 So, in honor of Indigenous Peoples Day, which is today, you know, the committee and I, we reached out to a phenomenal, dynamic speaker who is actually one of my professors at Oregon State University and taught me so much about not just the LGBTQIA community, but Indigenous people as well. Dr. Coley Driscoe, who is a non-citizen, Cherokee-to-spirit and queer writer, activist, and performer, also of African, Iris, Lenape, Osage, Ascent. They are the author of Walking with Ghost poems and the co-editor of Sovereign Erotics, a collection of two-spirit literature and queer Indigenous studies, critical intervention theory, politics and literature all out of the University of Arizona. Their book, Osage Stories, Cherokee, Queer, and Two-Spirit Memory out of the University of Arizona was a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award in 2017. They are the director of graduate studies and queer studies curriculum organizer in Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Oregon State University. Using poetry, history, and personal stories, this talk will address how telling our stories Indigenous and the LGBTQIA plus peoples can contribute to social transformation, resistance, healing, and imagining of the decolonized future. Can you all join me in a warm welcome of Dr. Coley Driscoe? Hi, everyone. My name is Coley and I want to thank the Muckleshoot Nation, the Duwamish Nation, the Puyallup Nation for allowing us to be on their land and waters today. I also want to say thank you to Dominique, Multicultural Affairs, the LGBTQIA Task Force, and everyone here for bringing me to Highline. It's truly an honor and really humbling and I want to ask forgiveness from the elders who are here today if I should misstep in following any protocols and thank you for your work and wisdom and get some water. I speak Cherokee like a three-year-old about because like most Cherokees I didn't grow up speaking Cherokee and I'm in the process of relearning our language so for any speakers who might be in the audience, I'm grateful to my Cherokee language teacher, Bo Taylor and any mistakes are my own. I weave baskets, mostly I weave the double wall baskets that are closely associated with Cherokees in Oklahoma but I also weave our old southeastern style of double woven river cane baskets and coiled baskets. I'm not an expert weaver and still have a lot to learn how to gather materials for weaving, how to process cane, how to weave other styles of baskets that are now part of Cherokee weaving traditions. I share this because weaving deeply informs my theorizing about Cherokee two-spirit and queer memories and histories and has become my guiding metaphor for thinking about the ways in which Cherokee two-spirit and queer people are reimagining our pasts and futures through a practice of restoring in the present. By restoring I mean retelling and reimagining stories that restores and continues our cultural memories. Chicana scholar KCC Cobos theorizes embodied storying, the ways in which Chicanas continue indigenous identities through embodied practices and writes that embodied storying quote requires interrogating ways that history and the archive have acted upon indigenous bodies and looking for ways that this can be countered by retelling stories. Miami scholar Malia Powell begins her writing quote this is a story reminding us that theory and scholarship are always stories about how the world works and are part of a much more complicated accumulation of stories end quote. Powell and other women of color feminists refuse the separation between theory, poetry, art and other forms of expression. My work is also an accumulation of stories and a reimagining of those stories through scholarship, poetry, performance, beating and weaving in hopes to recreate new stories for Cherokee two-spirit people and larger indigenous queer movements and communities are re-storying. And so my talk today weaves back and forth between scholarship and theory and history and poetry and performance and intentionally disrupts colonial categories of how we do this work. There are several ways to describe two-spirit people in Cherokee and I think it's important to say that the speakers who have taught us this want to make clear that these are descriptions and not categories. But their diversity reflects the limits of any umbrella term in English. So some of those words are ashkayusti udanti, here she feels like a man, agayust udanti, here she feels like a woman, nudale agaya udante di different-spirited woman, nudale ashkaya udante di different-spirited man, shkigi that way, uligi shti degi flirt, tali quoti dantan, here she has two hearts, udselida special, nudale udanto, or nudale udante di a different-hearted spirit, achowine, third as in gender, asegi udanto, or asegi udanti, or asegi udante di, which means a strange heart and spirit. And it is this final term that I would like to look to as a way to think through a critique of colonial heteropatriarchy and to begin to reimagine histories of Cherokee gender and sexuality. So asegi udanto refers specifically