Be like the beauty and brightness of the sun
emerge without permission
because fierce is never invited.
Tap on darkness’s shoulder
to say “I’m here, it is my turn”
while lighting up the sky.
Jana-Rae Yerxa, “The Uninvited”
1What does it entail to be the uninvited to the picture? This is one of the underlying questions implied by Jana-Rae Yerxa, Anishinaabe activist, writer, poet, teacher, and community leader (Treaty 3 territory). “The Uninvited” hints at the inscription of this relationship-role (host-invited) in (imaginary) landscapes, which Yerxa symbolically frames in the contrasting choreography between “brightness” and “darkness” that constitutes the poem. This interplay of (in)visibility is, indeed, at the core of the nature of landscapes, which, according to Driftpile Cree Nation writer and scholar Billy-Ray Belcourt’s words, “a landscape conceals as much as it makes visible” (22).
- 1 As this discussion concentrates on North American contexts, and hence refers to quite an extensive (...)
2Landscapes have been present in Western imagination for centuries. They became tools for countries to map “new” territories, as well as historical constructions that encapsulated specific intentions, dreams, and desires of the sociopolitical habitus that (re)produced them when representing distinct sceneries. Landscapes were not only produced as representations of spatiotemporal control over the territory in the moment of their being painted. They also worked over the imagined past as a fantasy of possession, and as a promise of future settlement and utopia. They imposed settler names onto specific geographic and Indigenous territories while reflecting Western interpretations of the environment which may have already been outdated even at the time depicted. The (re)production of imaginative landscapes, especially in the visual arts, has had an impact on the establishment of U.S. and Canadian1 mythologies of nation-building narratives, like that of Manifest Destiny, that clearly opted for the concealment of Indigenous subjects from the picture. So, these imaginative landscapes perpetuate a series of affects along with the settler futurities that accompany them, thus inscribing what this paper calls “Manifestalgia,” a Manifest of Nostalgia, in their visions, that require questioning, de-normalization, and de-naturalization.
3Both Yerxa and Belcourt indirectly allude to a considerable and noteworthy (settler Western) artistic oeuvre that has, ever since the nineteenth century, contributed to the—beyond imaginary—displacement of Indigenous bodies and cultures from Turtle Island. Western nation-states have resorted to the (in)visibilization of Indigenous bodies to envision their settler heteropatriarchal claims to the land being fulfilled in such imaginary landscapes (Bae-Dimitriadis 106). This paper seeks to further understand the spatiotemporal and affective intentionality behind settler artistic representations, especially those produced across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In particular, these pages ask, what does the naturalization of queer Indigenous (in)visibilization really conceal in national terms? Has the intent behind these images changed with the passing of time? And perhaps most importantly, how can such epistemic and symbolic constructions of domination be reimagined?
4This article sets out to address the connection of Manifestalgia to the settler-colonial constructions of landscapes in U.S. and Canadian contexts, de-naturalizing them from both visual and poetic standpoints. On the one hand, the approximation to landscapes from a visual framework aims to show that there exists an underlying tendency to dream about an imagined past that is neither innocent, nor arbitrary. The first part of this paper takes the two main national artistic schools as baseline, that is, the Hudson River School from the U.S., and the Group of Seven from Canada. This section addresses how their settler-colonial manifestations, constructed throughout and expanding well beyond the nineteenth century into the present, perpetuate an exploitative heteropatriarchal view upon Indigenous bodies and nature. In a context where landscapes become symbols of national histories of Indigenous elimination, re-indigenizing the genre becomes vital.
5Thus, the second part of the article delves into more contemporary, feminist, and queer Indigenous counternarratives of such settler heteropatriarchal visions. Given that queer Indigenous bodies have been displaced and rendered (in)visible through settler heteronormative discourses articulated around such imaginative, symbolic paradigms, their re-imagining requires more than a visual perspective. Hence, this article argues that queer, Two-Spirit, Indigenous authors and artists are (re)mapping their representation in the imaginative panorama across visual, literary, and poetic angles, thereby de-naturalizing Manifestalgia. Mishuana Goeman defines (re)mapping as a method to unsettle “imperial and colonial geographies” both materially and metaphorically “to generate new possibilities” (Mark My Words 3). Plus, the (re) in-between parentheses, Goeman says, “connotes the fact that in (re)mapping, Native women employ traditional and new tribal stories as means of continuation or what Gerald Vizenor aptly calls stories of survivance” (3). Nevertheless, Goeman warns against “utopian” or “nostalgic” attempts of regaining or returning to “an original and pure point in history” (3). Instead, Goeman encourages for an understanding of “the processes that have defined our current spatialities in order to sustain vibrant Native futures” (3). Consequently, this analysis threads the works of several Indigenous authors from visual and literary panoramas that grapple with the denaturalization of heteronormative settler landscapes of Manifestalgia. By first diving into the visual universe of Two-Spirit Cree interdisciplinary artist and performer, Kent Monkman (ocêkwi sîpiy, Fisher River Cree Nation, Treaty 5), this article contends that the (re)mapping of landscapes and de-normalization of Manifestalgia occurs by (re)embodying the land, making Indigenous bodies not only visible, but thrivingly manifest and queer. Then, stepping to the more literary excerpts, I read a series of “poems” from the poetry collection Nature Poem (2017), by Kumeyaay Nation poet, scriptwriter/ TV writer, performer, and podcast host, Tommy Pico, along with Yerxa’s “The Uninvited” and Belcourt’s fragment from the short story collection Coexistence (2024). Their perspectives help understand that re-indigenizing landscapes and de-normalizing Manifestalgia is also a matter of questioning the “nature” of representation in itself, discerning the tendencies that have become static because of settler colonization, and denouncing the consequences they have had on the land. Pico, Yerxa, and Belcourt’s poetic (re)mappings further question the (in)visibilization of queer Indigenous bodies and voices, signaling the need of queer Indigenous articulations of survivance.
