A member of Fisher River First Nation in Manitoba, Kent Monkman is a two-spirit cisgender man whose paintings about the adventures of his alter ego, Miss Chief Eagle Testickle, dramatically confront chronic misrepresentations of Indigenous history and culture. Miss Chief’s very name contains a double pun on androgyny and mischief as well as being a satiric homonym. In collaboration with Gisèle Gordon, a writer and media artist who moved from England to Canada as a child, Monkman has fashioned two volumes of genre-demolishing history, fiction, and art that revise and remake our understanding of Turtle Island. Famous and infamous notables such as Sir John A. Macdonald, George-Étienne Cartier, and Egerton Ryerson are dispatched with deadly wit — as are international figures like Charles Dickens and Eugène Delacroix.
The Memoirs of Miss Chief Eagle Testickle is certainly a double whammy, with magic realism in text and painting consorting to expose the colonial...
Keith Garebian has published thirty books and five chapbooks, including the poetry collections Three-Way Renegade and, most recently, Stay. He is featured in the third volume of Laurence Hutchman’s In the Writers’ Words.
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