Clay and Common Ground: Clanships and Polyspirited Embodiment

Sebastian De Line

doi:10.24908/jcri.v7i1.13378

Abstract

In this article, I explore embodiment within discourses on trans and two-spirit through a consideration of polyspirited(many-spirited) within the context of Indigenous and transnational stories of clay. Two main articulations spiral out from embodiments of the polyspirited: 1) that embodiment is not limited to one or two spirits but potentially many spirits operating through or within the body collectively in reciprocal relationality; and 2) that stories of clay teach us that the Westernized scientific conception of the human body is limited in its capacity to articulate what it means to be in relation. By understanding clay stories, we begin to comprehend that we are potentially more than two-spirit peoples.

Highlights

The term “two-spirit,” or niish manidoowag in Anishinaabemowin, was first introduced more broadly by Indigenous folk acrossTurtle Island during a conference near Winnipeg held in 1990 (Anguksuar, 1997)
I conclude with a poetic passage in the Chu Ci dating back to the Warring States Period (475 BC – 221 BC) in China: “When giant turtles bearing islands on their backs stir, how do they keep them steady?”2 In reading the foretelling of Turtle Island’s formation alongside the Chu Ci, how might obligations to the land and waters be understood as relational?
While the common interpretation of the Haudenosaunee creation story depicts Turtle Island as those combined continents of the Americas, other ways of interpreting the creation story present the possibility of a supercontinent or, in the example depicted within this Chinese poem, the possibility of a multitude of Turtle Islands and the overlap of their remembrances by different cultures

Summary

Introduction

The term “two-spirit,” or niish manidoowag in Anishinaabemowin, was first introduced more broadly by Indigenous (predominantly gay and lesbian-centered) folk acrossTurtle Island (the Americas) during a conference near Winnipeg held in 1990 (Anguksuar, 1997). 120-121) To both Leanne Betasamosake Simpson (2017) and Qwo-Li Driskill (2011), the gifts, or medicines, that two-spirit queer people carry are grounded in Indigenous landbased ways of knowing.

Results

Conclusion