6All in all, this interdisciplinary conversation underpins how visuality and symbolic forms together construct the discourse of Manifestalgia within settler heteronormative imaginative frameworks, as observed in the U.S. and Canadian art histories. Contemporary queer Indigenous visual artists and poets intervene in these same forms (visuality and poetics), to engage with and unsettle this artistic landscape tradition, (re)mapping it to make it signify queer Indigenous presence, agency, and onto-epistemologies. This article consequently constitutes a dialogue between the literary and the artistic that questions and (re)maps landscapes as imaginative forms, hence de-normalizing Manifestalgia, while evidencing the material and real-life consequences that these representations have entailed. Queer Indigenous representations foreground the need to de-naturalize and escape settler heteronormative landscapes for new and more habitable (land) possibilities to be (re)generated.
- 2 Understood in Mary Louise Pratt’s terms in Imperial Eyes.
- 3 See Pratt; and Goeman, Mark my Words.
7In the volume Landscape (2007), John Wylie begins with one of the approaches to the term “landscape” as interconnected to “a particular set of cultural values, attitudes and meanings: [that is, as] ‘a way of seeing’ the world” (153). Most often, and put bluntly, this “way of seeing the world” was equated to the settler heteronormative Judeo-Christian imperialistic European/Western one. As Wylie states in the volume, “the representation of non-European landscapes by Europeans—by travellers and explorers, for example, by officials, the military, colonists and settlers, traders and pilgrims—can be critically examined as part of more general ‘discourses of imperialism’” (123). Landscapes have historically functioned as representational contact zones.2 They have served as forms of imagining and constructing, in the visual and in the literary, specific events and snapshots of nature as stages to narrate and naturalize myths connected to nation-building discourses. Eve Tuck (Unangax̂) and Marcia McKenzie, in the relevant volume Place in Research: Theory, Methodology and Methods (2015), draw on Mary Louise Pratt’s and Tonawanda Seneca scholar Mishuana Goeman’s works3 to explain that the “European planetary consciousness” that was spread via the increase of expeditions and the establishments of settler colonies had significant implications for the Native and settler communities alike (49). Such consciousness, according to Tuck and McKenzie, was built around a classification system which “typified a European desire to order nature into hierarchies” (49). Landscapes, either artistic or literary, can be regarded as having several functions within this framework: as souvenirs of the expeditions; as reminders of the expansions; as fantasies of settlement; and as ways of capturing nature into familiar codes, to make that “other” nature signify “home,” even if such association was only occurring in the narratives and in the paintings. The underlying objective of these imaginations became thus to display Americanness or Canadianness in due time.
8Taking two of the most renowned art schools in each country as examples, namely, the Hudson River School from the United States, and the well-recognized Group of Seven in Canada, one can understand how landscapes have become naturalized as a symbol of the nation for both nation-states. The two groups remain thought-provoking, not only in terms of representation (and of misrepresentation), but in terms of temporality. The Hudson River School, with artists like Thomas Cole, George Innes, and Frederic Edwin Church, was active from the mid-nineteenth century, whereas the Group of Seven was active ever since around 1920 and 1933, with exponents such as Lawren Harris, Frederick H. Varley, and Frank Johnston. These groups were not painting landscapes as newcomers, explorers, or settlers in the first encounters and settlements in Turtle Island. They were all looking at their material environments and (re)imagining their landscapes with a nostalgic view on nature’s past—and the nature of their past.
- 4 See Mitchell.
- 5 Building on Indigenous feminist and two-spirit critiques that conceptualize representation as a for (...)
- 6 See, for instance, Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, As We Have Always Done; Finley, “Decolonizing the Q (...)
9In this regard, then, temporality becomes key in settler representations. Wylie, building up from Mitchell,4 further unveils landscapes as the “dreamwork” of imperialism, “as utopian fantasies of the perfected imperial prospect and fractured images of unresolved ambivalence and unsuppressed resistance” (Mitchell 10, qtd. in Wylie 123). This dreamwork is hence elaborated by double-weaving5 the concealment of Indigenous peoples in the imaginations to foreground their real-life intentions. That is, in the paintings, Indigenous peoples are either shown as mere presences, or ultimately and altogether erased from the pictures. This normalizes landscapes as nationalist visions of the settled lands, making land embody settler values. Thus, landscapes signify white settler identities and spirituality as “natural” to the land, serving either as windows to a “pristine”—unreal—past, or as imaginings of a close-future, making these efforts trespass beyond the canvas to the real-world. This is not new; Indigenous and non-Indigenous scholars, activists, and communities have long discussed the inherent symbolic violence that is perpetuated through the settler discursive and artistic representations, especially when they came accompanied by the (both symbolic and physically violent) imposition of Western structures of time, spatial relations, Christianity, heteronormativity, etc.6 As Māori scholar Linda Tuhiwai Smith explains, “Imperialism and colonialism brought complete disorder to colonized peoples, disconnecting them from their histories, their landscapes, their languages, their social relations and their own ways of thinking, feeling, and interacting with the world” (28).
- 7 See Wolfe; and Tuck and Gaztambide-Fernández.
10Western literary, artistic, cultural, and scientific traditions have long been instrumentalized and (re)produced Western binaries of nature/culture, body/mind, male/female, etc., to normalize mechanisms for the justification, instruction, discipline, and erasure of queer, Two-Spirit, Indigenous subjects. According to Michelle Bae-Dimitriadis, artistic representation is also closely linked to settler emplacement/replacement (106). Drawing on the works of Patrick Wolfe as well as Eve Tuck and Rubén Gaztambide-Fernández on settler logics of elimination and futurity,7 Bae-Dimitriadis argues that there is an inherent temporality instilled in these representations, naturalizing white settler occupation and settler futurities that obscure Indigenous presence and land sovereignty (106). Therefore, she explains that “this visual narrative justifies White settlers’ emplacement by portraying the land as empty in origin, and European discovery and expansion as worthy of historic commemoration” (107). These visual representations either persistently emptied the landscape or depicted it as roamed by some Indigenous peoples who were almost undistinguishable from their surroundings. As Mishuana Goeman asserts, this contributes to how the colonial logics of difference “relegate who is expendable (Indigenous populations) and who is given priority (settlers). It is a violent form in which Indigenous bodies are made absent or disinterred to lands now renamed or domesticated” (“Ongoing Storms” 101). In this process, as Tuck and McKenzie point out, reducing land to a “domesticated” property produces a redefinition that recasts it as “ahistorical,” thereby positioning prior claims of inhabitance as “pre-modern” and “backward” (66). In this way, the (in)visibilization of Indigenous bodies is also tied to settler temporalities. White-settler representations then visually and temporarily “bury” the “existing epistemological, ontological and cosmological relationships to land” to sustain the myth of the terra nullius (66). Besides, as many scholars note, the land was paradoxically and simultaneously feminized, imagined both as “available” and “expectant” of white settler’s “domestication,” heteronormative power-structures, and gendered definitions. In doing so, the paintings insisted that the land was ready to be “civilized,” and that it was the predestined settlers’ role to accomplish such an undertaking.
