Refusing Berdache, Becoming Two-Spirit

In the summer of 1990, the spirit-name Two-Spirit was gifted to the growing community of gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender and queer Indigenous people of North America. In addition to giving a name to the unique identities and roles shared by many queer Indigenous people, the widespread adoption of Two-Spirit also almost immediately moved to disrupt the academic complex that had accumulated around the study of “the berdache”—a complex with roots dating back to the eighteenth century. The history of “berdache” and the still-unfolding legacy of the adoption of “Two-Spirit” offers a powerful story about how academic theorizing has been continually built on the bodies of gender-diverse Indigenous people, but it also shows us how Two-Spirit people have been able to disrupt this cycle through communal action.

The word berdache does not appear in reference to certain Indigenous people in North America in text until the early nineteenth century. It was not until Anglo-Americans began moving through the parts of the continent west of the Mississippi for various reasons—in search of exploitations ranging from fur pelts to scientific knowledge to adventure—that the term became more widely used in print to refer to a category of Native people variously  described as  “men dressed as women,” “sodomites,” “hermaphrodites,” and more recently “homosexual,” “trans” and “Two-Spirit.” The term berdache, though, has its roots earlier and in other people’s mouths, as a folk-term used by French Canadians whose incursions into western North America exploded in number during the eighteenth century. A cycle between European observation and theorization emerges when we look closely at the circulation of this term as it moved from descriptions of travel writers to citations in articles by academics.

Although some trace “berdache” further back to France and Italy in the 1500s or even to older versions in Arabic and Persian, it is in the eighteenth century when the tracks are laid for this European understanding of Native people assumed male at birth who lived as women or held feminine roles. This usage first appeared in the 1693 account of Sieur Pierre Deliette to describe the iihkweewitaki of the Inohkaki peoples (more well-known as the Illinois confederacy). Other travel-writers’ stories of these ancestors were then taken up by European thinkers throughout the eighteenth century. European writers created a dense web of distorted references, drawing on stories about Inohkaki and Timucua people, as well as earlier records made by Spanish writers in the Americas. For example, in 1779 philosopher Christian Heyne published a Latin text comparing what he perceived as hermaphrodites among Inohkaki, Timucua, and other Indigenous people with ancient accounts of the Scythians, in an attempt to devise a scientific understanding of sexual variance. He used these details to elaborate on the condition Scythian melancholy, which Boissier de Sauvages de la Croix had first coined in 1731, ultimately informing European conceptions of gender variance as mental illness that would evolve and remain influential to the present day.

White observations and assumptions about Two-Spirit people continued to serve as fodder for Euro-American ends in the centuries that followed. Travel accounts continued to bring the “berdache” to European and Euro-American attention. Theorists, doctors, psychologists, anthropologists, and activists then seized upon these accounts to evidence their claims about race, gender, and sexuality. By the turn of the twentieth century, American scholars began drawing on earlier European accounts of Two-Spirit people to cement the burgeoning profession of salvage anthropology. After foundational figures of American anthropology like Alfred Kroeber, Robert Lowie, and Leslie Spier “documented” what they believed to be “the last of the true berdaches” in the first half of the twentieth century, the subject of gender and sexual diversity among Native people went mostly unnoticed during the twenty years after the Second World War, a period of assimilative pressure for Native people and intense homophobia for queer people in the United States. The cycle, however, repeated itself yet again as a group of mostly white gay men and lesbians in the 1970s began to return to these anthropological texts in hopes of using them to “prove” that gay people had once been respected somewhere in the world.

At the same time, Native queer and trans people were also mobilizing. As urban Native communities grew in the mid-twentieth century due to colonial policies in the US and Canada, larger numbers of queer and trans Indigenous people found community with each other. One cofounder of the first organization for 2SLGBTQ Native people, Randy Burns of Gay American Indians, described in an interview how “we did our own tribal research…a lot of the stories were shared by gay elders. And they would whisper.” The whispers spread throughout North America so that by the late 1980s, several queer Indigenous writers had published books (including an oral history anthology produced by the organization Gay American Indians), and HIV/AIDS-related organizing among Native people had emerged in places like Minneapolis and Winnipeg, culminating in the first international gathering of queer and trans Native people in 1988. It was at the third such gathering—1990 in Beausejour, Manitoba, where Myra Laramee, a Cree woman, shared the dream she had received that summer which became the inspiration for the term Two-Spirit. The gathering of Two-Spirit people, at once physical, intellectual, and artistic, marked a groundbreaking intervention in the cycle of white appropriation of Indigenous genders and sexualities.

In addition to providing a springboard to revitalize gender variant roles in Indigenous communities, Two-Spirit as a term spoke back directly to the academic complex around berdache. While white anthropologists worried about whether “berdache” could simply be replaced by “Two-Spirit,” Indigenous people insisted on the need for Two-Spirit sovereignty over representations of Two-Spirit people. At a conference of both academics and Two-Spirit community members held in 1993, Clyde M. Hall (Lemhi Shoshone) warned scholars, “You Anthropologists Make Sure You Get Your Words Right.” Critically, they argued that Two-Spirit people must speak for themselves and have self-determination over the words that are used to describe them. As a result, in the roughly twenty years since that conference initiated this conversation between anthropologists and Two-Spirit people, the term berdache has almost entirely disappeared from academic vocabulary.

Of course, destroying a colonial legacy over three hundred years old does not happen merely by removing a word from use. The remarkable achievements of the Two-Spirit movement, however, extend beyond linguistic shifts among academics. For example, Two-Spirit activism also focused on intra-Native issues of homophobia and transphobia, largely disrupting the once-common discourse in Indian Country that claimed homosexuality was brought by colonizers. Furthermore, across North America Two-Spirit people have made strides in reclaiming and sometimes reinventing places for themselves in Indigenous communities through a process that Cree scholar Alex Wilson calls “coming in.” Two-Spirit people have also been at the forefront of land, water, and bodily defense efforts throughout the US and Canada, often pointing out the connections between these forms of resistance. By drawing on the linkages across the continent that were facilitated by the network of people involved in the arrival, gifting, and adoption of “Two-Spirit,” queer and trans Native people have been able to powerfully mobilize for change on multiple levels, in numerous spaces.

This does not mean that Two-Spirit people have entirely overcome the weight of centuries of colonial oppression. Some 2SLGBTQ Native people such as Erin Konsmo and Jas Morgan have argued that visibility in the Canadian arts and academic scene has not led to improved quality of life for other Two-Spirit people, who continue to face high levels of violence and precarity. New challenges have emerged, such as the potential co-optation of the Two-Spirit movement by nonprofits. That old cycle continues, too, as white social media influencers use historical accounts and images of Two-Spirit people as their proof that “nonbinary people have always existed,” while ignoring the demands of Two-Spirit people today. The strength of Two-Spirit people to intervene, however, is greater than it has ever been. For my 2SLGBTQ community, I want us to take a moment to pause and consider what we have been able to achieve in the past fifty years, so that we can recognize our ability to continue effecting change. For the academic community—because I have a place there, too—I hope that we reflect on this history and take note of how we have potentially participated in the cycles of observation and theorization built on Two-Spirit bodies. The Two-Spirit movement shows us, all of us, the power of 2SLGBTQ Native people speaking and acting for ourselves. While this story speaks of a legacy of refusal of academic colonial extraction, it is also more than that—it is a movement for Two-Spirit self-determination.