Two-Spirit Influencers Speak On Indigenous Issues in Trump Times [WATCH]

Chelazon Leroux and Haley Robinson speak about Trump, Canadian politics, the epidemic of missing and murdered Indigenous women, and what makes them proud to be Two-Spirit in 2025

Video by E. E. Oliver

This Thursday, March 20 marks the fourth annual Two-Spirit and Indigenous LGBTQQIA+ Celebration and Awareness Day in Canada. The day, which has not been made official in the eyes of the Canadian government, is meant to celebrate the diversity and resilience of Two-Spirit, queer, and trans-Indigenous identities. 

It was conceived by Indigenous scholar Harlan Pruden and is held in alignment with the spring equinox each year. “This day is vital for raising awareness and educating the public on [the] Two-Spirit resurgence through demonstrations, proclamations, and community celebrations,” says Martin Morberg, the program manager at the Two-Spirit Program at the Community-Based Research Centre. 

Ahead of this important day, Uncloseted Media spoke with Canada’s Drag Race star and Two-Spirit activist Chelazon Leroux and Two-Spirit actor and influencer Haley Robinson about the problems their community faces in today’s political climate. They speak about the misunderstandings many non-Indigenous folks have about their community and how they have seen societal conceptions evolve.

Watch the full interview above or read the transcript here:

Spencer Macnaughton: Hi everyone, I'm here with Haley Robinson and Chezlazon Leroux, two Two-Spirit influencers. Guys, thank you so much for speaking with me and Uncloseted Media today.

Chelazon Leroux: Yeah, thank you for having me.

Haley Robinson: HiyHiy, salamat, thank you.

SM: I think a lot of people watching this will have never heard the term Two-Spirited, honestly. What does Two-Spirit mean to you, and how is the idea of being Two-Spirited part of your identity?

HR: For me, it means a person that walks in between two worlds, spiritually and culturally. In more basic terms, Two-Spirit is like an umbrella term of describing Indigenous identities of having both female and male spirit.

SM: Explain a little bit more about what you mean having male and female identity.

HR: It just means that I don't follow the Western ideals that came over during colonization. I see myself as someone who's kind of in between. I don't necessarily see myself as a female, I don't necessarily really see myself as a male, I kind of see myself as a person that's like in between that walks both worlds. So yeah, again, it's different for everybody because not every Two-Spirit person is gender diverse. We have straight, cis, Two-Spirit people. It all really depends on their identity and how they see themselves, but that's how I see myself as a Two-Spirit person.

CL: I always like to start with the historic understanding. Two-Spirit was a word invented in 1996 in Winnipeg, Manitoba for a lesbian and gay Indigenous conference. The reason why they created this word [was because] they knew they needed an English word to describe this identity that we had known for in different tribes and different nations across Turtle Island. We knew there was differences that there was something in between man and woman, and each language has their own word for that. So they needed an English word so that we could start having these conversations. Two-Spirit came along as a really convenient word to describe to settlers and allies about what this meant.

SM: So in journalism, at least, news organizations here in the States will say LGBTQ, and north of the border, they'll say 2SLGBTQ+ sometimes, right? How do you feel about incorporating 2S, as in Two-Spirited, into the acronym that's used at large? Is that important? Should it be incorporated?

HR: A lot of people thought that adding Two-spirit was honoring the Indigenous people who were first here. But then also in some communities, they don't believe that Two-Spirit really fits in with the LGBTQ community because it's its own cultural, spiritual thing. So, I don't personally use 2SLGBTQ. I usually say LGBTQ+, and then I say I'm also Two-Spirit. I just like to keep them separate because being Two-Spirit is part of a cultural identity.

SM: And you don't necessarily relate the cultural identity of being Two-Spirited to the cultural identity of being LGBTQ, you see them as separate?

HR: Yeah, I see them as separate. There are Two-spirit people who are in the LGBTQ community, and there are Two-Spirit people who aren't. I like to personally keep them separate because even though they kind of wander between the same line, it's not necessarily on the same line.

SM: What is the difference between Two-Spirit and identifying as, say, non-binary or even trans? There is a distinct difference, but can you explain it to somebody who might have no clue?

HR: So nonbinary is essentially like you don't see yourself in the binary roles of the Western ideals. Two-Spirit is the same in that way, but it's again really taking a role in your Indigenous communities, taking up the roles of being an in-between person, a knowledge keeper, an educator, a healer, a medicine person.

Whereas non-binary and trans, they're part [of] the LGBTQ community of not following that binary of Western ideals, but it's not necessarily connected to a culture.

SM: The idea of stigma within Indigenous communities toward Two-Spirited folks. Is there any? And if so, how does that manifest?