- 8 As disclosed by Madsen’s thorough approach, John O’Sullivan was one of the first authors that uses (...)
- 9 In fact, Tricia Cusack studies the connection between the Hudson River School and Gast’s picture as (...)
11All of this concurs with a nostalgic view that is neither apolitical nor momentary. Goeman contends that “colonialism in the context of the United States, Canada, and their provinces and states demands a temporal process of remembering a nostalgic past and places of pristine virgin land” (“Ongoing Storms” 114). There is indeed an interest in retrieving that image of the past, that vision of nature as depicted in the paintings, as a controlled, dominated metaphor of conquest, and a Christian sacrifice and penitence necessary for the future success and utopia of white-settler Americanness and Canadianness. These landscapes, in both the American and Canadian contexts, envision nature as enmeshed with Indigenous peoples, as the “darkness” that requires “domestication.” The sublime paintings by the Hudson River School and the works by the Group of Seven can be looked at as “manifests” of opportunity and providence, as mediums to visually (re)produce the Manifest Destiny narratives to legitimize their “God-given duty to tame the vast North American continent” (Ryan 185). As Deborah L. Madsen argues in relation to John O’Sullivan’s rhetoric of Manifest Destiny,8 this rhetoric was sustained under the premise that North America was “represented as a land of opportunity: economic opportunity for the landless of Europe and religious opportunity for those who sought a haven from persecution” (372). Albeit not from the Hudson River School itself, John Gast’s famous painting American Progress (1872) takes the Hudson River School iconography one step further,9 providing a symbol for the Manifest Destiny narrative and rooting it as “part of the nation’s notion of its own exceptionalism or the idea that the country, its landscape, and its people were somehow unique” (Ryan 185). In the paintings, this can be observed when considering the gazes that produced them as “landscapes of opportunity,” as legitimizing territorial claims and settlements by re-naming Indigenous territories and displacing their presences, and as “divine” justifications to expand westward and gain terrain to nature. This self-proclaimed predestination to conquer nature, implied in the sublime landscapes of capitalist (re)production, can also be regarded as a discourse of “self-deception.” While exceptionality is imagined as a reward for their persecution, beyond the frame settlers face “powerlessness,” struggle with an unwelcoming environment, and enact violence on Indigenous peoples. All of this must be concealed in and beyond the frame, to sustain white settler innocence, as understood by Tuck and Yang.
- 10 See Tuck and Yang’s “Decolonization is Not a Metaphor.”
- 11 Following Altmeyer, “Three Ideas of Nature in Canada”; Cronon, “The Trouble with Wilderness”; and R (...)
- 12 Bearing in mind not only those who paint the landscapes, and those who pay for the works of art and (...)
12There is an inherent temporality imbued in this memorialization and fantastical depiction of the past, shaped by historical conditions and anxieties contemporary to those painting movements, which drove artists to re-imagine the past as a utopia to be restored, a utopia already devoid of Indigenous bodies or in the process of completion. Renato Rosaldo, in his seminal “Imperialist Nostalgia,” contends that this affect revolves around a paradoxical axis. According to him, there has been both an intentional alteration of the lives of communities and the land, and a regret “that things have not remained as they were prior to [colonial] intervention” (108). Rosaldo further explains that “In any of its versions, imperialist nostalgia uses a pose of ‘innocent yearning’ both to capture people’s imaginations and to conceal its complicity with often brutal domination” (108). Yet again, it is not arbitrary that the bodies of Native women, queer and Two-Spirit Indigenous relatives are the ones intentionally erased, enmeshed with nature, and left to be forgotten. Mohawk and Anishinaabe scholar Vanessa Watts discloses the settler colonial need to disengage “place and thought,” the gendered diversity therein encountered, and the systems of relationality that placed femininity as an intrinsic part of Anishinaabe—and many other Indigenous—onto-epistemologies. Claims to the land are justified when overlapping the bodies of Indigenous peoples—particularly Indigenous women, queer, and Two-Spirit peoples—with the landscape, as a way of (re)producing settler heteronormative societies and imagining the end of Indigenous futurities. As per Goeman, “Colonial forms of amnesia that regulate Native women as absent bodies or as victimized or degenerative subjects depend on Native bodies’ being out of place—that is, shadows and haunting presences of political and symbolic economies” (“Ongoing Storms” 114). What is being represented in these settler paintings is, often, a desire to return to a time when settler masculinity and its values were legitimized upon the landscape (at least in their imaginations and narratives), while maintaining their vision of virtuosity and guiltlessness to be (re)produced into the future. In other words, Manifestalgia, as a settler heteronormative vision of domination that is both imagined and actively and continually reproduced, relies on the colonial amnesia that perpetuates settler innocence and futurities.10 Furthermore, Shultz identifies in her analysis11 that the Group of Seven advocated that the American frontier myth, “seen as a place of rugged, masculine individualism,” could also be encountered in the Canadian north as “the turn of the century saw a fear that Canadian manhood was being undermined by urban living” (7). Their landscapes were nostalgic for a comeback to a specific narrative of “traditional values,” they were used as a form of mystifying settler (middle/high class)12 masculinity, noting that many of the elements of nature in the paintings highlighted follow phallocentric patterns—for example, looking at the trees from the Group of Seven, or observing the Hudson River landscapes as metaphors of “penetration”—and Enlightenment discourses—the interplay between darkness and light, narratives of independence and productivity surrounding the settler/pilgrim viewer/painter, discourses of culture over nature … Therefore, the vision we are given is an utterly white settler Christian heteropatriarchal one, where the bodies of Indigenous women, queer, and Two-Spirit peoples are displaced or utterly absent to justify “civilization,” and land domination and exploitation.
- 13 See, for example, Whyte’s concept of “Ecology of Settler Colonial Domination” to understand the env (...)
