Urban Indigenous Youth Reframing Two-Spirit

Marie Laing is a Youth Leader with the Native Youth Sexual Health Network in Toronto, Canada.

Certain to be essential reading in the study of Indigenous gender and sexuality and community-centred scholarship, […] Laing brings readers into a community conversation that is at once profound, multidimensional, and provocative; she considers not just the histories of representation but also lived experiences as well as transformative visions of otherwise futures. This is a generous and generative study firmly rooted in honourable relations and ethical praxis; it stands as a model of what respectful and robust scholarship can be, and takes seriously the call to specificity in time, place, and relations. We have needed this book for a very long time.—Daniel Heath Justice,Professor of Indigenous Literature and Expressive Culture, First Nations and Indigenous Studies/English, UBC, Canada.Marie Laing invites Two Spirit, Trans and Queer young people to take up space–intellectually, politically, and otherwise–and to center themselves, their communities, and their own experiences and desires. Laing carefully traces Two Spirit histories and language, and ways that Indigenous young people in the city of Toronto are reimagining Two Spirit futures. By refusing the anthropological impulse to define, confine, and fold Indigenous Two Spirit, Trans, and Queer life into white neoliberal identity politics and the state, Laing’s work with Indigenous young people offers a convening of collaboration and care which resists colonial logics and practice. Laing asks readers to listen to the critical and transformative conversations that Two Spirit, Trans and Queer young people want to have, and in so doing, reiterates the brilliance and complexity of young peoples’ theorizing and activism. This life affirming and justice doing book should be essential reading across Indigenous, Feminist, Queer, Youth, and Community Studies. I wish I had this book as a young person. Reading it as an adult gave me hope and sense of place that I so longed for then. I have no doubt this book will save lives; urgently, it helps imagine the type of decolonial futures that Two Spirit, Trans and Queer folx want to live here and now–a life abundant in community, cultural connection, ceremony, and radical love. —Jeffrey P. Ansloos, Assistant Professor of Indigenous Mental Health and Education, University of Toronto–Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, Canada

• Artist Statement on the Cover Artwork by Kaya JoanAcknowledgementsChapter 1 Introduction Chapter 2 The Emergence of Two-Spirit Chapter 3 Refusing the Question "What Does Two-Spirit Mean?" Chapter 4 Two-Spirit as a Hashtag and a Container Chapter 5 Roots of the Literal Definition Chapter 6 Needs & Desires Chapter 7 Conclusion Two-Spirit ZineCommunity Discussion Guide