Making Love with the Land by Joshua Whitehead (review)

Reviewed by: Making Love with the Land by Joshua Whitehead Kai Pyle (bio) Making Love with the Land Joshua Whitehead University of Minnesota Press, 2022 JOSHUA WHITEHEAD'S Making Love with the Land is deeply concerned with the ethics of writing as a queer Indigenous person. From the first essay, which asks, "Who names the rez dog rez?" and demands that the reader reconsider who exactly they think these essays are written for, the book flows through ten essays that are distinct from one another but related through ongoing themes. The second essay, "My Body Is a Hinterland," sets up a number of these major themes connecting land, body, mind, dreams, and writing in one sinuous thread. "Writing As a Rupture" forms the centerpiece of the book, a long essay in which Whitehead grapples with the question of genre, trying on several different terms for his writing and settling on none with satisfaction. The remaining essays deal intensely with topics of the body, illness, grief, healing, and mourning. "Me, the Joshua Tree" is a vivid and beautiful piece written in a series of flashbacks to a moment of transitioning a relationship away from romantic and sexual partnership but toward something no less powerful. With the last essay, "The Pain Eater," we find ourselves in the present as Whitehead describes the entwining of "end" and "beginning" in the era of COVID. One of the most striking things about the book is the way Whitehead continuously finds ways to interweave land, body, mind, and writing. In one of the more explicit statements of this relationship, he asserts, "I posit my stories as an umbilical space between the body of text and the body of the writer, and furthermore, as woven from the surrounding larger bodies: the basket as a body of land that holds a body of water—which is to say that the stories I produce herein are a body of text umbilically tied to the exquisite ache of my physical body, which is bound within the cuppings of Treaty 7 and Treaty 1." (95) Throughout the book, he makes the case that this connection is as literal and physical as it is ephemeral or creative. The draw of this book for many people will likely be the fact that the author is a queer Indigenous person and already a prolific author, and it would not be wrong to say that Whitehead has written these essays while thinking intensely about what it means to be queer and Indigenous in the settler colonial nation-state of Canada today. Yet he is also clearly deeply End Page 146 ambivalent about the gaze that this brings to his work; a major theme running through the book asks whether writing and consuming creative non-fiction by a queer Indigenous author under these circumstances can ever be more than a form of a "voyeurism of a genre" (21). Indeed, issues of writing as a practice and form suffuse almost every single essay in this book, and I suspect this aspect of Making Love with the Land will receive less attention than the identity categories the author draws upon. Yet in addition to questioning the ethics of writing in relation to non-Native audiences, Whitehead also discusses connections between writing and dreaming ("My Body Is a Hinterland"), taking inspiration from art and video games ("On Ekphrasis and Emphases," "The Year in Video Games"), and writing as a form of mourning ("My Aunties are Wolverines"). In spite of his frequent concerns about whether "narrative is a type of stripshow," (133), he also recognizes the healing power of narrative, whether it is self-healing through the narratives others have written, or healing of a community through the honoring and remembrance of kin. The prose of Making Love with the Land is thickly embedded with imagery, much of it culturally specific in ways that might escape those unfamiliar with the Plains Cree language. In "A Geography of Queer Woundings," White-head replaces all pronouns with the equivalent in Cree syllabics, forcing those who do not read Cree to experience a reversal of the alienation he has faced in white queer spaces. While the text is clearly informed by academic debates...