- 14 Tuck and McKenzie build up on the relevant work of Winona LaDuke’s All Our Relations: Native Strugg (...)
13The dismantling of Indigenous land sovereignty and kinship networks has wide-reaching consequences: forced assimilation, the establishment of stereotypes and narratives that question and undermine Indigenous sovereignties, the persecution and assimilation of non-heteronormative subjectivities and roles, and the displacement and allotment of territories and communities. Concurrently, the exploitation of land as a resource from which to extract supplies, capital, and making it an asset “to own,” has entailed and led to constant environmental degradation.13 Eve Tuck and Marcia McKenzie signal that such degradation has “disproportionate effects on Indigenous land and peoples [as] an extension of the violence and biopolitics of settler colonialism” (38).14
- 15 See Brison and Jessup, “Terre Sauvage,” for a close consideration on the national/foreign reviews t (...)
- 16 Interesting here is the language used by the curators of the commemoration exhibition A Like Vision(...)
- 17 In the speech the phrase to be noted is this: “It was sung by immigrants as they struck out from di (...)
- 18 I am thinking here of the chain of events that surrounds the centenary. The exhibition was curated (...)
14It may appear that such dynamics of representation and Manifestalgia were restricted to the moments of creation of the artworks. However, these narratives are constantly reproduced in museums and art galleries, which profit from commemorating these groups while concealing the role of the paintings, artists, and the institutions in concealing Indigenous presence and survivance. Such settler visual and symbolic rhetorics are also echoed in other contemporary political and digital forms. Here we can consider the international exhibition show—with an awfully telling title—Terre Sauvage: Canadian Landscape Painting and the Group of Seven, which toured across different geographies from 1999 until around 2001;15 the centenary celebration of the Group of Seven, A Like Vision, held between 2020 and 2022;16 Obama’s Primary Concession speech in 2008;17 and the recent newsfeed post via Instagram by the U.S. Homeland Security Department, dated July 24, 2025, in which they posted John Gast’s American Progress painting with the caption “A Heritage to be Proud of, a Homeland worth Defending.” By retrieving these images and overlapping contemporary meanings of nationalist narratives upon them, they connote both a memorialization of an innocent past that was/is still “viable,”18 and a way of inscribing Trump in the narratives of Exceptionalism and Manifest Destiny, of Manifestalgia, to “Make America Great Again.” Therefore, to invoke and proclaim these images of Manifestalgia is to perpetuate the (Christian and masculine) heteronormative capitalist dreamwork and claims over (imaginary) territories in a shifting national and global context that is becoming more aware of Indigenous voices, histories, and experiences.
15As observed in this article, though pushed to the margins, queer, Two-Spirit Indigenous subjects have had their absent presences made to resonate in the silences of these artistic landscapes, showing up, even as present absences. But they have done so constantly and fiercely, as Yerxa’s poem suggests, not only in the paintings, but in literary, artistic, and sociocultural panoramas, to trouble white settler visions of the nation. It is precisely in these silences and erasures produced by settler landscapes that contemporary Indigenous visual and literary practices intervene.
16Audra Simpson concludes her significant volume Mohawk Interruptus with a paramount reflection:
How to stop a story that is always being told? Or, how to change a story that is always being told? The story that settler-colonial nation-states tend to tell about themselves is that they are new; they are beneficent; they have successfully “settled” all issues prior to their beginning .… Indians, or Native people, are not imagined to flourish, let alone push or interrupt the stories that are being told. (177)
17Such a way of interrupting is encountered, as this essay contends, in (re)mapping settler imaginary landscapes. These interruptions suspend, in time, the narratives of progress of settler colonialism and their Manifestalgia in multiple, fluid, imaginative, and land-based ways. As previously stated, the (in)visibilization of queer Indigenous bodies was shaped by more than pictorial images, there was an imaginative—discursive—paradigm of settler heteronormative exploitation that accompanied and was amplified through such images. Due to this, re-indigenizing imaginary landscapes can signify a remapping that operates beyond the visual, at the level of the discursive and literary.
- 19 See, for instance, Androgyny (1983), Cycles (1985), or Observations of the Astral World (1994) to h (...)
- 20 Worth including here is a reference to the Indigenous AR Intervention Encoded: Change the Story, Ch (...)
18There are countless Indigenous visual artists whose work could be discussed here as re-indigenizing imagination. From Anishinaabe artist Norval Morrisseau, whose representations of the land altogether subvert Western traditions and represent Anishinaabe ways of knowing,19 to (apihtâwikosisâniskwêw/mânitow sâkahikanihk Métis) Christi Belcourt’s floral landscapes and beadworks, to Demian Dinéyazhi’s Diné transdisciplinary artistic, compelling, and claiming installations that directly call out the violence of settler-colonial states upon the land. The forms of (re)mapping landscapes and de-normalizing Manifestalgia can take many vibrant shapes to imagine and sustain Indigenous futurities.20
19Many Indigenous artists and authors seek to challenge the temporal bind of Manifestalgia by directly engaging and/or reinterpreting the nineteenth- and twentieth-century landscapes that helped shape the Eurocentric Western imagination. One such artist is Kent Monkman. In an interview with Timm, Monkman acknowledges that “the artwork of the 19th century was really about freezing Aboriginal people in time and setting us backward” (Timm 94-95) and that a lot of his own work “is about deconstructing the authority of these paintings—because they continue to hold authority over how First Nations are perceived” (95).
