It's the big picture, and we must be bold enough to envision it.
Indigenous Transilience aims to strengthen the voices and representation of Indigenous and marginalized peoples via education and general policy advocacy.
With members of our team also being LGBTQ/Two Spirit folks, upholding their human rights is not only intersectional, but embracing a return to Native traditional values of acceptance with eyes focused on decolonization and the greater good of humanity.
We aim to help provide the tools needed to strengthen our communities which includes history lectures to combat ignorance with education that they have actually bannede also deem protecting our Indigenous lands, water, and animals like the bison as conducive to our way of being.
As such, when we will all inherently strive to become stronger leaders for our communities, things like suicides rates drop, as does the violence manifesting to the MMIW crisis, addiction, crime, etc, and we all prosper be it economically, or — most importantly — spiritually as morals are raised with continued hopes for a better tomorrow.
EXCERPT...
LGBTQ Nation: What advice would you give trans kids who live in states affected by anti-LGBTQ+ lawmakers?
AJ: I spoke recently to a group of activist teens, and they appreciated I didn’t try to placate them with generic feel-good statements. I told them, basically, progress comes from being scrappy and not presuming brain-rotted, meme-brained fascists who worship people like Matt Walsh ever want to be “civil.”
They want you erased from the public, if not dead, if you’re trans. Popular right-wing pundits openly celebrated and blamed the mass shooting at Club Q in Colorado Springs on the LGBTQ community.
They are persistent and will use “state’s rights” abortion laws to attack trans people, so you must be persistent, too.
While Martin Luther King Jr., noted, “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice,” it came from a long, hard-fought struggle. King Jr. was shot four days after that speech.
Sure, it’s a slough, and everything seems to go backward sometimes in red states to the point where even small victories almost seem pyrrhic, but remember, you are in the trenches, so carry that “f**k you” swag like those old Nazi resistance fighters, ya know?
There’s a rebellion manifesto quote from the Star Wars show Andor. It said, “Tyranny requires constant effort. It breaks, it leaks. Authority is brittle. Oppression is the mask of fear. Remember that.”
Know someday we’ll all just sit together proud of the struggle we collectively made it through. It was tough, but we made it.
Do not give up, and know you are valued. Remember that.
LGBTQ Nation: You must be afraid for your life every day. What keeps you motivated as an activist?
AJ: Because ugly-minded people want me to be terrorized and afraid, I won’t let them [win]. Yet, I’m not naive and do take safety precautions more seriously now.
There are other LGBTQ people who’ve been attacked who don’t get the layer of protection I get from being a semi-public figure, like a trans woman who was smashed into a wall with a car and another teen beaten severely by a group of thugs who were going to “beat the gay out of him.” While police are investigating it, in the meanwhile, this poor young person is terrified, knowing these thugs have their wallet and all of their information. A very feminine presenting Native friend of mine who was going to transition was smashed in the head outside of a bar a couple blocks from where I live for no known reason and died. Her murder is unsolved.
I think about these people all the time. And me doing activism, I feel like I am doing something that might help stop this from happening again in the future.
LGBTQ Nation: What are your plans for the future?
AJ: I just want to grow my startup nonprofit, Indigenous Transilience. It’d be nice to not have to travel and pay for everything on our own dime or rely on the individuals who are often struggling themselves. But I’ll do it regardless because it is my passion.
I gave my history lecture to Standing Rock middle and high school students – that’s the rez where the NoDAPL (No Dakota Access Pipeline) pipeline protests took place – and they loved it. That’s given me a lot of hope for our future, and I want to keep doing stuff like that.
But also, what every close friend of mine says – and I agree – is I need to be able to finish my novel, which is based on a lot of that insanity I dealt with coming out as trans in a red state. The insecurities. Self-acceptance. The hate. The love. The tears. The spiritual beauty felt, as only good art is wont to do.
If I didn’t transition, there was probably always going to be the self-resentment of not loving myself enough to quit using, and it’d likely cause me to relapse from my addiction. These are the struggles many of us red-state LGBTQ queers go through and sometimes feel alone in dealing with, but somehow, the writing always understood.
On that note, people who don’t think very deeply about this stuff seem to have a propensity to tell vulnerable people to just leave red states, and live somewhere more welcoming. What’s your response to that as an Indigenous person?
I was living in Las Vegas on a writing fellowship back in the fall. I loved it there. I didn’t feel like I had to constantly be wary and suspicious of everyone, especially in the goth club I lived by where I’d “found” my social tribe. I finally had time to relax and work on my novel.
After dealing with that libel lawsuit nonsense and just feeling done with how moronic our laws were going to get, I honestly didn’t want to go back. There seemed nothing left for me in Montana other than being co-dependent to the land.
But I did eventually have to come back and give a speech about being Two Spirit to high school and middle school kids on the Standing Rock Reservation. The same speech Butte banned – and those students loved it. Whereas before I’d been a lost doomer, after that I had hope. The kids are all right, I thought.
I might eventually move and write novels full time, but while I’m stuck here, I’ll give ’em hell.
“I am grateful that after a tumultuous year, Pastor Jordan Hall was final able to admit committing libel and bearing false witness against me. In this day and age when trans people like myself are targeted with political bullseyes on our backs, it was especially dangerous of him to falsely accuse me of bullying and harassing an elderly state Senator I’d never met to the point where the sergeant at arms had to pull me away,” Jawort said. “There are people out there who’d physically hurt me if they thought that was true and then saw me to take revenge.”
Pastor JD Hall admits fabricating trans Native lobbyist story (greatfallstribune.com)