Transmotion Vol 6, No 2 (2020) Sweatlodge in the Apocalypse: An Interview with Smokii Sumac JAMES MACKAY *Please view the html version of this piece in order to watch the recording of the original interview. James Mackay: I wanted to start by asking about the images on the front cover of your book, you are enough. They’re very striking, and seem to say a lot about you and your relationship to the land. How did you come to the design and how did you come to choose those particular images? Smokii Sumac: I love this question! I don't get to talk about it a lot. I was really lucky to be working with an Indigenous press, Kegedonce (https://kegedonce.com), who gave me the freedom to choose. And when I started thinking about what I wanted to share, I was thinking about first of all, where I'm from. The lands there in those photos are my many different homes, places that I'm connected to. A lot of the book is about finding home. So there's Peterborough, Ontario, where I was living. One of them is just the moon. There are the mountains from home where I live in Ktunaxa territory. And there's also Blackfeet territory where I do ceremony. Then I put myself out there. I think there's sort of this insecurity around selfies sometimes that can happen because there's sort of a stigma around them – at least, the Kim Kardashian kind of selfie mode. And yet it means something else for our Indigenous women specifically. I think of an artist Nancy King, who is known as Chief Lady Bird (https://chiefladybirdart.tumblr.com), or of Tenille Campbell 117 James Mackay An Interview with Smokii Sumac (www.tenillecampbell.com) who is another poet and photographer and she's got a book, Indian Love Poems (www.signature- editions.com/index.php/books/single_title/indianlovepoems). You look at their Instagrams and they have thousands, tens of thousands of followers. And they've talked about this idea of revolutionizing the selfie, which is important for me because of the transition. Not just because I medically transitioned, but also because of being in transition in my life, deciding to change genders and moving between. What does that presentation look like? There was kind of a really neat time in my life, the two years of when these poems were written, where I was playing with different things, whether that was being feminine-presenting and using earrings and lipstick, or male-presenting and wearing my hats. I think when we say gender is performative, sometimes it is what you're wearing. So I did have quite a few photos that I sent and said “These are options,” and we went from there. It's revolutionary for Indigenous people to represent ourselves. I think about Tik Tok (https://www.tiktok.com/tag/firstnations?lang=en), I think about Instagram (https://www.instagram.com/explore/tags/firstnations/), I think about our youth being able to just sort of make a movie in a way that's so much more accessible compared to the years of the only representation of ourselves being through lenses like Western movies. It’s changing for now. When I talk to my students, I ask “Do you know who John Wayne is?” And they don't now, but they know Pocahontas, so that's the next stereotypical imagery to overcome. It’s different when we get to represent ourselves. When it comes to my book, I also thought about the people who are the young people who are in transition and what it would mean to see that sort of spectrum on the cover. My four year old niece, when she was showing it to someone, was really proud. But she also went, “This is Smokii's book, but he's not a lady!” She was very confused 118 Transmotion Vol 6, No 2 (2020) on that front, although we’ve been talking to her about gender, because it’s only in the last two years that she's sort of adopted me. JM: I love what you're saying about the digital self-representation for First Nations artists. Isn’t it also true for most trans people that they haven't been self-represented? SS: Definitely. When I started looking for trans representation, all I found was young white men - young white boys even. There weren’t a lot of people that look like me or were my age even. And then it's often a before and after photo. It just becomes like weight loss photos: these sort of problematic things that show this instantaneous “before and after” this moment. I wanted to show the range. I wanted to show the movement. We're not all of this stuff. It's not a binary line. For my story, I can't say there was a before and after - there were years of change and of understanding myself, and that movement continues. So I like the idea of thinking of it as a spectrum rather than the binary. JM: I don't think I see a single capital letter in the entire book outside the copyright pages. What does lowercase mean for you? SS: I've been taught that in our languages we don't use the same kind of grammar, although we have adopted some punctuation marks to make it user-friendly, for example the question mark. I'm not a fluent speaker, but I'm learning right now. We have a grammar app, and I'm learning from that. We've been debating whether to use question marks or not, or whether we use periods or not, because in our language it doesn't work that way. Our grammar actually is added in through suffixes and prefixes and these kinds of things. So that was part of it. 119 James Mackay An Interview with Smokii Sumac Another part is just aesthetic. At one point my editor said, “I don't know why you have a period in some places and why in some you don't.” And I said, “Well, because they were all written on Facebook!” I was not thinking of them as a collection at the time - it was just basically an unconscious choice. But I think part of it was just the social media aesthetic. It also honors what, what Joy Harjo calls (https://poets.org/text/ancestors-mapping-indigenous-poetry-and-poets) our “poetry ancestors.” bell hooks (https://www.berea.edu/appalachian-center/appalachian-center- home/faculty-and-staff/bell-hooks), for instance, has that idea of not capitalizing the “i.” It means not putting myself above anything, and that we're all on the same level. I also at the time was moving from using my previous name, which I usually used in lowercase. (Now actually I do capitalize my name, I think because it means a lot to me.) JM: The other thing I'd ask about is poem titles. Because a lot of the pieces are untitled and it’s really unclear in some places if it's one long poem or if it should be considered as lots of short poems. SS: Most of these poems are curated from two years of work under the hashtag #haikuaday, which I was posting on Facebook daily, or almost daily, for two years. The original working title for the collection was actually #haikuaday, though we scrapped that at some point, and when I was in the editing stages, I had a really long table of contents at one point, where I had titled each poem as the date they were written. As the work evolved, as it became the book, when I started organizing them by topic, it became a completely different thing. Do they need titles? How do you title a haiku? It was quite funny because the academic in me was saying “People are going to write about this! It's going to be impossible! How are they going to cite?” And my editor 120 Transmotion Vol 6, No 2 (2020) had to say, “You're the poet - you're not the academic right now.” And so we scrapped the table of contents because it was confusing and just got in the way. Now they feel like a longer poem, even though the breaks are where they were as when they were written as haiku, certainly for any of the ones that follow that the 5- 7-5 syllable haiku pattern. The longer poems are a little bit different, of course, and those are signified in different ways. JM: As you say, these poems appeared on social media originally, which makes for a very particular audience, especially on Facebook where the audience is closed off. Is there a difference, either in what you're prepared to share or in what you do with form? How does the medium affect the poems? SS: When I started sharing on Facebook, the nice thing about it was that it gets lost. Like you read it and then it's gone. It's a moment in time. And because not only is there a closed audience, but also because of the algorithms, people don't necessarily see your posts all the time. So I was getting interactions of maybe 15-20 likes on a post, and in my mind people weren't really reading them. So when I started it as a practice, it was very casual. A writing coach told me to try to write a poem a day.