Watch Over Yourself Well: Coast Salish Gender, Sexuality, & the Canoe Journey

Centering on the 10 rules of the canoe and the annual tribal canoe journey, Professor Gemmell weaves together personal experience, Coast Salish tribal stories and knowledges and contemporary understandings of Two-Spirit, queer, and trans identities to understand how the community can center Two-Spirit folks in their healing from gendered violence and trauma of colonization.

Professor Gemmell’s presentation will examine the annual tribal canoe journey, crucial for the (re)vitalization of stories and community practices, and understanding gender and sexuality within Coast Salish communities and (re)claiming traditional knowledges around gender and sexuality.

Kyles Jacobs Gemmell (they/them) is a salib pre-binary Suquamish scholar and a Visiting Assistant Professor at Western Washington University in Fairhaven College of Interdisciplinary Studies. They received their PhD in Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies with Queer Studies minor at Oregon State University. Their current research centers Indigenous feminisms, Two-Spirit critiques, queer of color critiques, and decolonial methodologies. Their dissertation uses the Coast Salish canoe journey as a part of their (re)clamation of Two-Spirit identities. In their work with colleagues, they develop language to address gender identities existing prior to the binary as opposed to outside the binary when addressing communities impacted by colonialism. Using the 10 rules of the canoe journey as a research methodology, they use archives, interviews, and story to draw on Coast Salish stories more broadly but specifically working with the Suquamish tribe and tribal members to build a community-based project. Their recent publication in Contingencies: A Journal of Global Pedagogy extends the use of the 10 Rules of the Canoe Journey as a pedagogical practice, and in Journal of Global Indigeneity on Two-Spirit masculinities. Their work has previously been published in Journal of Global Indigeneity addressing desires for home for Two-Spirit folks during the global pandemic.