Hybridity in Joshua Whitehead’s Full Metal Indigiqueer

Abstract

This essay reads Oji-Cree poet Joshua Whitehead’s full metal indigiqueer in relation to hybridity. Whitehead’s poems are both lyrical and experimental, offering a hybrid poetics that resonates with existing critical discussions of hybridity, but he also extends hybrid poetics in new directions through his engagement with posthuman and Indigenous futurism and through his development of Zoa, the hybridized trickster figure who combines the technological and the biological, who features so prominently throughout the collection. Indigiqueerness emerges in these poems as a hybrid identity positioned not only to survive but to thrive in the twenty-first century and beyond.

Joshua Whitehead (Oji–Cree) is a multi-genre writer from Peguis First Nation, Treaty One Territory, in Manitoba, Canada. He is the author of numerous books, including the poetry collection full metal indigiqueer (2017), the novel Jonny Appleseed (2018), and a book of essays titled Making Love with the Land (2022). Whitehead is part of a new generation of Indigenous writers from the lands now occupied by Canada who are engaging with Indigenous identity and decolonial resistance through innovative and often hybrid literary forms. This group includes poets Jordan Abel (Nisga’a), Billy-Ray Belcourt (Cree), Liz Howard (Anishinaabe), Jaye Simpson (Oji–Cree), and Arielle Twist (Cree). Many of these writers identify as queer, Indigiqueer, or Two-Spirit, and all are committed to poetic engagements with gender that are grounded in decolonial resistance and Indigenous sovereignty.

Whitehead himself has done much to popularize the term “Indigiqueer” through his writings, most directly through his poems in full metal indiqiueer but also in his other books, including the recently published Indigiqueerness: A Conversation about Storytelling (Whitehead 2025). Indigiqueer, a portmanteau of “Indigenous” and “queer” signals a hybrid identity in which Indigeneity and queerness are mutually constituted and interconnected. The term was originally coined in 2004 by queer filmmaker T.J. Cuthand, who curated an “Indigequeer” program as part of a Queer Film Festival in Vancouver. Cuthand notes that some queer Indigenous people prefer this term over the more established “Two-Spirit” because it arguably allows for a more fluid approach to gender and sexuality, one that foregrounds Indigeneity while also gesturing to the political subversion of the term “queer” (Cuthand 2017). “Indigiqueer” was further popularized in 2017 with the publication of Whitehead’s (2017) full metal indigiqueer (Talon Books).1 Whitehead identifies as both Indigiqueer and Two-Spirit and elaborates on his use of these terms in the introduction to his edited volume Love After the End: An Anthology of Two Spirit & Indigiqueer Speculative Fiction:

I craft a theory of Indigiqueerness by rejecting queer and LGBT as signposts of my identity, instead relying on the sovereignty of traditional language, such as Two-Spirit, and terminology we craft for ourselves, Indigiqueer. How does queer Indigeneity upset or upend queernesss? Are we queerer than queer? Who defines queerness and under whose banner does it fly? Whose lands is it pocked within?

(Whitehead 2024, pp. 9–10)

Indigiqueer is a hybrid identity distinct from Western formulations of queerness that are rooted in Eurocentric human rights discourses, positing instead a queer identity that is inseparable from decolonial resistance and Indigenous epistemologies. In Making Love With the Land, Whitehead further explains how Two-Spirit identity differs from Western understandings of queerness: “I identify as Two-Spirit, which means much more than simply my sexual preference within Western ways of knowing, but rather that I am queer, femme/iskwewayi, male/nâpew, and situated this way in relation to my homelands and communities.” (Whitehead 2022, p. 38). In his most recent book, Indigiqueerness, he refers to Two-Spirit as “untranslatable and unknowable in English translations” (18). These articulations of Two-Spirit and Indigiqueer identity build on the ideas he first explores in full metal indigiqueer, the collection of poems upon which this essay will primarily focus.