CL: The point of colonialism is to remove every piece of Indigenous identity. That was residential school and for those who don't know that was the act of government both in U.S. and Canada—U.S. they'd say boarding school—but removing children from reserves as early as four or five years old to go live on these religious funded and government approved/operated boarding schools that would abuse Native kids and strip their identity, cut off their hair, take off their regalia, abuse them for speaking language. So the mission statement was to kill the Indian within the child, but keep the child. And that was followed through with abuses: sexual, verbal, physical. It's a horrific story. And what that has done is incited trauma and religious understandings through abuse.

For a lot of young boys, their first sexual experiences were abuses from priests. So their only understanding of queer intimacy or queer people is physical sexual abuse. So because of that, they don't know what a healthy queer person looks like. They don't know what a Two-Spirit person is because they were removed from community, and even the traditional understandings of Two-Spirit. So there's this identity that they weren't raised to know about and they only have abuse as a source of reference. So they project that.

SM: Can you speak specifically about the stereotypes that folks have about Two-Spirited individuals that are really frustrating for you?

CL: I'm at the intersection of drag, Indigenous, queer, Two-Spirit. So all of those things—the biggest label is predator or grooming children. It happened when I first came off of Canada's Drag Race and I started doing a lot of media interviews, there was even a community called like Alberta that tried to protest me from coming there assuming that I would be trying to push transgender ideals or encourage kids to get sex changes. The thing that these people make up in their minds is so telling to me of their understanding.

Because when I think of myself and community and reading to a child or sitting with elders or performing in front of community, the last thing on my mind is sex. That is the furthest thing. And so to me, it is more dangerous for someone to have a mind that is able to sexualize an image of kids and queer people and women so readily. That is more threatening to a community than someone who is just there to support and listen. So I've learned that that again is a projection of their mind and how disturbing is that that their brain is so quickly able to go to that and anger and violence. That is more a threat to communities than I am putting on a wig and some makeup.

HR: I get that on a daily, I get people commenting, telling me “I'm an abomination, I'm ruining the children,” and I'm like, “Girl, I'm not doing anything, I'm just chilling.”

CL: We're just chillin'.

SM: What are they reacting to on your social?

HR: Just being myself, just yeah, existing and looking different and being different. I get a lot of people constantly telling me that “I'm hideous,” or they'll like make jokes about me being trans and like, “Oh, you'll never be an actual woman,” blah, blah, blah. And it's like, again, it just shows their understanding of what they think Two-Spirit is, which is like, they don't know anything. And so just being yourself and being present in the moment as a Two-Spirit person, people don't like that. They wanna harm you because they think that you being yourself is a harm.

SM: I do want to get your guys' reactions to Trump's election, especially concerning the Two-Spirited community. In American politics, there were some signs of progress. When President Biden confirmed Deb Haaland as the first Native American to serve as a cabinet secretary. But now, like with many minority groups, there has been a backsliding. Donald Trump, as he seeks to purge the federal government of so-called woke initiatives, agencies have flagged hundreds of words to limit or avoid according to a compilation of government documents and some of these words include literally “Indigenous community, Native American, tribal.” How do you guys react when you learn that the American presidential administration is trying to remove those words about your community in 2025?

CL: Two-Spirit identities have lived here on these lands way before any form of government was here, way before any political party was here, way before any form of colonization was here. So we're not going anywhere. So no matter how many words you strike from a book, we don't care because we've been erased before, we've been denied our existence before, but that has never stopped us from living. So I know it is fearful. I understand it feels like a threat to our being and our identity. But we are not defined by words in a book or a constitution or a government. We are defined by our community and our people. And so long as that exists, we will never stop living.

SM: There must be a frustration, though, with the politicization of this, to conflate just being Two-Spirit or being BIPOC or being Indigenous with being woke. I mean, it just is nonsensical and must be so frustrating when you think “this is my identity, this has nothing to do with, you know, these made up wedge issue words like woke.”

CL: In this sense of colonialism, identity for so long, if it wasn't a straight White man, it did not exist or wasn't important. So when you say it feels regressive, they're trying to get back to that point. That you just have to be White and a man to be in power. That is the whole point of it is to say Indigenous people never existed here, so therefore we can take the land. And so to conflate wokeness to us not existing here, that's the point. It's to remove our identities or to wittle it down to one word so it's easy to get rid of.

SM: So to just kind of flip to another political question, but north of the border. Canada, as we know, has a horrific history as it relates to Indigenous people, a history with residential schooling that was filled with abuse, forced sterilization, and many manifestations of forced assimilation. There have been efforts at reconciliation and reparations in certain cases. I wanna know where you guys feel Canada is at right now in terms of the treatment of Indigenous communities.

