Indigenous nationhood remains a growing political ideology, discipline, and rallying cry for Indigenous peoples in decolonially conceptualizing community and the self in relation to and opposition to the settler-colonial state. While Indigenous nationhood as a lived politic is shaped by historically-informed cultural, regional, and linguistically-grouped governance systems, our ancestral ways of living gender, intimacy, and love have been deprioritized as a subtopic in these efforts. Internalized oppression in our communities manifests not only as overt forms of queerphobia and transphobia, but also as whitewashed rhetoric of equality and inclusion, binary-focused fights against violence, and the regulation of Two-Spirit (2S) bodies and voices to preserve colonial comforts.

Indigenous 2S, Trans, Queer, non-binary, and agender community members persist despite the borders of exclusion drawn by our own kin: these boundaries include land-based knowledge transmission as sites of harm and erasure, gendered sustenance activities and practices, and the persistence of cis-patriarchy in leadership. Through cross-community networks of care, commitments to gender-informed and ancestrally-inherited responsibilities, and the re-crafting of family and mentorship, 2S people resist cishetero-nationhoods as decolonial pathways and re-center our existences as knowledge holders, decision-makers, and healers of our communities. This presentation will explore stories, current strategies, and needed shifts for alternate Indigenous futures that affirm our existences on our territories.

Nicole Davies (she/her, they/them) is a Saulteaux Anishinaabe and Métis Two-Spirit pan femme. She has a master’s degree from the University of Victoria with a focus on Indigenous queer ecologies and plant medicine revitalization, and she is currently an Indigenous Knowledge and Climate Change Research Fellow with the David Suzuki Foundation working to support Indigenous sustenance sovereignty efforts. Nicole is passionate about decolonial, accessible, and community-building engagements with more-than-human relations that work to de-center and dismantle settler colonial cisheteropatriarchy. She is the founder of the Mashkiki Collective, a plant medicine knowledge revitalization and reclamation project for Anishinaabe and Métis Two Spirit, LGBTIQA+, genderqueer, and womxn community members, and she currently lives in Tkaronto in so-called Canada.

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