These emotional conversations can be sites of change,growth, and strengthened understanding.
Ahmed (2017) says emotional “negativity” is feminist work: naming harm is part of transformation. Discomfort reveals power. Here discomfort is not a failure; it is necessary for political learning.
Simply adding Two-Spirit to the list of LGBTQ fails to fully account for the underlying systems ofpower and knowledge that continue to shape possibilities for solidarity be-tween queer and Indigenous communities.
This relates to Combahee Collective's (2022) criticism of “add-and-stir” feminism that includes but does not transform systems. Inclusion that ignores power is not decolonization; it is reproducing existing colonial structures.
The term is not intended to mark a singular identity category,but is an indigenously defined pan-Native North American term that refersto a diversity of Indigenous LGBTQ identities, as well as culturally specificnon-binary expressions of gender
The discussion of Two-Spirit identity deepened my understanding of gender diversity as rooted in specific Indigenous worldviews; not just Western LGBTQ+ frameworks.
We suggestthat this decolonization is already active in embodiments of Indigeneity andqueer gender and sexuality, yet this ongoing resistance to colonialism oftengoes unseen within queer spaces.
This shows that the gender binary itself is a colonial project, reinforcing the gendered violence of settlement (Maracle,1996). The article shows how queer Indigenous and settler families resist these norms at home, which is often not recognized as important as public activism.
Their stories, poetry, and cre-ative nonfiction constitute “theories for decolonizing the body and mind aswell a queer theory itself” (Burford, 2013, p. 168), yet their analysis and lead-ership are often marginalized within both LGBTQ and Indigenous scholar-ship, including in accounts of contemporary Two-Spirit community-building
This parallels Yamada’s point on Asian American women’s invisibility (2022). It also mirrors the Combahee Collective’s claim that Black women are marginalized even within feminist spaces (2022). Silence from marginalized groups will not help protect them; to resist erasure one has to stand up and call out systems and practices of oppression. These texts highlight that marginalized queer people face erasure even inside supposedly inclusive movements.
decolonization in our everyday lives, rather than only academic reflection onthese themes.
This mirrors Anzaldúa and Moraga’s (2022) “theory in the flesh”: theory emerges from lived realities of race, sexuality, land, and oppression. Decolonization isn't only academic; it's embodied practice.
it also canmask the reality that Cindy’s family benefits materially from owning land andthis ability to buy land is directly related to other forms of prior land theftof her White settler ancestors (and her partner’s
There is material privilege from genocide. This reminds me of the statement "No one is illegal on stolen Indigenous lands", used to condemn the abuse that ICE is perpetrating in the US right now. Link to an article: https://www.culturalsurvival.org/news/no-one-illegal-stolen-indigenous-lands
and decolo-nization that happen within and across intimate geographies of the home
Article thesis that decolonization is lived through daily, small actions, not just grand public activism.
Stories from theauthors—two cisgender queer women, one of whom is Indigenousand one of whom is a White settler—highlight intimate practicesof allyship and decolonization that are often made invisible whenactivism is seen as only taking place in “public” spaces such ascommunity coalitions.
Their personal stories reveal decolonizing actions happening in close relationships; actions that usually go unnoticed.
Queer and Two-Spirit 4 Indigenous people have long written aboutthe necessity for anti-colonial struggles and queer rights to be investigated asinherently linked in social justice movements
For a long time, Two-Spirit and queer Indigenous writers have emphasized that decolonization efforts and queer liberation must be understood together, not as separate movements.
as we redefine what it means to decolonize and to queer our homes, bodies,and relationships
Who carries the emotional labour in these relationships; Indigenous people, settlers, or both?
taught Sarah about colonialism, social justice, and definitions of communitythat were not rooted in identity politics but in everyday actions.
When is storytelling decolonial, and when is it simply therapeutic for settlers?
However, for Indigenous people, intimate partnerships are also spacesin which questions of colonialism and White privilege can arise.
Do queer homes challenge colonial structures, or can they reproduce settler privilege even when they feel “non-normative”?
Another necessary yet uncomfortable family conversation is the waythey benefit from past and present White settler colonialism, which hasallowed them to buy property on stolen Coast Salish land.
I never thought about home ownership as a colonial benefit. Their reflection made visible how property is structurally tied to settler privilege.
