<p style="text-align: right">. . . extraordinary stories of negotiation, creativity, and survival trump colonial misconceptions to prove that [First Nations and Métis] women have steadfastly resisted, worked with courage and spirit, struggled to maintain the sacredness of their responsibilities, and challenged the forces that sought to confine them.
—Sherry Farrell Racette, “Nimble Fingers and Strong Backs: First Nations and Métis Women in Fur Trade and Rural Economies” (2012)</p>
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The Outlander (2011), a scene staged and photographed by Dayna Danger, is one of high intensity, great drama, and sensuous ecstasy. It is a Bosch-like fantasy world, rich in cultural and spiritual symbolism. On the verge of some great calamity or deliverance, the depicted nighttime forest environment and its motley crew of half-human-half-beast characters wait in suspense, frozen between trepidation and Dionysian festivity, darkness and blinding light, effervescent life and the slow rot of death.

Every time I return to Danger’s “Bad Girls” series, images which reflect on the role of women through art historical tradition, religious iconography, and mythological storytelling, I am struck by the new details I discover. These photographs are rich visual tapestries, epic narratives that give the impression of unfolding differently every time they are studied. Danger has a deep understanding of these landscapes or bondagescapes, not taking for granted their many meanings and contradictions. For the Métis/Saulteaux/Polish two-spirit queer creator from Manitoba, this state of flux, this threshold, this trans-ness is a familiar, embodied, and ancestral reality that they continuously make manifest through photography, video, and performance.

In the series Big’Uns, Danger defies societal gender norms that objectify women, trans, and non-binary individuals by attempting to strip them of their power. At issue are different forms of colonial, capitalistic, and other neo-conservative restrictions and violence. Reclaiming authority over their own sexuality by wearing strap-on animal antlers over their genitals, Danger’s models defy Western hetero-patriarchal paradigms that have, for example, paved the way for residential schools, sexual abuse, and sexualized portrayals of bodies in the media.

In Aapijigogizhawenimin (2021), their most recent portrait of Adrienne, a recurring model, collaborator, and friend, Danger demonstrates detailed beadwork in the shape of a jet-black kinship mask that recalls rich traditions of floral and plant-life motifs in Métis beading practices. Unlike previous projects, which seem oriented towards the outside world, this new photograph speaks of intimacy, interiority, and serving a queer community, its individual stories, and its life cycles. By reclaiming spaces for healing, beauty, self-expression, and strength, Danger challenges the continued suppression of two-spirit Indigenous peoples by settlers, the state, and religion. Practicing refusal, they also denounce the fetishization of two-spiritedness and Indigeneity by so-called white allies. Fiercely portraying and publicly performing identities that have for centuries been repressed, Danger’s work echoes what Joshua Whitehead, a two-spirit Oji-nêhiyaw member of Peguis First Nation (Treaty 1), writes in the introduction to Love after the End: An Anthology of Two-Spirit and Indigiqueer Speculative Fiction (2021): “as we know, we have already survived the apocalypse—this, right here, right now, is a dystopian present. What better way to imagine survivability than to think about how we may flourish into being joyously animated rather than merely alive?”

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<pre><img class="alignnone size-full wp-image-8830" src="https://vuphoto.org/workspace/uploads/03_Bad-Girls_Derby-Girls_2011-copie.jpg" alt="" /></pre>
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<pre><img class="alignnone size-full wp-image-8832" src="https://vuphoto.org/workspace/uploads/04_Bad-Girls_Mary-Ann-Cotton_2010-copie.jpg" alt="" /></pre>
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<pre><img class="alignnone size-full wp-image-8838" src="https://vuphoto.org/workspace/uploads/07_Kinship-Masks_aapiji-go-gizhawenimin_2021-copie.jpg" alt="" /></pre>
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<pre><img class="alignnone size-full wp-image-8840" src="https://vuphoto.org/workspace/uploads/08_Kinship-Masks_Self-Portrait_2019-copie.jpg" alt="" /></pre>
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<pre><img class="alignnone size-full wp-image-8842" src="https://vuphoto.org/workspace/uploads/09_Kinship-Masks_Adrienne-Dagger_2017.jpg" alt="" /></pre>
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