Indeed, homes are spaces where the intimacy among family members can open up daily opportunities to “see, hear, think and act differently” (Armstrong, 1995) as we redefine what it means to decolonize and to queer our homes, bodies, and relationships.

We are not speaking here of taking up or appropriating these roles, but creating stronger connections with queer Indigenous people within local Indigenous communities and findings ways to support their particular struggles for visibility and recognition.

we call on non-Indigenous queers to think about a politics of accountability instead of a politics of inclusion, asking how we might perform queerness differently within a decolonial praxis. Given that White supremacy operates through multiple logics, our politics of accountability requires that we examine the interlocking nature of these logics and the related complicities, not only focusing on how we are oppressed (Smith, 2010a).

we are challenged to avoid speaking for our loved ones and our relatives without their consent while also creating spaces in which we can be called on as allies when desired.

Within the spaces of our homes, families, and communities, we have opportunities to develop long-term processes of challenging our assumptions about how we perform queerness, Whiteness, Indigeneity, cisgender privilege, and a whole range of other identities.

“solidarity and allyship are great in theory but when imposed they replicate the same oppression we’re resisting” (n.p.).

We have not provided a clear path or model for allyship, queering nor decolonization. Rather, we hope to have exposed some of the tensions, dynamics, and unresolved questions at the heart of decolonial processes in our everyday queer lives. Within the spaces of our homes, families, and communities, we have opportunities to develop long-term processes of challenging our assumptions about how we perform queerness, Whiteness, Indigeneity, cisgender privilege, and a whole range of other identities.

t is important to make space for these and other uncomfortable conversations as a necessary part of resisting racial amnesia (Razack, 2002) and the familiar White settler narratives of innocence and denial of conquest and genocide, and thus moving toward White settler practices of accountability to Indigenous people and people of color in Canada.

K: I love you Mommy.C: I love you too.K: Do you love everyone in our family?C: Of course! I love you, Mum, Rosebud, Nana, all of our aunts, uncles, cousins, nephews, and our friends who are family to us, like Aunt Caroline.K: And our ancestors?C: Oh yes! I love our ancestors too.K: Well not all of them … we don't love our England ancestors who came over here and did the whole stealing the land from the Aboriginal people.C: Oh … those ancestors. Umm, right. Well, that's a really good question. Do we love people who do things that are wrong? Could we hate what they did, but love the people?K: Well, I’m not sure. I care about the Aboriginal people and what happened to them.C: I do too. That's a really interesting and important question you are asking.K: Yeah.C: It's not easy to figure that out, is it?K: No, it isn’t.

How can White queers talk about allyship without positioning themselves as better than other White queers, or without perpetuating narratives that maintain White supremacy by propping up White settlers as benevolent saviors of the “oppressed other”? While sharing stories of the everyday practices of White settlers resisting White supremacy may be a necessary part of decolonization, it is not a neutral or uncomplicated process.

However, the allyship is not just one way, as Sarah also demonstrates allyship with her single mother, who raised Sarah while struggling to make ends meet.

critical self-reflexive conversations among White family members around the kitchen table are insufficient on their own. Once again, this highlights the importance of embracing a “both/and” approach to allyship that honors the intimate and often invisible practices of decolonization in home and family spaces, but connects them with other acts of solidarity with Indigenous people taking place across much wider sociospatial contexts as well. Participating in public rallies, marches, and direct actions supporting Indigenous sovereignty, attending Indigenous art exhibits, visiting Indigenous cultural centers, signing petitions, writing letters, making monetary donations, and volunteering to support Indigenous initiatives are only a few of the other forms of solidarity that must accompany acts of decolonial allyship in the White queer settler family home. In this way, we can also see how these geographies of allyship are relational.

However, there remains a disturbing lack of commitment by White settlers to challenging racism and colonialism in queer and trans communities (including within friendships and intimate relationships) and practicing a politics of accountability to Indigenous people and people of color. A decolonial queer praxis requires that we continue to ask why these questions are marginal to discussions of allyship in queer relationships. Additionally, in the context of their relationships, White settler queer and trans people can challenge one another to think about how issues such as home ownership and parenting can become spaces to think through a decolonial queer politic.

Intimate relationships with partners or lovers raise a different set of questions about enacting decolonial practices across axes of race, gender, class, sexuality, and so on. As cisgender queer women, we have been in intimate relationships with genderqueer and trans partners in which we have enacted allyship by providing intimate support and care for partners encountering transphobia and heteronormativity in daily life. This requires undertaking self-education and self-reflection, particularly as our intimate relationships are spaces of reciprocal support in a different way than our friendships.