White settler queer and trans people can challenge one another tothink about how issues such as home ownership and parenting can becomespaces to think through a decolonial queer politic.
This article challenged my assumption that allyship is mainly public or activist based. I hadn’t considered how decolonization must reshape parenting, friendships, and even our understanding of home.
the histories of Two-Spirit people
I was not taught about Indigenous queerness and two-spirit identities in school; I had to learn about it myself. https://youtu.be/A4lBibGzUnE
Thus, we call on non-Indigenous queers to think about a politics of ac-countability instead of a politics of inclusion, asking how we might performqueerness differently within a decolonial praxis.
"Diversity" without structural change reinforces colonization and reproduces Western settler ideology. This connects to the to Combahee River Collective (2022) critique of liberal inclusion politics. It emphasizes the importance of intersectionality; recognizing each part of a person’s identity as relational and important.
As Sarah (forthcoming) has argued elsewhere, “the forced disappearance oflocally defined systems of gender is central to the settler project of nativedisappearance” as gender plays a central role in understanding and definingIndigenous peoples’ identities.
This showcases gender regulation as a tool of genocide. It reminds me of the unproportioned violence rates against Indigenous queer people and Two-Spirit individuals. Link to the article: https://www.gbvlearningnetwork.ca/our-work/backgrounders/GBV%20Against%20Two%20Spirit%20Indigenous%20Peoples/index.html
These need to be seen as queer familyissues—questions we are compelled to discuss with one another
Queer families must confront whiteness and colonialism internally.
White settler narrativesfounded on good intentions, which have allowed settlers to overlook thepotentially harmful outcomes of their well-intentioned actions. These “goodintentions” can also be enacted within and across our closest relationships,as we try to “protect” our loved ones from the violence of racist, transpho-bic, or homophobic systems and interactions
These good intentions replicate the same oppression that is trying to be resisted. Jordan (2003) critiques white innocence and unearned solidarity, which focuses solely on inclusion of marginalized groups and not accountability from the privileged groups.
Well not all of them . . . we don’t love our England ancestors whocame over here and did the whole stealing the land from the Aboriginalpeople.
This is classic feminist killjoy work: naming histories that disrupt White settler comfort. Ahmed (2017) says naming oppression is read as “killing joy,” but is necessary to live ethically.
Since welcoming their child into the world, Cindy and herpartner have consciously tried to parent from what might be called “a criticalsocial justice framework” that makes connections between multiple systemsof domination
This is exactly what TallBear (2022) discusses: Indigenous kinship vs. the imposed nuclear family model. The nuclear family is a settler colonial tool used to privatize care and restructure land relations. Lenon’s (2015) discussion of monogamy as a nation-building tool helps frame why resisting normative family models is decolonial. The very act of parenting in this way is resisting settler norms. By raising a child with anti-racist, anti-settler frameworks, Cindy resists the reproduction of the settler nuclear family model.
As an Indigenous person, Sarah has come to valuethese everyday actions as a true measure of her mom’s respectful approachto living as a non-Indigenous person within a mostly native community
Family and care as anticolonial; connects to Indigenous feminist emphasis on relationality and community-defined kin (TallBear, 2022).
However, there remainsa disturbing lack of commitment by White settlers to challenging racism andcolonialism in queer and trans communities (including within friendshipsand intimate relationships) and practicing a politics of accountability to In-digenous people and people of color.
As Jordan (2003) states, there is danger in assuming automatic connection, when privileged women assume solidarity without accountability. This highlights the danger of white benevolence; helping without dismantling power. It also echoes the warning that ‘good intentions’ reproduce colonial harm.
friendships does not always require reciprocity on the part of the individ-ual who is socially marginalized. Instead, we suggest that allyship requiresaccountability on the part of members of the dominant group and is notpredicated on reciprocity by those who are marginalized
The privileged must take responsibility and accountability for recognizing that they are privileged within society; the burden is on them, not the marginalized people, to work towards connection. This connects to Jordan's (2003) emphasis that privilege distorts relationships and cannot be erased through superficial “connection.” Even though there can be shared connection through certain aspects of identity, oftentimes it is not enough to unite for a shared struggle.
Friendships can provide opportunities for enacting allyship and a de-colonial queer praxis, while raising questions about reciprocity and account-ability across axes of difference
Is allyship possible without reciprocity?
