Abstract
The gender binary, like many colonial acts, remains trapped within socio-religious ideals of colonisation that then frame ongoing relationships and restrict the existence of Indigenous peoples. In this article, the colonial project of denying difference in gender and gender diversity within Indigenous peoples is explored as a complex erasure casting aside every aspect of identity and replacing it with a simulacrum of the coloniser. In examining these erasures, this article explores how diverse Indigenous gender presentations remain incomprehensible to the colonial mind, and how reinstatements of kinship and truth in representation fundamentally supports First Nations’ agency by challenging colonial reductions. This article focuses on why these colonial practices were deemed necessary at the time of invasion, and how they continue to be forcefully applied in managing Indigenous peoples into a colonial structure of family, gender, and everything else.
Highlights
KinshipsIn spite of these colonial incursions, First Nations communities across the world continue to apply their own kinship forms and relationality extending beyond blood-
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In order to understand the need for these binaries in the colonial project of managing gender, people, and everything else, it is important to consider how the Western system imposed through colonial incursion is exclusively interested in an unbroken line of blood connection and direct descendancy (Strathern 2017, p. 20)
Summary
In spite of these colonial incursions, First Nations communities across the world continue to apply their own kinship forms and relationality extending beyond blood-. Across the colonised North American continent, the modern term, Two Spirit/2-Spirit, has been formulated in recent decades to describe contemporary and historic genders and sexualities that were erased through the colonial record and to provide, as Alex Wilson (Opaskwayak Cree) suggests, a connection from the past to the present Taking control of modern narratives that challenge the colonial project by locating ways to recall and restructure gender and sexualities is key to much of the queer work being done by those who inhabit First Nations’ communities These terms, and other terms yet to come, allow for an expansive kinship structure to be calibrated and reframed They form a challenge to the forced induction of communities into western religious practices that exclude and demonise relationships that fall outside of linear family structures They provide a level of resistance (Farrell 2017, p. 1), even as there remains work to be done for these communities to accept and support queerness in the push/pull of the colonial project (Day 2020, p. 368)
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