Unsettling homocolonial frames of remembrance: Two-Spirit and Indigiqueer interventions at the museum

Abstract

This article considers a Two-Spirit and Indigiqueer protest at the Canadian Museum for Human Rights as a flashpoint that exposes problems with how memory-making institutions are incorporating lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans and queer issues into their programming and/or collections. The protest brings into relief the museum’s investment in a homocolonial framing of remembrance for the way in which the telling of lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans and queer ‘progress’ is entangled with a settler colonial political economy wherein the tokenistic inclusion of some queers into the sexual citizenry happens alongside the dispossession, devaluing and criminalizing of others. I then undertake some preliminary ‘curatorial dreaming’ upon two other interventions–commentaries uploaded to a digital story bank by a Two-Spirit and an Indigenous queer museumgoer, and the short film Woman Dress by Plains Cree artist TJ Cuthand. Along with the protest, the commentaries and the film unsettle homocolonial frames of remembrance and provide critical openings towards decolonial queer memory work at the museum.

Queering Collective Dreaming: Weaving Métis Futures of Belonging

“…Some may prefer Indigiqueer, another pan-Indigenous term reportedly coined by trans Plains Cree artist TJ Cuthand (2017). It has since been taken up by some Indigenous 2SLGBTQ+ people to describe themselves as reflective of both their Indigeneity and queerness while not necessarily identifying as Two-Spirit, as noted by Failler (2023). There is a diversity of teachings, language, expressions, and embodiments of Indigenous queerness and transness, but we share the experience of surviving the colonial imposition of patriarchal, cisheteronormativity, a common experience that allows us to identify and critique both the "colonial nature" of "many" non-Indigenous LGBTQ+ movements as well as the homophobia and transphobia that has been internalized by many Indigenous people and organizations (Driskill, 2010, p. 69).…”