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One of the strongest aspects of emergent queer of color critiques is their ability to employ a multiplicity of tactics to decode nationalist (both colonizing and colonized) strategies. Yet the absence of Native peoples and histories in formulating these emergent theories should give us pause. The fact that Native people and an analysis of ongoing colonialism for Native nations have largely been left out of queer of color critiques points to a major rupture in these theories. Native people, then, must disidentify with the very critiques that claim to be decolonial and counter hegemonic interventions for queer people of color in order to build viable theories for Native communities. Drawing on the Cherokee basketry tradition of doubleweave, in which two independent yet interwoven designs result, this essay asserts the necessity of Two-Spirit critiques that centralize Native peoples, nations, identities, land bases, and survival tactics, and invites an alliance between Native studies and queer studies through doubleweaving theories that can strengthen our theories and practices.

In the formative years of the developing cultural relations between the Mi'kmaq of the Maritime Provinces of Canada and European Judeo-Christian missionaries, Father Chrestien Le Clercq systematized Mi'kmaq written language in order to convert the Original People. More recently, collaborations between scholars such as Mi'kmaq Hieroglyphic Prayers: Readings in North America's First Indigenous Script, by Murdena Marshall and David L. Schmidt, have begun to translate and reinterpret this script using contemporary decolonial methodologies that privilege Indigenous survival. In "Puo'winue'l Prayers: Readings from North America's First Transtextual Script," I continue this conversation while engaging the script from a multiracial, visual-textual, Two-Spirit perspective.

AbstractThis roundtable discussion took place January–July 2016 via e-mail after participants and special issue editors initially met in virtual mode online. The editors posed the initial questions, and participants e-mailed their responses. Two further rounds of questions and responses ensued, and participants also viewed the responses of their peers on the roundtable. The questions were intended to generate rigorous dialogue about the uses of and problems associated with political economy (PE) as a lens to analyze the experiences of trans men and women and sex- and gender-diverse peoples in different but connected geopolitical locations. The emphasis was on bringing into conversation what is underprioritized in much PE work and also transgender studies as a formation, and how, from their own academic and activist knowledge, methodological bases, and experiences, respondents might see the (re)configuration of trans* political economy toward liberatory, antiracist, decolonial, and economically transformative ends.