Queer Nature is an education and social sculpture project based in the Puget Sound region of the Pacific Northwest—Lower Skagit, Swinomish, Suquamish, and Snohomish territories—that actively dreams into decolonially-informed queer ‘ancestral futurism’ through mentorship in place-based skills with awareness of post-industrial/globalized/ecocidal contexts. Queer Nature is co-founded by Pinar and So, who spoke with us here about queer ecologies, mysticism, and belonging. Ryan: I wanted to give you an opportunity to introduce yourself, and who you’re calling into this space, and this conversation. I was curious who else is speaking with, in, and through you? Pinar: I think it will be important for me to share my ancestors and my aunt who are in the room and in my body. My matrilineage is Quechua or Wanka Quechua, which is from East Chaka, or so-called Peru, as well as Turkish from my patrilineage, which is where I grew up. And also name and bring in my transcestor lineage: Quariwarmi, which is from my Andean lineage as well as the other parts of myself that are informed so greatly by land and place, and especially by water. In particular, this creek that lives in Yavapai-Apache territory, who is one of my deepest mentors. And some of the beings who live by them who are also a big part of who is in the room; who is Cottonwood, and Yucca, and Canyon Wren and all these wonderful riparian beings. So: I feel inspired to talk about some beings and entities who are guiding me. One of those is fungal beings. Mushroom people, with their underground mycelium networks. One is actually southeast of us, in Eastern Oregon’s Malheur National Forest. They’re between 3,000 and 8,000 years old. There’s so much that they have to teach us. A few years ago, there was a fungus discovered in a landfill in Pakistan that is able to break down and eat plastic. So I feel like there’s so much mythic medicine that we have to learn from them. And then also bringing in the hoof beings — especially sheep, and also deer, and just any hoof-creatures. They teach me a lot about earthly belonging and initiate me to live life more devoted to the earth. Also naming that I am of settler descent, and I was really raised by the land of the Northern hardwood forests in Vermont. That’s a big part of who I am. I also spent time growing up in Greece, particularly around the city of Athens as a kid. So I also feel very informed by this urban-Mediterranean landscape, which is pretty different from rural Vermont. Ryan: Thank you both for pulling all that in. Pinar, you mentioned living in Turkey. And So you just mentioned having spent a good amount of time in Greece, and now you’re both in the Pacific Northwest. I’m curious about how living in different places affects your relationship with place itself and your sense of belonging. And also how it affects your role there? So: There’s a lot of confusion, tension, and longing in this theme of belonging for me. I’ve been thinking a lot about our motto at Queer Nature, “belonging as resistance”. In this view, belonging is basically a set of practices. It’s a skill, and a craft. It’s not an end-state. I’ve been thinking about my discomfort with sometimes using that word. Belonging can be unsettling. And I feel that for some of us, it should be, especially for me as a white person of settler descent. I’m weary of the word belonging being green-washed or ending up like “#blessed”, where it’s like, “Oh yeah, look how good I am at belonging.” Belonging is not always radical or good. Belonging to a system of extractivism, of burnout, of white supremacy — that’s not belonging as resistance. That’s belonging as complicity. There has to be belonging, but also resistance. This resistance is like fugitivity, or like an exile, or a pushing back against the status quo. I’ve begun to apprentice more to various practices of belonging, like wildlife tracking, bird observation and bird language, or working with natural materials. I’ve actually learned more about how to discern the boundaries of others this way. If I’m walking pretty fast at a hikers pace through the woods where I’m less aware of my surroundings, and not paying a ton of attention to what’s around me, the birds flee from me more readily. They see that as a threat. These animals are constantly in a dance where their circle of awareness has to exceed their circle of impact. I also feel some people, human and non-human, who are really good at belonging in my mind are those who are nomadic or migratory. I’m talking about people who do this out of necessity, because they need to survive. This is a big lesson I took from sheep when I worked as a shepherd throughout a lot of my twenties. That’s been an interesting project; to critique a colonial view of belonging that I might have unwittingly been instilled with — like staying in one place, or like “private property”. I want to cultivate a practice or feeling of fugitivity from dominant culture, which is to say white supremacy, capitalism, and patriarchy. And I feel if we have one thing without the other, like if we have belonging without resistance or resistance without belonging, we can become lost. Pinar: That was just really beautiful. I really resonate with that word mysticism and mystical. And I think that in a lot of ways it’s a visceral invitation to apprenticeship to liminality and that in-betweenness. One of the first things that came to my mind was my experience being neurodivergent and experiencing parallel realities. The way that I started making sense of my neurodivergence, after being forcibly medicated and institutionalized, was that I started to realize my body-mind was essentially a confluence of all the places my ancestors are from. I experienced my body-mind as a place, as having its own terrain and its own typography and places of meeting — where