I am interested in the multiple sites of hybridity in Whitehead’s full metal indigiqueer, and in considering what a reading of these poems through the concept of hybridity might illuminate about Whitehead’s poetics, his politics, and the ways in which he articulates and affirms Indigiqueerness in his writing. Hybridity operates in full metal indigiqueer through aesthetic and poetic registers to unsettle the colonial nation, identity, gender, and poetic form and is linked in his writing to other concepts, including Indigenous futurism, the posthuman, and Two Spirit identity.2 Before discussing Whitehead’s poetry in detail, I want to clarify both the possibilities and limitations of reading full metal indigiqueer in relation to existing discussions of hybridity, specifically as this term has developed within the field of postcolonial studies, as well as in a critical discussion of hybrid poetics in (largely) American literary contexts. I contend that, while both of these critical frameworks for understanding hybridity provide possible contexts for Whitehead’s work, his specific poetics of hybridity is distinct from each of them in important ways. Frameworks derived from posthuman theory, I contend, provide a more fruitful framework for understanding Whitehead’s hybrid Indigiqueer poetics. Whitehead deploys concepts derived from posthumanism, as well as the extended metaphors of “web,” “honeycomb,” and “hive”, to articulate and explore his own Indigiqueer hybrid poetics in full metal indigiqueer.

If, as Homi K. Bhabha suggests, hybridity is a sort of transcultural space produced through colonization that challenges cultural hierarchies, then we could potentially draw on this concept to make sense of Whitehead’s poems and their disparate influences. Bhabha describes hybridity as “the sign of the productivity of colonial power, its shifting forces and fixities; it is the name for strategic reversal of the process of domination through disavowal (that is, the production of discriminatory identities that secure the ‘pure’ and original identity of authority)” (112). Hybridity repeats, deforms, and displaces the discriminatory effects of colonial power: “For the colonial hybrid is the articulation of the ambivalent space where the rite of power is enacted on the site of desire, making its objects at once disciplinary and disseminatory—or, in my mixed metaphor, a negative transparency” (Bhabha 1994, p. 112).3 This formulation, while productive for reading some postcolonial texts, is of limited use for a reading of Whitehead’s decolonial poetics. Whitehead articulates Indigiqueerness as a hybrid identity that transcends the colonial-margin-to-center dialectic that informs postcolonial theories of hybridity articulated by Bhabha. Full metal indigiqueer explores Indigiqueer identity as a product of multiple intertextual engagements, including Japanese anime, Indigenous thought, pop music, Hollywood cinema, and the literature of Black, Indigenous, and Asian writers, alongside canonical white texts.4 Notably, this relationship is not simply one of colonial margin to colonial center. Rather, it is one of multiple global and local influences. Moreover, Whitehead is not articulating a “Third Space” or liminal space between the cultures of colonizer and colonized (Kuortti and Nyman 2007, p. 8) but is instead articulating more of a web-like set of cultural and linguistic influences.

When hybridity is invoked by literary critics in relation to poetry, the term is often used to describe the work of a generation of American poets who began writing after the “poetry wars” of the 1980s and 1990s and who reject the schism between lyric and experimental poetic modalities and the attendant splits into the dueling factions, such as neo-Romantic versus Modernist or lyric versus language, that characterized American poetry throughout much of the twentieth century. In the 2009 anthology American Hybrid, the editors Cole Swenson and David St. John (Swenson and St. John 2009) situate hybrid poetics as poetry that inherits aspects from both traditions and note that “hybrid poems often honor the avant-garde mandate to renew the forms and expand the boundaries of poetry—thereby increasing the expressive potential of language itself—while also remaining committed to the emotional spectrum of lived experience. As different as these two goals might seem, they’re both essentially social in nature and recognize a social obligation—and as such, they demonstrate poetry’s continued relevance” (qtd. In Gallaher 2009).5 As a poet considerably younger than those whose work is reprinted in American Hybrid, Whitehead began writing well after the debates about the relative merits of lyric poetry and language poetry, and he was not particularly marked by these discussions. Moreover, as an Indigenous writer, he does not position himself as affiliated with white-dominated poetry movements or nation states, nor does he necessarily pay them much heed. Whitehead’s particular style of hybrid poetics stems less from an affiliation with American hybrid poetic movements and more from an interest in articulating a poetics rooted in decolonial politics and Indigiqueer identity.

