Two Spirits
There was a fluid understandings of gender, sexuality, and identity in some indigenous North American cultures prior to, during, and after European colonization. Identified as “berdache” or “hermaphrodites” by Europeans (both in colonial times and more recently) many Native American nations recognized a multiplicity of genders and sexualities.
Such colonial encounters included: the sixteenth-century meeting between René Goulaine de Laudonnière’s expedition to claim what is now Florida for the French and two-spirits of the local Timucua people; those between Captain Cook and aikane representatives of Hawaiian chiefs and later between missionaries and the mahu in Hawai’i; between the Kutenai female two-spirit Qánqon and fur traders in the early nineteenth century along the border of Idaho and British Columbia; the alliance of boté Ohchiish with the US Army against the Lakota Sioux and Cheyenne in 1876 at the Battle of Rosebud in Montana.
Among the Native American, from the Eskimo of Alaska downwards to Brazil and still further south, homosexual customs have been very frequently observed. Sometimes they are regarded by the tribe with honor, sometimes with indifference, sometimes with contempt, but they appear to be always tolerated. Although there are local differences, these customs, on the whole, seem to have much in common. Each Native American group has had their own terms to describe these people, and different criteria for defining them. For example, a male twospirit was called boté ("not man, not woman") by the Crow and nádleehí by the Navajo. The most common trait attributed to male two-spirits across cultures (though not always) was skill in making crafts that were typically done by women. The bote wore woman's dress, and that his speech and manners are feminine. The dress and manners are assumed in childhood, but no sexual practices took place until puberty.
These definitions could be much more complex than a man who lives as a woman: Zuni lhamana We’Wha was a two-spirit male who government ethnologists encountered in 1879 while on an expedition to record “vanishing” Native American cultures as white America expanded westward. As a lhamana, We’Wha embodied both male and female traits and activities while dressing in traditionally female clothing. We’Wha was a potter (a female craft) but also excelled in weaving (a male craft) as well as being a farmer and a member of the men’s kachina society, who performed masked dances (both male-identified activities).
On the whole the evidence shows that these practices were regarded with considerable indifference, and such people passed unperceived or joins some sacred caste which sanctified such exclusive inclinations.
Since the 1970s, the term twospirit has been adopted by many Native Americans and anthropologists as an umbrella term for these multiple identities. This concept developed out of and in response to the lengthy period of repression and violence under Euro-American colonial regimes, including the actions of government agents and missionaries to coercively “civilize” Native peoples in part by removing Native children to white Protestant boarding schools whose goal was to eradicate any elements of Native culture from these children.
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