When looking at your own history, who looks back? It could be someone just like you.
A new exhibit at the Chachalu Cultural Museum in Grand Ronde called “My Father’s Father’s Sister” explores that question for Two-Spirit and queer Indigenous, or Indigiqueer, people.
Co-curated by Anthony Hudson and Felix Furby, the newly-opened exhibit focuses on Shimkhin, a 19th-century Two-Spirit Atfalati Kalapuya healer and will be open to the public until November 30.
Seeking to empower others in their community with the joy and healing of acceptance, Hudson (Grand Ronde, Siletz), a Two-Spirit artist and writer and Furby (Grand Ronde, Chinook), a Two-Spirit cultural researcher, created an educational art program exploring the history of Two-Spirit and Indigiqueer peoples in their community and celebrating their contemporary contributions.
Hudson, also known as Carla Rossi or “Portland’s premiere drag clown,” and Furby sat down with Street Roots to discuss the project.
This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
Henshaw: Can you tell us a little bit about who Shimkhin was?
Furby: Shimkhin had the power to heal people, she had clairvoyance, and she also had, what was most interesting, the power to become woman. And that one really caught my eyes like this power is put through this phrase of the “power to become woman.”
There’s something that we culturally refer to as spirit powers; these are powers that someone is called to but then has to go and receive, and the thing is that whatever these powers are, they have to be respected and then honored by the community.
To receive this power, Shimkhin had to dance five consecutive nights for five years to receive this spirit power.
I guess one of the things that strikes me is just that this was something that it sounds like more people had — it sounds like wasn't just Shimkhin. And it offers a little glimpse of understanding into how the thinking of some amount of gender diversity might have been in our cultures, which is the most information I think I've ever seen about any of that.
Shimkhin had at least four spirit powers, which is unusual. She was a really powerful person. And she was extremely well-liked and respected by her community.
She was called on by multiple people from all over. We have reports of Shimkhin from all over Oregon, in Siletz, and in Chinook up north, and California, and we have Klamath, and all of that, so all these connections.
The thing is that her being what we would today describe as trans-feminine didn't stop her from any of this. It wasn't stigmatized; it wasn't marginalized. People didn't describe it in a way that was like, ‘Oh, that person's a little strange, but a good doctor.’ It was like, this is honored as an honored part of her — and she was a really good doctor.
This was really significant to me to see these details. As colonization and assimilation came in, this changed in her lifetime. But in her life in a pre-colonial context, she was not marginalized for who she was. And seeing an actual historical reference from our culture is really powerful. Because today, so much of what we experience is around the experience of marginalization. You know, so much of our queer identity is almost a response to the oppression that we face.
Hudson: It's wild. You can see the shifting of how people refer to her over time as we get further away from Shimkhin. You can see the shifting understanding culturally, you can see colonization settle in. So that's a big component of the exhibit for us; demonstrating how this is traditional for us, but how we made it untraditional through assimilation, how we made it something othered to be queer.
Shimkhin isn't the only example of that power to become woman, that's a precedent. So this goes much further back. And so that I think for us, the whole draw is going full circle, is going so far forward that we go back again to that world where we are welcome.
Furby: Yeah, it's seeing that that world is possible. Seeing that that world happened before, it means it can happen again.
Hudson: (Shimkhin) was cool. She was like, wicked cool. I'm sorry, I'm getting excited. This is the doctor that you call on when, like, bad doctors do shit to you, ‘scuse my language. Like, this is the person that you go to for extremely serious spiritual matters, like statewide — once it became a state.
Yeah, and she loved her dogs; she made sure they got to eat first. She was like, jovial. She was super queer.
Henshaw: Can you tell me about the exhibit at Chachalu Cultural Museum?
Hudson: We wanted to present a look at past, present and future of queerness in Grand Ronde, but all centered around Shimkhin.
So the first half of the exhibit, really the first like two walls, are all history that you can find. But we literally just printed the pages and put them up on the walls with contextualized statements. The other half of the exhibit, it focuses on a couple of us that are out within the tribe and the work that we've done; we have portraits, we have art pieces, like cedar carvings. And then, we have a conversation area with resources and books.
We just want to create a space that kind of holds people but also can create conversation and thoughtfulness and processing about these things. Because I think a big aspect of going back to culture, there's a lot of trauma around that. What is tradition? And where do we fit into that? So we wanted to create a space where people could feel held.
So as part of the two-year plan, this exhibit offers a 101, it's an overview, but there are deeper histories that we can delve into.
"This information has always been here, sometimes it takes queer people to look at history
and to recognize somebody smiling back at you."
There's a lot of things we didn't include in the exhibit, a lot more history that we actually need to go out to like Seattle, to Eugene, we have to go out and do physical research in person. It also just offers the tiniest glimpse of some of the incredible contributions and present-day contemporary artwork by Two-Spirit people, both within our tribe and elsewhere.
And I think one wonderful place where the artwork gets to shine is the reconstruction image. We owe so much to Steph Littlebird, our Grand Ronde cousin, who is absolutely knocking it out of every park right now.
We thought it'd be really appropriate since Shimkhin is Atfalati Kalapuya, and so is Steph. Like, who better to illustrate a reconstruction image? Because we don't have an image (of Shimhkin) that we know of. Who better to create this image of our ancestor Shimkhin than Steph?
