Queering Indigeneity

“A straight white guy walks into a queer Indigenous show” feels like it might be a setup to a comedy riff, or maybe, in these fraught times, a breaking news push notification for some new indignity, degradation, or atrocity. This year we have already had Minnesota’s own Pete Hegseth pronouncing that the soldiers who participated in the massacre at Wounded Knee will keep their Medals of Honor, after a review that would have stripped recognition away from soldiers who slaughtered 150-300 Lakota people in 1890. “History is settled,” Hegseth said, which is what someone says when they don’t know anything about history.

Reclaiming history, celebrating presence in the present, and opening up new futures is at the heart of the Minnesota Museum of American Art’s new exhibit, Queering Indigeneity. With an opening celebration on Saturday, October 11, the show runs through August 2026 in the M’s Nancy and John Lindahl Gallery, a long stretch for a show that began planning in 2023. In that year, the M began a partnership with Penny Kagigebi for a “multi-year, multi-generational project that celebrates the vision and diversity of 2-Spirit, Native queer, gender expansive artists in the Upper Midwest,” according to press materials.

 

Niibawi Ajijaak (Standing Crane), A community without Two Spirits, 2023, Vinyl text installation. Image courtesy of the Minnesota Museum of American Art.

 

The materials also go on to note that the focus of the partnership with Kagibegi and the 16 participating artists in the show emphasized “opportunities for intergenerational transfer of knowledge and artmaking, such that community is nurtured among artists, and sustaining mentorships develop.” That community is front and center before you even enter the gallery, highlighted by Sharon Day’s installation Tree of Peace, a tree trunk made of driftwood from Gitchi Gami (Lake Superior) that fills the atrium of the museum, festooned with handmade messages as leaves. Day notes in her wall text, “Since I am queer, and many of my friends also are, there are messages to love ourselves and respect each other. We are all part of the tree of life.”

Immediately on entry into the gallery is a large patchwork quilt in a star motif by Madeline Treuer. Desert Twilight is an intricate example of reuse and creativity with materials at hand, in conversation with quilting as a creative act across cultures and generations. Treuer is also the co-creator of the web series Ojibwe Word of the Day, along with her father, the Ojibwe scholar Anton Treuer. That educational focus carries on around the corner in the gallery, where a video projector plays a loop of Instagram reels from the artist Giiwedin, whose Instagram account, @giiwedinindizhinikaaz, has over 216K followers. The videos are conversational, instructional about queer Native identity, the history of boarding schools and evolution of language, and Giiwedin’s own creative practice in visual arts, food, and fashion.

 

Madeline Treuer (White Earth Band Ojibwe, "Desert Twilight" 2025 Twilight, courtesy of the Minnesota Museum of American Art

 

In one video, Giiwedin quips that “People all throughout history have been on their high horses trying to colonize,” and past and current pain is a throughline of Queering Indigeneity. Taking up one far wall of the exhibit is a poem by Niibawi Ajijaak, A Community without Two Spirits, which references nuns taking away children at boarding schools and exclusion of Two Spirit individuals, and the loss that accompanied cutting out a part of a community:

 

Brother said, “That’s when their medicine left forever.

Solutions became less clever.

Inclusion was close to never.

And with them went soldiers for language, warriors for peace.”

 

The text wraps around a collection of Kagigebi’s own birchbark and porcupine quill vessels, baskets, and canisters, taking traditional arts and practice and updating it with contemporary queer motifs of hearts and rainbows. Cetanzi Nick Metcalf also addresses this separation from a more individual perspective. Their poem The ache in this body, is installed on a wall and across a mirror, including the text:

 

I live in this body

It has embodies me so far in this lifetime

I am making peace with it.

 

The poem is surrounded by surrounded by a Two Spirit photo wall, a salon-style collection of 35 photos of Two Spirit and queer community members, many of whom are also artists represented in the show, with the clear interplay of connection, support, and the necessity of community in individual healing.

