Gender variation in Native American tribes
In an interesting article about the hidden LGBTQA history over at the Daily Californian, Katherine Kudriavtsev writes about the Native American transgender two spirit people:
Unlike the strict gender roles in today’s western civilization, the majority of Native American tribes saw gender as a nonbinary spectrum dating back to 14th-century pre-European contact.Â
Research shows that more than 150 Native American tribes acknowledged a third gender in their communities. These tribes even had a special position for people who were considered both male and female, which is known today as “two-spirit.” These people were seen as doubly spiritually blessed, as they had the spirit of both a man and a woman. They also had some of the most prestigious roles in the tribe — healers, artists, hunters or even war chiefs.
Unfortunately, a large amount of this Native American cultural legacy was erased from all tribes due to colonization, religious indoctrination and the imposition of laws criminalizing varied gender expression after European contact.Â
Two-spirit traditions were specifically targeted by conquistadors, missionaries and government agents, as they clashed with the 14th-century European idea of gender. These people were forced underground or completely uprooted in many tribes.Â
However, Native American activists recently began to use the term “two-spirit,” coining the name in 1990 at the Indigenous lesbian and gay international gathering in Winnipeg to both reclaim their culture and heritage and serve as a pan-Indian unifier for androgyny.
Read the whole article, “LGBTQ+ history that you didn’t learn about in high school,” here.
Note that we must always use contemporary terms with care when writing about gender variance in the past and in different cultures. Still, I believe it makes sense to the term “transgender” as an umbrella term for gender variant people everywhere and everywhen, in the same way we use it as an umbrella term for all shades of gender variance today.
The photo above is of a two spirit person of the Native American Pueblo peoples native to the Zuni River valley. Photographed by John K. Hillers between 1871 and 1907.
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