Learning and Laughing with ‘Your Two-Spirit Aunties’

Shilo George and Brianna Bragg help listeners tap into humor, joy and the idea of survivance through their podcast.

Editor’s note: Support for this reporting came from the Poynter Institute with funds from the Gill Foundation. Read other stories in this series here and here.\

Listeners tuning into the first episode of “Your Two-Spirit Aunties” are greeted by a joyfully goofy ditty.

“You have reached Your Two-Spirit Aunties Podcast. Please leave us a message after the tone. Da-da-da-da,” Shilo George says in a sing-song voice.

And so begins a singular podcast journey with George and co-host Brianna Bragg, who guide the way with “laughs, truth, heart, and all things Two-Spirit.”

Airing since 2022, the podcast explores themes such as Indigequeer identity, Two-Spiritness, disability, boundaries, survivance and much more. The podcast hosts do so with a balance of humor, joy and intentionality — listeners are transported so it feels as if they are sitting in a room listening to a conversation between two friends: Shilo George and Brianna Bragg.

George (she/they), Southern Cheyenne and Arapaho descendent, is an artist and owner of a consulting business called Łush Kumtux Tumtum Consulting, which translates to “a great awakening of the heart and spirit” in English. Their work focuses on organizational liberation and trauma-informed practices, often involving government agencies.

Bragg (they/them), Ihanktowan, co-runs the The Uprise Collective, teaches at Portland State University and works in public health outside of podcasting.

In community together for years, the two worked together at the Native American Youth and Family Center (NAYA) in 2016 when George was working as a parent advocate and Bragg as an early childhood policy advocate intern. They were just across the hall from each other and remember getting in trouble for talking too much.

Those conversations evolved, laying the foundation for a conversation between friends in a podcast format.

“I don’t think I could have done it with anyone else,” Bragg said.

“Your Two-Spirit Aunties” started during the COVID-19 pandemic as the friends began to record their phone conversations, talking for hours about culture, activism and their feelings.

“We want to model how we talk to each other,” George said. “We want to model how we have built trust over many years and have conversations and ask each other and set boundaries or ask consent.”

‘It’s a magic’

Along Killingsworth/Lombard in North Portland resides a billboard with an image of George standing with her cane, head thrown back in laughter.

The billboard is part of a campaign by the Future Generations Collaborative in collaboration with Multnomah County, TriMet and the local Two-Spirit community following the death of Nex Benedict. The organization invited Two-Spirit community members to be part of a “2-Spirit Survivance Campaign,” creating visibility and celebrating Indigequeer joy.

“Across Indigenous Nations, Two-Spirit people were historically held in high regard and considered sacred or divine. Holding important positions like: Matchmakers, Medicine People, Warriors on the front lines of battle,” reads a description on the campaign website.

The term Two-Spirit serves as an umbrella term connecting Indigenous and Western ideas of gender and sexuality. Native nations each have their own understanding and terms for Two-Spirit people.

Along with centering Two-Spirit and Indigequeer joy, the campaign highlights the idea of survivance, which means “the conjugation between resistance and survival,” according to the campaign website.

“Visibilty is validation, right? Visibility means that when you are driving down the road feeling terrible, seeing Shilo can change your perspective in the moment,” said Bragg, who worked on the campaign. “[It’s a reminder] that I can do that. I can survive. I can be something that I want to be in the world and contribute meaningfully to my community’s health.”

Visibility carries through in the podcast as well, where Bragg and George provide examples through their conversations of joy and survivance.

“It’s a magic,” Bragg said about what being a Two-Spirit auntie means to them. “There is something about being Two-Spirit that feels magic. It’s medicine. And with it comes responsibility and a lot of humor.”

George long felt there was something missing with the European understanding of queerness. They spent time in prayer, reflecting with their ancestors, getting to know themselves and their role in community. Then they heard the term Two-Spirit and it just fit.

Being Two-Spirit is a very personal relationship between a person, their community, elders, ancestors and creator, according to George. And not every Indigenous person who is queer is Two-Spirit.

Part of the goal of the podcast is to normalize Two-Spirit identity and also talk about the differences and nuances within that identity as well.

“Normalize being queer. Normalize being Two-Spirit. Normalize standing up for your community,” George said.

Throughout the podcast, George and Bragg have intersectional conversations about identity, healing and the state of the world. Though currently only eight episodes long, more are in the works and scheduled to release soon.

Each episode feels as if you are hanging out with two of your Two-Spirit aunties, imparting wisdom and healing through joy and laughter.

“We want people to feel loved. We want people to know that they belong and they matter,” Bragg said. “All the things that we needed when we were little.”

‘Being and acting in humor’

The episodes of “Your Two-Spirit Aunties” cover a wide range of topics, from living through a pandemic to what it means to be an auntie, and so much more. Throughout it all, Bragg and George tap into the healing power of humor, with the goal of bringing “hope and laughter” into their listeners’ lives.

For many Indigenous people, laughter is a form of medicine and humor a tool of survival.

“Being a traumatized people you’ve got two choices: you can cry or you can laugh about it,” Bragg said.

Laughter is a way to release emotions and transform them into something new, according to Bragg. George and Bragg say humor alleviates traumas in their own lives.

“Just being and acting in humor allows us to reclaim that joy that genocide and the colonial project want us to be rid of,” Bragg says on “Episode 4: Survivance.” “They don’t want us to be able to access that part of ourselves because, if we do, then we don’t need them to heal and we don’t need them to tell us what healing looks like.”

George and Bragg both reflected on what the coming four years might look like with another Trump presidency, and the need to tap into community, joy and laughter.

“I think we are going to need a lot of humor in the coming years,” George said.

‘Joy is the best act of survivance’

Both George and Bragg needed time to process following the election on Nov. 5.

George remembers a panic starting to set in as the results came through. They processed by praying to and connecting with their ancestors and were given a strong image of Barbie’s Village. That came with intense feelings of love, connection and support — a reminder to tap into and ground in community.

Bragg came to a similar conclusion.

“After he won, I went outside and smudged and sat and looked at the stars,” Bragg said. “And my thought process was, ‘There were people here before us and there will be people after us. And our job is to help as many people survive as we can.’”

Part of how Bragg and George plan to do this is through their podcast and a new series called “Entering the Slipstream Bullshit Era.” Episodes will cover a range of topics, including reflecting on their own processing; breaking down Agenda 47 and Project 2025; and talking about coping skills learned during “his first reign of terror,” according to Bragg.

One episode will focus on community organizing and mutual aid, looking to revolutionary examples such as the American Indian Movement, the Black Panthers and the Zapatista Army of National Liberation.

And, through it all, there will be joy.

“Joy is the best act of survivance,” Bragg said. “To be joyful in a world that wants you to only suffer or to be dead, that is the ultimate act of survivance, is being able to engage in joy.”

This story is co-published by Underscore.news and ICT, a news partnership that covers Indigenous communities in the Pacific Northwest. Funding is provided in part by Meyer Memorial Trust.