 

Image courtesy of Carl Aitya Swanson

 

That healing is named as the focal point in one of the most striking pieces in the show. Awanigiizhik Bruce, along with Dayna Decoteau-Dyess, created the wall-sized photo mural Niizhoomanidoowag manidokewining, aaniish naa izhi-noojimo’idizowaad? (How do they heal themselves in a Two-Spirit ceremony?) In a black and white composite image, embellished with touches of red and blue, Bruce puts themselves on a blanket in the center of a group of people, each of whom are also Bruce, in costume and regalia as leaders, healing women, and other helpers. 

 

The technique of costume and disguise for exploring identity and self-mythologizing has a long history in contemporary photography (see Cindy Sherman, Carrie Mae Weems, Jeff Koons) and Bruce plays with that history, as does Ryan Young, whose work is on the opposite side of the wall uses projectors to shroud and abstract his subjects.

 

Detail of Safe Space, 2018, Vinyl text installation by Ryan Young (Lac du Flambeau Ojibwe). Image courtesy of Carl Atiya Swanson.

 

A pair of black and white photographs show a figure in deep shadow with projected text – a chart of fractions in Blood Quantum is a Heterosexual Construct, and the repeated title phrase in the other, My Gender is Indigenous. Above the photographs is the text installation Safe Space:

 

Every room I walk into

Becomes a Queer space

Becomes an Indigenous space

Becomes a Two Spirit space

 

Across from Young’s work are Delia Touché’s playful, pointed mixed media abstractions and illustrations, playing with traditional crafts and arts components – quills, ribbons, jingle dress bells – to create contemporary pop-inspired meditations on memory and identity. Buffalo and eight-pointed stars live alongside Power Rangers, dinosaur skulls, and polaroids, a reminder that the past is not just a distant past, but a personal connection and recollection that exists in real time.

 

Delia Touché (Spirit Lake Nation) Dinosaur Oyate, triptych, 2025, Dinosaur Oyate (Blue), Dinosaur Oyate (Leader), Dinosaur Oyate (Pink), Screen print, porcupine quills, birchbark, horse hair, and seed beads, dentalium, moose hide. Image courtesy of the Minnesota Museum of American Art. 

 

There is more to see in Queering Indigeneity, and for an audience with an intention to seek to learn and understand, one that should reward multiple visits and engagements. That is especially the case if taken with the M's collection as a whole for more Native perspectives and practices. There is a room full of George Morrison’s sculptures and works on paper, Frank Big Bear’s sprawling and enthralling collaged portrait of the American Indian Movement, the sly photography of Cara Romero across from the ceramics of Maria Martinez, Jeffrey Gibson’s geometric pop punch, two giant canvasses from Rabbett Before Horses Strickland and Jim Denomie that play with identity, history, and stereotypes, Julie Buffalohead’s mythological animalia, Leya Hale’s engrossing and expansive portrait of the Mississippi River, the vibrating, beaded, beating hearts of Maggie Thompson’s Quantum Entanglement, and more. 

And then there is Hazel Belvo’s gnarled portrait of Manidoo-giizhikenss, also known as the Spirit Tree, a four hundred year old red cedar on the north shore of Lake Superior. Belvo returned to this tree throughout her career, and as noted on the wall didactic, the tree is sacred to the Ojibwe people for its resilience. Resilience and survival are holy and precious, for the land and the people. The desire to see and be seen is about as universal as any sentiment,  and as Queering Indigeneity shows, there is a “confluence of beautiful potential when 2-Spirit, Native queer, and gender expansive relatives fully embody their gifts.”◼︎ 

 

Awanigiizhik Bruce (Mikinaak-Wajiw Anishinaabe, Nehiyawe, Michif)
with Dyana Decoteau-Dyess, Niizhoomanidoowag manidokewining, aaniish naa izhi-noojimo’idizowaad? (How do they heal themselves in a Two-Spirit ceremony?), 2025, Photograph. Courtesy of the Minnesota Museum of American Art.

 

QUEERING INDIGENEITY is on view up through August 16, 2026, in the
Nancy and John Lindahl Gallery at the Minnesota Museum of American Art. You can join in the opening reception on October 11, 2025, from 4 pm to 9 pm.