Huard, Adrienne2026-06-022026-06-022026-04-292026-04-29http://hdl.handle.net/1993/39818This dissertation engages with Two-Spirit, trans, and queer Indigenous performance practices while highlighting their contributions to the continuance of Two-Spirit epistemologies on the so-called Canadian Prairies. I argue that Two-Spirit knowledges, aesthetics, and creative works are synonymous—these knowledges are simply translated through visual, auditory, and embodied languages. However, settler-colonialism has driven these epistemologies into a dormancy period as a result of Judeo-Christian indoctrination and Eurocentric violence against Indigenous understandings of sex, sexuality, and gender-expansiveness. This dissertation includes voices from prominent Two-Spirit, trans, and queer Indigenous drag performers, powwow dancers, artists, scholars, and Elders who are trailblazers within the Two-Spirit community in Miiskwaagamiwiziibiing (Winnipeg, Manitoba). They provide insight on local Two-Spirit histories, nation-specific teachings, and their perspectives on creative practices, such as drag, burlesque, and other embodied performances. Additionally, this research delves into Anishinaabe oral histories and narratives that reveal pre-colonial concepts of Indigenous sex, sexuality, and gender-expansiveness—concepts that have been silenced by settler-colonial tactics of erasure and eradication. These stories include expressions of the erotic, body autonomy, and ancestral corporeal knowledges. By engaging in dance and embodied storytelling, Two-Spirit, trans, and queer Indigenous performers are physically remembering dormant Two-Spirit knowledges while generating new ones, building safer spaces to actively share their ways of being and knowing with future generations. Lastly, this dissertation contextualizes trickster narratives as witnessed in Two-Spirit Indigenous performance practices, revealing their shape-shifting, gender-bending, and campy Two-Spirit ontologies. Although I incorporate Two-Spirit, trans, and queer Indigenous voices and knowledges from a broad range of communities and nations, I employ an Anishinaabe analytic framework to situate the research from my own positionality, as a Two-Spirit Anishinaabe person. In doing so, I resist settler-colonial scholarship’s desire to homogenize these vast and dynamic Indigenous ontologies. Through all of this, it is my hope that this research contributes to the revival of these sleeping Two-Spirit, trans, and queer Indigenous knowledges while celebrating the proliferation of Two-Spirit re-emergence.engTwo-SpiritPerformance ArtIndigenousAestheticsAnishinaabe