Global Online Conversation
Indigenous Futurism in Drag

Saturday, October 30

3:00 – 5:00pm MST

• Pre-recorded and streamed

Join Indigenous Drag artists Stone Motherless Cold (Arrernte), Cerulean (Meriam), Mora Money (Wiradjuri), and Rose Mary (Atayal/泰雅) in a conversation that explores the future of drag as its past. Curated and facilitated by Oyana (Haitian-American)

Pretext:
This conversation is inspired by the life and work of William Dorsey Swann (c. 1858 – 1925). Swann was a queer Black-American born into slavery, an American queer liberation activist, the leader of a queer resistance group, and the first known person to self-identify as “The Queen of Drag”. There is ample evidence to support the existence of Indigenous LGBT+ culture that predates colonial invasion. Thus, it is a sound argument to make that the drag culture that originated in the USA was a recontextualization of a continuum of indigenous queer rituals expressing themselves during an ongoing colonial invasion. The legacy of drag balls and drag culture is deeply enriched with queer Black and Indigenous liberation and empowerment.

Context:
This cultural legacy has shifted into the mainstream and has been subjugated into a colonized, reappropriated, and gentrified product to feed an ongoing capitalistic invasion of Indigenous lands. These invasions have enforced a pejorative narrative of non-binary gender and sexuality to justify a system that steals land, bodies, and culture.

The contemporary pop culture of drag has been brought to the global limelight by RuPaul’s drag race: however, the cost has been the erasure of this cultures’ origins. An origin that is rooted in the legacy of Black and Indigenous queer resistance to western colonial paradigms.

This panel will dissect the layers of the biospheric impact of a black and indigenous American queer liberation art form on indigenous communities outside of Turtle Island. Seeking to answer an urgent and pressing question: “ How do Bla(c)k and Indigenous queer people outside of Turtle Island see and represent themselves in the queer liberation artform of Drag?”