Becoming through storytelling: Rethinking age(ing) and gender through Ma-Nee Chacaby’s A Two-Spirit Journey

As an Ojibwa-Cree lesbian and Two-Spirit Elder, Ma-Nee Chacaby redefines gender and womanhood, aging, and survivance through the lens of Two-Spirit identity in her autobiography A Two-Spirit Journey: The Autobiography of a Lesbian Ojibwa-Cree Elder (2016). She navigates intersecting structures of oppression through relationality and her rootedness in her Indigenous epistemologies and cosmologies. By working with Chacaby’s A Two-Spirit Journey, I examine decolonial and intergenerational visions of aging and gender that transcend Western colonial frameworks. Chacaby’s work invites broader understandings of survivance (Vizenor, Citation2008) and care that center Indigenous cosmologies and honor nonbinary and aging people as foundational to decolonial futurisms. I show how Chacaby refuses Eurocentric binary gender systems and heteronormative life trajectories and instead grounds queer Indigenous aging as an embodied practice of survivance (Vizenor, Citation2008). Drawing on Indigenous feminist theory, queer Indigenous Studies, and critical aging studies, this article focuses on how Chacaby utilizes storytelling, intergenerational care, and Indigenous epistemic teachings to disrupt dominant colonial imaginaries of aging women and nonbinary people.