Our friendship developed initially within the context of our scholarly work, but it was deepened through conversations that made clear our mutual interests in issues of violence, power, and colonialism. We also shared involvement in queer and social justice circles in Coast Salish territories, and developed several collaborations, which allowed both our personal connection, and academic collaborations to deepen. Thus, our friendship developed through undertaking collaborative action to foster cross-cultural conversation about colonialism, violence, gender, and space, rather than just acknowledging these shared interests on an intellectual level.

We have chosen stories that raise questions and tensions, in order to center the dynamic, messy quality of relationships among individuals who are engaged in processes of unsettling dominant power dynamics and colonial ideologies. The material reality of colonial dispossession is often overlooked in conversations in non-Indigenous queer and trans communities about creating a sense of home and safety in these lands.

Similarly, the term Two-Spirit has been used to reflect the identities of Indigenous people who embody both masculine and feminine spirits and qualities within Indigenous knowledge paradigms which do not operate through dichotomous systems

ndigenous languages contain within them place-specific terminology that reflects the spiritual, social, and political position of variously gendered people within individual nations. Recalling these diverse systems of gender pushes at the limits of the English language (Driskill, Finley, Gilley and Morgensen, 2011). However, many queer and trans Indigenous people now use the term Two-Spirit to express what are a varied and complex array of gender and sexual identities rooted in Indigenous worldviews and lived experience

olonialism is, at its heart, a project intent on the erasure of Indigenous peoples. Colonial policies imposed sociolegal categories that were defined and managed in ways that were intended to lead to fewer and fewer Native people over time. Inherent in this project of erasure was the imposition of a binary system of gender which simultaneously imposed Indigenous rights and status along heterosexual lines and suppressed Indigenous systems of gender that went far beyond the gender binary. Yet Indigenous queers persisted. Decolonization involves actively challenging or disrupting systems of knowledge that do not fully account for the lives of Indigenous people, queer and trans people, and many others whose lives are erased through epistemic and material violence (Hunt, forthcoming). We suggest that this decolonization is already active in embodiments of Indigeneity and queer gender and sexuality, yet this ongoing resistance to colonialism often goes unseen within queer spaces. Accounting for Indigenous expressions of gender and sexuality requires acknowledging that the ongoing colonial categorization of Indigenous peoples and their identities is integral to the denial of Indigenous self-determination.

Within our own families, we have found solidarity across difference to hold great possibility for enacting a decolonial queer praxis. And yet we acknowledge there are multiple meanings and experiences of home on unceded land in the context of ongoing colonialism. In many contexts “the family home” may not a place of comfort and refuge, but may be a site of oppression, violence, and surveillance; for example, the heterosexual or cisgender family home for LGBTQ2S people, or non-Indigenous foster homes for Indigenous children. However, as we discuss here, family homes can also be sites of resistance, critical dialogue, support, and allyship.

Reagon criticized feminists (primarily White and lesbian feminists) for trying to create homogeneous “safe” spaces based on narrow identity politics, arguing instead that it was necessary to move outside of the comfort zones of sameness and to practice solidarity in uncomfortable places including the streets. Although written in 1981, Reagon's speech is cited in current discussions about allyship in Canada on the topic of Indigenous–settler solidarity.

In writing about the everydayness of decolonization, we acknowledge that Indigenous peoples’ resistance to colonialism has unfolded in daily acts of embodying and living Indigeneity, honoring longstanding relationships with the land and with one another. While large-scale actions such as rallies, protests and blockades are frequently acknowledged as sites of resistance, the daily actions undertaken by individual Indigenous people, families, and communities often go unacknowledged but are no less vital to decolonial processes. As scholar-activists, we ask how we might locate our solidarity within and across various family and community spaces, rather than only in more visible activist sites. In doing so, we also value the quiet, relational processes of change that are necessary for non-Indigenous queers, and all non-Indigenous people who seek to align themselves with Indigenous struggles. Here, we connect these relational decolonial processes to queer, Two-Spirit and trans solidarity, resistance to heteronormativity and cisnormativity, locating these intersections in practices of decolonizing and queering the intimate geographies of the family and the home. The stories, conflicts, tensions, celebrations and connections inherent in these processes are at the heart of the conversations through which this article was written.

