Talking Jonny Appleseed
Jonny Appleseed has been travelling with Joshua Whitehead for years. When Whitehead — an Oji-Cree, two-spirit storyteller from the Peguis First Nation in Manitoba — was18, he wanted to write a novel about a group of Indigenous teens that would capture the reality of youth culture in Manitoba: a Go Ask Alice or The Outsiders for a new generation.
Although his idea didn’t materialize, the character of Jonny Appleseed did emerge; first in a short story, then in a novella, and now as the star of Whitehead’s debut novel published by Vancouver’s Arsenal Pulp Press.
Jonny Appleseed follows the titular character, a two-spirit Indigiqueer young man who leaves the rez for Winnipeg where he ekes out a living as a webcam boy or “NDN glitter princess” with an arsenal of costumes and identities.
The book is framed around Jonny’s return home for his stepfather’s funeral, weaving together coming-of-age stories of family and kinship, love and lust.
It’s raw, occasionally violent, with ample blood, vomit and other bodily fluids. There’s plenty of sex, but there’s tenderness, too.
Jonny Appleseed is marketed to adults, though Whitehead — who is completing his PhD in Indigenous Literatures and Cultures at the University of Calgary, where he teaches a course on children’s literature — wrote the book for a young adult audience. (Arsenal Pulp also published Raziel Reid’s 2014 explicit YA novel Everything Feels Like the Movies, which became a target for conservative activists after it won a Governor General’s Literary Award).
Whitehead understands that Jonny’s experiences may be too much for some readers.
“I think the idea of being sexpositive, of representing the livelihoods and the traumas — especially of Indigenous or people of colour, or queer, and any intersections between them — becomes, for some people, really fraught or horrifying,” he says.
“Indigenous sexualities, gender and sexes are so taboo right now because they’re so traumatized by residential schools. If you read any residential school narratives, there’s the idea of a demonized queer sexuality brought upon by concepts of sex and religion, and attitudes.”
full-metal indigiqueer, Whitehead’s genre-busting 2017 debut poetry collection, re-envisioned a trickster character named Zoa who imitates icons such as RuPaul and Lana Del Ray as a way of decolonizing Indigiqueer life.
Jonny Appleseed also threads in pop culture, from the TV show Queer as Folk to Dan Savage’s It Gets Better initiative.
When he was younger, Whitehead appreciated the roles those touchstones played in his life, but now views them through a different lens.
“If you say the word ‘queerness’ now, it always signals this idea of whiteness, especially of white cis males, shirtless, dancing at Pride festivals that are so heavily vested in corporations,” he says. “For me, it was important to remove Indigenous queerness.”
In March, full-metal indigiqueer was nominated in the Trans Poetry category for a Lambda Literary Award, one of the most prestigious prizes for LGBTQ–authored books.
The definition of two-spirit varies between nations, languages and individuals, and can encompass a variety of Western concepts of gender-variance and sexual identity.
“When non-Indigenous people Google what two-spirit means, they think you have these two feminine and masculine spirits, and it becomes this really condensed web of meaning,” Whitehead says.
“It’s something that is totally engrained to a body, and to the nation. It’s thinking of the land as body, too.”
The two-spirit term is often used incorrectly as a direct substitute for trans identity, which is why, in a beautifully penned letter that went viral on social media, Whitehead turned down the nomination.
“Pulling out of the Lamdba was super important as it wasn’t my space to take,” he says.
“The trans category is fairly new, and for me to take that spot didn’t feel right. But with the publication of the letter, I do think it’s broadened the minds of what two-spirit entails. I think it’s opening up a larger conversation.”