Why We Should Read: Johnny Appleseed

Why We

Should Read

At its best, fiction shows us who we are and, more importantly, expands our idea of who is included in that “we.” In Jonny Appleseed, Joshua Whitehead captures the loneliness of the protagonist’s double exile as a youth who is Two Spirit and Indigenous in a society which fully accepts neither. We accompany Jonny as he struggles to find belonging moving from the rez to Winnipeg carrying scars of intergenerational trauma, and we begin to see a commonality with a character whose life on the surface seems so dissimilar from most of our own. Both Jonny’s mother and grandmother understand that he is Two Spirit and accept him in a way many on the rez do not. Much of the novel is a recounting of Jonny’s quest for the unconditional love and acceptance he found from his kokum. In his pursuit of this connection and a way to make his way in the city, Jonny becomes an online sex worker. While the very graphic details of sexual encounters may not be to everyone’s comfort level, it gives a sense of how much this is a part of Jonny’s day-to-day life. As he says, sex is a way to feel that “we were here,” to be seen and known in some way, as “… our bodies are a library, and our stories are written like braille on the skin.” Being Two Spirit, Jonny and indeed Whitehead themselves, resist the gender pigeonholes into which society wants to put people. Jonny says, “There are a million parts of me that don’t add up, a million parts of me that signal immodesty. When I think of masculinity, I think of femininity.” Through the character of Jonny, Whitehead is trying to break down the preconceptions of what being Indigiqueer is – and readers may be left surprised, grateful for the tenderness that is revealed in this book.

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Submitted by David and Ranji