Whitehead lives and writes in Canada, where the aesthetic divisions between lyric and language were arguably less pronounced than they were in the United States. It is important to note that critical discussions of a poetics of hybridity in Canada unfolded along slightly different lines than in the United States. In Canada, debates about poetry and hybridity focused primarily on questions of hybrid identity. Fred Wah, a Canadian poet of mixed Chinese and European descent, offers an important articulation of hybrid identity and Canadian poetics in his book Faking it: Poetics and Hybridity. Wah is particularly interested in the hyphen as both a mark of punctuation and a sign of the implicit ambivalence of hybridity (73). He notes the possibilities that arise at the intersection of hybrid racial or ethnic identity and poetic experimentation. He argues that writers of hybridity must “develop instruments of disturbance, dislocation, and displacement” in which the presence of the hyphen is not glossed over or erased but rather is made audible and visible. Drawing on Bhabha’s notion of hybridity, Wah argues that the hyphen can assert pressure on “the master narratives of duality, multiculturalism, and apartheid” and creates a “volatile space that is inhabited by a wide range of bodies” (74). For Wah, the “contradictions, paradoxes, and assumptions active at the hyphen, all indicate a position and a process that are central to any poetics of opposition (feminist, sexual, racial)” (90). Wah’s (2000) formulation of hybridity offers a potentially more useful framework for thinking about the various kinds of hyphenated identities at work in Whitehead’s poetry, which arguably enact formal, identitarian, and political versions of the disturbance, dislocation, and displacement of which Wah speaks.

Specifically, Whitehead is interested in articulating a hybrid Indigiqueer subject position that exists in tension with predominantly white gay frameworks that are rooted in homonormative, assimilationist values tied to liberalism and capitalism (Duggan 2003, p. 50). In a poem about engaging in gay sex with a closeted man on the reserve, he writes: “I am the liberal project for a happy-hour experiment” (75) and in another poem that addresses Indigiqueer identity and in/visibility he writes: “I exist as spiders in the live[r]s of men/because their bellies are full of words like: liberalism.” (90) Liberalism is again invoked a few pages later when he writes about white lovers exoticizing his Indigenous identity; he refers to this as a manifestation of “lumbersexual hipster liberalism/dreaming of the fur trade” (96). The poems in full metal indiqueer speak to the complexities of navigating a variety of spaces—the city, the reserve, the gay bar, the university—as a young queer Indigenous man. He is called upon to perform his Indigiqueer identity in these spaces in ways that replicate and extend colonial dynamics and heteropatriarchal violence. The poems enact a kind of working out of his own hybrid identity as he navigates and questions these contexts.

Poetic hybridity is also enacted in these poems on the page through formal poetic experimentation, most notably through the figure of “Zoa,” who features prominently in many of the poems in this collection. The description on the book’s back cover describes Zoa as a “hybridized queer trickster” who “brings together the organic (the protozoan) and the technologic (the binaric) to re-member and re-beautify queer indigeneity.” Zoa is not a conventional lyric “I” speaker, although they are a continuous presence throughout many of the poems in the book. As a sort of posthuman trickster virus, Zoa infects the literary canon and pop culture, decolonizing these references to center an Indigiqueer presence but also disrupting the lyric impulse of these poems. Zoa infects and mutates colonial language, warping and distorting recognizable lines from Hollywood movies and canonical literary texts. Hybridity manifests through Zoa in at least four different ways: the hybridity of the biological and the technological, which converge within the figure of Zoa; hybrid gender (Zoa is neither male or female); formal hybridity (Zoa acts as an agent that combines a lyric impulse and a sort of disjunctive glitchiness); and a cultural hybridity as Zoa brings together disparate cultural and textual influences. Zoa surfaces in poems throughout the collection, although they are not a constant presence in every poem. When they are present, they tend to disrupt conventions of readability, inserting glitches that manifest as computer code into otherwise readable text.

