LOVE AFTER THE END
LOVE AFTER THE END
AN ANTHOLOGY OF TWO-SPIRIT & INDIGIQUEER SPECULATIVE FICTION
EDITED BY JOSHUA WHITEHEAD
LOVE AFTER THE END
Copyright © 2020 by Joshua Whitehead
Stories copyright © 2020 by individual contributors
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any part by any means—graphic, electronic, or mechanical—without the prior written permission of the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may use brief excerpts in a review, or in the case of photocopying in Canada, a licence from Access Copyright.
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The publisher gratefully acknowledges the support of the Canada Council for the Arts and the British Columbia Arts Council for its publishing program, and the Government of Canada, and the Government of British Columbia (through the Book Publishing Tax Credit Program), for its publishing activities.
Arsenal Pulp Press acknowledges the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish), and səl̓ilwətaɁɬ (Tsleil-Waututh) Nations, custodians of the traditional, ancestral, and unceded territories where our office is located. We pay respect to their histories, traditions, and continuous living cultures and commit to accountability, respectful relations, and friendship.
This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance of characters to persons either living or deceased is purely coincidental.
Natalie Diaz, excerpt from “Manhattan Is a Lenape Word” from Postcolonial Love Poem. Copyright © 2020 by Natalie Diaz. Reprinted with the permission of The Permissions Company, LLC on behalf of Graywolf Press, Minneapolis, Minnesota, www.graywolfpress.org.
Cover art by Kent Monkman, Teaching the Lost, 2012, acrylic on canvas, 24" × 30"; image courtesy of the artist
Cover and text design by Jazmin Welch
Copy edited by Doretta Lau
Proofread by Alison Strobel
Printed and bound in Canada
Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication:
Title: Love after the end : an anthology of two-spirit & indigiqueer speculative fiction / edited by Joshua Whitehead.
Names: Whitehead, Joshua (Writer), editor.
Description: Previously published: Narol, Manitoba: Bedside Press, 2019. | Short stories.
Identifiers: Canadiana (print) 20200208535 | Canadiana (ebook) 20200208667 | ISBN 9781551528113 (softcover) | ISBN 9781551528120 (HTML)
Subjects: LCSH: Two-spirit people—Fiction. | LCSH: Sexual minorities—Fiction. | LCSH: Indigenous peoples—North America—Fiction. | LCSH: Short stories, American—21st century. | LCSH: Short stories, Canadian—21st century. | CSH: Short stories, Canadian (English)—21st century.
Classification: LCC PS8323.T86 L68 2020 | DDC C813/.08760892066—dc23
“Am I
what I love? Is this the glittering world
I’ve been begging for?”
— NATALIE DIAZ,
POSTCOLONIAL LOVE POEM
CONTENTS
Joshua Whitehead
Nathan Adler
Adam Garnet Jones
jaye simpson
HOW TO SURVIVE THE APOCALYPSE FOR NATIVE GIRLS
Kai Minosh Pyle
Gabriel Castilloux Calderon
Darcie Little Badger
Mari Kurisato
Nazbah Tom
David A. Robertson
INTRODUCTION
JOSHUA WHITEHEAD
Love after the End: An Anthology of Two-Spirit & Indigiqueer Speculative Fiction is a project I have been humbled to be a part of for the greater span of two years now—one that saw a migration from its original home with the now closed Bedside Press and into the arms of Arsenal Pulp Press. I write this new introduction in the age of COVID-19, a time of global pandemics, social and physical distancing, and a time of unprecedented mourning, loss, and historical triggers. I find it particularly apt for us to be sharing these stories with you once again, in a newly polished reformation, if only because these are stories that highlight a longevity of virology and a historicity of genocidal biowarfare used against Indigenous peoples across Turtle Island since the docking of colonial powers into our homelands.
I have asked myself: Who names an event apocalyptic and whom must an apocalypse affect in order for it to be thought of as “canon”? How do we pluralize apocalypse? Apocalypses as ellipses? Who is omitted from such a saving of space, whose material is relegated to the immaterial? Here, too, I craft a theory of Indigiqueerness by rejecting queer and LGBT as signposts of my identity, instead relying on the sovereignty of traditional language, such as Two-Spirit, and terminology we craft for ourselves, Indigiqueer. How does queer Indigeneity upset or upend queerness? Are we queerer than queer? Who defines queerness and under whose banner does it fly? Whose lands is it pocked within? I churn these words over in my mouth, taste that queered Cree on my tongue, and wonder if they are enough. Like waneyihtamisâyâwin, the nêhiyâw word for queer, as in strange, but it is also defined as uncanny, unsettling; or waneyihtamohiwewin, the act of deranging, perplexing—I find Indigiqueerness a hinterland.
For surely, like the histories of virologies written into our codex, from smallpox, to HIV/AIDS, to H1N1, and now COVID-19, the histories of our queerness, transness, non-binaryness, arc back to originality and our vertebrae are blooming heart berries and dripping seedlings. What does it mean to be