to people who fall either outside of men's and women's roles or who mix men's and women's roles. Asegi, which means strange, is used by some Cherokees as a term similar to queer, and it provides a means by which to rethink through Cherokee history in order to listen to those stories rendered strange by colonial heteropatriarchy. Asegi stories are the other stories, the strange and queer stories that are told in the absent presence of two-spirit and same gender-loving people in both archival and embodied memories. They are the stories Cherokee two-spirit people tell each other in order to revise cultural memories. They are the stories hidden between the basket walls. And it is through the retelling and a reimagining of these asegi stories that we can work together to place gender and sexuality at the center of radical decolonial work. Beating the sash. I'm beating a ceremonial sash. This double-needle applique beadwork with white beads on blue wool and trimmed with red silk ribbon. Our Cherokee southeastern style of beadwork is currently under revival thanks to the work of Martha Berry, Cherokee Nation, who is pivotal to this movement. A friend of mine, an Osage two-spirit, taught me double-needle applique so I could bead a pair of moccasin bands for walking with our sisters, a project to commemorate missing and murdered indigenous women. After I learned the technique, I ordered Martha Berry's patterns and I'm slowly trying to teach myself to make everything I can. I've completed a few small projects. The vamps, a Koopa square for a friend's wedding, and two small purses. The few other pieces I've made were gifts, but the sash is for me. The sash is much larger and much slower processed for me as a beginning beater than I imagined. It's detailed handwork that uses more than one beading technique and hand sewing that takes my novice hands and pained body a long time to complete. As I bead the white spirals against the blue wool, I remember J. P. Johnson, Natchez Cherokee says, I believe the revival of any lost art tradition is vital to understanding who we were as a people in the same way that speaking the language gives us a blueprint for real Cherokee thought. We should, as an entire people, be trying to revive everything. As we shed our colonized minds, bodies, and spirits, we may, just as some of the prophecies say, get it all back." I'm beading a story. These spirals are ancient patterns, but the memories are new. They're a revival, something we're getting back. I hope to bead more for the people I love and for myself, moccasins, bandolier bags, there's a lot to tell. I won't be done anytime soon. I grew up in Western Colorado in a tourist town built on land stolen from mute people. My mother's Cherokee Irish Lenape Lumbee in black. My father was Osage in Irish, but thought of himself as Irish and had little connection to his Osage history. There were a few other native people in my hometown, but there was no sense of a native community. It was a very white community, and though there were people of color, the town's relationship with race was and is troubling. My native community was my family, mostly my mother, who carried the stories and histories of our family with her. It was through her that I understood pieces of our family history and who I was and am as a Cherokee person. I don't remember not knowing I was Cherokee. I do remember understanding that I wasn't really a boy, and I do understand the moment I first understood the word gay had something to do with me. While growing up, I had the stories my mother told me about our family history, about her experiences as a mixed blood Cherokee child in rural southeastern Colorado with brief periods in both San Francisco and Vallejo, California. My mother's stories helped me know who I am. But even as these stories root me in who I am as a multiracial, diasporic, non-citizen Cherokee person, there were and are gaps in the stories I needed and need. When I began the process of coming out as queer and trans and learned about the organizing of Indigenous Two-Spirit people, I wanted stories about Cherokee Two-Spirit people, these stories that weren't there, not at least in writing I could find and not in stories my mother told me. This led me to ask, where are the stories of Cherokee Two-Spirit folks? And in the absence of any answer I went looking. I'm beating a story. To help bring Cherokee Two-Spirit LGBTQ stories to the center, one of my current projects is what Della Pollock calls an oral history performance, which she defines as, quote, performance that takes their impetus from formal or informal oral history interviews when oral history is understood as the recreation of storied experience for the primary purpose of gaining social historical perspective, end quote. My project is based on oral histories with Two-Spirit LGBTQ people of Cherokee descent, and I also perform a solo version of this performance, but the solo version is an in-progress study to try and imagine an ensemble performance in the future. Through the process of oral history performance, stories