Decolonizing objecthood through 2SQ Indigenous art: Dayna Danger and Jeneen Frei Njootli’s performance,‘Chases and Tacks’

. . . the creator is trans and the earth is a psychology experiment to determine how quickly we mistake a body for anything. (excerpt from ‘The Creator is Trans’, by Billy-Ray Belcourt, 2017)

The title of Dayna Danger and Jeneen Frei Njootli’s exhibition, ‘A Fine Pointed Belonging’ (8 March – 20 April 2019) at Modern Fuel Artist-Run Centre in Ka’tarohkwi ¹ and curated by Genevieve Flavelle, ² is reminiscent of a riddle. Its meaning escaped me initially, but some months later while walking down the street in Tiohtià:ke ³ I remembered one such fine pointed agent – a needle!

This recent collaborative performance by gender non-conforming, Two-Spirit (2SQ) artists Dayna Danger (Métis/Saulteaux/Polish) and Jeneen Frei Njootli (Vuntut Gwitchin Nation) that threads an understanding of how 2SQ decolonial art praxes must be interpreted through Indigenous ways of knowing (Simpson, 2017) rather than a continual reliance upon Western frameworks. The invocations of transness within this work do not replicate colonial frameworks of gender and transness in which understandings of gender are based on essentialist epistemologies including the gender binary. Instead, this performance takes place at the intersections of Indigeneity and what is known as transness within Western frameworks to honor the inherent queerness and gender-queerness of Indigenous kinships. This brief response begins with an excerpt from the poem ‘The Creator is Trans’ (2017) by Billy-Ray Belcourt which opens to Danger and Frei Njootli’s work in invoking Indigenous epistemologies that disrupt a colonial binary of gender on which normative readings of ‘trans’ embodiment rely. Belcourt’s work and ‘A Fine Pointed Belonging’ both make apparent the untranslatability of transness between colonial and Indigenous frameworks of gender, by encapsulating holistic understandings of ontological kinships. ⁴ The generative dialog between the works of Danger and Frei Njootli and Billy-Ray Belcourt’s writings unravel Cartesian logics that, as Belcourt states, ‘mistak[e] a body for anything’ through systemic objectification, commodification, and subalternated labor.

This teleological epistemology and ontological passing through and unraveling is what the artworks of Danger and Frei Njootli do – they subvert and complicate colonial categorizations of belonging, engendered and sexualized laboring, embodiment, consent and carcerality. They do this while calling attention to our entrenchment and simultaneous resistance within such systems, particularly in art, prison industrial complexes, academia and predatory economies of value through dispossession (Byrd et al., 2018; Chakravartty and Ferreira da Silva, 2012) as forms of surplus value in originary accumulation (Marx, 1976[1867]); Federici, 2009) while refusing to become propertized.

Danger and Frei Njootli’s exhibition brings together fine beadwork, BDSM, queer symbolism, and ceremony through photographic, sculptural, video and performative media. Curator, Genevieve Flavelle, ⁵ relayed that the title of their performance, ‘Chases and Tacks’, refers to the technique of double-needled beading where one hand chases a small row of beads onto a needle while the other hand tacks them down. The use of a needle serves many functions. It can puncture leather or fabric, threading twine or sinew and beads into forget-me-not flowers on regalia; skin-stitch tattoos or hypodermic needles can pass through epidermal layers tying histories of adornment, moments of passage, surgical intervention and kink ⁶ together.

Reflective of the title of their exhibition, belonging speaks to being in relation with all of our relatives while in tension with histories of belonging as ownership and unbelonging (Brand, 2001). The impact of tensions between belonging and unbelonging resonates with epidermalization or the racial epidermal schema that Frantz Fanon (2008[1952]) posits as the internalization of racialization [of Blackness] which is schematized throughout the colonial reordering of our relations. Rhyming with Fanon, Billy-Ray Belcourt (2019: np) states that a ‘sense of unbodiedness, of having been made to be unbodied, to be that which disturbs the idea of the body and embodiment themselves, is . . . the sensation of Indigeneity.’ The unbodiedness of Belcourt and troubling of belonging by Danger and Frei Njootli are instantiated by various photographic, video, and three-dimensional works within the exhibition. In the image ‘#MetisAF’ (2019), a photograph depicts an unknown person from behind, whose skin has the physical impressions of a woven wicker chair (see Figure 1). The image evokes distinctly Two-Spirit play where the weave is among agential players participating in the scene. Unlike common tropes where furniture play is often equated to forms of submission, the wicker chair silently tops from below. The audience is reminded of Qwo-Li Driskill’s (2010) ‘doubleweaving’ concept, in which s/he argues that resurgent conceptions of sexual identity and Indigenous understandings of transness should be interwoven, and not understood as separate (p. 74). Weaving is intergenerationally passed down and the accumulation of ancestral ways of knowing collectively transmit their remarks upon the skin.

OPEN IN VIEWER

Figure 1.

Jeneen Frei Njootli, Knowledge Transference I (2017). Archival ink on vinyl, metal hardware 52 x 35.5” Photo courtesy of Chris Miner.