Zoa is closely linked to the book’s articulation of Indigenous futurism, a concept that is also manifested through a persistent interest in this collection in exploring Indigiqueer identity through and in relation to the technological and the posthuman. The term Indigenous futurism was coined by Grace Dillon in her book Walking the Clouds: An Anthology of Indigenous Science Fiction (Dillon 2012) and builds on the more established concept of Afrofuturism. Indigenous futurism involves “recovering ancestral traditions in order to adapt in our post-Native Apocalypse world” (10). Dillon uses this term primarily to refer to fiction, but Whitehead’s book opens up new possibilities for Indigenous futurist poetics.6

The book begins with Zoa’s “birthing sequence,” which is dramatized in the first few poems in the collection, rendered through the poetic appropriation of the language of computer coding and the statement “H3R14M” or “here I am,” announcing Zoa’s presence. Lydia R. Cooper (2019) has argued that Zoa emerges in these pages as a specifically “Anishinaabe being, an identity already coded in patterns of relationality, reciprocity, and kinship” (491) and further shows how Zoa’s digital existence liberates them from the “artificial boundaries imposed by … colonial spaces without damaging or delimiting their essential queerness, Indigeneity, and most importantly, their capacity to be (as a singularity) and to represent (as an idea) sovereign spaces, nations, and persons.” (492).

In Making Love with the Land, Whitehead further elaborates on the role of Zoa in his own understanding of Indigiqueer identity:

I take a cue from my Two-Spirit cybernetic trickster, Zoa, and learn to re-augment my body: transgressive, punk, Indigiqueer. … If Indigeneity is a vanishing act, it’s one we’ve perfected to ghost ourselves into the future …Here I am attaching those loosened minerals to my skin to emerge a diamond-crusted NDN, full-metal and vicious in the light. I am not a whole thing, I am a web of fractures living in my brokenness; web-like okimâw apihkêsîs trickster spider who spun the original world-wide-web, all sticky with feeling and smooth as a weathered pebble.

(36–37)

Zoa is an agent of hybridity, a cyborg trickster who unsettles bodies, genders, and language. Whitehead references Donna Haraway’s essay “A Cyborg Manifesto” as part of the inspiration for Zoa (Talon Books). Haraway describes the cyborg as a “hybrid of machine and organism” (149) and “a creature in a post-gender world” (150). Indigenous cyborgs employ writing as an act of survival in the face of colonial genocide: “Cyborg writing is about the power to survive, not on the basis of original innocence, but on the basis of seizing the tools to mark the world that marked them as other” (Haraway 1991, p. 175).

Whitehead takes inspiration from Haraway’s strategy of cyborg writing. He plunders Western literary and popular culture and draws on Indigenous and decolonial methodologies to enact a hybrid poetics that is grounded in multiple cultural contexts and forms. In addition to the literary figures on whom he draws (which include Edmund Spencer, Charles Dickens, John Milton, Zora Neale Hurston, Toni Morrison, and Sylvia Plath, among others), Whitehead names many contemporary theorists as inspiration for his poetry, including Indigenous thinkers like Daniel Heath Justice, Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, and Tanya Tagaq. He also references celebrities, including Lana Del Rey, Rihanna, Justin Bieber, RuPaul, and Donna Summer; episodes of Seinfeld and Roseanne; the gay hook-up app Grindr; and elements of Japanese culture, including Katsuhiro Otomo’s Akira7 and Takayuki Tatsumi’s (2006) Full Metal Apache: Transactions Between Cyberpunk Japan and Avant-Pop America. The disparate influences can be read in part as a record of the texts and influences Whitehead himself was probably encountering while he wrote these poems in the 2010s as a university student studying literature, a young Indigiqueer person, and a consumer of various forms of popular culture.

