A Future Perfect: Queer Digital Sovereignty in Joshua Whitehead’s Jonny Appleseed and full-metal indigiqueer

Abstract

© 2020 by the Board of Regents of the University of Wisconsin System ji-Cree debut author Joshua Whitehead’s book of linked poems, full-metal indigiqueer, opens with a visual representation of the birth of its hybridized, biologicaltechnological Trickster narrator, zoa.1 This birthing sequence spans a series of black pages. A small white dot the size of a pinhead on the first black sheet grows in size on each consecutive page until it reveals a white space filled with binary code, and superimposed on it, zoa’s ontological claim: “H3R314M” (17). That newly birthed singularity exists relationally as well as adaptively: “i lrn: / youthisme.” Next, the entity seeks “home,” seeks the maternal source, nikâwiy, and “paint[s] my face with pixels” to become “warpathtoo” (19). This startling opening image merges the technological (pixels, artificial intelligence) with the biological (“i seek nikâwiy”): zoa orients themself to the world as a being (“14M”) but a specifically Anishinaabe being, an identity already coded in patterns of relationality, reciprocity, and kinship (“youthisme”) as well as one embedded in matrices of colonial violence and Indigenous survivance (“lookmaimwarpathtoo”) (19).2 Throughout the poem sequence, zoa’s disembodied technological self is also always