GLR July-August 2022

ESSAY Sex and Gender in Native America V ERNON R OSARIO

A SHORT REVIEW of Gregory D. Smithers’ Reclaiming Two-Spirits would report that he presents an LGBT-affirmative history of gen der fluid Native Americans and how they had been valued as shaman healers within Indige nous communities. Centuries of European colonization and Christian evangelizing replaced this reverence with homophobia. Since the 1960s, brave LGBT Native ac tivists and artists have battled homophobia within their fami lies and racism in the dominant LGBT movement to reassert their sexuality and culture with its deep spiritual roots in the Two-Spirit tradition among First Nations. A longer treatment is going to be politically bumpier and conceptually more complicated. The term “Two-Spirit” was only adopted in 1990 at the Third Annual Intertribal Native Ameri can/First Nations Gay and Lesbian Conference in Winnipeg, Manitoba. The attendees wanted an alternative to the term “berdache,” which had been applied by Europeans in reference to Native American boys who dressed as girls and performed in sexual rituals. “Berdache” had also been adopted by some gay Natives and anthropologists. The delegates also sought a pan Since 1990, the term Two-Spirit itself has come to mean many things. Most generically, it’s an umbrella term for “gay In dians” or “LGBT Native Americans” (according to the Min nesota Two Spirit Society). More narrowly, the term can be restricted to those who blend male and female spirits and are charged with ritual duties of reconciling these and establishing balance. There have been varied Native critiques of the term. Why choose one English term in place of the hundreds of Native words that are not quite reconcilable? The Navajo word nádleeh suggests fluidity and has been translated as “constant state of change ... and nádleehí means one who is in a constant state of change.” The Blackfoot ninauh-oskitsi-pahpyaki can be trans lated as “manly-hearted woman.” The Cree napêw iskwêwisêhot refers to “a man who dresses as a woman.” AMescalero Apache man could be Nde’isdzan , a “man-woman.” Even if we force these different words into Western boxes, they still seem to refer to different Western concepts of cross Vernon Rosario is a historian of science and an Associate Professor of Psychiatry at UCLA. Indian English term for over 150 words in different Indigenous languages for diverse phenomena involving people whose gender and sexuality (to use Western concepts) shift between female and male. They transition from one gender to another, inhabit an inter mediate gender (sometimes called “third sex” or “third gender”), or are fluid in their gender through their lifespan.

dressing, third gender, gender transitioning, gender fluidity, or gender nonbinariness. Anthropologist Alice Kehoe has pointed out that in some Native cultures a person might be the incarna tion of more than two ancestor spirits. Thus the term “two spirit” buys into the very bifurcation of gender that it should reject as foreign and colonizing. However, there seems to be general agreement that Two-Spirit is an identity term restricted to Na tive Americans and should not be appropriated by non-Native New Age LGBT people aspiring to spiritual enlightenment. Ojibwe journalist Mary Annette Pember voiced her anger about the popularization of the term: “My concern is not so much over the use of the words but over the social meme they have gener ated that has morphed into a cocktail of historical revisionism, wishful thinking, good intentions, and a soupçon of white, en titled appropriation.” Gregory D. Smithers is acutely aware that he’s stepping into highly contested territory with his sweeping history of Two Spirit people. In a work that repeatedly claims to be engaged in scholarly decolonization of the history of Native sexuality, he has to acknowledge that he risks being criticized for an act of colonization as a white, Australian, heterosexual, cisgender man. is a core challenge to historians of the First Nations north of the Rio Grande (whereas a number of Mesoamerican civilizations, notably the Olmecs, Mayans, and Mixtecs, had writing). We are dependent on the accounts of European explorers, colonizers, and missionaries or the transcribed oral accounts of Natives who cooperated with them. What credence can we lend these texts, often by writers completely ignorant of and hostile to the cul tures they were “discovering”? Smithers’ work is broadly divided in two parts. First, he en gages in a “decolonizing” examination of these early European accounts (largely through translations of the originals and con temporary scholars’ publications about them) and two centuries of anthropological research, also by non-Native (but presum ably better intentioned) academics. Second, Smithers weaves together his own extensive archival research on, and interviews with, contemporary LGBT Native American activists and artists, tracing the reinvention of Two-Spirit identity. And rein vention it is. As noted above, many Natives are uneasy that there exists a monolithic “Two-Spirit” shamanistic phenomenon. What does seem startlingly clear is that, in hundreds of Euro Still, Smithers, a professor of American his tory at Virginia Commonwealth University, is uniquely qualified for the task, having au thored several books on Indigenous history and being proficient in Cherokee. Written Cherokee, a syllabary developed in the 1820s by Sequoyah, was the first Native North American language to have a written form. The lack of Indigenous written records

Since 1990, the term Two-Spirit has come to mean many things: “LGBT Native Americans”; or those who blend male and female spirits.

July–August 2022

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