2 page essay

Puo’winue’l Prayers readings from north america’s First Transtextual script

Louis Esme Cruz (Mi’kmaq/Acadian and Irish) with Qwo-Li Driskill (Cherokee)

artist’s statement

The past is a mysterious place for Indigenous people to dwell, especially if line­ age has been broken. The coming of Christianity dispersed some Mi’kmaq ances­

tors and held others close to our homeland. Knowing what I do about my own fam­

ily’s histories, it seems that I come from a line of people who dispersed, surviving

and resisting in differing ways. What has shown up in my own body and within my

own life attests to this. I am unraveling this mystery in a relatively short amount of

time, making tangible and grounded what once seemed magical and ethereal.

As a visual essay, “Puo’winue’l Prayers” explores some of the issues related

to “coming home” to ourselves, our land, and our people, referencing academic

texts in surrogacy of my extended family and cultural teachings. In Mi’kmaq

Hieroglyphic Prayers: Readings in North America’s First Indigenous Script, I came

upon “Morning Prayer,” a Roman Catholic supplication taught by Christian mis­

sionaries to Mi’kmaq people as part of their conversion project.1 Murdena Mar­

shall and David Schmidt translate the Mi’kmaq term puoin as shaman or religious

specialist. “Morning Prayer” reads, “Let me hate all my sins and all the wicked

things I dreamt of this morning, the things of the devil, of the shaman, and all

evilness that is in my body.” With their repudiation of Indigenous knowledges,

these words leave me grieving for the loss of traditional teachings about Mi’kmaq

queers, lesbians, gays, bisexuals, and trans people. Even with the loss of that

knowledge, however, I am not giving up on reclamation.2

Also in “Morning Prayer” is a line that reads, “I give You my heart, my

soul, my flesh and I give You all my possessions and my being. . . . Today is

the day that offensive things will be said.” From my contemporary perspective,

GLQ 16:1–2

DOI 10.1215/10642684­2009­021

© 2010 by Duke University Press

244 GlQ: a Journal oF lesBian and Gay sTudies

I read this as a prophecy within the poison that we give to each other in order to

ensure our survival into the present and future by living and loving as we are. Just

as Ralph T. Pastore argues that “today’s Mi’kmaq are no less Indian [sic] simply

because they wear the same clothes as other Canadians, drive cars, and watch

television,” so I know that we are no less Mi’kmaq because we were raised with an

absence of overt knowledge of who we are.3 As we heal the evil injected through

Christianity into our body­spirits, we remember who we are. No longer silent, we

are moving toward balancing ourselves and our families in ways that are both

covert and overt. At once, our transformed selves encapsulate our looking forward

while providing testimony to where we have come from. Nothing is the same as it

used to be. Thank god.

— Louis Esme Cruz

Creating new Ceremonies with remembered ones: a Commentary on “Puo’winue’l Prayers”

A few months ago, Louis Esme Cruz e­mailed me the drawings from “Puo’winue’l

Prayers,” and I immediately printed them out and taped them to my office wall.

They help me to remember the kind of artistic, activist, and scholarly work that

I think is necessary for Indigenous queer/Two­Spirit resistance, the work that I

label as Two­Spirit critiques in my essay for this issue. I think Cruz’s art and

theory speak for themselves and certainly don’t need my mediation. My intention

here, then, is not to guide an interpretation, but to comment briefly about what is

most important to me when thinking about Cruz’s work.

