A #PresentingACCUTE Interview

With the upcoming 2025 ACCUTE Conference at George Brown College from 30th May- June 2nd, we have been having interviews with some of the presenters in conversation with Gladwell Pamba, ACCUTE’s Coordination and Communications Assistant. Next up on the interview series of #PresentingACCUTE is Kai McKenzie, who teaches English and Theory of Knowledge to keen young 16-19-year-old students at Lester B. Pearson World College of the Pacific. Kai writes creatively, and explores their own and communal connections to place by walking, paddling and swimming on the land and water of Vancouver Island. Their path of learning has carried them through German and Russian literatures, folklore, mountaineering, salmon cultures, Canadian Literature, and Transgender and Two-Spirit literatures.

Tell us about what you’ll be focusing on in your presentation

I proposed a chapter from my dissertation that I just finished in the English program at the University of Saskatchewan where I was looking at three novels. Jonny Appleseed by Joshua Whitehead is one of them. My focus is its cross-cultural perspective on gender-diverse coming of age. I am interested in how they represent this real life experience of the authors, as they came of age as gender diverse people within their own cultures. I wanted to know what kinds of resources the cultures offer and what kinds of challenges they have. I was especially inspired by a short story I read years ago by Ashok Mathur called “Into Skin” about a hijada gender diverse immigrant from India. The key theme of the story was that Canada was not the land of opportunity but of challenges because this person had a culture of acceptance back in India and they were facing brutal racism and transphobia in Canada. It was their cultural resources from their own spirituality from Hinduism that were the resource for survival in Canada. My presentation positions the complexity of the cultural landscape around support for gender diverse people. In Jonny Appleseed, I’m looking at different literary strategies the author poses and the complexity that breaks free of confinement. Joshua emphasizes that he’s not transgender but two-spirit. He uses creative literary strategies to do the work of refusing containment and posing the complexity of identity. In the novel, a young two-spirit person is a naive narrator who doesn’t understand his identity but over time, he starts to understand that he has this two-spirit history and culture. I looked at the relationship between the fabula and the sjuzhet. There’s this constant interplay between the two going on as the protagonist looks back and remembers things that happened as he was growing up. There is a layer of complexity and the beauty of things fitting together in the multiplicity of experience. He slowly comes to understand his own identity. In the act of remembering, he’s reclaiming his own identity and also recalling the two-spirit history for his community. Joshua Whitehead’s strong act of activism was this act of reclaiming the Two-Spirit history to make it visible and available. By them remembering also becomes a cultural remembering and reclaiming Indigenous sexuality.

What inspired you to take on this subject?

I am parenting gender diverse children. My daughter came out as transgender and was always claiming and naming who she was from the moment she could talk, but we were so steeped in the mainstream ideology that we didn’t really listen. When she was eight years old, she finally got us to understand and that launched me into understanding my own identity as non-binary and also starting to do a lot of activism for trans children. I was thrown into it just trying to support her. I started realizing how retrenched the institutions were about not including the stories and the constant rhetoric was present even in a progressive school district like the Boulder Valley School District in Boulder, Colorado, where we were at the time. We couldn’t talk about the stories because “it’s not age appropriate” meaning your daughter is sexualized, her identity has something to do with sex and her identity is therefore inappropriate. I launched a civil rights action and later started homeschooling my kids. I started looking into indigenous histories and histories of gender diversity. Often, I was met with skepticism and suspicion. I did a lot of research and brought some stories and some artwork to my kids. We travelled a lot and we started realizing that this was a much bigger issue. It wasn’t just about Colorado. I wanted to create resources for gender diverse children but I didn’t know enough. I needed to understand more. So I decided to go back to school and that’s when it launched me to come here to University of Saskatchewan and start this program that I just finished.  I wanted to know more and to raise my professional platform as well to support trans youth and two-spirit youth.

What have you been reading or watching lately that you can recommend to your ACCUTE colleagues?

Khaled Hosseini’s A Thousand Splendid Suns is very powerful as it focuses on the relationships of women. I think it’s important right now, especially given what’s happening in Afghanistan, about Afghani history and what women are experiencing. I love the style and the embeddedness in the landscape and the setting, which has a huge cultural history.

What do you love to do when you’re not researching, teaching, or studying literature?

I have kids who are now teenagers, so just trying to stay connected with them in various ways, which involves letting them teach me about what they’re engaged with and just trying to stay physically connected with them. I also started paddleboarding. It’s beautiful to go out on the river.