An NDN Home Is Like a Dandelion”: Queer Indigenous Orientations in Joshua Whitehead’s Jonny Appleseed (2018)

Abstract

Ever since Joshua Whitehead published his debut novel, Jonny Appleseed (2018), the (inter)national acknowledgements for his ground-breaking work have only flourished. The story follows its eponymous protagonist, a young Two-Spirit, Indigiqueer man who lives in the city, through a physical and a mental journey back to the reservation to attend his stepfather’s funeral and visit his kokum’s grave. Jonny Appleseed constitutes a homecoming narrative that conflates different temporalities and spaces in a non-linear account, from his apartment in the city to his kokum’s house in his childhood memories; thus, creating a multidimensional tapestry that explores the gendered, sexual, ethnic and class configurations of the spaces – and times – that he inhabits.

By using the novel as a key to enter the emerging field of Queer Indigenous phenomenology, I aim to unravel the temporal and spatial possibilities of approaching Two-Spirit, Queer Indigenous home(making) by utilizing the dandelion as a metaphor for – Two-Spirit – Queer Indigenous frames of reference and home configurations. Moreover, departing from the idea that Whitehead’s account is devised as a healing and transformative journey, this dissertation examines how the text inscribes queer Indigenous futurities throughout the novel. The first chapter: “Dandelion Clocks: Queer Indigenous Orientations” establishes the (temporal) framework from which the novel will be analyzed; then, “Roo(u)t(e)s: Memories of Inhabiting Home” dwells in Jonny’s childhood memories, marked by the “traditional” Indigenous heteropatriarchal reservation and his kokum’s house as a queer space, to demonstrate that “the Native Child was already queer” (Smith 48). The third chapter: “Flower/Pest: Present Being-in-Time” confronts the city and the reservation, as well as the virtual space that Jonny “creates” with his apartment in the city to reveal the converging temporalities and frames of reference that he encounters in that porous dwelling. And finally, “Seeds: Queer Indigenous Futurities” considers the prophecies in the novel as expanding the limits of Queer Indigenous homes.