Jonny Appleseed

Jonny also remembers taking trips to Selkirk, a local town, to visit the grocery store with his mother and grandmother. His mother searches for painkillers and alcohol as his grandmother lets him rent a video. On every trip, Jonny chooses to rent the film DEUCE BIGALO: MALE GIGOLO.

His grandmother takes him to a discount hair salon, where she gets a perm, and he cuts off his long hair. Having long hair on men is more traditionally NDN, so Jonny associates his grandmother’s approval of his haircut with her preference for whiteness. His mother was very upset when she saw his new ‘do.

Jonny recounts the ways that passing for white has made his life in Winnipeg easier, including with white gay men. He says that he “played straight on the rez in order to be NDN and here [in Winnipeg] I played white in order to be queer” (58).

Jonny considers how to get together the money to make it back to Peguis for his stepfather's funeral. He needs two hundred dollars, and he’s spent his last cash on makeup for work. He isn’t upset about his stepfather's death, but he wants to be present for his mother in her grief and visit his kokum.

His grandmother is the first person to whom he came out as gay. When he came out to her over the phone, he cried for a long time before she told him she already knew. She tells him he’s Two-Spirit (a non-binary Indigenous gender identity).

One year, Jonny’s mother takes him Christmas shopping in Selkirk. At the Hallmark store, Jonny picks out a tiny glass frog as a gift for his grandmother, but he doesn't have enough money for the purchase. When his mother tells him he can’t buy it, he locks himself in the bathroom and cries. On the drive home, his mother surprises him with the frog for his grandmother.

Substantial characterization of Jonny’s kokum is narrated in this chapter, especially her interest in knitting wool items and her basement crowded with gifts and decorations.

Jonny’s grandmother used to babysit him. She tried to teach him how to bead (a traditional Indigenous craft), but he had difficulty with the fine motor skills required. At night, she takes him outside into the bush with flashlights to look for Bigfoot. Once, when they are dressing up and dancing together to a Redbone song, Jonny accidentally falls down the stairs and cracks his collarbone. When his mother arrives to pick him up, she's very angry with her own mother for Jonny’s injury.

Jonny walks down a street in Winnipeg to purchase orange juice from the dollar store. The first-person narration roves to create a streetscape from Jonny's point-of-view: unhoused people, buildings, and local landmarks. As he walks, Jonny remembers a moment from his teen years: he and Tias were making out in the bushes when several other teens attacked them with rocks. In the present, Jonny gives an unhoused Indigenous man a cigarette and considers once more how to raise enough money to go home for his stepfather's funeral.

Jonny remembers visiting his aunty’s house on the reservation. His aunty was well-known for making delicious soups on Sundays and serving it alongside bannock (pan-fried bread). Extended family gathered to eat and share stories from the weekend.

His aunty was also fearless: Jonny describes an incident in which she fended off a garbage-eating bear with only a kitchen broom. The bear made him afraid of walking over to his aunty’s house. This fear came to a head one day when he met a bear cub in the road, though he shooed the cub away by playing a Nirvana song from his phone’s speakers.

Jonny recounts the best advice he ever received, from his mother when he was eight. When he was beading a thunderbird to gift to a boy on whom he had a crush, she told him not to give work away for free. She accepts his Two-Spirit identity, saying “you girl and you boy and that’s fine with me, but what’s not fine is you selling yourself short” (82).

Jonny takes a bath. Vivid imagery connects the experience to fish moving in the Red River in Winnipeg. He remembers standing in the river on the reservation as a child and watching crawfish move over his toes. He also remembers taking childhood baths with his mother, where he would feel genderless in the water. He feels homesick, and he masturbates with his ears underwater, listening to his own heartbeat.

Jonny describes a recurring dream of a walk through the mountains in which he finds the reproductive and animal imagery sexually suggestive. In the dream, he sees the footprints of Maskwa, a bear cub spiritually important to the Cree people, and he makes a tobacco offering. As he’s pressing the tobacco into the earth, he feels the bear come up behind him, lick him, and pin him down as Jonny hears the round dance song.

The bear has sex with Jonny in this position; the bear takes a seed out of Jonny's body before bringing Jonny to orgasm. After the orgasm, Jonny notes that “all of this treaty land is filled with me” (90). The bear speaks to him in Cree, recognizing Jonny’s Two-Spirit gender identity.

Jonny remembers watching Tias shower after gym when they were young. Some nights, Tias’s parents would hire a babysitter, who would give the kids makeovers and watch movies with them. Though they usually washed off the makeup and nail polish before Tias’s parents came home, one night his parents came home early. Tias’s father is upset at their silver glitter nail polish and cuts Tias’s nails too short, which makes his fingers bleed. After Tias washes his hands in the shower, he and Jonny bandage them. When Jonny puts one of Tias’s fingers in his mouth, Tias begins to cry.

Jonny books his next camming client. As he waits for the appointment, he remembers trying to visit a traditional Cree sweat lodge with his kokum while wearing traditional Cree feminine clothing. Jonny was not allowed to enter in the feminine clothing; he considers how traditional medicine is reserved for gender-conforming Indigenous and not for “self-ordained Injun glitter princesses like me” (100). The pattern of being expected to conform to masculine gender roles repeated throughout his childhood. As an adult, Jonny sews himself a Jingle Dress in the four colors of the medicine wheel, with recycled soup can lids as bells.