Transformational Flows in Anishinaabe Ecologies and Agokwe Futures

This essay intercedes in trans studies and global Romanticism by turning to Ozaawindib (Anishinaabe), who was an agokwe. Assigned male at birth but living as a woman in her community at Gaa-Miskwaawaakokaag or Leech Lake, Ozaawindib’s agokwe personhood is routinely elided by American writers. I trace pathways through and beyond settler reports of Ozaawindib with the writings of another Anishinaabe figure, Bamewawagezhikaquay, also known as Jane Johnston Schoolcraft. I argue that Bamewawagezhikaquay’s retellings of aadizookaanag, or sacred origin stories, rendered in “Origin of the Robin” and “Corn Story,” index a mode of transformable embodiment that exists through lived responsibilities to local ecologies, which she often figures in the seasonal growth patterns of plants and in the fluid dynamics of waterways. I read her coordination of transformable embodiment and gendered responsibility to reread settler archives for agokwe roles that flicker into view and disrupt the smooth unfolding of a colonial epistemic norm. Ultimately, I contend that engaging with Anishinaabe transformable bodies and relational ecologies must revise our sense of what it means to write about Indigenous gender and sexuality when we turn to the literary archives of global Romanticism for trans lives.