He began from a game I used to play reading YA novels, I called it “Where’s We’Wha” and made it my task to find the vanished Indian in every novel. Jonny’s birth is an unfortunate one, I think he carries too much with him: anger, hate, loneliness, servility, and perhaps even a dash of sycophancy, but necessity is the most energizing segment of his structuring. Was the story born with this notion in mind? I know no story has a single ‘seed’ from which it germinates, but was a desire to provide alternatives to this dominant narrative part of your motivation for this story? “You know lattes and condominiums,” Jonny says, “-you don’t know what it’s like being a brown gay boy on the rez,” and it’s true: Jonny isn’t the version of gayness (white, probably monogamous, double-income-no-kids) that you’re likely to see on television. “Jonny Appleseed” opens with the titular character discovering his sexuality through the mediator of HBO’s Queer as Folk, but rejecting that particular vision of queerness sometime after. He identifies as two-spirit (niizh manitoag). Joshua Whitehead is an Oji-Cree member of the Peguis First Nation. East Coast poet Jake Byrne discusses Indigiqueer identity, community, and non-linearity with Joshua Whitehead, whose short story, “Jonny Appleseed,” appears in the Malahat’s recent Indigenous Perspectives issue.
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