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Early Indigenous Literatures

I Cover the Waterfront Triptych

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Queerness at the Waterview Storme Webber’s (Sugpiaq/Black/Choctaw) poem, “I Cover the Waterfront” is an Indigenous retelling of the jazz standard of the same name composed by Johnny Green and Edward Heyman. Based on the queer nightlife that enfolds in the casino on an Indigenous reservation, Webber attends to the sensuality of placemaking by noting the movements, textures, and interactions that produce queerness in Indigenous territory. Webber identifies as a two-spirit person, and much of their work centers on revisiting and creating an archive of Black Indigenous queer experiences in Seattle. While casinos on the reservation typically feature as a locations of capitalist deprivation in popular media that contributes to the high mortality of Indigenous people, Webber provides an alternate imaginary of partying in the casino, in which queerness is not only made available as an out of body experience —“No stories are seen there in the underground, but they are felt” — but inspires self-reflection about the speaker’s Black and Indigenous identity. In their introduction to the Queer Theory and Native Studies issue of Gay and Lesbian Studies Quarterly, Mark Rifkin notes that tribal relation in itself is a queer relation vis-a-vis the liberal state (Rifkin 17). If the tribal relations are inherently queer because of the nature of Indigenous kinship structures, Rifkin warns us that Indigeneity as projected within White Settler fantasies and its eternally infantalized depictions is “insistently queered” (Ibid). Tending to both of these implications of queerness, we can think of the state’s impingement upon Indigenous sovreignty as operating within intimate, sexual terrains that seeks to discipline, control, and surveil divergent and queer sexualities within Indigenous cultures. Reading queerness within and alongside Indigeneity does not safeguard us from liberal exclusion, but it outlines the sexual field within which Indigenous writers, like Webber themselves, negotiate alternate worldmaking possibilities.

Webber begins the narrative poem by indicating that its queer subjects do not abide by the demands of the confessional — “This isn’t a sad story. It isn’t a sad story or happy story or… really, it’s both, all mixed-blood water under the bridge”. Webber further goes on to claim that they reside in the “subspace”, which is a fugitive site of refuge that actively resists the impulse of recognition or representation. Instead, in the chaos of the casino, they are drawn to fleeting images and sounds — “cuban heels”, “cheap thongs”, “steeply angled lights” — that obscure notions of self-identifications through an excessive sensual experience. As Webber goes on to describe the demographics present at the casino, they address the contentious question of Black Indigenous identity by focussing on the “waves of dispossession” and the violent technologies that have historically severed Indigenous forms of relation. Directly referencing the debate around blood quantum, they write: “This is a liminal line and I am always trying to walk it. Like all the ones before, half breeds to the ninth degree of pure blood half breed. It takes a delicate science to blend all these bloods and voyages, mix in the joy and the wailing, and discover how to loft above it all (Webber 1)”. Opting out of the need to explain identification through the science of blood quantum, Webber’s invokes a relation of opacity with history, in which Black Indigenous identity is constituted by, but not entirely subjected to colonialism, enslavement, and settler colonialism. In this vein, Webber’s attempt at place making through the materiality of the text and their memories of the casino acknowledges the inherent fragility and transience of queer refuge; it exists in the “debris” and “ashes” that remain in the aftermath of settler colonialism, anti-blackness, and homophobia.

In the final stanzas, Webber returns to the natural environment that surrounds the casino — the shoreline, rocks, and rolling waves — that remind them of the horror of the middle passage, and the ancestors who fell into, and also chose to walk out of the water. Putting Melanie Yazzie and Cutcha Baldie’s theorization of “waterview” , Webber underlines that forms of “radical relationality” that arise from close proximity to the water are not immune from the violent aquatic associations for Blackness (Yazzie and Baldy 3). Yet, in its ability to flow, change course, stay still, and even dry up, the water evokes ambiguous emotions of joy, sadness, and pleasure, which might just be the traces of a particular form of queer feeling, which enables the alternate lifeworlds of characters like the the “India butch”, who are in union with the Duwamish spirits of Seattle.

The life of Blackness and Indigeneity, in other words, realizes it shared futurity through queerness, such that it is not geared towards identitarian reproductions of each other, but comprehend one’s implication over the other through visions of survivance. Survivance, as Daniel Heath Justice, notes is “about place and presence rather than futures and pasts, and it allows for forgetting and remembering, dying and living, making and destroying, repetition and reiteration” (Justice 20). And the politics of relationality necessarily involves returning to Black and Indigenous relations not as a site of congealing identities, but as a poetic explosion that carries the potential of rupturing colonial conceptions of race, gender, and sexuality through its worldmaking possibilities.