Whitehead’s poem “The Fa-[ted] Queene, an Ipic P.M.” illustrates the specific kind of hybrid poetics at work in this collection of poems. The poem reworks Spencer’s “The Faerie Queene,” rendering Spencer’s poem only partially recognizable. The first two lines in Whitehead’s poem echo Spencer’s, but Zoa soon begins to infect and invade the poem. The opening lines read:

• A Gentle Knight was pricking on the plaine,
• Ycladd in mightie armes & siluer shield
• Where 1n: ::: :old::dints : : of d: :ee::p::e::w::0u:n:d: ::s:d1d:r: : :: e: ::m: :: :: a: :: :I: :::
• :n:e: :: : :: :: : : :: :: :: :: :: : :: : ::: :::: : ::: :: ::: :::[instealing software]:: :: :: :::: : :: :: ::: : : ::
• :press: :: : :: :: : : :: :: :: :: ::: ::::: : ::: :: ::: :::[instealing…] : :: :: :: : ::[instealing…]: :: :: :::: (43) 8

Once Zoa is “instealed” in the poem (puns like “instealed” are themselves a manifestation of a hybridized language), their presence begins to disrupt Spencer’s lines:

• I am the red crosse knight
• patr0n of true ho11 ness
• Thank you :: spenser: :::
• For m0u 1ng me to westerne sh[or]e (43)

Reading the poem alongside “The Faerie Queene,” one can easily identify sections from Spencer’s poem transposed in Whitehead’s. When I teach this poem, I bring “The Faerie Queene” into the classroom, and we trace Whitehead’s departures from Spencer’s text. One thing that becomes apparent when reading these texts side by side is that Whitehead does not simply rewrite Spencer’s lines. Rather, Zoa infiltrates, ruptures, and “insteals” this canonical work of Western literature, as well as its attendant understandings of gender, sexuality, and Western understandings of selfhood. As a shapeshifting trickster, Zoa becomes the Redcrosse Knight, a figure who is commonly understood in Spencer’s poem as an allegory for Christianity, and in the process, the poem queers and decolonizes “The Faerie Queene” and its Christian undertones. Whitehead invites readers to link this allegorical Christian knight to the role of Christianity in the colonization and Canada, and in particular, Residential Schools. These schools were run by Catholic, Anglican, and United Churches and were in operation in Canada until the late twentieth century. Indigenous children were forcibly removed from their families and sent to these boarding schools, where they were stripped of their traditional language, teachings, and culture, and frequently subjected to physical and sexual abuse (Menzies 2020). The traumatic effects of Residential Schools are still felt today within Indigenous communities across Canada. The imposition of Christianity on Indigenous communities also led to the marginalization and persecution of Two-Spirit people, who had been widely accepted and even honored in Indigenous communities prior to colonial contact (Thurston n.d.).

Zoa appropriates the identity of the Redcrosse Knight as a way to decolonize the poem by inserting a Two-Spirit and Indigiqueer presence.

Whitehead writes:

• i am zoa
• halfe like a man the other halfe
• did womans shape retaine
• i am the thing that nightmares are made of
• when you dream of guilt
• youll see me
• riddled in wildernesse wetdreams of shame
• I am the indigenous boegeyman
• You should fear me
• I am the most lothsom, filthie, foule
• & full of vile distaine
• Did you not see me in jeckyl & at oka [questionmark]
• In the bones of chief Teresa spence
• You cannot kill me red crosse
• I haue timely pride about the ndn vale
• (43–44)

Zoa is transgressive and erotic, an object of both fear and desire, infecting and rewriting Spencer’s poem and pushing back against the Christian messages that underscore “The Faerie Queene,” and more generally, the ways in which Christian colonial ideologies have harmed Indigenous communities. The poem enacts what Homi K. Bhabha, in his discussion of postcolonial hybridity, refers to as the subversive recasting of discriminatory identity in order to deform and displace colonial texts (112). Zoa poses a threat to the colonial order, Christian missionary values, normative sex and gender roles, and hierarchies of literary value. Zoa also implies their presence at Oka9 and in the bones of Chief Teresa Spence10, suggesting their strong ties to Indigenous sovereignty movements. As a figure who brings together the organic and the technologic, Zoa resonates with posthuman theories in which the subject is understood as profoundly inter-implicated within the ecological and technological networks through and in which it exists and is sustained (Braidotti 2013, p. 190).

