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What makes a work of literature an autobiography, creative nonfiction, personal essay, or poetry? Where do these distinctions lie, and how useful are they when our identities and experiences are so rarely binary? How can language evolve to accommodate the intersections and spaces in between, and what happens when it fails us?

These questions are at the crux of Joshua Whitehead’s Making Love with the Land, a collection of essays he calls “biostory” that explore the intersections of Indigenous identity, love, desire, grief, and connection to the land. Shortlisted for the 2022 Hilary Weston Writers’ Trust Prize for Nonfiction, Whitehead’s essays blur the lines of genre as he navigates the inadequacy of the English language — what he calls “this flailing, flailing English,” particularly as it reinforces colonial violence.

Whitehead is no stranger to pushing the boundaries of category. In his previous works, full-metal indigiqueer and Jonny Appleseed, Whitehead writes in a style that is at once biography and fiction. These works never fully cross into the autobiographical. In Jonny Appleseed, his protagonist exists “on the ledge between biography and fiction.” It’s this hidden biography that Whitehead unveils in Making Love with the Land, what he calls a “hemorrhaging” that seeks to use Indigenous knowledge systems to express lived experience.

In his first essay in Making Love with the Land “Who Names the Rez Dog Rez?” Whitehead blurs the lines between poetry and essay to describe himself as a “rez dog,” a wild animal longing for kinship among his pack. Whitehead uses the rez dog and its escape from captivity as a metaphor for his desire to be free and amongst kin. He establishes this desire to find refuge from colonial trauma, writing that he is “looking for a good home, both in their skins and my own.”

This desire to find refuge and escape the limitations of the human body is palpable throughout the essays that follow. In “My Body Is a Hinterland” Whitehead wrestles with what it means to inhabit a body, calling his body “the area beyond,” and the mind a “wilderness.” He compares himself to the animals that roam at night, asking “What are we both hunting for, right here, right now, my kin?” Later, he recounts his struggle to perform in order to assimilate into hetero-patriarchal society, and how this experience dehumanized him.

But dehumanization is not just a product of rejection — it’s also a product of categorization. In his essay “Writing as a Rupture,” Whitehead wrestles with the notion of autobiography, writing that autobiography “becomes a declaration of absoluteness that firmly anchors the “I” of a narrative and binds it to the writer as a truth-teller.” Whitehead would rather reject the absoluteness that the term “biography” carries with it — the idea that there is only one objective truth, and one correct way to tell it. He rejects the idea that he must “form a pact without consent” or adhere to the limitations of genre as it’s understood from a colonial, institutional perspective. Instead, he opts to call his writings “biotextual,” distancing himself from the “belonging and subservience” that genre demands.

In a political landscape where discussions on decolonization are still spoken through the language of colonial institutions, Whitehead’s essays come as both remedy and welcomed alternative. His work rejects categorization and genre in favour of a desire to explore language, to make it fluid, and to call back upon the idea that land, language, and body are intimately connected. It remains relevant to all those who seek a reprieve from those boxes. As Whitehead prefaces in his dedications, the book is for “every person who has touched profound pain.”

A testament to the powers of kinship, Indigenous knowledge, and storytelling, Making Love with the Land is a book that everyone should read, so that we might collectively deepen our understanding of ourselves and each other.