About Me

Hi! My name is MJ Laing (he/they).

I’m a queer Kanyen’kehá:ka writer of mixed Haudenosaunee and Irish/Scottish/South African settler ancestry. My family comes from Six Nations of the Grand River Territory, and I belong to the turtle clan. I grew up in Kingston, Ontario and moved to Toronto in 2010 to complete my undergraduate degree at the University of Toronto. In 2022, I moved to the shared, unceded, ancestral territories of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish), and səlilwətaɬ (Tsleil-Waututh) nations (currently known as Vancouver).

This website is part of the work I did to complete my Master of Arts degree in Social Justice Education at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education (OISE). The title of my thesis was “Conversations with Young Two-Spirit, Trans and Queer Indigenous People About the Term Two-Spirit.” On this site, you’ll find the zine I made to share my research findings with community, as well as information about the book I wrote based on my thesis research, Urban Indigenous Youth Reframing Two-Spirit.