In several of the poems in the book, Whitehead employs organic metaphors of the “web,” the “hive”, and the “honeycomb,” as a way of further articulating a hybrid Indigenous identity that spans the biological and the technological. Whitehead’s poem “The Hive” employs a web metaphor to explore Indigiqueer identity as hybrid and multifaceted. While the overt presence of Zoa as an Indigiqueer trickster figure is absent from this poem (and “The Hive” does not contain any of the glitchy coding disruptions that seem to signify Zoa’s presence elsewhere in the book), Whitehead begins by invoking two trickster figures: Iktomi (a Lakota spider-trickster figure) and Nanabozho (a shapeshifting Cree trickster figure who appears as a hare, a coyote, and a raven in different Indigenous teachings):11

• iktomi spun this web for me
• nanabozho polished it bright
• ive take a cue from kardashian
• i broke the internet to make this reznet
• we are all here, live
• logging in|jacking off (109)

The web that Iktomi spins references both a spider web and the Internet (sometimes referred to colloquially as “the web”), suggesting that cyberspace is the domain (reznet) of Indigenous tricksters. “Web” also indicates the intricate network of cultural references upon which this poem and others in the collection are built. Directly after invoking these trickster figures, Whitehead cites “Kardashian,” and although he does not tell us which Kardashian, the reference braids pop culture and Indigenous culture together, challenging the assumption that Indigenous identity is disconnected from technology and popular culture. The poem then proceeds to invoke iconic lines from famous movies, including “Nightmare on Elm Street,” “Titanic,” and “Edward Scissorhands,” along with lyrics from pop songs, including “I Think We’re Alone Now.” These intertextual references come one after the other with no context offered, but they further situate the poem in relation to popular culture, and in particular, Hollywood entertainment. The tone of the poem then shifts as Whitehead writes:

• When you lift my mask
• You reveal the face of the bogeyman
• Here I’m tanya tagaq
• Here I’m penny [nonethe]wise[r]
• Here I’m freddy kruger (109)

Whitehead groups Tanya Tagaq (an Innu throat singer and writer) with two well-known cinematic horror villains.12 While this might seem like an odd grouping, Tagaq’s music is often associated with gothic and horror tropes, which she utilizes to explore themes of trauma and colonial violence. Grouping these three figures in this way establishes a link between the horror genre and the horror of colonial violence; one of the roles of the trickster figure in Whitehead’s poetry is to expose this violence and explore its legacies. The poem then moves to more concrete images of the horrors of colonial violence: Child and Family Services apprehending Indigenous babies, the spread of disease through colonial contact, and the displacement of people from their traditional land.

The speaker of the poem is situated in a sort of technospace—the “web” or “hive” created by the trickster figures at the outset of the poem: “here im you asking me to see you/I watch from my hub/downloadingencodingencroaching/see our warrior men & white men alike” (109). The poem continues:

• this is the hive ive created
• where were all plugged in
• not competing or comparing
• but saying I love you in decolonial tongues (109)

And a few lines later:

• this is the new hive
• where we regenerate, rejuvenate, resurge, revive
• this is hypercyberrezsphere
• where decolonialism has a chance
• where survivance rests its head (110)

Words like “hypercyberrezsphere” (a hybrid linguistic creation) function as an articulation of Indigenous futurism because it locates the Rez (or Reservation) as a techno-utopian space of decolonization.

The poem calls for Indigenous communities to move away from the “danger” of “only protect[ing] (pro)creation stories” (109) and the need to incorporate queerness into Indigenous cultures as an act of decolonization. The poem’s closing lines call for a kind of unity and celebration of hybridity:

• indigeneity can encompass so much more
• complete, so much more
• if we interject, intersect, interlay
• not compete nor compare
• share, grow together sideways
• woven together like kokums hair
• braided, queer & punk
• channeling our minds
• like a honeycomb
• to bind, break, reclaim
• reject the greedy fingers
• of settler colonialism (110)

“The Hive” ends with a push for an inclusive form of indigenous identity that encompasses queer and punk through and alongside Indigenous traditions “braided” or “woven” together (110). The poem advocates an Indigiqueer punk futurism, one that is connected to tradition and technology, Indigenous teachings, nature, and Hollywood movies, and that weaves these features together to articulate a hybrid and intertextually situated identity.