my ancestral lands meet and converge and create something new and emergent. This also brings in my experience with emergence, and liminality, and mystery — being trans as well as my experience with my gender, which as a non binary person, it just feels like a very liminal place. My gender is always shifting and feels very informed by all the pieces of land that my ancestors have come from. In some ways it can sound really disorienting. But I was able to orient through mentorship with the more-than-human world and through kinship, especially in the so called Four Corners area of the Colorado Plateau, and in particular that creek that I spoke of in Yavapai-Apache territory really supported my understanding of belonging and identity, and how those two inform one another. One thing that just keeps coming back to me is how the more-than-human world here on Turtle Island has been so generous with helping me remember my own indigeneity; also the gift of hybridity, and adaptation. It helps me on my journey towards dignity, to accountability with place, specifically here where we live on the Salish Sea now, which is a very new place for us to be in relationship with. Ryan: You’ve both touched on this in a way, but what does it mean to relate to the Earth and our ancestors in a way that is particularly queer? So: I’m interested in the original meaning of the word queer, as something similar to strange or weird. We center human queerness and culturally-rooted queerness in the context of this moment in Western culture. But we also are trying to center other-than-human queerness, which is actually available to everyone, not just not just LGBTQ people. This connects with the interest in reviving this kind of arcane meaning of queer as something cryptic or mysterious. We’ve been watching a lot of Stranger Things lately, so I feel like I’m influenced by that neo-Lovecrafty aesthetic right now. Strange basically means something that is external or outside of what is familiar. It’s from the Latin word extraneous. Weird is a similar word. And that refers to something that seems like it shouldn’t belong, but yet it’s here. Like it does belong somehow. It’s really interesting because when the status quo is toxic and damaging, like white supremacy, for example, then what is weird or what is strange within white supremacy or within the status quo can actually be good. It can even be enchanting. It’s pointing to something sacred, I think. For me, queer and in the term Queer Nature, there’s a promise of healing our estrangement with the more-than-human world, our ancestors, and with land. If I think about nearly every memorable experience or connection with other-than-human life or death that I’ve had, those experiences have all been what I would describe as “strange” or “eerie”. Like holding a stick full of mycelium that’s growing green because it’s bioluminescent. The first time I encountered bioluminescent fungus was a very strange and eerie experience. It wasn’t because it felt wrong, but because it felt right. There’s this earthly, strangeness or queerness that is almost like a spirit and, and we need to be possessed by it or something. As other trans thinkers like Susan Stryker have written about, there’s so much in the root of the word monster, which means portent. Like what is revealed about the hidden truths in ourselves. Revealing things that we can’t process or come to consciously. Pinar: I really identify with what you’re sharing about. Going off the theme of monsters and portents, it’s been interesting as someone who was pathologized as a teen, and was often followed by the city’s cops at my high school and around town. Partly because of my experiences with parallel realities and being neurodivergent, and in that way becoming like a monster. I’ve been recently trying to give a lot of voice into the ecologically-informed queer. And I’ve been grappling with what words to use in the English language to describe what that is. One of the words that I am working with now is a lifeform queer. For awhile it was species queer, as in someone who is a creek and a bot in the human body, speaking for myself. I found out about the yacuruna several years ago — which is a Quechua word for water being or water entity. This is something that’s really important to me. I don’t know if you’ve seen the movie, The Shape of Water, but that movie is based off of the yacuruna. I just found it excruciating to watch how the colonial perspective sees yacuruna as monstrous. When you go to different places in so-called South America, yacurunas are seen as relatives. Similarly with Quariwarmis, which are the gender variant people of Quechua lineages — they were the first people targeted when the conquistadors invaded in 1942 because it was such a threat to colonial masculinity. I also wanted to share the origin story of Quariwaurmi. Our origin story is emerging from the chuqui chinchay, which is a multi-gendered Jaguar mountain deity during the first Pachacuti (which means a cataclysmic change to the culture as it’s known at the time). Essentially the Quariwarmi were initiated and brought into the world by the multi-gendered Jaguar deity who wanted to support the Quechua culture and in particular, the Incan culture through the first Pachacuti. Our cosmology sees the sacred as androgynous and gender liminal. So the Quariwarmi are seen to embody the androgynous and liminality, and therefore we are seen to be able to support between unknown times. We need the gift of liminality and people who walked through in between places. I have so much curiosity about the gifts that so many people hold in our queer community that is land and place informed. I really truly believe that queerness is actually an expression of the earth and it’s an ecological formation. Ryan: I’ve heard you propose the question, “What’s