Seven Generations from the Fur Trade to Facebook: Tracing Trans/Queer/Two-Spirit Indigenous Linguistic Kinship in the Archives

This paper offers an Indigenous intervention into the debates around the ethics of present-day transgender claims to “transcestors” – the practice of claiming historical figures as transgender ancestors. I follow the archival trail of several terms referring to gender diversity in the Anishinaabemowin and Cree languages from the 1830s to the present, bringing together missionary dictionaries, fur trade accounts, bible translations, early ethnographies, Facebook posts, and oral traditions to show how these words and the Two-Spirit people they name have persisted despite the ravages of assimilationist violence. The fact that the same words are used today as were used two hundred years ago suggests that speakers of Anishinaabemowin and Cree recognize a form of continuity and kinship between past and present Two-Spirit people. Turning to an example by Saulteaux-Métis-Cree writer Lindsay Nixon of how Two-Spirit people today have drawn on their own history to assert this kinship, I argue that Two-Spirit/trans/queer Indigenous people enact a tangible sense of ethics for engaging with a history that is rooted in tribally-specific Indigenous values. While “transcestors” claimed by non-Indigenous people are usually ancestral only in a metaphorical sense, Indigenous understandings of kinship across time rely on the knowledge that historical Two-Spirit people are literally our relatives. As such, Indigenous (here specifically Anishinaabe) value systems demand certain actions and responsibilities towards these kin. In considering the debates about the place of history in trans communities, this paper thus addresses questions of not just who is able to “claim” trans ancestors, but what it even means to do so, and what specific actions we owe those ancestors.