Mischief and Trans-Indigeneity: Rethinking Indigenous Narratives through Kent Monkman’s Miss Chief Eagle Testickle
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The presentation, “Mischief and Trans-Indigeneity: Rethinking Indigenous Narratives through Kent Monkman’s Miss Chief Eagle Testickle,” was delivered (online) at the international conference Décoloniser la comparaison: Lectures transautochtones des littératures contemporaines du Canada et du reste des Amériques, hosted at the Université du Québec à Montréal on 22 May 2025. Situated in a symposium devoted to trans-Indigenous approaches and comparative Indigenous literatures, the contribution explored how Kent Monkman’s gender-fluid, Two-Spirit alter ego Miss Chief Eagle Testickle operates as a disruptive and regenerative figure within contemporary Indigenous art. Drawing on Monkman’s multimodal practice (painting, performance, and the recent Memoirs of Miss Chief Eagle Testickle), the presentation examined how Miss Chief reclaims narrative sovereignty, unsettles colonial art historical frameworks, and mobilizes trickster aesthetics to challenge dominant representations.Framed through an ethical, non-extractive research positionality, the talk emphasized the importance of relational accountability and Indigenous theorizing, engaging especially with the work of Leanne Betasamosake Simpson on grounded normativity, resurgence, and trans-Indigeneity. By analyzing key artworks such as The Triumph of Mischief (2007), The Daddies (2016), and I Come from pâkwan kisik, the Hole in the Sky (2022), the presentation showed how Monkman revisits and subverts canonical Western visual traditions while simultaneously articulating creation stories, queer Indigenous futures, and the fluid, pan-temporal presence of Miss Chief. The discussion highlighted how Monkman’s narrative strategies resist erasure, rewrite colonial histories, and create space for Indigenous self-histories that move beyond recognition politics toward resurgence.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.006 | 0.006 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.030 | 0.028 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.010 | 0.007 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.008 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".