sink deep into my bones. Recording oral histories with other Cherokee Two-Spirit LGBTQ people helps restore a sense of community for me. It helps create new memories for the future of who we are and who we might become. As I transcribe these stories, the voices of those I talk with stick to me. It's like trying to learn an old stomp dance song. I play the recordings over and over as I transcribe and the voices sink in. This lends itself to performance. I can hear the voices of the people I talk with, try to honor who they are as I retell their stories. These stories are always the tellers, but through the process of the interview, transcription, memorization, and performance, they become part of me too. I'm beading a story. I also tell stories through reading baskets, finger woven sashes, and beadwork. For me, these aren't really separate projects. They're a way to tell stories, both old and new. Cherokee writer Thomas King writes, the truth about stories is that's all we are. Oral history performance is another way to tell stories. Each story is a bead stitched together with the thread of memory. I'm beading a story. It's a story I need to hear and missing fragments of cultural memories of who we are as Cherokee Two Spirit LGBTQ people. It's a story to help us remember. As I listen to and tell the stories of other Cherokee Two Spirit LGBTQ people against the bright background of our histories, I remember. There is a lot to tell. I won't be done anytime soon. The queer lady of Kodafacheke and other Asegi roots. Mulberry plantation, Camden, South Carolina, October 2014. I stand on the edge of an overlook at a river that moves slowly below us. Don't get too close to the edge. The woman who is the inheritor of the plantation tells me the ground there is eroding. What stories are in this eroding ground? What memories does the river hold? I remember the enslavement of generations of African and indigenous peoples, the moment when the people of Kodafacheke looked down and across this river to see DeSoto's army waiting on the other side. The major disruptions to indigenous life after DeSoto's armies left smallpox, swine, and the spaces of stolen bodies in its wake. As the woman shows me the plantation ground, she points out the Kataba path that once ran through this land base. She tells me of how she used to find artifacts as a child playing on these grounds. I'm excited to see river canes still growing on the edge of the woods as we drive across the grounds and she stops her truck so I can take a picture. I wonder what patterns were woven into mats and baskets here. Imagine this place before colonization, genocide, and chattel slavery. Colonists found river came throughout the southeast a barrier to plantations and farming and tried to eradicate it. They didn't understand that the complex rhizomatic systems of roots held the land together. I am here because the mulberry plantation is thought to be the site of Kota Facheke. The city written about by DeSoto's chroniclers that was governed by a woman called the Lady of Kota Facheke. It was not a Cherokee city, but the moment of DeSoto's army invading this area and the Lady of Kota Facheke's resistance while traveling as a prisoner through Cherokee territory and her escape from DeSoto along with enslaved Italino and North African slaves opens up an assay-gee re-reading of history that helps us understand the relationship between colonialism and hetero-patriarchy, particularly for southeastern indigenous people, and recognize larger mappings of colonial hetero-patriarchy and hetero-patriarchal desire onto indigenous bodies and lands. Colonial invasion and exploitation of indigenous territories work through the gendering and sexualization of indigenous bodies and lands in order to place both indigenous people and land bases into colonial legibility in order to facilitate European expansion, settlement, and claim of resources, including human bodies. These gendered and sexual mappings preceded DeSoto. They can be traced all the way to the Columbus invasions and even earlier. There are many places we can start this story, but in this telling it begins with the interactions between DeSoto and his army and the Lady of Kota Facheke, who has rendered in colonial counts as queer, not because of contemporary understandings of gender and sexuality, but because her status as a female leader who resisted European Christendoms, gendered and sexual norms, positions her as strange, troublesome, and chaotic in colonial accounts. It begins on the ground of what is now the Mulberry Plantation near Camden, South Carolina, where a queer story begins as the Lady of Kota Facheke saw DeSoto's army waiting for her on the other side of the river, on the edge of memory where my feet back away from the eroding cliff, where river canes still grows despite attempts by colonists, plantation owners, and farmers to eradicate it. This is an Asegi story. There are other paths, other stories, old trade routes that have nothing to do with European invasion. Robert Warrior reminds us, quote, trade routes have