Like “The Hive,” the closing poem of the collection, “Full Metal Oji-Cree” further develops the notion of Indigenous futurisms through the metaphor of the hive.13 “Web,” “honeycomb,” and “hive,” are metaphors drawn from the animal world. On a literal level, they reference intricate habitats that living organisms construct for themselves. On a metaphorical level, they suggest hybrid and multiple subjectivities that bring together the biological and the technological. Whitehead writes,

• this is the hive
• mind, you, I am calling you—
• i am calling all freaks like me who like freaks like me
• robotics have always been poc
• : : :: ::kateta tesuo: :: :nice2meetu: :::: I am Kanada post-conciliaion
• from scrapyard apaches
• fieldwork black cybernetics
• weve all coalesced, convened, intersected, interwoven
• we are growing sideways, queer & braided
• what kind of bodies can be cybernetic [questionmark]
• i asked molly milliions, abelard lindsay, motoko kusanagi
• i asked harriet e. Wilson & sojourner truth
• I asked william apes, I asked zitkála-šá
• I asked yung wing, Bulosan, salt fish girl
• I asked joaquin murietta, maria ruiz de burton
• Ii asked sapphire, grace dillon, junot diaz (112)

The passage begins by invoking the “hive/mind” (Internet slang for the kind of collective consciousness that exists in online spaces and to whom social media posters frequently ask questions). He posits these writers and literary figures as a sort of hivemind, to whom he poses the question “what kinds of bodies can be cybernetic” (110). He asks characters from cyberpunk novels and films, Indigenous writers, and other non-white writers, challenging established hierarchies of literary value, race, and gender that are steeped in settler–colonial and racist ideologies. By bringing into his poem as interlocutors historical and contemporary Black literary figures like Harriet E. Wilson, Sojourner Truth, William Apes, and Sapphire, as well as historical Indigenous literary figures like zitkála-šá, Whitehead invokes important racialized literary lineages. References to Latinx and Asian writers and texts further broaden the poem’s intertextual universe. Whitehead situates cybernetics as part of Black, Indigenous, and Asian cultures, bringing together a wide range of historical and literary figures in this poem in response to his question. Importantly, the hybrid relations explored here are a kind of hive created through careful reading of racialized writers in order to explore and celebrate Indigenous futurism and Indigiqueer identity as sustained and nourished through reciprocal relations that are “intersected, interwoven/… growing sideways, queer & braided” (112).

Whitehead invites us to read his poetry through the concept of the posthuman; he references scholars of the posthuman, including N. Katherine Hayles and Rosi Braidotti, within his own poems and essays, and in “Full Metal Oji-Cree,” he claims that “the posthuman is innately NDN” (113). The posthuman is a hybrid subject position because it challenges the divisions between human, machine, and animal and poses a challenge to the “Eurocentric paradigm [that] implies the dialectics of self and other, and the binary logic of identity and otherness as respectively the motor for the cultural logics of universal Humanism” (Braidotti 2013, p. 15). The Humanist ideal is implicitly aligned with European Enlightenment thinking and all its colonial trappings, whereby the “human” subject is understood as white, male, and able bodied (to the exclusion of all women and non-binary people, non-white men, and people with disabilities) and is seen as not only separate from and superior to the material world but also entitled to endlessly extract its resources. In contrast, posthuman theory seeks to challenge the anthropocentrism, racism, and misogyny inherent in much Humanist thought (Braidotti 2022, p. 20). Whitehead’s adoption of the posthuman as a productive site for Indigiqueer identity is closely linked to his overarching interest in articulating Indigiqueerness as distinct from, and in tension with, white gay discourses that are rooted in liberal frameworks of inclusion and homonormativity.

