in colonial space must either deny colonial pasts or else foreclose Indigenous futures. It leaves them in impossible, fragmented space. But where does that leave the Indigenous person whose lived experiences span from colonial trauma to Indigenous joy? In these processes of ‘displacement for replacement,’ we come to believe in binaries – perhaps Indigenous realities cannot exist whilst colonial ones do. Instead, they are meant to contain her Indigenous body by inserting colonial stereotypes as normative and by displacing mino iskwew as deviant from “the settler state’s codes”. Holding mino iskwew up to the colonial senses of Indigenous beauty, one realizes “they never meant to call her beautiful” (Whitehead 99). Addressing this tension in her discussion of Joshua Whitehead’s Full-Metal Indigiqueer, both Cooper and Whitehead importantly work to imagine Indigenous liberation as neither erasing trauma nor precluding Indigenous flourishing.įor Whitehead, colonial reality is always seeking to eclipse Indigenous ways of knowing and being, inserting, for example, its restrictive and violent understandings of beauty over “mino iskwew:” “pleasing to the sense or mind aesthetically of a very high standard excellent”.

As Lydia Cooper writes, settler colonialism has configured Indigenous lands as “both home and colonized un-home,” complexly orienting Indigenous ways of being toward the realities of love and relationality, but also those of violence and fragmentation. Indigenous bodies exist in tension in colonial space. Jonny Appleseed is a unique, shattering vision of Indigenous life, full of grit, glitter, and dreams."-Publisher.This wiki book is licensed under a CC-BY license.ĭigital Disembodiment as a Space for Indigenous embodiment, by Nicole Jung Jonny's world is a series of breakages, appendages, and linkages-and as he goes through the motions of preparing to return home, he learns how to put together the pieces of his life. The seven days that follow are like a fevered dream: stories of love, trauma, sex, kinship, ambition, and the heartbreaking recollection of his beloved kokum (grandmother). Self-ordained as an NDN glitter princess, Jonny has one week before he must return to the "rez"-and his former life-to attend the funeral of his stepfather. Off the reserve and trying to find ways to live and love in the big city, Jonny becomes a cybersex worker who fetishizes himself in order to make a living. "You're gonna need a rock and a whole lotta medicine" is a mantra that Jonny Appleseed, a young Two-Spirit/Indigiqueer, repeats to himself in this vivid and utterly compelling debut novel by poet Joshua Whitehead.