Oji-Cree writer JWhitehead204 is continuing his run of creative brilliance with 'Making Love With the Land,' a collection of linked essays with an August 23 release from KnopfCA. Here, he talks language, literature, and 'writing white' with Maclean's:
It has been an intense five years for Joshua Whitehead, marked by both personal loss and remarkable literary achievement. Since 2017, the Oji-Cree writer has published the poetry collection, winner of both the 2019 Lambda prize for gay fiction and Canada Reads 2021. He’s also experienced the end of a long-term relationship, deaths in his family and, of course, the pandemic.
A child of Peguis First Nation in Manitoba, Whitehead was raised in the city of Selkirk, the son of a trucker father and a mother who worked at a shelter for Indigenous women. Growing up and attending school in mostly white Selkirk, Whitehead would beeline almost daily to the local library. He wasn’t there for the books, much as he liked to read, but for the internet access that allowed him to join online role-playing games and create digital personas.
Whitehead himself was a born storyteller—his parents still keep a box of stories and poems he told them. “They’re very secretive about it. I’m always trying to find it,” he says. He describes himself as a muckatoon, using a Cree term he defines as meaning “unabashedly verbose.” But his Cree remained rudimentary through his youth, and he was drawn to the likes of Ursula K. Le Guin, Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg. “I was trained, like we all are, really, to write white,” he says.
Whitehead’s evolving ideas about language and literature, along with developments in his life—including debilitating bouts of insomnia and anxiety—are all visible in. But for sheer cerebral and emotional rewiring, little matched his 2018 promotional tour for. The novel tells the story of a two-spirit Indigiqueer youth who leaves his Manitoba reserve and becomes a cybersex worker in Winnipeg.
All authors are open to that kind of metaphorical autopsy, but BIPOC authors far more so, and—in Canada at least—Indigenous ones most of all, even when their forensic dissectors are sympathetic readers. Whitehead points to what he calls the non-Indigenous “starving hunger” for residential school trauma narratives. “I definitely have the utmost respect for residential school survivors, and I think their stories should be told,” he says. “But Indigenous writers have so much more to give.
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