existed in the Americas since the first pathways linking people emerged in a time that no one can remember. Those pathways become trails and the networks of trails that crisscrossed the single land mass that is the Americas, end quote. As I sit with these stories, maps are always present. Maps of our lands, maps through our lands, charting and documenting of resources, routes to enable trade and settlement. Not all invaders created literal maps but instead described travels and interactions with indigenous peoples that were later used to make maps. Gender and sexuality and colonial desires for their regulation are constant present in these descriptions, mapping colonial desires onto indigenous bodies. What the maps don't show is our bodies. Our memory as Cherokee people, as two spirit people, as indigenous LGBTQ people is often limited by the exact colonial structures that dictate knowledge about our past. What if we looked at our past in ways that examine how all of our genders and sexualities as Cherokee people were queered by colonial powers to tell new stories, Asegi stories that rethink our cultural memories. Within this network of roots, incursions into our bodies, attempted eradication of our lives and nations, our bodies survived. Though there are even words for two spirit people that are remembered in any language as a miracle. Asegi Udanti, Nudile Udanti. But Kofatacheke and other native people, as well as the slave called Gomez, and other Africans enslaved by De Soto, found ways to negotiate, resist and subvert De Soto. In fact, they all ran away instead of being captured. Telling Asegi stories about this very queer lady of Kofatacheke enables us to create an Asegi imaginary that examines how her queer presence disrupts colonial gendered and sexualized uses of power. Remembering Kofatacheke is inhabiting an Asegi space and offers us a vision of Asegi identities as chaotic, not to indigenous worlds using communities, but to settler power. As Cherokee and other indigenous two spirit people engage a process of remembering, continuing and reimagining our histories, the lady of Kofatacheke is significant, not only because her interactions with De Soto can be seen as one of the origin stories about the ways colonial heteropatriarchy was used in the original invasions of indigenous nations, but also because the lady of Kofatacheke subverted colonial desires, formed alliances with others wanting to escape and returned home. An Asegi returned to home is not limited to a return to Cherokee homelands, but also to a homecoming to who we are as human beings, regardless of our presence in the colonial archives. Liz Leah, a participant in the oral history project I was mentioning earlier, asserts that we must inhabit our identities in the present, refusing the idea that Cherokee two spirit people need to have evidence of past existence. This is Liz Leah, but really at some point it has got to stop sharing about what we don't love about how we're being treated and start being the people we are, taking on those roles, and so for me that was learning how to play river cane flute, it was fishing, it was helping Earl fix his ultralight plane, it was out being with the guys doing the cars, that sort of stuff, and just being who we are. And at that point we'll start, I feel certain that our mythology will start reemerging because none of this stuff is ever lost. We were never lost. While heteropatriarchal colonization attempts to claim land and bodies, Asegi bodies remain unruly. We trick colonial powers, we escape, we survive, we recreate, and we remember who we are. We come home. Amid all of these bodies of our dead are also the bodies of our living, our bodies, the bodies of those who survived in order to bring us here alive. Our bodies protecting each other, our bodies holding each other, our bodies loving each other, a kiss that burns their maps away. Map of the Americas. I wish when we touch, we could transcend history in double helixes of dark and light on wings we build ourselves, but this land grows volcanic with a smoldering hum of bones, all that's left of men who watched their beloveds torn apart by rifles, grandmothers singing back lost families, children who didn't live long enough to cradle a lover, arms around waist, lifts gently skimming nape, legs twine together like a river cane basket. Sometimes I look at you and choke back sobs knowing you were here because so many of my people are not. Look. My curled and asleep becomes a map of the Americas. My hair spread upon the pillow a landscape of ice. My chest to the plains and hills of this land. My spine the continental divide. My heart drums the rhythm of returning buffalo herds. Do you notice the deserts and green mountains on my belly's topography or the way my hips rise like ancient pyramids, my legs wrapped with the Amazon, the Pampas, the vast roads of the Incas. Here are rainforests, highlands, stolen breath trapped deep in mine shafts and my feet that reach to touch Antarctica. When your hands travel across my hemispheres, know these lands have been invaded