so mystical about being trans and queer?” I’m wondering if there’s more you’d want to share on that? And on the flip side of these stories of origin, what is it that you feel queerness leaves behind? So: If you look at the instances of what we call “mysticism” throughout history with a softer gaze, what you find is an interesting political meaning, which is that it’s a longing for a transformed world. And it’s often expressed through a deeply intimate relationship with an other-than-human entity. Traditionally in Western culture, this is God, but in our understanding of mysticism, you could devote your life to a forest, to a river, to a whole landscape, to an ancestor, or to an entire species or creature. There’s this promise where mysticism is kind of a politics beyond the human. One example of that is there’s some toxic forms of public mysticism right now, like the conspiracy theory slash postmodern religion known as QAnon. The problem with people needing an emotional anchor in times of uncertainty is that it’s not just going to go away by calling these people gullible. I think it’s one of the reasons that we do need a mysticism that is grounded in ecology and centers accountability, and devotion to the other-than-human world. And I think there’s very few tools that the current generations in this society have for doing this. One more piece I could say about it is that especially in the last couple of years we see so many trans and queer folks reclaiming the mystical especially through the occult, like astrology or tarot and basically what I would call neo-animism. In my experience as a trans person, I had to create ways of coping with existential terror at a pretty young age. So for me, there’s a huge connection between the mystical and despair. There’s a way in which the mystical is like an answer to despair and like a doorway into enchantment, and humility, and awe. So yeah, there’s something in which the mystical and the trans ecology or experience does feel very connected for me. Pinar: Thanks for sharing that. I’m thinking about the question, “What’s so mystical about being trans and queer,” especially through an Indigenous perspective. My experience with my Indigenous relatives is that there is a form of mysticism but it’s not called that — it’s just called, you know, being in relationship with the land. It’s a way of knowing rather than a way of belief. And it’s relational, it’s very gritty and real. In the Quechua cosmology there’s something called Ayni, which essentially means sacred reciprocity. It’s just this reciprocity — like a reciprocal relationship with place. And you know, it’s pretty impossible to separate my transness and queerness from my ancestries and the lands that I’m accountable to. So we have to expand what family means, whether it’s inner, chosen family with our human relationships or creating relationships with the more-than-human world. That’s something that comes up for me: not being blood related, but actually having kinship being at the center. Being queer can be an invitation to expanding kinship and family and potentially a really beautiful invitation or love in a multi-species, futurist way. Ryan: There’s this kind of obvious, almost tropey idea of “you need to know your history in order to move forward”, but I am curious in this context, what that means for you. Building on that notion of what is left behind, what for you in all this weaves into the future? So: Right now I’ve recently become involved with the world of tabletop roleplaying and collective storytelling. I’m actually playing a game right now with a mostly queer group of people. It’s so mind blowing — there’s something about the mythic state that it creates. Just creating that space of joy where we can really create these characters and narratives in a collective way with people that we care about. As a way to get to know people as a community practice. That’s a medium I think has a lot of potential. Also, I see a lot of folks who are trans and queer and folks of other identities engaging in fan fiction or comic books and graphic novels. I also think about the importance of dreams and dream space, and storytelling in a realm and way that is mythic. Right now we are drowning in a sea of information and data, but there’s often very little story there. I do feel like queer and trans folks, and other folks occupying marginalized and targeted identities have a gift for seeing ourselves in mythic terms. I think part of that comes out of a lot of pain of feeling excluded or abandoned by myth and ritual. Like not seeing our queerness reflected in dominant cultural narratives. So we have to engage in a type of what I call “myth hacking” or “mythic remediation” where we’re trying to locate ourselves in mythic time and space. We have to create worlds of our own like in the realm of role playing. Pinar: One of my mentors who is Santa Clara Pueblo, who is also a mixed, multiracial Indigenous person, was sharing with me that, you know, tradition is not static. And we’re speaking specifically to indigeneity, especially as hybrid and multiracial people who are also queer. She’s queer too. And she was sharing with me that there’s this idea that in 1492, our tradition just became static when it was interrupted by colonizers. But tradition is actually very much a living being and is very emergent. We’re constantly co-creating and being co-created by origin stories. And also to remember, that there’s many species who are collaborating in that. That is something that I just want us to share in particular. And also maybe end with the question, with that in mind: Who are you apprenticing to during the social-eco collapse? That’s something that I think really informs and co-creates conditions for origin stories that are informed by the times that we’re in right now.
