Indigiqueer
2024 curated booklist
Stories by and about indigenous queer Native American, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people lives.
Honouring Our Ancestors
Edited by Alison Green, Leonie Pihama
In these rigorous and challenging essays, writers from Aotearoa and Turtle Island (Canada and the United States of America) explore the well-being of takatapui, two-spirit, and Maori and Indigenous LGBTQI+ communities. Themes include resistance, reclamation, empowerment, transformation and healing. Central to Honouring Our Ancestors is the knowledge that, before colonisation, Indigenous peoples had their own healthy understandings of gender, sexual identities and sexuality. Some of these understandings have survived the onslaught of colonisation; others require decolonisation so that our Indigenous nations can begin to heal. Through this lens, the writers gathered here contribute their knowledge and experience of structural and social change. This collection was inspired by two major research projects: the HONOR Project, which investigated well-being in American Indian and Alaskan Native two-spirit communities, and the Honour Project Aotearoa, which investigated Kaupapa Maori strengths-based understandings of the health and well-being of takatapui and Maori LGBTQI+ communities. Edited by Alison Green and Leonie Pihama, Honouring Our Ancestors upholds the independent authorities and languages that distinguish our Indigenous nations and celebrates the relationships that bind us. Decolonised Indigenous knowledges are offered as a wellspring of unlimited potential for Indigenous communities and nations everywhere.
Category: NZ Authors, Non-Fiction
Representation: Takatāpui, two-spirit, diverse genders, diverse sexualities, indigiqueer
Content Warnings: Unknown
ISBN: 9781776920730
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A Snake Falls to Earth
Darcie Little Badger
Nina is a Lipan girl in our world. She’s always felt there was something more out there. She still believes in the old stories.
Oli is a cottonmouth kid, from the land of spirits and monsters. Like all cottonmouths, he’s been cast from home. He’s found a new one on the banks of the bottomless lake.
Nina and Oli have no idea the other exists. But a catastrophic event on Earth, and a strange sickness that befalls Oli’s best friend, will drive their worlds together in ways they haven’t been in centuries.
And there are some who will kill to keep them apart.
Category: Young Adult, Fantasy
Representation: Asexual, indigiqueer
Content Warnings: Violence, character death, mental illness, abuse, racism
ISBN: 9781646140923
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Elatsoe
Darcie Little Badger
Elatsoe—Ellie for short—lives in an alternate contemporary America shaped by the ancestral magics and knowledge of its Indigenous and immigrant groups. She can raise the spirits of dead animals—most importantly, her ghost dog Kirby. When her beloved cousin dies, all signs point to a car crash, but his ghost tells her otherwise: He was murdered.
Category: Young Adult, Fantasy, Science Fiction
Representation: Asexual, aromantic, indigiqueer
Content Warnings: racism, homophobia, violence, character death, abuse
ISBN: 9781646140053
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Love After the End: An Anthology of Two-Spirit and Indigiqueer Speculative Fiction
ED. Joshua Whitehead
This exciting and groundbreaking fiction anthology showcases a number of new and emerging 2SQ (Two-Spirit and queer Indigenous) writers from across Turtle Island. These visionary authors show how queer Indigenous communities can bloom and thrive through utopian narratives that detail the vivacity and strength of 2SQness throughout its plight in the maw of settler colonialism’s histories.
Here, readers will discover bio-engineered AI rats, transplanted trees in space, the rise of a 2SQ resistance camp, a primer on how to survive Indigiqueerly, virtual reality applications, motherships at sea, and the very bending of space-time continuums queered through NDN time. Love after the End demonstrates the imaginatively queer Two-Spirit futurisms we have all been dreaming of since 1492.
Contributors include Darcie Little Badger, Mari Kurisato, Kai Minosh Pyle, David Alexander Robertson, and jaye simpson.
Category: Short stories, Science Fiction
Representation: Diverse sexualities, diverse gender identities, indigiqueer, BIPOC
Content Warnings: Violence, character death, racism, homophobia, transphobia, substance use/abuse, religion
ISBN: 9781551528113
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it was never going to be ok
jaye simpson
It was never going to be okay is a collection of poetry and prose exploring the intimacies of understanding intergenerational trauma, Indigeneity and queerness, while addressing urban Indigenous diaspora and breaking down the limitations of sexual understanding as a trans woman. As a way to move from the linear timeline of healing and coming to terms with how trauma does not exist in subsequent happenings, it was never going to be okay tries to break down years of silence in simpson’s debut collection of poetry:
i am five
my sisters are saying boy
i do not know what the word means but―
i am bruised into knowing it: the blunt b,
the hollowness of the o, the blade of y
Category: Poetry
Representation: Indigiqueer, BIPOC
Content Warnings: Violence, racism, transphobia, sexual violence, sexual activity, abuse, religion
ISBN: 9780889713826
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The Boy from the Mish
Gary Lonesborough
I don’t paint so much anymore,’ I say, looking to my feet.
‘Oh. Well, I got a boy who needs to do some art. You can help him out,’ Aunty Pam says, like I have no say in the matter, like she didn’t hear what I just said about not painting so much anymore. ‘Jackson, this is Tomas. He’s living with me for a little while.’