We follow Tuck and Yang (2012) in observing that conversations using the language of decolonization often make no mention of Indigenous knowledge or peoples, nor any recognition of the immediate context of settler colonialism on the lands where these conversations take place.

yet their analysis and leadership are often marginalized within both LGBTQ and Indigenous scholarship, including in accounts of contemporary Two-Spirit community-building.

For over three decades, Indigenous lesbian and Two-Spirit women authors such as Beth Brant (1994), Chrystos (1988; 1995), and Paula Gunn Allen (1986) have illustrated through their poetry, essays, and fiction, the interlocking nature of heteronormativity and settler colonialism, the history of Indigenous lesbian and Two-Spirit resistance and the tensions and possibilities of coalition building between non-Indigenous LGBTQ and Indigenous communities.

Some scholars and activists have described this as “coalitional queer politics,” “queer intersectionality,” and/or “postcolonial queer.” These terms critique “politics of inclusion” and depoliticized articulations of intersectionality that ignore hierarchical power relations and reinscribe White, colonial, gender, and sexual norms. This is also referred to as “queer of color critique” to foreground the theories and activism of LGBTQ2S people of color and Indigenous people and that examines the interlocking nature of race, sexuality, and gender.

A decolonial queer politic is not only anti-normative, but actively engages with anti-colonial, critical race and Indigenous theories and geopolitical issues such as imperialism, colonialism, globalization, migration, neo-liberalism, and nationalism (Oswin, 2008; Morgensen, 2011; Driskill, 2011; Dakin, 2012; Smith, 2010b).

While queer is often used as an identity category or umbrella term for non-normative sexual and gender identities, it emerged as a critique of essentialist constructs and identity politics.

We view “decolonization” and “queering” as active, interconnected, critical, and everyday practices that take place within and across diverse spaces and times.

The rhythm of today, like every day we have lived here on Turtle Island, is made possible through the historic and ongoing processes and ideologies of colonialism. Importantly, it is also made possible through ongoing and persistent resistance to colonialism.

In this article, we investigate questions about the nature of decolonial processes within our daily lives. We have chosen to center our investigation of decolonization at the level of interpersonal relationships, families and homes in order to highlight the intimate and everyday practices of allyship and decolonization that are often made invisible when we focus solely on social action strategies taking place in more “public” spaces such as community coalitions

Today we awoke on the unceded lands of the Coast Salish peoples and went about our days as two queer activist-scholars living on these stolen lands. The rhythm of today, like every day we have lived here on Turtle Island, is made possible through the historic and ongoing processes and ideologies of colonialism. Importantly, it is also made possible through ongoing and persistent resistance to colonialism.

Although the concept of decolonization has been taken up by critical scholars working in a range of disciplines in recent years, including queer theory, examinations of settler colonialism often remain peripheral to theorizations of queer rights and gender and sexuality more broadly (Smith, 2010b). Queer and Two-Spirit Indigenous people have long written about the necessity for anti-colonial struggles and queer rights to be investigated as inherently linked in social justice movements. Yet what does decolonization look and feel like, what does it entail, in our daily actions as queer women? What is decolonization beyond something to aspire to as allies to Indigenous struggles for self-determination or as Indigenous queers who want to align various aspects of our Two-Spirit identities?Before entering the academy, we both worked for many years in community-based contexts where our understanding and analyses of colonialism and decolonization grew out of front-line anti-violence and anti-poverty work. In our academic research and teaching, as an Indigenous queer scholar working on issues of colonial violence, and a White queer scholar working on issues of violence in the lives of women and LGBTQ2S people, we have integrated analyses of colonialism and anti-racist politics. Yet inspired by our community-based work, we also know firsthand the importance of lived, embodied and interpersonal engagement with decolonization in our everyday lives, rather than only academic reflection on these themes. Thus, this article is a joint exploration of what decolonization entails in the intimate spaces of daily life, particularly moments with family members and close friends.

two queer activis

unceded lands

queer cisgender women

Cindy is an academic researcher and instructor, who is active in various anti-violence, health, and social justice movements.

She is involved in anti-violence education, sex worker rights solidarity, local Indigenous arts, and has recently completed her Ph.D. focused on law and colonial violence.

Kwakwaka’wakw nation

THE POLITICS OF EVERYDAY DECOLONIZATION: STARTING WHERE WE STAND