“…In that engagement in spirit and heart we will always know who we are. It will never be taken from us ever again, ever. Ever, ever, ever.”1 –Dr. Myra Laramee
“Skoden!”2 –the kids
Declaring our presence with a word! Imagine!
Two-Spirit, Indigiqueer, all these words are a declaration, a resistance. Two-Spirit is the container for a movement of self-declaration, self-identification, and self-perpetuation.
Words hold power, y’all. That’s what I’ve been saying and hopefully showing via My Dilbaa Dreams. It’s me dreaming via words and stories of lives lived and living. I hope I’ve even converted a few of you (thank you to those of you reading!) to my ilk of word worship/obsession. Bigger picture-wise words are building blocks for how we contextualize our existence where we have been disappeared or written out of our own history, present, and future. These containers hold declarations of our presence, while pointing to the need for future development of alternative and/or related terminology. I think we also need to pay attention to the history of words and usage because they have a story to tell: the story of how disappearance and dehumanization happens via words and language.
What the term Two-Spirit did for me (once I learned about it) was allow me to dream about a place/role for me within my community. It also (along with what I was learning in my Anthropology classes) revealing Indigenous gender systems that were not binary.
A declaration can ignite a movement, “Two-spirit” was a declaration of self-identification and contextualization and a model for how language and action are intertwined in resistance movements and yes, even world-making.
This is also why I’m utterly caught up in learning more about words like dilbaa and nádłeeh their definitions and etymologies, etc., and their future and the communities that are built up around them. Being removed from my language I am also learning how to pronounce those words, how to use them in conversation, and the protocols around those terms. This incredibly painstaking process is where the new new is cooked up, dreamed in feverish sleep. I make a lot of art around my learning and re-learning of Diné Bizaad. Most of my pieces center around how language learning is as much as about toilet humor as it is about linguistical survivance and resistance to colonial erasure, let alone being queer whilst thinking and doing these thingz.
All of this, I promise, makes complete sense to me! I chuckle nervously as I type this, for reals, though. I hope you’re picking up what I’m putting down. This year I want to shift to a practice of declarations, declaration-making, what others say about declarations, and so on, and what does that mean??? Tune in and see where this ride takes us, I promise we will all learn something!
1 https://youtu.be/Eu4xNUq2hGE?si=vxUmHeYBqz2ODm1N See Dr. Myra Laramee’s explanation of Two-Spirit identity.
2 See several definitions of this term here: https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Skoden
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