Future Song

i saw fc and yellowhair

at the stacked houses

with honeycombed walls

their mouths moving

the sound

reaching me on a 

delayed beat

saad to sin

their chants make me

tap my foot

dust clouds rising

around their moccasin feet

they’ve much to sing about

saad to sin

in ceremony

first about the loss

lost nádleehí and 

dilbaa

lost to

genderc*de

or TB

or AIDS

or cancer

or Covid-19

their high-pitched, feminized voices 

sing

saad to sin 

for memory sake 

and re-membering

 the lessons

we need for the times

when their leaving

is a lesson we needed to learn 

more than once 

but what’s ceremony for but

a chance to sing it all back

a re-do

after all has gone to sh*t

that’s what fc and yellowhair were doing

at the stacked houses

with honeycombed walls

their mouths moving

with songs for the future

I opened this post with a poem featuring two nádleehí who spent time (either living, visiting for business, accessing services unavailable on the Reservation) in bordertowns in the Four Corners area of the Southwest, just like me.  I’m being speculative in this short piece but I honestly dream of a would-be friendship, a Bermuda Triangle of Naadleehí/Dilbaa love, admiration, and joy.  I dream of us discussing and practicing ways to reclaim ceremony as being a space not just for equal gender representation but a space for us to lead the dreaming and rebuilding that takes place in ceremony.  For some context, third and fourth Diné individuals can act as “stand-ins” during ceremony if a balance of sexual representation which is sometimes required for ceremonial instruction/structure is not met.  While there are many inferences made to the generative nature of our sexualities in creation narratives, I am also interested in how sexualities are represented as an aspect of ceremonial activity and world-building.  And possibly most excitingly, what and how can present-day dilbaa and nádleehí make ceremony safer spaces for future generations? 

Gathering places/spaces/foci and temporalities of dilbaa and nadleehí people are places where they play, world-build, and enact and express their gender and sexuality.  When I think of places like these (I’m talking about places where we felt safe to gather and be joyous with one another, places and times like Techno Night in a local bar in the 90s in Flagstaff, Arizona), I don’t recall the dangerous world “out there” as I danced and flirted with my gay and queer friends, but I know some of these same friends carried box cutters with them for the walk home.  We carved out time and space in bordertowns that were not made for us.  This is a typical experience/memory for LGBTQ people Native and non-Native, alike.  However, when you add in the intersection of being Indigenous to the mix things get muddy, like a Rez-road-after-a-monsoon muddy given that we Indigenous folx still have ceremonial knowledges that specifically name third and fourth gendered people as being important members of Native communities, yet we are subjected to imposed gender understanding that are limited to the extreme and is now common knowledge that a binary gender system is one tool of settler-colonial oppression.  How do we walk this world having both sets of knowledge?  Or, how do we theorize and practice gender in the 21st Century in bordertowns built on stolen land?