20Kent Monkman’s work can be considered a direct interpolation of nineteenth-century landscapes, as he takes some of the most famous paintings by the American and Canadian schools of art and (re)maps them, namely with Two-Spirit bodies. Monkman seizes the paintings that were both shaped and intended for the white settler gaze and its continuation, pointing at the perspective through which they represented the landscape and the audience they primarily addressed. Chris Bundock ascertains that “for Monkman, both addressing the colonial legacy of violence and ongoing social and political marginalization faced by Indigenous peoples is best approached not by rejecting but by reinhabiting the history of European art” (498). Monkman dialogues with and reframes canonical art history by double-weaving both a critique to Indigenous (in)visivilization and a manifestation of the continuation and survivance of Two-Spirit and Indigenous peoples. This survivance is embodied, on many occasions, in her now famous alter-ego, Miss Chief Eagle Testickle, who exposes the presence of Two-Spirit and queer Indigenous bodies in these images of Manifestalgia, while also subverting settler narratives of conquest and colonization that talked about the disappearance, backwardness, and violence of Indigenous peoples. Looking at paintings like Study for Artist and Model (2003), Trappers of Men (2006), The Allegory of Painting (2015), and The Three Graces (2017) is to engage with the re-indigenization of art history, not only in terms of content but also in terms of perspective. Monkman re-indigenizes landscapes by interrogating and subverting who controls the gaze—what is (un)seen—redirecting it toward vibrant, diverse queer bodies on the land that look back at the white-settler gaze. Vanessa Watts speaks of the importance of reconnecting Indigenous epistemologies through bodies, of flesh and of land, to resituate Anishinaabe ways of knowing and cosmologies to the forefront, as she emphasizes the corporeal-relationality connection between Indigenous bodies and the land, for “our flesh is literally made of soil” (27). Watts explains that this is true for Anishinaabe and Haudenosaunee peoples—albeit applicable to most Indigenous societies (27). Given the heteronormative legacy of colonialism and the displacement of female, queer, and Two-Spirit experiences and knowledge, Watts explains that land has been reduced to a stage or a resource, rather than as a relative with whom to interact. As per Watts: “The measure of colonial interaction with land is to be accessed, not learned from or a part of” (27). However, she counteracts, “flesh becomes action not because it is material but because it must do so for our ears to remain open and low to the ground” (33). This is an undertaking that Monkman understands, endorses, and celebrates as Indigenous survivance throughout his work. For instance, in The Three Graces, he displays a triad of Indigenous women with diverse bodies embracing their beauty and celebrating their “flesh” in relational synchrony with the land, rather than being visually enmeshed with it. Similarly, in The Allegory of Painting, Miss Chief directly looks to the audience returning the settler gaze. Monkman re-indigenizes the settler visual landscape imaginary as a Two-Spirit representation by centering Miss Chief, interrogating settlers’ perspective and (in)visibilization, all while holding a color palette that gestures to the very process of “landscape creation.” Female, Queer, and Two-Spirit Indigenous bodies are here made the foci of the works, made openly visible and subverting the vanishing tropes of nineteenth-century painting traditions. The questioning of representation is also extended and made evidently visible in Study of Artist and Model, where a naked cowboy with a photographic camera by his side poses captive in front of Miss Chief, who is drawing the image of the cowboy, reduced to lines and traces on a canvas. Monkman intertwines different layers of meaning in this subversion of the tradition. The Model, none other than a stand-in for the infamous photographer Edward S. Curtis, becomes a target to both the arrows that reduce him to the tree and to Miss Chief’s gaze. Monkman questions how Indigenous peoples have been romanticized and shaped by Curtis’s lens, re-positioning the Model as the submissive, sexualized, version of San Sebastian, throwing his camera to the side in an act of symbolic reinstitution, and “erasing” his identity along the way as he disappears into the sketches that Miss Chief is realizing on the canvas. Monkman further interrogates, with a certain sense of irony, the hypersexualization, the stereotypes of primitiveness, and the erasure of queer Indigenous peoples in Western imagination by displaying them onto the—very white—body of the Model, making them feel “unnatural” to that subject. Lastly, in Trappers of Men, probably one on the most well-discussed paintings by the artist, Monkman populates an “in-betweenness” collage of Albert Bierstadt’s In the Mountains (1867) and Among the Sierra Nevada Mountains (1868), two of the paintings that configured the imaginary of the American West, with figures famous to colonial history—from settler explorers, such as Lewis and Clark, to more “modern” figures, such as Mondrian—and Two-Spirit, drag-queens, and Indigenous bodies to make further claims around (in)visibility (Elston 188). As per Elston, “by interjecting a prosopopoeiac stand-in—a queer indigenous body in drag—into otherwise conventionally arranged European landscapes, Monkman disrupts the ‘vanishing Indian’ myth which such scenes have historically supported and perpetuated” (188). Trappers of Men clearly illustrates how Monkman re-indigenizes landscapes from visual and temporal perspectives, subverting settler temporalities by overtly intertwining different historical moments on the canvas, along with their Manifestalgia and settler heteronormative expectations and futurities.
21Monkman’s queer Indigenous (re)mapping of landscapes, and thereby de-naturalization of Manifestalgia, illustrates the visual dialogue that there exists between the canonical artistic landscape traditions, both in the U.S. and in Canada, and the re-indigenization of the genre. But, as previously stated, such landscapes functioned as catalysts that materialized settler heteronormative frameworks beyond visual representations, into symbolic and discursive spheres. At the discursive level, remapping imaginary landscapes and Manifestalgia can also take various forms. These pages namely read feminist and queer Indigenous poetic remappings as forms of reimagining and reclaiming not only the imaginary paradigm, but the embodied voicing of queer Indigenous survivance. Similar strategies to those of visual queer re-indigenization emerge throughout the varied articulations of queer Indigenous poetics, rendering the queer Indigenous subject visible, and de-normalizing both Manifestalgia and the settler heteronormative frameworks that sustain it.
22Taking Jana-Rae Yerxa’s poem, “The Uninvited,” presented at the beginning of this paper, as a bridge that connects the more visual to the more literary, Yerxa invokes the settler heteronormative landscape imaginary—similarly to Monkman—to remap it as a resurgence exercise. The targeted Indigenous reader/addressee is invited to “emerge” from darkness, not as vanished and invisible, “under the surface,” but as living and thriving. The poetic voice encourages the addressee to show themselves, and to disrupt the status-quo, animated by the idea that all which is appointed as “fierce”—as other, wild, uncivil—has never been “invited” to this picture: “Be like the brightness and beauty of the sun / emerge without permission / because fierce is never invited” (23). Yerxa imaginatively constructs this poem through the symbolic opposition of darkness and light, a contrast central to how painting and the visual arts structure perception. Nevertheless, this complementary imaginative creation goes beyond in its re-indigenization. Yerxa decides to subvert white settler heteronormative Western traditions and positions the “hosts”—those who invite—as personifying darkness—“darkness’s shoulder”—, while the uninvited—understood as Indigenous peoples—embody the light. This poetic (re)mapping of the host/guest relationship hence displaces narratives of Enlightenment and land ownership, transforming the silences and the repression produced through colonialism—a.k.a. darkness—into an active act of resurgence in the poem. Regarding this (in)visibility that seems to come with landscapes, Billy-Ray Belcourt’s words—“A landscape conceals as much as it makes visible” (22)—continue to resonate as a reminder that landscapes have not only worked to subjugate Indigenous peoples and lands by “concealing them,” silencing them from the national narratives, as well as displacing their experiences and histories from national recognition. Yet, in a double-entendre, they can also serve as mirrors that display through those silences such violences. Both Yerxa and Belcourt (re)map and re-indigenize landscapes to make them acknowledge Indigenous presence and experiences, while simultaneously interrogating what has been representationally normalized.