It’s a hot summer, and life’s going all right for Jackson and his family on the Mish. It’s almost Christmas, school’s out, and he’s hanging with his mates, teasing the visiting tourists, avoiding the racist boys in town. Just like every year, Jackson’s Aunty and annoying little cousins visit from the city – but this time a mysterious boy with a troubled past comes with them… As their friendship evolves, Jackson must confront the changing shapes of his relationships with his friends, family and community. And he must face his darkest secret – a secret he thought he’d locked away for good.
Category: Young Adult
Representation: Gay, diverse sexualities, BIPOC
Content Warnings: Homophobia, racism, police violence/brutality, sexual activity, substance use/abuse
ISBN: 9781760525880
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Too Much Lip
Melissa Lucashenko
Wise-cracking Kerry Salter has spent her adulthood avoiding two things: her hometown and prison. A tough, generous, reckless woman accused of having too much lip, Kerry uses anger to fight the avalanche of bullshit the world spews. But now her Pop is dying and she’s an inch away from the lockup, so she heads south on a stolen Harley for one last visit.
Kerry plans to spend twenty-four hours, tops, across the border. She quickly discovers, though, that Bundjalung country has a funny way of latching on to people—not to mention her chaotic family and the threat of a proposal to develop a prison on Granny Ava’s Island, the family’s spiritual home. On top of that, love may have found Kerry again when a good-looking white fella appears out of nowhere with eyes only for her.
As the fight mounts to stop the development, old wounds open. Surrounded by the ghosts of their Elders and the memories of their ancestors, the Salters are driven by the deep need to make peace with their past while scrabbling to make sense of their present. Kerry just hopes they can come together in time to preserve Granny Ava’s legacy and save their ancestral land.
Category: New Adult
Representation: Indigiqueer, BIPOC
Content Warnings: Racism, police violence/brutality, sexual violence, substance use/abuse, mental illness, abuse, character death, sexual activity, religion
ISBN: 9780063032545
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how to make a basket
Jazz Money
“the end of the world was marked with beautiful light we should have known”
Simmering with protest and boundless love, Jazz Money’ s David Unaipon Award-winning collection, how to make a basket, examines the tensions of living in the Australian colony today. By turns scathing, funny and lyrical, Money uses her poetry as an extension of protest against the violence of the colonial state, and as a celebration of Blak and queer love. Deeply personal and fiercely political, these poems attempt to remember, reimagine and re-voice history.
Writing in both Wiradjuri and English language, Money explores how places and bodies hold memories, and the ways our ancestors walk with us, speak through us and wait for us.
Category: Poetry
Representation: Indigiqueer, BIPOC
Content Warnings: Unknown
ISBN: 9780702263385
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Jonny Appleseed
Joshua Whitehead
“You’re gonna need a rock and a whole lotta medicine” is a mantra that Jonny Appleseed, a young Two-Spirit/Indigiqueer, repeats to himself in this vivid and utterly compelling novel.
Off the reserve and trying to find ways to live and love in the big city, Jonny becomes a cybersex worker who fetishizes himself in order to make a living. Self-ordained as an NDN glitter princess, Jonny has one week before he must return to the “rez,” and his former life, to attend the funeral of his stepfather. The next seven days are like a fevered dream: stories of love, trauma, sex, kinship, ambition, and the heartbreaking recollection of his beloved kokum (grandmother). Jonny’s world is a series of breakages, appendages, and linkages—and as he goes through the motions of preparing to return home, he learns how to put together the pieces of his life.
Jonny Appleseed is a unique, shattering vision of Indigenous life, full of grit, glitter, and dreams.
Category: Adult
Representation: Indigiqueer
Content Warnings: Racism, homophobia, substance use/abuse, bullying, transphobia, abuse, character death, self harm, sexual activity, sexual violence
ISBN: 9781551527253
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Full Metal Indigiqueer
Joshua Whitehead
This poetry collections focuses on a hybridized Indigiqueer Trickster character named Zoa who brings together the organic (the protozoan) and the technologic (the binaric) in order to re-beautify and re-member queer Indigeneity.
This Trickster is a Two-Spirit / Indigiqueer invention that resurges in the apocalypse to haunt, atrophy, and to reclaim. Following oral tradition (à la Iktomi, Nanaboozho, Wovoka), Zoa infects, invades, and becomes a virus to canonical and popular works in order to re-centre Two-Spirit livelihoods.
They dazzlingly and fiercely take on the likes of Edmund Spenser, Shakespeare, Charles Dickens, and John Milton while also not forgetting contemporary pop culture figures such as Lana Del Rey, Grindr, and Peter Pan. Zoa world-builds a fourth-dimension, lives in the cyber space, and survives in NDN-time – they have learned to sing the skin back onto their bodies and remain #woke at the end of the world.
“Do not read me as a vanished ndn,” they ask, “read me as a ghastly one.”
Category: Adult, Poetry
Representation: Indigiqueer
Content Warnings: Racism, homophobia, sexual activity, sexual violence
ISBN: 9781772011876
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