before, and though I may quiver from your touch, there is still a war. It is not without fear and memories of wash and blood that I allow you to slip between my borders, rest in the warm valleys of my sovereign body, offer you feasts and psalms, dress you in a cloak of peacock feathers and stars. These gifts could be misconstrued as worship, honor mistaken for surrender. When you taste my lips, think of maize, venison, perfect wild strawberries. Notice the way my breath smells of cedar, my sweat flows like slow southern rivers and my flesh burns with history. Honor this. I walk out of genocide to touch you. For the boarding school survivors, panicked footsteps of memory run toward you, something forbidden is walled up in that church. The heavy muslin curtains a monologue of endless silence. Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those whose fingers permeate our dreams. What is buried behind the school, whose red fingerprints lay under the fresh white paint? Loving Day, the epigraph reads, Everyone get out of pulse and keep running. Facebook posts from Pulse, Orlando, June 12, 2016. To staunch the bleeding, sharp and hidden as a man, write a poem with intent and precision. Try to imagine to turn dancing into bodies, bodies, write guns into outlines while stories play dead in the walls. Barricade police tape at South Orange and West Esther. I wanted to write a poem, but stuffed a handkerchief into my name and the bullet hole in his back instead. I wanted to write a poem, but the letters huddled together for three hours in a bathroom stall and bleed out. I know the sharp, sharp pop stopped turning this poem in the dark right now, sparks from a barrel. Words creep to shell casings, clot my blood, steal onto our televisions, whisper across our screens. I hear wounded knee, Spanish names, mass shootings in U.S. history, indigenous and black, and how much can our hearts carry? I'm tired of writing poems to our dead, but cannot withstand their tugs on my skirt, hungry little lullabies. Paper doesn't want held, but I need our dead. I need our living. I need someone to carry them. Charlottesville. One. Orbital elements, astrological units, rotational axis, the moon sweeps the sky clear of light in Charlottesville. Two. I don't know the kelvins of the sun, but I do know that fire burns hot and dangerous in Charlottesville. Whitemans scream blood and soil as they stomp skulls into monokin land. The governor of Virginia says, hate has no place in America. I'm grateful for his lie, but I am one of the merciless Indian savages, Octoroon, Walter A. Plecker's Mixed Blood Nightmare, Thomas Jefferson's racial equation and amalgamation and abomination. The governor of Virginia says, hate has no place in America. Dear governor, thank you for your lie from Charlottesville. Three. Corona, valley of the moon, bands of moving light, crickets chirp under the umbral shadows as flower petals fall at the intersection of water and forth where Heather Hayer was run down in Charlottesville. Four. Oh, Sally Hemmings. Let me see you a lullaby to help you survive Monticello. Let me sing you a song that carries you to Polaris. I will sing only celestial words, only sun and a moon and star and beautiful, only pegasus and cassiopeia, big dipper and little dipper. I will sing the back cloth of distant pins of light we watch facing north on an August night. I will sing the strawberries from your mother's garden warned by gravitational pull of planets. I will sing about the solar eclipse, the axis of the earth, rivers of light, Sally. I will sing nothing, I swear, of Charlottesville. The great American, thank you. The great American eclipse. Don't look away. The giant toad is coming to swallow the sun. Call him Pepe, call him Trump. A monster is here to rearrange the sky. Your eclipse glasses will not protect you. Your basement will not keep you safe. You must memorize the constellations of a nuclear winter. Remember the names of stars, the ghoul, the bear, the wing of the flank, the snake, the hare, the tail of the goat. The great frog is coming. He has placed himself in Capricorn. He has placed himself in Scorpio. He names himself the lancer, the giant, the crown of the forehead, the dragon, the lion, the sword of the slaughter. He is vengeful. He is hideous. He is covered in sores. He dreams of a conquest of sky. He hungers for a new sun to etch us all to shadow. His followers clear the way, parade with tiki torches and swastikas. They usher him in, chant, the club, the crook, the nose of the bull, the claw, the sting, the tip of the arrow. It is happening again. Don't look away this time. The giant toad wants to swallow the sun. A great shadow is coming. Come out of your homes. Dust the street off your jeans. Bang pots and pans. Howl, shriek, weep. Make every noise imaginable to drive him away. Now, there is no more time. The moon's shadow, in the moon's shadow, the outworks of our hearts gleam with the light of ancestor stars. There, in the dark, find each other. Hold it tight. Bring your rattles and drums. As hard, seeing aloud, ascend like Pleiades, circle into a new constellation. Now, hurry. The great toad is coming. We are in the path of totality. We are in the path of totality. Rise like a flock of stars. Stomp dance. Two-spirit gathering. A giveaway poem, especially for Michael St. Clair. 