Visibility is a tricky beast for queer and trans NDNs (or is it invisibility)? In rural places, queer and trans NDNs are somehow both invisible — erased, hidden, made afterthought — and hypervisible, surveilled by white rural and Indigenous communities alike, if they find the codes and customs of a colonial gender binary to be an uncomfortable fit.

It is invisibility that makes queer and trans NDNs the running kind, the kind that flees to the flashing lights of the city. But invisibility meets NDNs in the city too, in spaces where Indigenous representation can mean identity claims based on vague and distant ancestry. Sometimes NDNs can be surprised to encounter an Indigenous art community with no NDNs at all, composed of peoples who would wear their skin, put them to their grave, and make them disappear. Yet, ironically, it is visibility in the city that marks the bodies of queer and trans NDNs as undesirable within the necropolitics of white-dominated communities. It is visibility that makes Indigenous queer and trans NDN youth in cities over-policed and often street-involved.

In response, Lacie Burning’s photograph Blockade Rider contends the queer and trans NDN desire to just be, while always somehow existing liminally, somewhere between struggling to be seen and fighting to blend in. Burning photographs queer and trans NDNs as they are. Sometimes they are city dwellers with a classic James Dean style, like the individual in Blockade Rider. These city slicker NDNs might ride concrete and brandish black leather whips that are far cries from the horses their ancestors made kin with, and the traditional whips made lovingly by kokums, but they are still NDNS, nonetheless. Their environment is equal parts urban development — nature carved out in designated city grids — and steel beams, much like the spirit of queer and trans NDN themselves, caught in a tumbling abyss between their traditional land, the imposition of city space, and the cyborg adaptations of their traditional knowledges. Still, whatever your kink is, there’s no denying that the life atop that concrete does have the advantages of its worldly pleasures. Because what is an NDN if not a lover of a little chaos and absurdity at the end of time?

* PHOTO OF LACIE BURNING: Lacie Burning