HR: The government really tries not to pay too much mind [to] Indigenous communities. Like they do the bare minimum. They'll go to the communities, they'll be like, “I'm so sorry,” give this heartfelt speech and cry and give little parts of land back. But it's like, “What else are you really doing? Like, isn't there still dirty water in these communities that nothing's being done about?”

SM: You said dirty water, right? And this is a massive social problem in Canada and in the United States. Explain what you mean by that and why this is a problem that persists in 2025. 

HR: In a lot of Indigenous communities they have a boil water advisory because the water that's coming through the taps are unsafe to drink, it's undrinkable water. In some communities you can't even use the water to shower because it's dirty water. And these communities have been speaking out for years about not having clean, fresh drinking water to drink from and so far, nothing has happened. We continue to have a boil water advisory in these communities and to the point where some people will come out of those communities and we're always asking, we're like, “Is this water okay to drink?” Because we're not used to having fresh clean water being able to come from the tap and being able to drink that.

SM: Another question that I wanted to ask was the issue of Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women, MMIW. I just finished watching the Gabby Petito documentary, the, white, cisgender woman where so many resources, so much money was put into finding her as, you know, a young blonde white woman. And of course, every case should get resources, right? But can you talk about the problem of MMIW in the community right now?

HR: Sorry, I'm trying not to get emotional about it because I had a very personal experience with MMIW. So when I became homeless, I made friends with another girl who was kind of going through the same things as me. I remember she went missing and we put up all these missing posters and the families and the friends went out and searching. There wasn't a lot of cops that came out to help, until way later. I think after a month when she was missing, cops went out and they found her, like, across the city from where we lived, under a pile of snow. And they essentially just labeled it as an unsuspicious death and that was it. They closed it, swept under the rug, nobody talked about it anymore.

And we were pissed. We were so angry that this person that we loved so dearly was just swept off to the side and that's when I really started learning more about MMIW and I learned that this happened to a lot of Indigenous women, girls, Two-spirit, and people in our communities where we go missing and then they find us and we just are just another person that was found and they don't realize that we were people that were loved, we were family members, we were partners, and it just hurts my soul again seeing all this over and over again, MMIW, and we just continue talking about it but it seems like nothing is done and it seems like nobody cares and wants to put in the work that we put in.

We put in so much work to look for our own community members but when is it that we're going to have help from the outside of community members to help us?

SM: When you found out that your friend's death was labeled unsuspicious, how does that make you feel when you're also so acutely aware of the large issue of MMIW in society?

HR: They instantly labeled it as an addict who just died. But they didn't do any investigations. I remember we were waiting for any sort of autopsy report and nothing was done. They didn't do an autopsy report and then they just labeled unsuspicious or like just leave it alone. And it does make me mad.

People think that we deserve that ending because of how our life has been going because we did this or because we did that. Because we're an addict, because we're homeless, which is completely unfair too. That's just building on more stereotypes and building on more hate and more fear. 

SM: In 2019, a UN spokesperson declared that the plight of MMIW in Canada has been declared a genocide. They said that a national inquiry found reasons to believe that Canada's past and present policies, omissions and actions amount to genocide under international law. Do you think that's warranted?

CL: As far back as I could remember, being a young Indigenous person, four or five years old, anytime we showed up on any form of media and news outlet, it was always missing and murdered. And it was always justified because of addictions, because of sex work. “Oh, they didn't deserve to have a life because they did these things.” But they never asked what led to that. Residential schools, abuses, trauma, intergenerational trauma.

They just said they deserve that ending. because of the way life went for them. So now all Canadians are programmed to numb their brain out because they've seen these stories. The mindset becomes, “Canadians will never care to look for them, so they're the easiest target.” And you will see this disgusting rhetoric in certain comment sections or Facebook threads about how we lack value in lives. That we don't deserve a life. And because you don't give us that respect or value of life, we're disposable to abuse and to trauma and, “Oh, they'll never go looking for them.”

SM: How can allies better show up for the Two-Spirit and Indigenous community in 2025?

CL: Educate yourselves. It is so many easy and free resources. It's so simple as watching one of Haley's videos or my videos. And that has been, I think, our biggest change in Indigenous narrative with social media. Honestly, no government was going to do it for us. No TV show was going to do it for us. So it was a matter of social media and speaking our truth that really changed the narrative over the last five years.

TikTok was a huge change in our narrative as Indigenous people because we were the ones telling the story. There wasn't a non-Indigenous person recording and then changing the narrative. It was us recording, telling the story, and posting and explaining. So that was a huge shift in media and the creation that we have had.

