Indigenous 2SLGBTQIA+ Books to Read for Indigenous History & Pride Month

Author’s Note:

June is Pride Month and National Indigenous History Month in Canada. This month is an important time to hear and learn from Indigenous and 2SLGBTQIA+ communities, including at the intersection of these two identities. In honour of this month here is a shortlist of books about and by Indigenous 2SLGBTQIA+ people. We hope you will engage with these stories and celebrate the beautiful cultures and experiences that exist at the intersection of these identities. 

Beyond this, we ask that you make sure Indigenous History Month and Pride Month are not only a time for learning and reflection but also a time to engage in action, advocating for the rights of these communities and engaging in meaningful allyship. 

Fiction:

The Gilda Stories by Jewelle Gomez

The Gilda Stories is a lesbian Science Fiction/Horror/Fantasy novel. Escaping from slavery in the 1850s Gilda's longing for kinship and community grows over two hundred years. Her induction into a family of benevolent vampires takes her on an adventurous and dangerous journey full of loud laughter and subtle terror.

Kiss of the Fur Queen by Tomson Highway

Born into a magical Cree world in snowy northern Manitoba, Champion and Ooneemeetoo Okimasis are all too soon torn from their family and thrust into the hostile world of a Catholic residential school. As young men, estranged from their own people and alienated from the culture imposed upon them, the Okimasis brothers fight to survive. Wherever they go, the Fur Queen--a wily, shape-shifting trickster--watches over them with a protective eye.

Memoirs:

A Two-Spirit Journey by Ma-Nee Chacaby

A Two-Spirit Journey is Ma-Nee Chacaby’s account of her life as an Ojibwa-Cree Lesbian. It provides insights into the challenges many Indigenous people face and the journey of healing and growth to coming to understand yourself in the context of the world around you.

A History of My Brief Body by Billy-Ray Belcourt

Drawing on intimate personal experience, A History of My Brief Body is a meditation on grief, joy, love, and sex at the intersection of indigeneity and queerness. It seeks to reconcile the world as it is with the world that could be through a series of powerful essays.

Short Story Anthologies:

Love After the End edited by Joshua Whitehead

Through this anthology authors show how queer Indigenous communities can bloom and thrive through utopian narratives that detail the vivacity and strength of 2Spirit and Queerness throughout its plight at the hand of settler colonialism, envisioning potential Indigenous-futurist realities.

Love Beyond Body, Space and Time edited by Hope Nicholson 

"Love Beyond, Body, Space, and Time" is a collection of indigenous science fiction and urban fantasy focusing on LGBT and two-spirit characters. These are stories of machines and magic, love, and self-love, and imagining Indigenous futures.

Poetry:

IRL by Tommy Pico

IRL is a poem composed like a long text message that follows Teebs, a reservation-born, queer NDN weirdo, trying to figure out his impulses/desires/history in the midst of Brooklyn rooftops, privacy in the age of the Internet, street harassment, suicide, boys boys boys, literature, colonialism, religion, leaving one's 20s, and a love/hate relationship with English.

Fireweed by Tunchai Redvers

Fireweed is a collection of poetry that explores, through the symbolism and growth of fireweed, the rawness, trauma, and realities of adolescence compounded with the experience of being a young, Indigenous, and two-spirit intergenerational residential school survivor.

Not Vanishing by Chrystos

Passionate, vital poetry by acclaimed Native American writer and activist Chrystos addresses self-esteem and survival, the loving of women, and pride in her heritage.

Disintegrate/Dissociate by Arielle Twist

In “Disintegrate/Dissociate”, Arielle Twist unravels the complexities of human relationships after death and metamorphosis. In these spare yet powerful poems, she explores, with both rage and tenderness, the parameters of grief, trauma, displacement, and identity, navigating through what it means to be an Indigenous trans woman, discovering the possibilities of a hopeful future and a transcendent, beautiful path to regaining softness.