Cruz’s art is itself a Two­Spirit critique, and — specifically — a Mi’kmaq

Two­Spirit critique that remembers the trauma of colonization but moves through

and beyond that trauma to insist on a return that unites Mi’kmaq Two­Spirit people

to homelands, history, language, memory, children, and future. While there are

thriving Mi’kmaq communities on the East Coast of the United States and Canada,

Cruz speaks from a place of displacement and — most important — of a “com­

ing back” to Mi’kma’ki (the Mi’kmaq homelands) both literally and through active

engagement with Mi’kmaq history, language, and cultural practices. As a rheto­

ric scholar by training, I can’t help but notice the way Cruz represents Mi’kmaq

modes of transmitting Two­Spirit/queer memory and identity in these drawings:

the wampum belts bordering the pages, the use of the Mi’kmaq writing system,

and the images of Mi’kmaq pottery all ask us to pay attention to Mi’kmaq­specific

traditions for recording and transmitting knowledge. These images (and images

Puo’winue’l Prayers 245

within images) do the kind of rhetorical work that Cherokee scholar Angela Haas

asserts is hypertextual. Haas explains that “wampum belts [functioned as] hyper­

textual technologies — as wampum belts have extended human memories of inher­

ited knowledges through interconnected, nonlinear designs and associative stor­

age and retrieval methods — long before the ‘discovery’ of Western hypertext.”4

Because I am familiar with Cruz’s larger work, I am aware that he works in wam­

pum records and pottery in addition to drawings. So the images here allow us to

experience “transtextual” (with an emphasis on the multiple meanings of trans),

layered, and interconnected knowledges that invoke memories both within and

outside of the frame of the drawings, knowledges deeply rooted in his practice as a

Mi’kmaq Two­Spirit activist­artist.

While the constraints of a bound volume impose a particular linear reading

of these images, there are numerous points of entry into these visual texts. While

alphabetic writing systems require a linear reading that represents one sound at a

time, the Mi’kmaq systems Cruz references and employs enable entire phrases and

ideas to be transmitted simultaneously and nonlinearly. The images here require

an engagement with Mi’kmaq history (including the history of diaspora) and rheto­

ric in order to understand the Mi’kmaq queer and Two­Spirit imaginings that Cruz

is arguing for: a prayer that “offensive things will be said” to disrupt colonial and

heterosexist gender regimes and decolonize Indigenous bodies, minds, spirits, and

homelands.

Elsewhere, Cruz writes:

Basically, our oppression is about being punished on a daily basis for not

being able to conform to colonial/christian expectations of gender and

sexuality. We are pushed out of our families, ceremonies, languages, histo­

ries. Maybe the thinking goes that if we are ignored and made fun of that

we’ll just go away, or at the very least we’ll hate our true selves into non­

existence. Well, we didn’t and we can’t. And though we are often scared,

we are also fierce in refusing to go anywhere except back to the Earth we

came from. We continue to make love, transition our genders, create new

ceremonies with remembered ones. We create. We love.5

“Puo’winue’l Prayers” asks us to remember, to create, to love, to refuse

erasure of our lives at the hands of both colonial and Indigenous communities,

“looking forward while providing testimony to where we have come from.”

— Qwo­Li Driskill

246 GlQ: a Journal oF lesBian and Gay sTudies

notes

1. David L. Schmidt and Murdena Marshall, eds. and trans., Mi’kmaq Hieroglyphic

Prayers: Readings in North America’s First Indigenous Script (Halifax, NS: Nimbus,

1995).

2. In addition to referencing Schmidt and Marshall, Mi’kmaq Hieroglyphic Prayers, the

first image in “Puo’winue’l Prayers,” titled we have come back for our tongues, also

references Tara Prindle, “Native American Technology and Art: Chronology of the

Windsor Pottery Tradition of Native Americans in Southern New England,” 1994,

nativetech.org/pottery/chrono.htm (accessed November 20, 2009).

3. Ralph T. Pastore, “Traditional Mi’kmaq (Micmac) Culture,” Archaeology Unit and

History Department, Memorial University of Newfoundland, 1998, www.heritage

.nf.ca/aboriginal/mikmaq_culture.html (accessed November 23, 2009).

4. Angela M. Haas, “Wampum as Hypertext: An American Indian Intellectual Tradi­

tion of Multimedia Theory and Practice,” Studies in American Indian Literatures 19

(2007): 77.

5. Louis Esme Cruz, “Making Friends In­between,” in “The Prison Justice Issue,” spe­

cial issue, Redwire 10 (2008): 16.

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