#we-wha

[bossymarmalade]

John K. Hillers, Portrait of We-Wha (c. 1871–1896)

A remarkable pair of late-1800s photographs by John K. Hillers depicts We-Wha, a Two Spirit person, or an individual in the Zuni tribe who took on both male and female tasks. We-Wha was a pottery and textile artist as well as a cultural ambassador who visited Washington, DC, and met President Grover Cleveland in 1886.

Here is a fully formed queer figure of the past, crashing through the history books to challenge modern-day assumptions about the range of late-19th-century public gender expression.

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[messoamerica]

We-wha was a Zuni Pueblo Lhamana who worked as an ambassador for his people to the United States in the 1800s. Lhamana is a third gender in the Zuni culture assigned to male bodied children whose adherents performed traditional women’s work and fulfilled a fundamental role as mediator during conflict. Lhamana falls under the category of Two-Spirit, a more general term used in Native American communities indicating an individual as neither male nor female but an entirely seperate gender.