1952 to 2012. After the Indian drag queens and kings shake their booties to Adele and Lady Gaga, chairs are spirited away to clear the floor for stomp dance. Silver milk cans and brown-yellow turtle shells are strapped to strong legs, even without the sacred fire. We spiral counterclockwise, tied as a snake to rebalance the earth. We carry our ancestors with us, our bodies' baskets that hold water. I want my sweetheart with me to see these songs water my resistance. I want his voice singing behind me. I want him to see me shake doxy used under my blue and white skirt. My heels soar from hitting concrete instead of earth. I want my sister and mom to see these other southeastern two-spirits, and my nieces and nephews hear folks talk our language like wildfire as it rose through the Ozarks. I want Colin here to joke me through aches. Sure, each year I shell out too much money to drive to Oklahoma, but it's the only time I can shake shells or hear Laura in her rainbow finger-woven sash remind us that the world began with water and earth, or J.C. show us we have a place around the fire. I drove nine hours from Texas to get here. My muscles shake with exhaustion and pain, but I dance every dance. Imagine our spirits as splints of light lock together. The Milky Way is a white path we follow to carry earth back to our mother mounds, and when we dance, stories are unearthed. We didn't know we lost. In the gravel parking lot, I talk with Mary Lou about the hot shell of grief we carry after our loved ones die and how we both find our spirits in love after loss. Ustitewa says those howls in the dark hills are mountain lions. Water and salt pour from my forehead as wade teaches me to lead a song and shake at the same time. I'm clumsy and dizzy, but the dancers are patient as smoldering fire as I struggle to balance, shake, and sing. There is fire in our hearts, so I try to ignore the voice in my head saying, what on earth are you doing and listen to wade in my right ear, not let my voice shake as I try to lead songs I've only ever sing in response while setting the rhythm for shell shakers. Some say we can't do these things, but I remember the story of Water Spider and how she carried that hot coal on her back anyway. I know the spirits of Susan and Grandmother Frida watch. This is the work of our two spirit people to sing, to shake, to listen, to remember the world needs our fire if any human is to survive. We hold oceans and springs in the water of our bodies. We are part of a story that does not end with the destruction of the earth, but instead where everything returns to us through turtle shells and songs. When we dance, manifest destiny shakes. We are the spirit of water and earth. We are the emergence of fire and turtle shells. We are the ones the world can no longer shake. A ceremony for reclaiming language. Our homelands remember us. They raise themselves up to mend our tongues, remove fingers of conquistadors and governors from bruised necks. As you enter into this ceremony, breathe phrases like copal smoke. Let syllables strengthen your blood like nopales. Wear words around your throat a gift of turquoise and gold. Remember, we are here to become elders and ancestors that teach our children to heal the world. As you enter this ceremony, say a prayer, offer tobacco. Remember each morning we enter into spinning light of a galaxy that loves us. Hidden words will sprout in your dreams like maize opening into the rich brown soil of Anahuac. As you enter into this ceremony, mourn for what was stolen. Smuggle your tongue across their imaginary border and laugh. Let this language suture your heart. Each word whispers a story through your lips. Weaves a basket that carries a mending world. So I know that there's some class shifting that might have to happen. It might be a good time for that. I have one more story I want to share. Which is part of the oral history performance. It will be a few minutes of that. And then we can talk and have questions and stuff. But... Oh, yes, thank you. Thank you. All right. So this last bit that I want to share is from the larger oral history project with Cherokee Queer and Two-Spirit folks. Just an excerpt from one interview. And this is an interview with Corey Tabor, who is a Cherokee and Muscogee and Osage Two-Spirit activist and fabulous person. So this is Corey. My brother Chad and I were born and raised in Tulsa. Our parents were also born and raised in Tulsa and our grandparents came from a few different places. Our dad's mom is Cherokee and Creek. She comes from down by Muscogee. And his dad was Y and also comes from that same area. Our mom's mom is Cherokee and Musage. She's a mixed race individual. And she comes from Arkansas, western Arkansas. And her dad was Y and comes from Tulsa. So we've got family from a few different