White culture and Christianity have been such bulldozers: Mona Belleau

Inuk LGBTQIA+ activist from Canada, Mona Belleau, who works with aboriginal organisations and LGBT Family Coalition was in the city for the 8th Kashish Mumbai International Queer Film Festival. Yogesh Pawar caught up with the activist for a chat on the festival, her work and the resonance it has with the Indian queer community

This is your first visit to Mumbai...

Oh not only Mumbai or India but this is my first visit to anywhere in Asia. It is an honour to be at Kashish and share some of my own experiences and let people know of the struggle of the LGBTQIA+ Inuk or Inuit community and be able to learn and grow. This is also important because of the many resonances the gay rights' struggle back home has for India and vice-versa. After watching films from India on the community's experience, I keep thinking how everything is so alike. Particularly when I see how mothers react to their child's sexual orientation or gender identity. It is exactly how my mother reacted, right down to some of the stuff being said.

It's been a year since the Canadian feature documentary, Two Soft Things, Two Hard Things, which explores a remote Arctic community holding an LGBTQ pride celebration was made, you watched it at Kashish for the first time...

That's right. I'd never watched the whole film. It felt special watching it at Kashish. Often, the film seemed to be talking about my own life and experiences. I can still remember the struggle when being a proud Inuk woman and a proud lesbian woman were two mutually exclusive worlds. But like the documentary shows, we're increasingly proud lesbians, gays or whatever we want to call ourselves without bothering about being judged.

The Indian gay commumity looks up to Canada as a liberal nation but the film and your work underline the several challenges ahead...

Canada is quite a large and diverse country and the reality of Vancouver or Toronto is not the reality of small Arctic villages in the far North. To say the LGBTQIA+ community across Canada has acceptance from families and society at large is wrong. While this is largely true of most of my country, there are still several pockets, particularly in aboriginal areas, where people have a long battle ahead against hatred, bigotry and exclusion. This creates a particularly cruel tier of exclusion within the excluded one per cent of aboriginal population of Canada, since there is also the narrative of the aboriginal fight for assertion vis-a-vis the white man which is still playing out. Given the centuries of indignities and excesses heaped on us by the white man, acceptance of gays and lesbians is often not seen as such a pressing priority. Like India, these issues can be pretty complex in Canada too.

And like India, indigenously, the culture among the aborigines of Canada was not homophobic till the arrival of the white man, Christianity and Victorian morals...

White culture and Christianity have been such bulldozers. They brazenly pushed aside our own memories of who we were and our way of life before they arrived. For example, it becomes difficult to oppose a community elder when he says that homosexuality is not an Inuit way of life. In my culture it is unacceptable to contradict an elder. And yet you know that this elder has been indoctrinated into this Christian moral view and there have been instances when younger assertive people have rebelled. During the 2014 Sochi Winter Olympics when some of us wanted to raise the rainbow flag many aboriginal elders opposed. They insisted we were being brainwashed by white culture and that this is not Inuit culture. Only they don't realise that what they are articulating is instead brainwash.

What is the big takeaway for the Indian LGBTQIA+ movement from the Canadian experience?

It's about going back to our roots, and reflecting on who we were in perspective with what we are being told to believe. We'll have to peel off the top layers of washed out white painting to arrive at the true, colourful layers below.

What about your own journey as a lesbian woman?

In 1998, I rebelled against my cis-gendered upbringing to fall in love with a woman. Later, I met my current wife, we've been together for 16 years, and got married in 2010. Though I wanted children, I was reconciled to the idea that I might not have them. But my Inuk mother hadn't given up hopes for grandchildren and kept in touch with my cousins. It's part of aborigine tradition to give a child away to a sibling or cousin who can't have any. That's how a cousin gave her new born son to me and we adopted Damien. Later, my wife had our second child, Christine, through artificial insemination.

Are you and your family now accepted by your community?

Whether it is the community, elders or my own mother, they accept my children very well. I think to them, seeing the children helps 'normalise' me and my partner as not being 'perverts'. We're loving parents who do everything cis-gendered parents do.

As for my mom, I owe my child to her, even though she isn't comfortable with my wife. She wanted to be a grandma and in the process brought us so much happiness. It doesn't help of course that my wife is white and it's also a cultural clash. Unlike me, who can navigate both cultures, my wife finds it difficult to adapt to Inuit ways. It's not made easy by my mom who is exacting in what she expects so we negotiate that territory and carry on.

Related read: Evangelical Christianity: Devils in high places