Like hybridity, posthumanism is a contested concept within the fields of Indigenous studies and post-colonial studies. The concept of posthumanism has come under criticism from some Indigenous scholars, who have noted the tendency of posthuman theory and related concepts like object-oriented ontology and new materialism to “reproduce colonial ways of knowing” (Sandberg 2014) and fail to properly credit Indigenous understandings of the agency of the natural world (Todd 2016). On the other hand, Rosi Braidotti has noted the productive convergences between Indigenous thought and posthuman subjectivity, noting that the distinction between human and nonhuman has been one of the cornerstones of European thought since the Enlightenment, and arguing that there is much for settler scholars to learn from Indigenous cosmologies and epistemologies about challenging this distinction (Braidotti 2022, p. 7). For Whitehead, the posthuman proves to be a fruitful line of thinking, in part because he understands his own work as part of a wave of recent Indigenous futurist texts. In “Full Metal Oji-Cree,” Whitehead utilizes posthumanism to articulate an Indigenous identity that is at once future-oriented and grounded in Indigenous culture, and that actively displaces colonial ideologies:

• There’s no room for white superiority in indigeneity
• We were surviving
• We are surviving
• Ive nullified your terra myths (112)

Whitehead engages with poetic word play to revise the term “terra nullius, which literally means “territory without a master” and was used in international law to describe land deemed “empty” and, thus, available for colonization; the poem “nullifies” the colonial myths through which land theft was enacted. Two lines later, the speaker describes himself as “terrae filius” (113) which translates as “son of soil” and connotes a person of lowly birth. At Oxford University, the term “terrae filius” refers to a student appointed to deliver a satirical oration, which could suggest that Whitehead is inviting us to read Zoa as a kind of satirical orator who is enacting a social commentary or critique in the process of inhabiting and redeploying colonial texts.

He then refers to himself as terra full[ofus] as a way of countering the colonial assumption that the lands claimed by Canada were empty lands available for resource extraction and colonization. He references “robomocassins” and “technobeadwork” (113) as hybrid manifestations of technology and Indigenous culture. He ends the poem (and the book) by asserting Indigenous identity as posthuman (113) and insisting on Indigenous cultural resurgence through a reference to Sylvia Plath’s “Lady Lazarus”: “so fuck you/well survive this too/like the cat ive nine times to die” (113). The final lines of the poem (and the book) read:

• ive outlived colonial virology
• slayed zombie imperialism
• us ndns sure are some badass biopunks
• wearesurvivingthrivingdyingtogetitright (113)

These concluding lines serve as a kind of rallying cry for Indigiqueer resiliency through embracing both technology and cultural tradition. The poem is celebratory, defiant, and fierce. Whitehead’s reference to the posthuman in this poem resonates with his use of Zoa as a cyberpunk trickster figure throughout the collection, and indeed the posthuman offers a way of thinking about subjectivity as constituted through both the animal and the technological—or to borrow the terms Whithead himself uses to describe Zoa—to the protozoan and the binaric.

Full metal indigiqueer engages with hybridity in order to affirm and celebrate queer Indigeneity, positioning Indigiqueerness itself as a hybrid identity that moves beyond the kind of colonial-margin-to-center dialectic that informs postcolonial theories of hybridity, and that instead explores cultural, technological, and poetic hybridity in relation to organic metaphors such as web, hive, and honeycomb. Specifically, Whitehead utilizes a poetics of hybridity to explore an Indigiqueer identity that builds on traditional Indigenous thought and extends these concepts into technological and cybernetic domains. He challenges white liberal gay discourse and, in the process, explores ways of enacting queerness that are decolonial and antiracist. Although many of these poems distinctly and pointedly unsettle colonial discourses, they also explore the relationship between Indigiqueer culture and Japanese culture, Black culture, and other cultural domains. These poems are both lyrical and experimental, offering a hybrid poetics that resonates with critical discussions of hybrid poetics, but Whitehead also extends hybrid poetics in new directions. In so doing, Indigiqueerness emerges in these poems as a hybrid identity positioned not only to survive but to thrive in the twenty-first century and beyond.