- 21 In their approach, Billy-Ray Belcourt and Jas M. Morgan (Lidsay Nixon) enter into dialogue around t (...)
23Tommy Pico’s Nature Poem (2017) enacts similar visual, spatiotemporal, and symbolic strategies that, like those of Monkman, Yerxa, and Belcourt, de-normalize Manifestalgia and re-indigenize the visual imaginary canon through a queer Indigenous poetics of (re)mapping and resurgence. The second volume of Pico’s tetralogy, published between 2016 and 2019, Nature Poem is described by Scudeler as a series of queer, Kumeyaay, epic poems (159). Pico decolonizes settler temporalities and re-indigenizes “epic poetry” by reclaiming and drawing on Kumeyaay oral traditions through “fragmented poems” that assemble into a continuous multitemporal and multi-rhythmic long poem whose visual field on the page—its spacing, breaks, discontinuities—actively unsettles linear settler time. Ho’esta Mo’e’hahne (Southern Tsistsistas and Hinono’ei), in their approach to Pico’s first poetry collection, IRL (2016), engages with Belcourt and Morgan/Nixon’s understandings of Queer Indigenous Ethics,21 and talks of queerness, when coupled with indigeneity, as a “way of moving through the world and unravelling settler-imperial common sense and its structures of violence” (316). According to Mo’e’hahne, addressing this settler common sense from such lens represents a potentiality “where alternative modes of relationality and connection across space and time can emerge” (316). Mo’e’hahne further identifies that “Pico maps Indigeneity not as a fixed point in space and time but as a set of spatially oriented forms of sensation, embodiment, and possibility which exist ‘in-between’ colonial gender binaries and spatial polarities” (317). Pico’s queer Indigenous “in-betweenness” is present all-throughout the witty, humoristic, almost-all containing, shape-shifting—as the collections vary in form—and multimedia referential tone of the collection, since there are numerous references to music, social media and internet events, technology, and art. The volume enmeshes past, present, and future together, enacting a poetics that unsettles Manifestalgia, and defies expectations of what—especially for Western, Eurocentric, settler audiences—may be encountered.
- 22 See Gamber, “A Poetics of Refusal.”
- 23 See Scudeler, “Tommy Pico’s Queer NDN Epic Poems”; Gamber, “A Poetics of Refusal”; Seymour, “Junk F (...)
24Nature Poem’s overt motif is the refusal to write a nature poem for the symbolic, epistemic, and embodied settler-colonial consequences that the connection between Indigenous peoples and nature has had in Western imagination.22 Hence, Pico defies not only the ways in which nature has been understood in settler-colonial, heteronormative terms, and, in many instances, stereotypically associated with Indigenous peoples, but also becomes the catalyst for rethinking—and remapping—the nature of representation itself. Building on previous approaches to his work,23 I argue that Pico addresses and challenges the nature of representation in Nature Poem: how it has been mediated and normalized within Western discourses, and how it is highly influenced by the imaginary of settler landscapes. Thus, Pico is de-naturalizing it in his poetry to (re)map and re-indigenize the imaginative panorama.
25Kyle Bladow explains that Pico humorously contradicts his constant statement of not wanting to write a nature poem, and in doing so, the resulting text resembles “what Sarah Nolan calls ‘unnatural ecopoetics’ which ‘use open and often extrapoetic forms and self-reflective commentary on the failures of words to accurately express material reality in order to foreground naturecultures within the distinctly textual space created by the poem’” (Nolan qtd. in Bladow 61). Pico’s refusal to write a nature poem leads to a creative reworking that broadens “possibilities for ecological thinking” (Bladow 61), for it expands the understandings of “nature” beyond what is contained in settler landscapes as those imagined by the schools in the nineteenth century. In one of the most quoted fragments from the poem, Teebs—Pico’s poetic voice—reports that writing a nature poem “[is] fodder for the noble savage / narrative. I wd slap a tree across the face, / I say to my audience” (2). As Seymour writes, indeed very much concerning this paper’s discussion, “It’s not nature that’s the problem; it’s nature poetry. It’s not ecology; it’s the Ecological Indian trope” (123). Teebs explains that encountering this has been frustrating, not only because of the blatant ignorance it represents, but because it fetishizes his indigeneity as solely connected to nature for ceremonial purposes:
This white guy asks do I feel more connected to nature
bc I’m NDN
asks did I live like in a regular house
growing up on the rez
or something more salt
of the earth, something reedy
says it’s hot do I have any rain ceremonies (15)
26The (in)visibilization of Indigenous bodies and enmeshment with nature in Western imagination leads Pico to see the interaction as one where this white guy has symbolically—and historically—“won”:
because he already did
because he always will
because he could write a nature
poem, or anything he wants, he doesn’t understand
why I can’t write a fucking nature
poem. (15)
27Nevertheless, Pico subverts this historical/artistic domination when they are having sex by biting the white guy in the cheek and drawing blood, thus (re)embodying the stereotype and “reify[ing] savage lust,” in a similar vein to what Monkman did in his paintings, but this time with queer Indigenous agency in their hands.
