Cree author Billy-Ray Belcourt’s A History of My Brief Body is a visceral and devastating account of the effects of colonialism and anti-queer animus on one’s body and psyche. A memoir1 in the form of a series of essays, the book engagingly sets forth vignettes from the author’s life interspersed with a meta-analysis of how instances of oppression—both personally experienced and witnessed—spring from colonialism and anti-queer animus, which operate as a combined axis of oppression or separately depending on the circumstances.
As a poet and as a non-Native scholar of tribal law and federal Indian law, I am constantly trying to better understand the effects of colonialism. Belcourt’s analysis is unique in the way that it melds personal experiences with discourses of philosophy and literary criticism and in its unflinchingness and insistence on truth and accountability. I highly recommend this book for anyone that wants to understand the effects of colonialism or anti-queer animus in the Americas. While Belcourt is Canadian, I found that the work very much resonated with my understandings of colonialism and anti-queer animus in the United States as well.
The book is so rich and dense that it would be impossible to do it justice here. Legal scholars may be particularly interested in Belcourt’s exploration of crimes against Indigenous persons in Canada by non-Natives and of how inadequate institutional responses to these crimes affect him as an Indigenous person. His naming of Indigenous crime victims is a powerful act in itself, but his analysis goes much deeper. For example, with respect to a twenty-year-old Cree man, Brennan Ahenakew, “found dead in a burnt-out car on the Ahtahkakoop Cree Nation,” Belcourt first relates the Royal Canadian Mounted Police’s (RCMP) belated and empty conclusion that “‘nothing indicate[d] foul play.’” (P. 42.) He then explains that, through this conclusion, the RCMP “sought to order grief, to pressurize the narrative and what could be publicly felt….,” further relating that, through such non-responses to Indigenous victimization, “NDNs are made to live and die in ways that are without shock value.”2 (P. 42.)
Later in the book, Belcourt recounts the high-profile trial of Gerald Stanley for the killing of Colten Boushie, a citizen of the Red Pheasant Cree Nation. Boushie was shot by Stanley during an incident in which Boushie and a few others were trespassing on Stanley’s property and attempting to use one of Stanley’s vehicles. Stanley was ultimately acquitted for both second-degree murder and manslaughter.3
Belcourt explains how peremptory challenges were used during the trial to remove Native jurors—“[o]ne by one, each potential juror with NDN features or an NDN cultural disposition was shown to be too biased or too implicated in the case to deliver justice….” (P. 120.) Belcourt’s astringent account of the all-white jury as “demonstrate[ing]…that what was to be scrutinized wasn’t truth but the social conditions by which NDNs were to live and die” (P. 121) potently brings home the way that colonialism reinscribes historical injustices so as to make them seem inevitable and inescapable. Belcourt next describes hearing of the acquittal during a reading and having to respond on the spot. (Pp. 122-123.) He acknowledges, however, that there were words he couldn’t speak in that moment. After the verdict, Belcourt and other Indigenous persons are left to wonder how they “will ever look white people in the eyes and not periodically see our mangled bodies.” (P. 124.)
Belcourt experiences feelings of doom after Stanley’s acquittal (P. 124), as well as after the Pulse nightclub shooting.4
In the context of the Pulse shooting, Belcourt probes the fact that the shooter had targeted Latinx club patrons in particular; he then defines doom “as the ways in which knowledge of one’s killability sits in the air….” (P. 127.)
Belcourt’s exploration of discrimination is by no means limited to the context of violent crimes and the justice system’s failure to appropriately respond. He also describes the anti-queer animus he experienced during his interactions with the medical establishment in an attempt to procure a post-exposure prophylaxis to protect him from HIV after an unintentionally risky sexual encounter. He was repeatedly turned away from clinics on the premise that the necessary drugs were expensive and that his sexual encounter was not risky enough. (Pp. 63-65.) Worse yet, his concerns were not treated seriously—indeed, he overheard a doctor describing his request for the drugs as “such a silly matter” and a waste of time. (P. 65.)
Belcourt explains the sense of wholesale abandonment and loneliness he felt as a result of these denials of care, denials which themselves sprung from a deep-rooted cultural fear of sexually transmitted diseases:
I was being conscripted into a culture of fear that makes STIs [sexually transmitted infections] such as HIV into public enemies. Without care, there is no room for harm reduction. What’s more, I had no audience for my misery. With no one around to apprehend the exigencies of my emotional tumult, everywhere I went became a zone of abandonment. (P. 65.)
Belcourt thus powerfully demonstrates how fear of diseases that are tied in the public imagination to queerness lead to lack of concern for the medical needs of queer persons. By sharing the intense feelings he experienced as a result of being denied care—fear, loneliness, and abandonment—Belcourt creates a work that operates on an academic and descriptive level at the same time it is piercing readers with visceral emotion.
And yet to say A History of My Brief Body is multi-faceted in this sense merely scratches the surface of the numerous levels on which it operates. The book is also filled with probing questions and unique and damning descriptions of anti-Indigenous and anti-queer culture in the Americas. I will leave you with one example–in a one-page essay written in the voice of “NDN writer,” in which he discusses Foucault, Belcourt comments that “NDN writer is hard at work on the paradox that one can be born into a past and at the same time [be] indecipherable to it.” (P. 45.) I read this passage as a powerful critique of the popular notion that Indigenous persons and cultures are part of the past (rather than the present) and the concomitant misrepresentation of them in this past-present in a form in which they never existed.
I urge everyone to read A History of My Brief Body. It may break you, but it will also widen your understanding of the entrenched injustices that infuse our culture. And understanding can be a step toward repair.
- Belcourt pushes against the idea of memoir but does not completely disavow it. As he explains in the “Author’s Note,” he “marshal[s] the forces of poetry and theory to weave not a linear story, which ‘memoir’ typically denotes, but rather a series of stories and analytical scenes into a composite that exceeds the boundaries of [his] individual life.”
- The term “NDN” is short for “Indian” and is often used by Indigenous persons to refer to themselves. See e.g., Rain Prud’homme-Cranford, Darryl Barthé and Andrew J. Jolivétte, Introduction in, Louisiana Creole Peoplehood: Afro-indigeneity and Community 3, 17 n.1 (Rain Prud’homme-Cranford, et al. eds. 2022); Crystal Raypole, “Some Indigenous Americans Are Using the Term ‘NDN’—Here’s What It Means,” Healthline (July 14, 2021).
- Kent Roach, Gerald Stanley Case, The Canadian Encyclopedia (Feb. 10, 2020, rev. March 26, 2021).
- The Pulse nightclub shooting was a “mass shooting that took place at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando, Florida, in the early morning hours of June 12, 2016, and [which] left 49 people dead and more than 50 wounded.” Michael Ray, “Orlando Shooting of 2016,” Brittanica.com (2016). “Orlando’s Pulse dance club had established itself as one of central Florida’s most vibrant centres for lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) social life,” and it was hosting a Latin night event on the night of the attack.” (Id.)
