Love After the End

Among the more insidious and tragic consequences of colonialism and its assimilationist policies is the eradication of indigenous conventions around gender and sexuality. In many indigenous communities, gender and sexuality do not operate in as binary as a fashion as they do in European societies.

Highlighting these historical and contemporary possibilities for what we might call queer identities (or “two-spirit” in some communities), is Joshua Whithead’s breathtaking “Indigiqueer” anthology, Love After the End. Contributors amend the provocation, the future is indigenous, to consider how the future is also queer or indigiqueer. 

Weaving between the traditional and the contemporary, the past… show more.

In one of the stories from this exceptional anthology, “How to Survive the Apocalypse for Native Girls,” Kai Minosh Pyle writes “we are future ancestors.” As the title suggests, this is a forward-looking anthology which imagines Indigenous worlds after “the end.” But it is also a book grounded in Two Spirit and Indigiqueer histories, one whose stories remember the historic acceptance and affirmation of queer and genderqueer Indigenous people as they reach toward Indigiqueer liberation.