28As Nature Poem unfolds, Teebs navigates different moments in his relationship with nature/land, as he deconstructs the stereotypes associated with Manifest Destiny narratives and addresses the (sexualizing) gaze, the oppressive struggles and violence that stem from settler-colonial frameworks, and fantasies of nature. He keeps coming back to writing what he would include or not in a nature poem if he were to write one—while indeed writing an “unnatural” one: “How do statues become more galvanizing than refugees / is not something I wd include in a nature poem” (6). Meanwhile, he challenges the consideration and value that (other) human life is given in Eurocentric, Western societies. Pico’s aim in Nature Poem is to de-naturalize the invisibilization of “other” subjects in Western settler heteronormative discourses. In a similar way to Monkman or Yerxa, Pico achieves this by either signaling or interpolating settler discourses with a similar vocabulary—or imaginary—while readdressing the gaze and awareness to the (symbolic) violence that is perpetuated in settler frameworks. Another instance of this occurs right afterwards, when Pico reflects on the normalization of gendered violence: “Ray Rice punches his girlfriend unconscious on camera and drags her / out of the elevator, and I’m supposed to give a fuck about pesticides? / That’s not a kind of nature poem I would write a poem about” (7). This questions the readership’s expectation to encounter the Ecological Indian trope, whereby the Indigenous subject would supposedly only care about the destruction of the land. Instead, Pico explicitly links environmental concerns to heteronormativity and to gendered violence—both symbolic and physical. In Bladow’s words, “Pico’s unnatural ecopoetics denounces the naturalization of colonial heteropatriarchy, which appears in such forms as the accessibility and claiming of natural spaces for settler desire, the erasure of queer presences in land, and the cooptation of environments to naturalize heterosexuality” (70). An instance of Pico denouncing this naturalization of land claiming occurs in a richly articulated passage that discloses an interaction at a gay bar. A guy asks “WHAT’S YR NATIONALITY!?!?” (9). Teebs then thinks about the natural phenomenon of hurricanes and their “scientific” explanation: “In order to talk about a hurricane, you first have to talk about a / preexisting disturbance over the ocean, so you have to talk about mean / ocean temperature, so you have to talk about human industry and sun rays” (9). He then expands this concatenation of causes to Greek mythology: “so did you know helium was named for the sun god Helios” reaching up to the Big Bang (9), eventually asking himself and the audience: “How far back do you have to go to answer any question about race?” (9). In this way, Pico de-naturalizes discourses that tend to address identity and nationality as natural phenomena rather than as socially constructed discourses. The conversation continues as Teebs struggles to identify the answer that is expected from him: “UM, AMERICAN? I say / or / KUMEYAAY. I say I’M FROM THE KUMEYAAY NATION” (9). His “in-betweenness” is marked as such not because of the discourses around identity—which is also the case—but because the (white) guy at the bar is interested due to his non-white physicality: “I know that when he says / NATIONALITY he’s saying you look vaguely not like a total white boy” (9), thus interconnecting Teebs’s queerness and indigeneity through the body. The interaction ends more positively than it started, with Teebs claiming “I’M FROM AN INDIAN RESERVATION NEAR SAN DIEGO” with the drag queen version of Michael Bublé “Feelin Good” resonating in the back, (re)embodying his body as a queer Indigenous man and reclaiming the connection to place in a thriving tone.
29Therefore, Pico (re)maps nature poetry conventions and stereotypes on Indigenous peoples by voicing the manifold, interconnected issues of his everyday life, navigating the “nature” of his community, of his “in-betweenness” positionality as a queer NDN living in the city and his dating life (in the clubs and online), among many other issues. This multiplicity also unfolds all throughout the collection, as Pico (c)overtly writes about diverse forms of nature, weaving reflections that draw together connotations and implications of “nature” across several spheres: about the natural world, its rhythms, temporalities and diversity; on human behavior, such as the fear of death, belonging, and the nature of relationships; on the “nature” of gender and sexualities; or on the nature of writing itself. In doing so, Pico does not only show the multifaceted, shifting, and temporal character of “nature,” but also exposes the multiple referents that the term holds beyond the framework of nature/landscapes.
30Pico hence uses nature as the connecting thread to explore the avenues of depth of the influences of heteronormative settler colonialism up to the present. A passage that underscores the contemporaneity and impermanence of nature, counter to the static-temporality reinforced by the canonical landscape visual tradition and imaginary of the nineteenth century, is that with the iterative buildup of “#death” (32-33). In this concatenation of “#death,” Pico interweaves a series of popular phrases, songs, hashtags and ad slogans from diverse brands, like Nike or McDonalds “just do it #death” (32) or “I’m loving it #death” (32), to create a symbolic snapshot of the (historical) moment he is inhabiting. Pico thus shapes these lines to display how capitalism can be grasped from the nature of language itself, as if it were a landscape of a specific moment in time. Mimicking settlers’ impulse toward historic commemoration as displayed in art history, Pico makes capitalism legible through a temporally bound visual language that sustains a system of violence, instead of concealing it. As #death indicates, all these messages are not only prolonged in a system based upon elimination, but will also be meaningless in the future, “dead,” because of the constant drive for progress by settler-capitalism. This temporal meditation certainly subverts Manifestalgia, as it unveils and makes visible the deadly momentum that accompanies the nostalgic-future dreamwork, and interrogates “settler innocence” along the way. This is also present in Pico’s Nature Poem, when Teebs, thinking of future events, produces a dialogue between Nature and Science: “Science predicts we’ll discover alien life by 2025 / Dude’s legs on the subway are constantly spreading / Nature asks aren’t I curious abt the landscapes of exoplanets” (40). The dialogue showcases how “Nature” and “Science” have installed themselves as institutions for settler heteronormative expansion, as the guy is doing by spreading his legs on the subway. In the meantime, while the narrative of Manifestalgia is made evident, Teebs calls into question how it comes with all kinds of settler-produced violence and white innocence: “NDN teens have the highest rate of suicide of any population group in America. A white man can massacre 9 black ppl in a church and be fed Burger King by the cops afterward. A presidential candidate gains platform by saying Mexican immigrants are murderers and rapists” (40). Pico de-normalizes Manifestalgia and rejects its discourse, re-indigenizing it as Teebs proclaims that: “It’s hard for me to imagine curiosity as anything more than a pretext / for colonialism / so nah, Nature I don’t want to know the colonial legacy of the future” (40).