A refusal ⁷ (Simpson, 2007) of fetishistic modes of identification (Belcourt’s unbodiedness as a belonging of colonial property) through the protection of a subject’s privacy within the photograph by close cropping or the use of a leather hood (belonging as objecthood) in order to facilitate negotiations of consent between the model and artist (belonging as relational) are artistic techniques both artists employ. The BDSM hood as a ‘fetish’ becomes teleologically transformed from its white queer scripting of kink when displayed in the gallery as an Indigenous hood – evocative of ethnographic museum collections displaying Indigenous masks through racialized biocentric scriptings (McKittrick, 2016) in art history and archeology. As McKittrick confers, ‘engaging interdisciplinarity and forging relational knowledges assist in anti-colonial academic research and teaching while also disrupting biocentric scripts, disciplined ways of knowing, and the spatial workings of knowledge’ (p. 4).

Similar to the work of Brian Jungen, ⁸ Danger’s mask entitled, ‘From Dayna to Jeneen’ (2019), breaks the carcerality of museum collection by negating its ethnographic collection by the outsider (belonging as ownership). It becomes a gift of kinship from one artist to another, its power retained, avoiding consumptive ownership while welcomed as a relative.

Danger and Frei Njootli kneel, facing each other in the center of the gallery upon the concrete floor next to their floor piece, ‘Kinship Catalyst’ (2019). ‘Kinship Catalyst’ is comprised of a flat black, rectangular, foldable table rested upon the ground with a shawl of floral fabric folded upon it and two beaded black floggers laid at its center. Their silent anticipatory agony within the audience is palpable as everyone realizes Danger and Frei Njootli are about to destroy their beautifully crafted whips. The beaded tails make contact with an impenetrable, institutional concrete floor, and yet the exactitude of their fine pointed conveyance is what makes the scene pervious. Danger interchangeably flogs their forearms and concrete floor – testing the toy on themselves first, so that they know what sensations they stimulate upon or within another (a good standard for BDSM practice). While the institution bottoms for this playful assertion of reconciliation, as Adria Kurchina-Tyson (2020) iterates, Indigenous governance systems, ‘[do] not deny that exchanges of power are implicated in relations, nor do they intend to prescribe certain power dynamics’ (p. 87).

Seed beads scatter across the floor transforming into atomic particles as the audience’s perception of scale shifts toward an agential expanse. With two handheld vacuums, Danger and Frei Njootli proceed to vacuum up the seed beads. Some of them escape capture within cement and limestone cracks. This teleological vitality of the vacuum, where its breath – the inhaling of the seed beads and noisy exhale – shifts the focus from inhaling that which is considered dirty, contained and displaced from the public eye through a production of social separateness in racial capitalism for the purpose of expropriating and accumulating resources and property (Melamed, 2015; Robinson, 1983). Resistance bypasses absolute captivity through multifarious kinship relations. The performance culminates in the transference of breath, energy and song through a three-way kiss. A thin metal contact microphone is suspended between the lips of the two artists. Should one let go, the mic would fall. This is a performance about staying connected and being intimately present for each other through kinships, love and ceremony.

They sing the ‘Strong Woman Song’ into each other, a song that Danger and Frei Njootli recollected with the audience, after their performance, as originally written in Ka’tarohkwi by Indigenous peoples ⁹ incarcerated in the P4W (Prison for Women) not far from the art gallery. Formerly the colonial capital of Canada, the city of Kingston (Ka’tarohkwi) is the site of a large network of carceral institutions including the former high max prison, Kingston Penitentiary, among numerous, smaller institutions still in operation.

Danger and Frei Njootli call to a necessity of remembering and honoring the Indigenous peoples who walked within the walls of P4W, singing through each other while standing next to a wall in the gallery. The song is recorded and replayed through a looper pedal, becoming both unbodied from the singers and reembodied as their own agential being, singing in the space.

While singing the ‘Strong Woman Song’ for a second time, the vacuums transform into turtle shell rattles, seed beads transform into planting seeds – their bodies vibrating and dancing together inside this space, singing, shouting, rioting and throwing themselves up against each other and the economized walls impeding the limitlessness of their mobility. As Michel Foucault (1995[1975]: 28), similarly explains:

It is not the activity of the subject of knowledge that produces a corpus of knowledge, useful or resistant to power, but power-knowledge, the processes and struggles that traverse it and of which it is made up, that determines the forms and possible domains of knowledge.

While colonial systems of (dis)possession and a perpetuity of predatory economies (Byrd et al., 2018; Chakravartty and Ferreira da Silva, 2012) within nation-states upon Turtle Island are prevised to cease inestimable acceleration, they continue to not only fail in reciprocation through empty and half-hearted attempts at reconciliation, but in the unwillingness to capitulate hegemony. Yet as Leanne Betasamosake Simpson (2017: 77) reminds us, ‘My Ancestors didn’t accumulate capital, they accumulated networks of meaningful, deep, fluid, intimate collective and individual relationships of trust.’ Two-spirit queer artistic methodologies have the ability to transform teleological function (use-value and labour of cultural capital) from a prescriptive and systematically institutional conditioning of objectification through which contingency brings about the emanation of relational resurgence (Simpson, 2017). These are the tenets upon which 2SQ Indigenous ways of knowing sing and vibrate.