Two-spirit, in the simplest sense, is an Indigenous person who is a member of the LGBTQ community.īut Whitehead said his sexual identity is a ‘braiding of two worlds’-his queerness and his culture. As part of the introduction to a recent interview with Whitehead at CBC Radio, the host writes: “When you look for a clear definition of the term ‘two-spirit’ you’ll quickly find that there isn’t one”: You might be wondering what, exactly, that means.

Title in all caps, light yellow, foregrounded and folded among foliage tendrils author name and “Bestselling author of Jonny Appleseed ” appears in gray all-caps font below.Joshua Whitehead is an Oji-Cree Two-Spirit/Indigiqueer from Peguis First Nation (Treaty 1 territory). Intellectually audacious and emotionally compelling, Whitehead shares his devotion to the world in which we live and brilliantly-even joyfully-maps his experience on the land that has shaped stories, histories, and bodies from time immemorial.Ĭover image description: Dark background with tangled foliage folded upon itself and humanized form within. Written in the aftermath of heartbreak, before and during the pandemic, Making Love with the Land illuminates this present moment in which both Indigenous and non-Indigenous people are rediscovering old ways and creating new ones about connection with and responsibility toward each other and the land. Whitehead ruminates on loss and pain without shame or ridicule but rather highlights waypoints for personal transformation. Through this narrative perspective, Making Love with the Land recasts mental health struggles and our complex emotional landscapes from a nefarious parasite on his (and our) well-being to kin, even a relation, no matter what difficulties they present to us. Deeply rooted within, he reaches across the anguish to create a new form of storytelling he calls “biostory”-beyond genre, and entirely sovereign. In prose that is evocative and sensual, unabashedly queer and visceral, raw and autobiographical, Whitehead writes of an Indigenous body in pain, coping with trauma. In Making Love with the Land, his first nonfiction book, Whitehead explores the relationships between body, language, and land through creative essay, memoir, and confession.

The novel Jonny Appleseed established Joshua Whitehead as one of the most exciting and important new literary voices on Turtle Island, winning both a Lambda Literary Award and Canada Reads 2021.

Jonny appleseed whitehead