We were able to give her a lot of ideas and a lot of guidelines on how this person lived and was understood from the texts that we have, and Steph brought her beautifully to life. And that's the centerpiece of the entire exhibit.
Henshaw: How did you two start creating this exhibit together?
Hudson: There's only a handful, really, of out queer folk from Grand Ronde, and Felix actually came and found me right before the pandemic when I was doing a show.
I was just like, 'Oh my God, another queer Grand Ronde person.' Like, I couldn't believe it. And now we have a little bit more of a network. We definitely found this project together, I think, as an avenue with this to really try to understand what does tradition mean for us? And how do we understand it and understand ourselves today as contemporary tribal people who are also queer?
So we met up in the Research Room at Chachalu right before I gave a presentation. I was giving a presentation as part of the Indigenous Place Keeping Artist Fellowship last year with Grand Ronde. And after the presentation, like it was great, 30-something people came, it was very nicely attended. So I was there talking about making drag, and how that's me honoring my Two-Spiritedness. And it kind of felt like, 'Oh, there's an audience here for this.'
So after, Felix and I reconvened in the parking lot and literally, like, right there, planned everything. It was a rough draft of a plan, but we literally just planned from there.
Furby: It was this idea that more people need to hear this history. And also look at how many signs there are that other people are ready to hear it, just from that night.
I think that it's a good time. We should make a plan that introduces some of these things, where we do research, and we release it slowly over a long timeline, so we have a presence of this information coming out steadily.
The idea is that can also help our community heal because there's some wounds here and some lack of acceptance. And something about the stability and consistency of information coming out over bits at a time and Anthony doing their play after a certain amount of time — that sounds like that might be really good for the community. Sounds like it might help people feel more like they belong. And, it's not just a unique circumstance on this one day. It sounds like it might also help acclimate people to learning to accept us as part of the community, as an internal feature of our community, and not as an external force.
It's kind of like this massive, like, way too big to process sort of cultural level plan that we were putting out. But it's like, here's some actual, tangible things that we can do over the next few years to bring that about.
Hudson: Yeah, it was kind of amazing hatching this plan, literally in a parking lot where everything just felt like, between seeing the audience in my presentation, having listened to the power song right before that, everything felt like it was just converging. Like it was all spiraling in on itself or circling in on itself.
In that moment, we definitely thought, like Felix said, this is the way to help acclimate people.
What if we start with a little exhibit this summer, and it's just about the history, but it also spotlights some of us and some of our artwork and our contributions to our cultures. And then what if the next year we do a larger show that is encapsulating that information, but it's also driven by artwork? What if we start having monthly meetings and museum tours and drop-ins? And we can get kids from Chemawa to visit? Or kids from NAYA and bring them out to see this history?
So yeah, in that moment, it was like we came up with essentially a two-year-plus plan. We don't want to make something that just happens once, and it's done — we want to build something and that can happen over time so that it becomes more built back into our culture again.
And then, after we've spent years working on this, then we want other people to be able to take it and sustain it. So somehow, in a parking lot, we came up with this very intentional plan. And even weirder, somehow, we got everyone to go along with it.
Henshaw: So how does it feel as queer folks who are Native yourselves to be the ones behind this exhibit?
Furby: Well, I mean, for me, it feels too big to comprehend. You know, in one moment, it's a lot to wrap my head around.
One of the things that I noticed is Two Spirit and Indigiqueer, when we get together, things happen. When we network with each other, we can make real change happen. We can do impossibly big things, things that are bigger than us. And it's hard to wrap our heads around it a little bit, because the implications are huge.
So much of what I was putting up (in the exhibit) is like, this is everything that I have wanted to see. So a lot of it is selfish like, this is what little queer me wants. Like, I want to walk into Chachalu and see a big thing that says 'You belong.' I want to walk into Chachalu and see evidence that people like me were always here. I want to see more thinking that says, ‘We always will be here.’
Just being able to put those up, like these are some of the things that I tell myself as little affirmative statements, these little reframes of thoughts I'm always doing to decolonize. It's amazing to actually put them up somewhere and having go further than myself. It's an incredibly hopeful experience.
Hudson: Yeah, I think it's also terrifying to some extent because, at first, we were kind of nervous about responses, what might happen, but everything has been very cool.
But the terror is just doing it right, honoring the history. I think that's a big part of why and the first word in our curatorial plaque, we say we are not historians. We want to be as upfront as possible that this history has been out there; we are just highlighting it. So like this is something that any of us could have found. But we were able to assemble this in a way and at a time when it just really felt right.
Having that opening night felt so formational and beautiful, and I don't think anyone has seen that many queer folks in the tribal museum at one time.
The space was functioning to what we wanted because I felt held where it feels very unreal.
I would love to prolong this kind of work and with our community, especially as long as possible, because it's been really incredible. I think it started a lot of conversations that have long been needing to begin.
Like I said, this information has always been here, sometimes it takes queer people to look at history and to recognize somebody smiling back at you.
“My Father’s Father’s Sister” is on display at the Chachalu Cultural Museum from now through the end of November. Engagements in the exhibit are planned throughout the summer.
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