Details

Storyteller: Kai
Tribe: Métis/Sault Ste. Marie Ojibwe
Created: 2018
Location: Minneapolis, MN
Transcript: The Great Lakes are my home. I was born and raised in Green Bay, Wisconsin, a border town on the edge of the Oneida Reservation. Although I attended very white schools, I always saw Native people in my daily life. As a teenager I struggled with my mental health, with my gender and sexuality, and with my family. I always wanted to run away to the big city where I thought I could find other queer and trans people like me. But when I moved to Chicago after high school, it was like culture shock--no one knew anything about Native people, and I no longer saw people who shared my heritage on a daily basis. I didn't even meet another Native person living in Chicago until my second year living there. For some reason, that actually made my identity as a Métis and Ojibwe person even stronger, maybe because I wanted to assert who I was in non-Native spaces. But living without community support took a toll on my mental health, and I felt I had to leave Chicago.

Since moving to Minneapolis, I’ve reconnected with Native community and become even more involved with my language and spirituality. I've realized I don’t have to try hard to be Anishinaabe, I just am. Language has been the biggest influence on my understanding of myself and my culture. I started learning one of my languages, Michif, when I was fourteen, but as a young adult I have been able to spend more time with elders who speak Michif and Ojibwe and it means the world to me. I'm not sure if I believe that there is a worldview you can only access through our languages, but I know that it makes me feel good to speak it knowing my ancestors did too, and that hopefully our descendants will as well. Receiving my spirit name and reclaiming my clan from family history have also made me feel a sense of strength and commitment to understanding my place in the world and my communities. I appreciate the few experiences I have been able to have with ceremony, but I am also increasingly understanding that ceremony is more than a few moments in my life, it is every day.

My identity as a Two-Spirit person is still incredibly important to me. For a long time, I didn't know if I had the "right" to call myself Two-Spirit. I didn't know any of the traditional roles that Métis and Ojibwe Two-Spirit people had. I am still learning, but I call myself Two-Spirit now as a way to recognize that I exist in the context of a long line of Two-Spirit Anishinaabe and Michif people. My experiences can't be limited to a word in the English language. I've started to write as a way to make sense of this journey I've made over the years. Through my writing I am trying to bring to light the historical and present-day experiences of people like me, and I hope that by doing so other Two-Spirit people can find kinship in my words.