“In-Between Kumeyaay and Brooklyn”

This chapter considers how the practice of queer Indigeneity creates spatially oriented modes of sensation, embodiment, and affect that transcend settler sexualities and structures of violence. Reading Tommy Pico’s poetry collection IRL (2016), the chapter examines how Pico’s meditations on pre-mature Indigenous death, colonial gender violence, and Indigenous cosmologies enact decolonial forms of memory and futurity through queerness. It also illustrates how Pico’s felt theorizations of “in-betweenness” challenge normative narrations of Indigenous urban migration while also mapping the Indigenous body as a site of resistance, ceremony, and Two-Spirit potentiality.