places, but all within maybe a two-hour drive from Tulsa. Regionally, I guess you could say it's all about the same. Our parents had us when they were pretty young and so they worked, you know? And we spent all our time with these old ladies. And it was kind of by default and kind of by tradition. That's pretty standard. That's an old tradition. It's how it used to be. The whole rest of the family would take care of these kids. That would be the elders and other community members. And that's just the natural way for us to live. Our family is not extremely traditional, like most Cherokee families, especially those living in cities by relocation or force or choice or whatever. And so while we did not grow up speaking Cherokee as a first language or did not necessarily grow up spending every weekend at the stomp dance, we grew up with a lot of traditional understandings and traditional knowledge and life ways that I think maybe other people don't, especially when they're not close to their elders like that. And so most of our waking hours until we were seven or eight was spent around all these old Indian ladies. And that's how we came to identify as Cherokee people. That was our primary identification. We grew up knowing we were Cherokee. We weren't told, oh, well, you're Cherokee and you're white, but you've got a little Cherokee in you. It was you, our Cherokee person. And that's who you are. You're not just part Cherokee. You either are or you're not. And I think that's a pretty common perspective here in Oklahoma. In traditional communities that have limited exposure to gay people or two-spirited people, you can still get ostracized by your own people. And that's unfortunate and we've experienced that to a lesser degree than society in general, but it's still there to varying degrees of assimilation into non-Indian culture by our own people. And so even in those traditional communities, there are times and places where you still be exposed to that sort of disharmony, that distrust, that exclusivity as if there's no reason for you to be there because you're gay or there's no reason for you to be there because you're mixed, that invalidation. I think those personal experiences provide you with a desire to make those changes. And so I can definitely say in my case the personal experiences were so frustrating that I wanted to subvert it somehow. And so I do that just by being here and exemplifying the ideas that I was taught to exemplify the best I can, fixing some of those old hurts, those old wounds, those old rifts that still exist for whatever reason, especially in smaller communities, people tend to perpetuate. It just happens, you know? And sometimes it happens for no reason at all. People are just doing it and they don't even know why. It's because they didn't stop to think or because so and so told them that's how it is. I've seen that happen so many times in so many different ways that it's frustrating and I don't know. For whatever reason I feel compelled to take it upon myself to be like, no, that is enough. It stops here. And I think it starts as a personal journey and I think it ends with a sense of obligation or continues with that. It becomes bigger than yourself. And certainly you have to feel it deeply to begin there. I haven't experienced a great difference between Cherokee and Creek communities and what I've learned from my experiences of all those people is that there wasn't necessarily a place of reverence for two spirited people necessarily. I mean there could have been, you know, all of our people teach different things but it was told to us that's not how you're characterized. What's important is how you help out your family and how you take care of your people, whether it be your community, your family, your tribe, whatever circumstance. How you treat the people around you and what you do to give back. That essentially defines you as a person and not who you choose as a partner. And also I've heard our medicine people say that everybody deserves a place of the fire. There's room for everybody at the fire and the fire is how we pray and how we commune and we don't waste people and that's not a good enough reason to throw somebody away. And so that's kind of been my experience. It's more of a non-issue than a point of reverence, just a non-issue altogether. I want future generations to know that regardless of what they hear from outsiders of any kind that we tried, we tried and tried as best we could to preserve what's left and regain what was lost for them because it's theirs. It's their legacy and we want them to have that because we find solace in that and we find ourselves in that and they won't find themselves in something else. That's where they'll find who they are. We love you. We love all of those of you who come after us or Bussanar asks us to try to make y'all happy. No, I mean that from the bottom of my heart. I say it jokingly but I mean every bit of it. We want this kind of thing to be here long after we're gone. But that's the thing though. You have to have that kind of foresight. You