Commentary: Love After the End: An Anthology of Two-Spirit & Indigiqueer Speculative Fiction

By Chava Possum

“So, here, in the opening pages of this anthology, I, too, put medicine down for you so that you may see the braids of Two-Spiritness glowing in the glaze of ink and paper. And I hear my Two-Spirit persona Jonny Appleseed reverberating in my thorax, itching to sing: ‘We are our own best medicine.’”

- Joshua Whitehead, Introduction

Love After the End is a collection of nine short speculative fiction stories written by Indigenous, queer, and Two-Spirit writers and storytellers. The question explored in each story is, as Joshua Whitehead tells us in his introduction, “What does it mean to be Two-Spirit during the apocalypse?”

As a white reader, the word “apocalypse” conjures images pulled from popular media: meteors crashing to earth, war, explosions, death, violence, famine, drought, every-man-for-himself, cataclysm, the end of all things. But I learned from not only Whitehead’s introduction but from each of the writers and their stories, that this version of the apocalypse is very white. You see, the word “apocalypse” to me and other colonizers is a future occurrence; it hasn’t happened yet. But for Indigenous peoples, in Turtle Island (North America) and elsewhere, the apocalypse has already happened and it continues to happen every day.

“Originally, the project was designed to be geared toward the dystopic, and after careful conversations, we decide to queer it toward the utopian. This, in my opinion, was an important political shift in thinking about the temporalities of Two-Spirited, queer, trans, and non-binary Indigenous ways of being. For, as we know, we have already survived the apocalypse— this, right here, right now, is the dystopian present. What better way to imagine survivability than to think about how we may flourish into being joyously animated rather than merely alive?”

And nowhere was this message as clear as in my favorite of the stories called, “History of the New World” by Adam Garnet Jones, a Cree, Métis, and Danish Two-Spirit screenwriter, director, beadworker, and novelist.

In the not-too-distant future, the world’s power-holders and governments decide to abandon Earth for a new home, the “New World”, on a planet that is said to be Earth’s “identical twin”. A family of three must decide if they want to make the journey to the New World or if they will remain behind on Earth. Thorah is white and our protagonist, Em, is Indigenous (Cree) and Two-Spirit. Their child is named Aseciwan and it is for her sake that they initially decide to leave Earth behind, forever. Our protagonist is resistant to leaving Earth.

“The only ones not pinning their hopes on fleeing to some distant planet were NDNs. Our people had been rebuilding our languages and cultures for the last three generations, returning to the land as the rest of the world prepared to abandon it.”

But Thorah insists that leaving is their only chance at survival.

“The daily news blasts have made it clear: with cities shutting down power grids all over the world and global warming far past the point of no return, to stay on Earth is to die.”

However, as the departure day nears, our protagonist wonders if what the news and the politicians are saying is even true or if it is propaganda pushing desperate, terrified people off-planet to serve their colonialist goals on the new planet. There is really no way to know for sure. But when news returns to Earth of “mermaids” found in the New World, Em’s desire to stay home grows. The mermaids sent the colonists a message: “Your circle is not round.” Em reacts,

“The mermaids’ message called to my blood, tugging me backward through nimosom’s stories, flashes of history like shards of glass pushing through old scars. My vision blurred. Screams rushed toward me like wind, getting louder and closer until they cut through me, everywhere at once. Screams of anger; cries rising from unmarked graves, from bones under schoolyards, from drummers stripped of songs, from praying mouths stuffed with dirt. I saw flashes of hollow eyes and tiny ribs. Saw nehiyowak, their blisters bubbling under their skins. Saw scalps shaved. Saw names on stacks of paper, fences of paper, gates and cliffs of paper. Dark hair chopped at the neck; round bellies cut open and made barren. Children yanked up into the sky and never seen again.”

The news triggers a conversation between Em and Thorah about sentient life. If the mermaids sent a message, that means they have a language, which means they are people. “Not like us,” Em says, “but still. Some kind of people.” Thorah insists they are just animals. Thorah says, “… maybe we’ll draft treaties with them… real treaties.” But Em knows better. Time has taught them over and over that treaties mean nothing. Em knows that nothing can stop the colonists from carving up the land, just as they did on Earth.

The day of departure arrives. I won’t spoil the ending of the story.

The magic of “History of the New World” as well as the other eight stories in the collection lies in the poetry that is Indigenous storytelling. Though written in prose, each story reverberated through time, shining a light on moments, images, and ideas that reoccur at different points in the same history. There are patterns colonizers like me would recognize, like manifest destiny, which lured swarms of white settlers to occupy and steal land across Turtle Island just as it lures white settlers to the New World where they will once again occupy and steal land from the original inhabitants. Then, there are patterns colonizers like me might not recognize but can find beauty in all the same.

Speculative Fiction posits future realities that, however inventive, feel familiar or at least feel possible. When I imagine having to choose between dying on Earth or surviving on another planet, a resolve that I don’t often experience sets in. I couldn’t leave. I’m not Indigenous to Turtle Island, but I am Indigenous to somewhere, right? And that somewhere is here on Earth. As much as I’d like to claim that my need to stay is purely rooted in the love for the soil, the water, the mountains, and plains, there is another factor at play: Maybe I don’t deserve to survive. If the Earth is “dying” to the degree it is no longer hospitable to humans, if the Earth is suffering because of pain we (mainly white people) have caused, then, as a white person, I should stay behind and suffer those consequences. But when I imagine that decision, it doesn’t feel like a punishment. It feels like an opportunity to build a new relationship. And that, right there, is the heart of Speculative Fiction. As said by my favorite television show “The Dark Crystal: Age of Resistance”,

“End. Beginning. All the same.”

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