“To Fight against Shame through Love”: A Conversation on Life, Literature, and Indigenous Masculinities with Daniel Heath Justice

Daniel Heath Justice is a Colorado-born Canadian citizen of the Cherokee Nation. He is the author of Our Fire Survives the Storm: A Cherokee Literary History (U of Minnesota P, 2006) and numerous critical essays in the field of Indigenous literary studies. With James Cox, he is the co-editor of The Oxford Handbook of Indigenous American Literature (Oxford UP, 2014) and former coeditor of Studies in American Indian Literatures (2008–2012). He’s also the author of the Indigenous epic fantasy novel The Way of Thorn and Thunder: The Kynship Chronicles (U of New Mexico P, 2011), formerly published as a trilogy by the Indigenous Canadian publishing house Kegedonce Press (Kynship, 2005; Wyrwood, 2006; Dreyd, 2007). Having taught as an associate professor in the Indigenous Studies and English Departments at the University of Toronto, Daniel is currently a Canada Research Chair of First Nations Studies at University of British Columbia in Vancouver bc.

When I began conducting interviews with Indigenous artists, activists, academics, and elders on the subject of Indigenous masculinities in 2010, Daniel was among the first people I contacted. His creative and critical work in the areas of gender, nationhood, and decolonization consistently courts complexity and tension, resisting the oversimplifying undertow of tragedy and romance while engaging with the messiness of lived experience. I’ve always marveled at his ability to speak to complex issues in a clear and accessible manner without sacrificing acuity and precision. His critical work on kinship—including “‘Go Away Water!’ Kinship Criticism and the Decolonization Imperative” from the collection Reasoning Together: The Native Critics Collective (U of Oklahoma P, 2008)—illuminates not only the reciprocal responsibilities that adhere among the human and other-than-human elements of creation but also the sophistication of Indigenous cosmologies of gender that betray the inadequacies of Eurocentric binary oppositions. His article “Notes toward a Theory of Anomaly” (glq, 2010) expands on these issues in the specific historical context of legal restrictions on sexual diversity in the Cherokee nation, mobilizing the late Mississippian category of “anomaly” as a queer-inclusive tribal model for belonging.

Daniel’s creative work grapples with many of these same concerns but with different weaponry in efforts to pursue, engage, and enliven alternative audiences. Shrouded by the dark shadow cast by legacies of historical trauma, The Way of Thorn and Thunder dares to reimagine community and warriorhood within complex conditions of dispossession and to consider the reinvigoration of reciprocal responsibilities to land and peoplehood after territorial removal. In a staunch refusal to accept colonial narratives of inevitable demise, Daniel struggles in his creative work to imagine decolonized futures, and through pedagogy, criticism, and public engagement he struggles to create conditions that will coax his audiences toward a more balanced world.

His written work has a great deal to teach readers about gender, power, and responsibility. I wanted to ask him about his own development as an artist and critic and to build that conversation into a critical study of Indigenous masculinities. The following conversation took place on February 14, 2011, in my office at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario, Canada, after Daniel had made a guest appearance in a graduate course I was then teaching entitled “‘Carrying the Burden of Peace’: Exploring Indigenous Masculinities through Story.” This conversation also appears as “Fighting Shame through Love” in Masculindians: Conversations about Indigenous Manhood (U of Manitoba P and Michigan State UP, 2014), a collection of twenty-two interviews with leading Indigenous thinkers. It is reprinted here by permission of the University of Manitoba Press.

sam mckegney:

What influences were most significant to your maturation and development as a Cherokee man, and how have those influences informed your critical sensibilities as a scholar and a creative writer?

daniel heath justice:

Really, it was my parents more than anything and then radiating circles of influence beyond that. But I grew up as my dad’s youngest child and my mom’s only. My mom’s his fourth wife. They’ve been together forty-two years now, forty-three...