“When I first read the description of this event in the journals of an army officer who accompanied Schoolcraft’s expedition, I found myself astonished, and kept coming back to one question: why has no one written about this? Why is this story not widely told within LGBTQ and Indigenous histories of the United States? As I began to research her in more depth, something very strange emerged. Ozaawindib was not completely unknown in either field. Yet it was as though there were two Ozaawindibs: one recognized as gender-variant but who was only known for her “disgusting advances” on a white man who had been adopted into the community, and another who was recognized as significant to the Schoolcraft expedition but who was assumed to be a gender-conforming Ojibwe man. Somehow, no one had made the connection that these were the same person.
Today, the fields of queer and trans history are still in the process of finding ways to talk about gender and sexuality diversity among Native people in a way that is neither appropriative nor exotifying. Here I am trying to tell the story of Ozaawindib’s life, not as a way to show the myriad possibilities of gender and sexuality among “primitive” peoples, as some white queer writers have done. Nor am I telling her story so it can be used as a sort of precursor or opening scene which non-Native queer people can inherit after Native people seemingly vanish from the dominant narrative of history. I am sharing her story simply because it is an apt demonstration of how gender diverse Native people were important actors in North American history. Ozaawindib’s story reveals important historical realities of queer, trans, and/or Two-Spirit experiences in North America, especially relating to the process of colonization and the erasure of people who did not conform to the accepted dominant standards of gender and sexuality.[i] Both her story and its subsequent narrative fracturing are symptomatic of larger trends in the history of North American queer, trans, and Two-Spirit peoples. “
