Decolonial Queerness and 2 Spirit Becoming in Cree and Métis Video Art and Film: Thirza Cuthand's Indigenous Autotheory

Abstract

Decolonial Queerness and 2 Spirit Becoming in Cree and Métis Video Art and Film:Thirza Cuthand's Indigenous Autotheory Thirza Cuthand and Lauren Fournier THIRZA CUTHAND (LITTLE PINE FIRST NATION) is an Indigenous filmmaker and video artist of Plains Cree and Scots descent. She was born in Regina, Saskatchewan, on the colonized lands known by some as Canada, and currently resides in Toronto. Since 1995, she has been making short experimental narrative videos and films about sexuality, mental health, age, desire, trauma, love, colonialism, indigeneity, and land. Many of her works use tactics from performance for the camera and experimental video art, including monologues, to engage these issues from an embodied place. Her work has screened in festivals internationally, including the Tribeca Film Festival in New York City, Mix Brasil Festival of Cultural Diversity in São Paulo, imagineNATIVE in Toronto, Frameline in San Francisco, Outfest in Los Angeles, and Oberhausen International Short Film Festival in Germany, where her short film Helpless Maiden Makes an "I" Statement (1999) won an honorable mention. CUTHAND completed her BFA in Film and [End Page 503] Video at Emily Carr University of Art and Design in Vancouver, and her Master of Arts in Media Production at Ryerson University in Toronto. She has also written three feature-length screenplays, has created live performance art for festivals and galleries, and created the video game artwork A Bipolar Journey based on her experience living with bipolar disorder; this interactive work continues themes of mental illness, psychiatric institutionalization, colonialization, and trauma, which she's explored in earlier works like Love & Numbers (2004) and Anhedonia (1999). Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 1. Thirza Cuthand, Reclamation (2018). Single-channel video. Courtesy of the artist. In 1999, she was artist in residence at the media arts artist-run centers Videopool and Urban Shaman, where she completed her experimental film Through the Looking Glass, which allegorizes Cuthand's Cree-Métis identity through the characters of a Red Queen and a White Queen. In 2012, she was an artist in residence at Villa Magdalena K. in Hamburg, where she completed her video Boi Oh Boi that follows the artist deliberating a possible gender transition through the performative use of a phallic banana. In 2015, she was commissioned by the Indigenous-run festival imagineNATIVE to make 2 Spirit Introductory Special $19.99, a video work that engages 2 Spirit identity in community through a [End Page 504] humorous pastiche of a television infomercial selling imaginary products tailored to the 2 Spirit community, including a beaded whisk, a nonslip lube mat, and a telephone support line that responds to problems specific to 2 Spirit people living in Canada. "Don't worry if you are just coming out as a 2 Spirited person, we have just the introductory special for you!" a smiling Cuthand announces to the camera. Both cheeky and sincere, Cuthand's performance for video uses humor and play to flesh out the intersections of indigeneity, queerness, and mad pride so central to her work, emphasizing the importance of kinship here to the health and well-being of queer Indigenous people living amid ongoing colonialism. This satirical impulse has been present through Cuthand's work from its earliest days, cohering even more explicitly in these later works. Her earlier work, like Working Baby Dyke Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 2. Thirza Cuthand, Reclamation (2018). Single-channel video. Courtesy of the artist. Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 3. Thirza Cuthand, Reclamation (2018). Single-channel video. Courtesy of the artist. [End Page 505] Theory (1997), shows the artist working from a DIY practice of performing for the camera on her own—a way of working that is characteristic of histories of Canadian and Indigenous video art histories since the early 1970s. In her more recent works, she collaborates with others from her communities—whether Indigenous, 2 Spirit, and/or LGBTQ2SIA+—as seen in The Longform Lesbian Census (2017) made with Riki Yandt and Reclamation (2018), starring Lacey Hill, Cherish Violet Blood, and Elwood Jimmy. Cuthand consistently shows an adept ability to navigate difficult, heavy subjects in a way that is often playful, comedic, and cathartic...