us.3 Ideas of this vexed sort leave a burnt path in their wake. Feet like ours are singed with a history that isn’t done with us. There is a point— call it a turning point—at which NDN boys can become angry men of at least two types (I’m not suggesting that this is fatalistic; the norms of gender and race fail to regulate us completely, to paraphrase Judith Butler): one that is imprisoning and riotous at once, a mode of being that sucks the air out of the room, and another that is quieter but equally denigrating, a slow injunction on happiness and possibility. Both beget a sense of immobility—these are ways of life at the heart of colonialism that cut along gendered lines. There is a host of violent acts done as a symptom of these performances of racialized masculinity. This is a well-documented facet of NDN life: the trauma of colonialism erupts in the minds and bodies of men, who then bombard the lives of women and girls, two-spirit peoples, and queers. Today, we are beholden to the work of feminist mothering and fathering to repair what has been done and to bring about boys and men who answer the call of democratizing the labor of care.
What is it to live, to suffer, and, above all, to love in an emotionally inflexible world fashioned to produce men who eat “too much of the sunset?”4 We are haunted by that turning point, brought back to it again and again. But it doesn’t once and for all consign us to a ravaged life. There is more to be said; there is another mode of life to inhabit.
In my first memory of nôhkom, she and I are on the couch in our home in the hamlet of Joussard, only a few kilometers from the place of our political and social belonging, Driftpile. What I remember most is a feeling of childish liveliness, which orbits nôhkom, and her enduring attentiveness to the ebb and flow of my behavior.
I’ve found myself unable to properly go about the task of articulating the infinitude of nôhkom’s care. How does one thank another for manufacturing a world to experiment with the precarity of aliveness? I might spend the rest of my life inching closer to that place of articulation, to a place where her act of giving in to the demands of care are made visible, celebrated. How could I strive for anything but this unfinishable avowal? How does one remain unwaveringly answerable to this call from nowhere and everywhere? On the other hand, how do I resist enfleshing a writer-me that is obsessed with bringing into view this unrepayable debt while the world-me idles by? Too much can go missing in this space of translation. Maybe the onus isn’t to sputter out in the ruts of the abstract, of the textual, but to live in a manner that cites those dear to the heart. Butler claimed that language and styles of behavior are citational, that they echo from a history of use. Joy, then, is a politics of citation.
Like most twins, Jesse and I were inseparable. We were Pokémon trainers and baseball players, boreal forest foragers and amateur engineers. At times, however, I strain to call up shared memories; I suspect this is because our senses of selfhood were intertwined, that we were bound up in a “you” and an “us” and a “we” that hardened into a singular entity over time, having begun in utero. What I do know is that many, relatives and otherwise, made us out to be opposites, good and bad, feminine and masculine, academic and unruly. Perhaps they were simply pointing out the parts of us that bifurcated, in opposition to our drive to enact a sameness that upset liberal norms of individuation. Maybe it’s a mere psychosocial fact that the lives of twins are labyrinthine, like any other social form. There’s a photograph of us from a Halloween in the late nineties; I’m dressed as Tinky Winky, the purple Teletubby, and Jesse is dressed as the blue Power Ranger. This artifact is regularly invoked as evidence of our disparate identities (and my nascent queerness). Nevertheless, Jesse and I were collaborators and accomplices, best friends and sometimes rivals. Which is to say that we too were key architects of the world of care that brought and is still bringing us into being, against the odds, in opposition to the insufficiencies of gender that colonialism yields.
“maybe i am here in the way that a memory is here? now, ain’t that fucking sad and beautiful?”5
It is likely impossible to trace when, where, and under what conditions those who arrived with enmity on the shores of what is now improperly called Canada inaugurated a modality of gender that produced men who self-destruct. Surely a historian more disciplined than I has tried, but my suspicion is that one would end up again and again with an incomplete bag of events, theoretical inclinations, and emotional responses. That this blow to subjectivity doesn’t invite curiosity from those outside our communities doesn’t, however, lessen its cruelty and longevity. We might look to the testimonial record that burgeoned from the atrocities of the twentieth century bathed in the language of state care and fiduciary obligation. Here, for example, is the public testimony of a woman who was made to attend a residential school on Vancouver Island:
I remember entering through the front doors, and the sound of those doors closing still haunts me when I go to places that look like … that building … when the door closes … The fear and the hurt … there’s nothing you can do once you’re … once you’re there.6
Though not explicitly vocalized, we might hear in this harrowing account of the reverberations of the trauma of state education a nodal point in the history of colonization that has to do with the brutalization of NDNs at every conceivable level. This is to say that throughout the long twentieth century, Canada incubated death worlds where meaning was made to injure via the categories we have come to inhabit with ease. Part of what is ghoulish about the fungibility of those doors, those facades that lived on in horror-filled memories, is that they bear too the experience of gender as it was traumatically unmade and remade in the bodies of NDN children.
It’s sometime in the early 2000s, and the wretchedness of history is still revealing itself, testimonial by testimonial, angered and shaken voice by angered and shaken voice, until there’s a pileup of words and tears that Canada can’t obliterate from its cultural memory. I can’t identify the source of my curiosity, but I ask nimôsom if he’d been made to attend the Indian Residential School at Joussard. Yes, but I don’t want to talk about it, he says without looking up from his plate.
This “Yes, but I don’t want to talk about it” floats above our family like an open secret. I watch nimôsom struggle against emotion, against gender, but never waver in his drive to break from the spell of that haunted door, that omnipresent and cursed doorway, in order to provide for our family. Everywhere NDN men are in a struggle against gender.
There are cavernous gaps in my memory in which people I love with fortitude today, those without whom being in the world would be a taxing affair, don’t exist, as though my brain has been surgically hampered. Rather than let those gaps swallow me up, I plant flowers of all sorts there. Daisies and prairie crocuses. Northern Alberta flowers that grow in the wild, ones that hold a firm place in my childhood psyche where bodies should be. There is no use marinating on the thorny question of how and for what reasons there is nothingness where there should be a haze of good feeling. A thick opacity is missing. Again, it isn’t mine to estimate who or what was the thief in the prairie, subarctic night. Perhaps I write now, in the mode of autobiography, to stimulate the conditions that might call up that opacity, the fragile and engrossing density of memory. In this way, I’m an archaeologist of the disappeared.
Nôhkom worked full-time as a receptionist at the health center on the reserve, so when nimôsom, a mechanic, had an uncompromising string of repairs to attend to at his garage, Jesse and I would stay at my dad’s house, also on the reserve. In and out of his house flowed a host of relatives and family friends, all irrevocably thrown into