Diary: Joshua Whitehead, Writing as Relation and Rupture

Kent Monkman, Teaching the Lost (2012), Acrylic on canvas, 24” x 30.” Image courtesy of the artist

To be a writer under the banner of “Literature” when you are a queer Indigenous person is to create a type of peeping, voyeurism, stripping, the expectation of the unveiling of bodies, histories, communities, traumas. Creative non-fiction fails me here, as did the novel, as did poetry, as do the larger boundaries and borders of genre and form—I stylize and characterize myself and my writings within the webbings of my ancestral and contemporary storytelling—otâcimowak—in an attempt to answer some of these questions, to unpack these expectations, to lay claim to the sovereignty my body houses, and, if I must strip, to do so on my own terms.