Indigenous people, people of color and White settler allies workingfrom decolonial and/or intersectional frameworks, have emphasized the im-portance of embracing a “both/and” conceptual and political stance for un-derstanding contexts, spaces, identities, and multiple forms of interlockingoppressions and violence as a way of resisting the “either/or” dichotomousthinking of colonial Euro-Western paradigms
Lorde (2022) insists difference should be “a fund of necessary polarities,” not erased. And theory in the flesh (Moraga & Anzaldúa, 2022) shows lived multiplicity as a form of resistance. Both texts refuse binary thinking: gender, race, belonging. This is shown through Indigenous gender systems and through the body (for theory in the flesh).
he ongoing colonialcategorization of Indigenous peoples
This supports TallBear's (2022) writings on how settler colonialism constructed what “family” should mean and look like; enforcing Western notions of kinship on Indigenous people.
Inherent in this project of erasure was the imposi-tion of a binary system of gender which simultaneously imposed Indigenousrights and status along heterosexual lines and suppressed Indigenous sys-tems of gender that went far beyond the gender binary.
This directly echoes the idea of heteropatriarchy: settlers enforced patriarchal nuclear family structures to reorganize Indigenous kinship (Maile, Tuck, and Morrill, 2013). Whitehead (2022) and Maracle (1996) argue that settler colonialism violently replaces Indigenous relational gender systems with patriarchal ones; this article gives a lived, interpersonal example of that statement.
However, as we discuss here, family homescan also be sites of resistance, critical dialogue, support, and allyship.
Who gets to define what good allyship looks like?
Reagon’s assumption that homes are spaces of comfortand ease due to shared politics, history or identity may not be true for
This is not true for everyone. The authors are challenging the idea that activism happens "out there", echoing Ahmed's (2017) idea of feminist practice as homework. This is also a perfect example of Ahmed’s feminist killjoy—discomfort enters the “home,” revealing sexism, racism, or colonialism where they are usually hidden (2017).
decolonization has been taken up in theoretical terms withinpostcolonial theory or other academically based knowledges, but is fre-quently disconnected from the place-based nature of ongoing colonialismin the lands and communities in which we live.
If decolonization needs to be place-based, how do queer settlers avoid symbolic belonging on land they occupy?
Queerness is then less about a way of “being,” and more about“doing,” and offers the potential for radical social critique
Being queer isn’t just an identity label; it is an active practice that challenges norms, structures, and power. Queerness is an action, a verb: it is about resisting norms.
We believe that our daily interactions with one anotheras Indigenous and non-Indigenous queer people across these relational ge-ographies of allyship provide numerous possibilities for furthering decolonialefforts upon these lands that continue to be colonized
How can these intimate acts (family conversations, allyship, parenting) translate into structural political change?
we chooseto utilize storytelling as a methodology with significance in Indigenous (Ko-vach, 2010), decolonial (Smith, 1999) and feminist and queer (Ristock, 2002)forms of knowledge production.
This echoes Anzaldúa (2022): “The act of writing is the act of making soul.” As well as theory in the flesh where lived stories produce political knowledge (Anzaldúa and Moraga, 2022).
Our methodology of allyship in this article centersrelational knowledge production, conversation, dialogue, and personal sto-rytelling
This showcases standpoint theory. Knowledge is created from lived experience, not detached objectivity. Knowledge should begin from the experiences of marginalized communities. Harding (1987) argues that marginalized standpoints produce “stronger objectivity.” TallBear (2014) also critiques extractive research and instead argues knowledge must be grounded in relationships and obligations, not neutrality.
In this article, we investigate questions about the nature of decolonialprocesses within our daily lives. We have chosen to center our investiga-tion of decolonization at the level of interpersonal relationships, familiesand homes in order to highlight the intimate and everyday practices ofallyship and decolonization that are often made invisible when we focussolely on social action strategies taking place in more “public” spaces suchas community coalitions.
The thesis of this article argues that decolonization is not only public activism, but something lived through intimate relationships, kinship, and everyday interactions. The authors reject the idea that decolonization equals symbolic gestures; instead, they centre it in the home, family, friendship, and embodied queer life. Decolonization happens in family, intimacy, conflict, and daily life.