have to be able to look that far in the future and know because if you can see that far into the past you can see that far into the future. If you look at how our people used to live you know what was important to them. You can tell. And I mean that's what we try to keep going that feeling, that good feeling, you know. And the age of flat screen TVs and four-year-olds with cell phones it's hard to keep it real, you know. It is so hard. But things like this, places like this are very convenient and very easy places for you to get a little glimpse of that, you know and a little taste of that. Just to remind you of who you come from because once we leave like Chad says we're satellites and we go out into the world and we share all of this with white people, green people and everybody else and it's not meant to be divisive. Two-spirit people and our two-spirit movement is not an act of divisiveness. It's an act of faith and it's an act of love and hope and continuity and preservation of nothing but, you know. What you're hearing right now is our grandmas. This is our grandmas talking. We didn't make this shit up. This was taught to us and this comes from two generations behind us and two generations behind that. And so that's what's so special about it is somebody our age can sit here and tell you things that people who have been dead for 150 years can tell you. It's the same message. We want love to be our legacy. Oh, I just can't wait till they see my pictures when we're all dressed up and I think that's going to be great because they'll see all these drag pictures and they'll be like, oh, that must have been a traditional Chickasaw dress. No, girl. We need to drag back then. They... No, but I think it will be great. One of my hope for future generations that our message is received and the feeling and sentiment with which it was intended, I fear that things will be lost in translation and I just hope that there's little bits and pieces and bigger bits and bigger pieces that we have for them to work from and operate from in order to build a life that holds true to our values, regardless of what it looks like because that's what really makes us who we are is our values, the way we walk through this world. And I think if we can do something to make other people or encourage other people or inspire them to do the same thing and live the same way, then we've done what we're here to do. Well, you know what? I want to say this, too. We have a lot of gay relatives. There's a lot. A lot. A lot of gay Cherokees and a lot of gay creaks and there always has been and there always will be. And anybody on the Tribal Council that tells you different is full of fucking shit. And I want you to believe that. I want you to know that from us. Just in case you didn't hear it anywhere else, you heard it here. I mean that from the bottom of my heart that's what our medicine people taught us. You guys aren't something new. I mean some kind of spectacle we've never seen. They treat us as if it's a non-issue. Like I said, they treat us as if it's nothing out of the ordinary because it isn't to us. And I want to make sure that gets in there. Decolonization is an act of imagining. I envision a world in which all indigenous queer and trans folks speak our languages where we all practice our life ways and teach those life ways to our children on our own lands where the land is not poison, where our lives as humans aren't constantly at risk. I envision a world in which we have our places returned to the center of our communities, one in which the colonial powers of the United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand no longer exist and indigenous people have created other forms of governance outside of settler states. A world where our red black selves are celebrated and understood as part of our survival, where women's leadership is centralized and respected, where sexual violence is unheard of, where in North America we no longer have to fight to bring attention to missing and murdered indigenous women, girls and two-spirit people, where our erotic lives are simply part of the larger reflection of who we are. Yes, I want it all back. Our lives, our languages, our lands, our songs, our plants, our children, our memories, our ancestors, our bodies, all of it. I want us all to remember who we are. Two-spirit people and other indigenous people we're calling queer and trans carry memories for our people. We must remake our past, honor who we are in the present, and imagine the radical and gorgeous possibilities of our future. Our work is to rebalance an unbalanced world. If we are to survive as humans, we must. I'm quite certain that this part, the part of that rebalancing is to dare to love ourselves and one another through our stories, told through scholarship, through poetry, through performance, through song, through art. We must tell our stories and imagine our stories in order to link arms together with others to carry us out of the colonial present and into a decolonized future. Our stories can reweave the world. Wado, thank you.