Kai Pyle

This project addresses the relationship between kinship and memory with a question: How have Anishinaabe Two-Spirit people remembered their own history? By examining Anishinaabe languages, nineteenth-century Two-Spirit figures, literature by contemporary Anishinaabe LGBTQ2 authors, and interviews with Two-Spirit youth and elders, this dissertation argues that the primary method of memory-making for Anishinaabe Two-Spirit people has been the maintenance of trans*temporal kinship—a form of queer Indigenous relationality that extends over vast time and space. Intervening in debates about continuity and rupture in Two-Spirit history and “claiming queer ancestors,” this project fills an urgent need to nuance understandings of gendered and sexualized aspects of colonization in North America.