The Albertan Queer Affirmation Review identified the importance of empowering Queer storytellers.

Through its ways, Treaty guarantees that two-spirit folks and others should be able to live in our cities and schools. Queer people have the grand joy that, in being true to ourselves, we make room for and affirm Treaty. The same treaty that allows us to be our own true selves lets others do the same and deserves empowerment. Through this, queer spaces become magic places and stories maintain that magic. What follows comes in part from being queer in Treaty 7.

“A New Stampede” - A Queer Salon Inspired Tale

Toby was back on treaty seven land. He built a life an ocean away in Aotearoa with his partner from Brazil, a love stitched together across hemispheres. But when the global tide of talent brought Brazilian drag superstar Pabllo Vittar to the Calgary Stampede, it created a constellation Toby couldn’t resist — a chance to show his love his home and to connect from diaspora reflections back to the prairie.

I remember how his voice, usually chipper and steady, had gone thin and flat over the phone. The visa, he said, the words not landing with anger but with a heavy finality. It’s not going to happen in time. There was a long silence on the line, an ocean’s worth of disappointment. So I was rung up to be the ringer. A government stamp had left an empty seat and Toby needed a friend to fill the space.

I have known many Toby’s since youth, and he could rightly claim the same about me, as we have lived many chapters and scenes of our lives overlapping. In concert for royalty, cribbage while on patrol aboard the CALGARY, stopovers at the Greco-Ukranski Seminary while on stints in Ottawa. We knew many different worlds as friends making their way, and all involved sound, story, music, and voice. We knew many things, we learnt many things, but amongst them was the heat, the cool, the joys, and the hate of northeast Calgary, and pride hidden upbringings and neighborhoods, and many a stampede time to recognize these truths.

He arrived with tickets, time, and a heart full of that particular hope that is spun from nostalgia. As we wandered and roamed the downtown core, all dudded up with painted window and hay here and there, Toby reminisced how the times were again a changing. Stampede is a time for stories made, edited, modified, and modified more. From how folks spend their time in the daylight and what they do after and after that, stories turn, churn, and adjust to fit the times. Toby’s reflections peeled back the shared now with perspective from time away. How despite adjusted stories layered on adjusted stories, Stampede was a celebration of diversity and stories felt, though rarely told. Stampede talk peels back truths of a tapestry of prairie cowboy spirit.

Think about it — The West was built by people who are running to something or running from something... The real frontier wasn’t a poster, it was a hard, diverse scramble for survival and at times belonging."

Toby swept a hand across the vibrant, noisy grounds. We’re told a story about these plains, he said. The story of the white, straight, Christian cowboy. And sure he existed. He turned to me, his eyes clear, but so did the Black, the Asian, and the Métis riders and more, the Two-Spirit and Queer folk who cared for horses and who ran accounts and negotiations paid in dirt and sky. He paused, pointing towards the distant festive tapestry of the summer fire season all about. Think about it — The West was built by people who are running to something or running from something. A Black cowboy from the American South wasn’t just seeking work, He was seeking a semblance of freedom. A Queer person finding a role with a ranch was finding a community that, for a time, might have valued their skill with a rope over their personal life or what they called themselves. The real frontier wasn’t a poster, it was a hard, diverse scramble for survival and at times belonging. The skills required with animals, tack, and trade didn’t come with a prerequisite of whiteness or straightness. This simpler, cleaner history was a fiction, a comfort to those who needed the past to be less complicated than their present.

While a stampede of my youth taught me many lessons, the one we’d walked through now showed me a reality I wouldn’t have thought possible. Sure, all sorts of folks could work the stampede back in my day, but now in the broad daylight, all sorts of folks were enjoying it. BIPOC folks, Queer folks, newcomers, old comers. They had smiles on their faces, and faces like theirs were on the posters; a glimpse of the times before stampede times neighbors from Marlborough neighbors from the Crossroads they’d be here working or hiding in plain sight where they could but often enjoying it away from the midway.

Toby quipped as we stepped into the river of people on that midway. I was struck by the cacophony. A woman’s laugh free and bell-like cut through the din of groaning machinery and the frantic pitch of carnival barkers. The air itself was layered sensory experiences: the sweet sticky smell of mini doughnuts fused with the scent of fried onions and the honest musky odor of horse and hay from the nearby stables. My hand drifted unconsciously to my neck as I absorbed the symphony of a thousand easy voices, a stark contrast to the careful practiced silence I carried with me like a necessary shield

He pointed to the advertisements in the lineups, bouncing to the beat of music. All of these folks, now out in broad daylight. It was a simple statement, but it held the weight of decades. For so long this place was sold as the last best West for a very specific kind of person. To be yourself in these spaces was a quite often solitary act.

Toby comes from long-standing prairie stock, but he took his knowledge of the land and carried it across the world. I remember visiting him by zoom in Aotearoa, his hands dark with soil as he gently showed me native plants and global crops, explaining in symbiotic relationship with the earth beneath his feet. His wasn’t just book knowledge, it was a deep, tactile understanding. To practice skills like that fully, you need a community that welcomes your whole self. Like the cowboys of old, he took his skills where he could live completely. Many Queer folk from these lands know this same journey. The need to leave in order to find a place for your hands and your heart to work is one.

As we walked, the strength he had built for himself was clear, a new kind of fortitude flowing through him like a deep, calm river. And there we were, at a city-block-sized pavilion tent packed with people who had come from far and wide in belief of art, in community, and in having a damn good time. I was there because of a paperwork failure, but shortly enough I found my own belief, It was the voice. Their voice. Pabllo does drag, but Pabllo sings. And the sound was a stunning, soaring force. It was the sheer effort behind it that truly entranced me — the countless hours of training and self-overcoming it represented.

“I, like many trans folks, have a fraught relationship with my own voice… A sound that can feel like a borrowed coat that doesn’t always make warm… And here was living proof… that it could all be done.”

I, like many trans folks, have a fraught relationship with my own voice. It’s a recording I often flinch from. A sound that can feel like a borrowed coat that doesn’t always make warm. I remember the exhausting practice sessions alone in car repeating phrases until they felt less foreign only to have a misgendering here or there like a stone crush the momentum. The struggle to find a sound that feels like one’s own one that fits is a constant quiet war. And here was living proof, screaming or more so serenading that it could all be done. Pabllo had forged their voice into an instrument that was entirely, powerfully their own.

Toby saw my silent absorption, reflecting later in his words a gentle truth. You know, throughout our walk and talk, you’ve been using your own voice all night. As a trans femme person, voices are a hard thing. They’re hard to practice where you might be heard, hard to hear played back, and hard to trust in the world and in the wild. I’ve wrapped myself in silence so many times afraid of being heard, of the disconnect between my voice and myself, causing that dreaded misgendering. Sometimes, in so many ways, it’s just easier not to talk but easier still was hearing progress validated and effort honoured. So here’s to all the Toby and Toby like folk out there making time and effort to flag progress.

There was an immense power in talking and gathering, being heard and feeling heard. It’s like a communion, a gratitude for a shared ideal, a sense that our efforts are seen and valued. Now the Stampede can reflect the narrow story some have always tried to tell or it can reflect the quiet but never silent truth of our diversity then and now the more we talk the more we gather the less the silence is deafening the more we encourage our stories the more the old stories make room.

The Queer in Treaty 7 podcast is a call to action from the Albertan Queer Affirmation Review, an ongoing work by community curated by Cupola Policy and Strategy. You can find more, read more, and hear more through this sub-stack and more on policy science inclusion efforts at CupolaStrategy.com.

Thank you for sharing your time and for entrenching Treaty and Queer folk.

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