Our Identity Is Not Fair Game; Our Ancestors Are Not Your Punch Line

October is a surreal month for Indigenous people in this nation, particularly this October in Minnesota. 

We live at the margins and our experiences are often dual existences. We’re often erased from existence, forgotten and relegated to the history books as some oddity that “pioneering” white settlers subdued and when we are acknowledged as living and breathing in this world with the descendants of those settlers, it’s almost always as some stereotype that’s employed to continue to make us something not quite human.

Fortunately, in the Minnesota cities of Minneapolis, St. Paul, Grand Marais, Grand Rapids, Moorhead, in Cook County and on the campus of Minnesota State University Mankato, the second Monday in October now acknowledges Indigenous Peoples Day. This year, Gov. Tim Walz continued a tradition of proclaiming the same; it would take an act of the state legislature to formalize this tradition.

Unfortunately, the Washington football team came to Minneapolis yesterday still holding onto a racist and stereotyped mockery of indigenous peoples' culture. Our community rightly responded in protest. The highest-ranking indigenous state official in the nation, Lt. Gov. Peggy Flanagan shared her daughter’s words on learning about the team’s name, “Mommy, that’s not right. We’re not animals. We’re people. We’re not mascots.”

The strength of solidarity is that it calls on us in the LGBTQ+ community (particularly those of us at the intersections) to remember our own fight for humanity, to remember the times when we struggled and continue to struggle forward towards justice, and to be with one another in these times of challenge and struggle. 

At the margins, we all live with the effects of hatred and fear that separate us from our friends, family, neighbors, coworkers, and turn us into people to be feared. At the margins, when we see each other in struggle against that same fear in a different guise (be it transphobia, homophobia, racism, antisemitism, or xenophobia), there is strength that unites and connects us in our push toward liberation for all.

I’m fortunate to serve our communities in my capacity as a board member of OutFront Minnesota and I’m honored that the staff and board continue to support solidarity work and stand for justice. I’m proud to know that Indigenous people, in particular Two-Spirit Minnesotans and our Latinx relatives, are supported and valued within our LGBTQ movement for times like these when fear and racism is visited upon us.

Alfred Walking Bull is a board member of OutFront Minnesota.