Second of all, showing up to community. So showing up to a pow wow or community gathering that are open to all peoples. Even if you read all the textbooks in history about Indigenous people, you didn't sit with them. So you don't even have the lived experience to understand and feel what it is. And I think that's the difference of why there is a lack of empathy or connection, or why settler peoples can so easily detach from realities, because they never put humanity behind the words or the statistics.

SM: Tell me a little bit about what you love about being Two-Spirited.

CL: Two-Spirit, as Haley explained earlier, challenges so many colonial views just by our existing. Just by sitting there in the room, all these colonial beliefs pop right up and you don't even have to say nothing. And that is powerful. Us working through all of that and the discomfort and the lack of knowledge and community brings them to a greater understanding and essentially bonds us. And so that's what we always do. And that's what I love is that it's still a historical identity that rings true today.

SM: Canada's getting ready for an election, and I mentioned it before, Poilievre is the Conservative candidate, Mark Carney is the Liberal candidate. Is there one candidate, I know no politician has ever been fantastic toward Indigenous populations, but is there one that y'all see as the better fit?

CL: Pierre Poilievre I don't believe, reflects Indigenous values. He has gone to Indigenous community gatherings. In his whole political career, he has never really mentioned anything positive about Indigenous people. More so the extraction of land and resources was his focus. So I don't think that aligns with Indigenous views and worldview at all, is that we like to protect the land and make sure it's sustained for future generations. And I believe his core belief is to extract as much money or pocket as much money for financial reasons, and even if that comes at the cost of land or Indigenous communities and reserves and resources.

I believe Mark Carney is the better candidate for myself at this point, because at least in my head his resume is so well rounded with financial situations and currently going through a global financial issue and time right now, so I think he's probably the most equipped to deal with it.

SM: What's a question you want to be asked that you guys don't get asked in these contexts that you think is important to speak on?

CL: That is a great question that I never thought about because we're so used to getting the same questions.

HR: I know, I'm so used to getting the same questions over and over again, I've never thought of that.

CL: Oh, What is the most exciting development that you have witnessed from birth to now for Indigenous people or Two-Spirit people? What is the change that you love seeing?

HR: I remember when I was growing up and it was so hard to find any sort of representation. And so just being able to see so many amazing Indigenous actors, voice actors, singers, and the Two-Spirit representation that we're having now, like, I don't want to toot my own horn either, but I felt so, like... “Oh my gosh, this is happening as a Two-Spirit person.” I got my first commercial for a Hyundai commercial. Like it's happening all the time. We have so many now and there's so much more in the works too. It's crazy. I love it.

SM: You guys are both young influencers and have a really big impact in younger demos as Two-Spirited influencers. What kind of responsibility do you feel in that space?

HR: For myself, I was put in a lot of dangerous, scary situations, and I wish I had community to be able to help me and to help guide me in those situations. So being an adult now, I find it's my duty to be able to create these spaces and to create these communities and to always continue help uplifting Indigenous Two-Spirit youth. I'm not necessarily like one that you should always follow, I make mistakes too, but I just hope that me being myself can really inspire other youth to be themselves as well. 

SM: I think there was one quote that I saw where you said that your drag is “unapologetically Two-Spirit.” And I just wanted you to kind of explain that out.

CL: Well, the OG quote, I believe, was “unapologetically Indigenous,” but you could also say Two-Spirit. So, when I say unapologetically Indigenous, unapologetically Two-Spirit is that I don't care which room I walk into, whether that be Drag Race, into a media room, in front of a camera. I'm going to bring my community with me, even if I'm alone.

I make my own spaces. It doesn't matter if I'm the only Two-Spirit person in the room. I'm still there. It's still on Indigenous land. It is my space. So I'm never gonna question that.

SM: You're amazing. I'm so grateful for your time. Anything else that I didn't ask that you wanted to add that you think is important to say in this context?

CL: A lot of my friends are so anxious about the state of the world and I said, “You cannot control what other people have to say about you but you can live authentically and you can stand and sit with your community.” That's the only thing you could really do right now and still fight and go to rallies. You can do these actionable things but I think a lot of people get paralyzed by their being threatened by government.

And honestly I think there's always gonna be some group that tries to. But as a reminder, Sylvia Rivera, Marsha P. Johnson, what choice did they have when you're pushed to such an extreme away from society, but to fight to exist? And that's what I like to remind people that Pride was not always a celebration, it was a protest. And so to honor that spirit of those who came before you and remind yourself, you have to probably fight just as hard, if not harder, because there's going to come these conservative times. And so I'm actually really excited for Pride this year, because it's la reminder and like an F-U to the systems that we're still going to laugh and we're still going to celebrate and we're still going to love, regardless of any government-mandated oppression.

SM: Thank you both so much for your time and insight. I really, really appreciate it.

CL: Thank you for having us.

HR: Thank you for having us!

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