31In terms of the nature of representation, Teebs is always aware of the readers’ gaze. Throughout Nature Poem, he relentlessly addresses them/us. Plus, the overall poem seems to be targeted to a specific Western audience, one that does not recognize the diversity of Indigenous peoples and voices and continues to frame them as figures of the past, bound to the landscape. Pico refuses both this view and the audience’s tokenistic tendencies, underscoring the problematic assumption that he should stand for entire Indigenous communities to justify their worth: “I’m telling YOU all about ME / In order to prove OUR intelligence, OUR right to live, WE becomes I” (16). In this sense, further in the poem, Pico includes a reflection around Da Vinci’s The Last Supper (framed as one of the great Enlightenment paintings), and writes that “I was just thinkin The Last Supper says way more abt Da Vinci than it / does abt the good book, you know? There’s no likeness for the apostles—/ those were just men about his life or something. Who is Jesus in the / painting but the painter? Or is he the Judas? (48). By invoking a Renaissance painting rather than a landscape, Pico employs this visual reference to question the unreliability of representation and expose how such paintings conveyed more about the artists than about the people they claimed to represent. Pico addresses the (in)visibility of those (c)overtly appearing in The Last Supper, whose “real” identities were utterly silenced, and erased from the picture, to uphold a Christian narrative. In a similar fashion to what occurred with landscapes, such visions and narratives rely on stereotypes, which generally leave Indigenous peoples out of the onto-epistemological framework of Enlightenment. Pico alludes to this when ironically concluding the train-of-thought with a “Just kidding I never think” (48). By reversing this imaginative referential map, Pico points to the evident irony: not all Europeans are Da Vinci; those were his relatives. Why build a whole discourse around European brilliance out of just one person?
32Relevant here is a return to Monkman’s The Allegory of Painting or Study of Artist and Model. Monkman and Pico not only question the (settler) looking gaze through the positioning of a (Two-Spirit, queer) Indigenous agent as the focal point of both the paintings and the poem, subverting the audience’s expectations of Indigenous (in)visibility. They also subvert the normalization of settler (pictorial) reliability and authenticity. Both creators question how settler imaginations have been presumed to be truthful representations of reality instead of biased spatiotemporal snapshots. Taking advantage of these “settler/familiar” visual techniques and adding a certain sense of irony and humor, Pico and Monkman both showcase the potentiality of queer Indigenous (re)mapping artistic imagination.
33Another moment in which Pico (re)maps the conventions of nature poetry occurs further in the poem, when he dedicates as an “ode” to the American treatment of the landscape the following lines:
Here is a short, peaceful, pastoral lyric:
Crappy water
Shoots thru purgatory creek
On its way to the Colorado River
My bad, say the EPA after accidentally dumping 3 million gallons of waste in the stream.
Fuck you too, says Nature. (54)
- 24 Here I am thinking of Vanessa Watts’s relevant contribution “Indigenous Place-Thought & Agency.”
34Pico mockingly criticizes the double-standards with regards to land-treatment, whereas the convention opts for writing “pastoral,” “peaceful,” and “aesthetic” innocent visions of settler-colonial representations (and Manifestalgia), the reality is that of the mistreatment of the land, such non “accidental” dumping of 3 million gallons of waste to contaminate river-streams is not arbitrary, the pollution and degradation of the land is, as previously remarked, closely connected to the necro/biopolitics of settler imperialism. Therefore, Pico gives a voice to the Nature/land to answer back: “Fuck you too” (54). Even though his relationship to nature/land is conflictive—“You can’t be an NDN person in today’s world / and write a nature poem. I swore to myself I would never write a nature / poem. Let’s be clear, I hate nature—hate its guts” (67)—Pico comes to briefly open up and acknowledge that “I don’t hate nature at all. Places have thoughts—hills have backs that love being stroked by our eyes .… This is the difference: / Some see object in the Earth, where I see lungs. Sky mother falls thru / a hole, lands on a turtle” (67). Land is thus regarded as a non-human relative that feels, thinks, and has an origin story based on coexistence and kinship between humans and the more-than-human; there is no hierarchical segregation that justifies the extraction of resources.24 Before concluding the poem, Pico subtly changes how he himself has been framing nature, opening a series of rhetorical questions—“What if I really do feel connected to the land?” (72). While confessing his longing for kinship and connection to Kumeyaay land, as he disapproves of NDNs “writing their dumb nature / poem” (73), he realizes that he himself has just done that. In the following page, closing Teebs’ insight, Pico/Teebs ambiguously addresses a “you” that can be either the author, or the readers’ expectations being met with a taste of judgment: “Admit it. This is the poem you wanted all along” (73). Hence, Nature Poem is Pico’s way of (re)mapping nature and reclaiming the agency and possibility to speak, to act with the “ears open and low to the ground” (Watts 33), re-indigenizing landscapes and refusing settler Manifestalgia, subverting on the way the nature of representation in itself.
35This article has dealt with how discourses of settler colonialism are naturalized as forms of gender, racial, and sexual conquest of the land, writing/framing discourses of nation-state legitimacy as “beneficial” and “innocent,” for God’s providence has already appointed them as forms of nationhood to be (re)produced, over and over, as symbols of Manifestalgia into the future. However, as modes of representation continue to change at different paces, with different socialities and intentions, Goeman reminds us that the act of (re)mapping is “always in process” (Mark My Words 116). There have been countless instances of Indigenous artists, theorists, and writers who have questioned, reimagined, and showcased feminist, queer, and Two-Spirit brilliance and survivance in the face of a discourse that insists on the erasure and elimination not only of gender and sexual diversity, but of Indigenous epistemologies and kinship relations to the land. The approach to the interdisciplinary works of Monkman, Yerxa, Belcourt, and Pico has shown diverse ways in which to confront the gaze, the nature of representation, and the representation of nature/land. These pages have shown that queer Indigenous (re)mappings of landscapes do not occur in a vacuum, but in an ongoing, transversal dialogue with the visual and symbolic settler canon imaginations that made such interventions necessary. Putting visual art histories alongside contemporary Indigenous arts and poetics does not collapse their differences; rather, it highlights how Manifestalgia circulates across both visual and textual forms and how queer Indigenous (re)mappings operate as transversal strategies of reconfiguration across them. For all these authors and artists question Indigenous (in)visibility, especially of queer and Two-Spirit bodies, that has been (re)produced in Western imagination, and Manifestalgia discourses, as a way of justifying land dispossession and Indigenous elimination. (Re)mapping landscapes can thus be read as active acts of resurgence and survivance that envision alternative futurities, re-indigenize imaginative landscapes, and foreground queer Indigenous voices and futurities. For, as Yerxa reminds us, “fierce is never invited,” they light up the sky.