Two-spirit and the indigenous map of gender and love

In 1990, at the third annual Native American and Canadian Aboriginal LGBT gathering in Winnipeg, participants chose the English term "two-spirit" — from the Anishinaabe niizh manidoowag — to replace the older anthropological term "berdache," which derived from a Persian word meaning kept boy and had always been an external imposition. The coining was a self-naming act, a piece of decolonization performed in a single word. Two-spirit was not meant to translate any specific indigenous gender term; it was meant to provide a shared English umbrella under which the many distinct traditions could organize politically without being collapsed into one another or into the white LGBTQ movement.

Among the Lakota, winkte — a contraction of winyanktehca, "to be as a woman" — were persons born male who took up women's clothing, work, and social position. They were considered spiritually powerful and were often called upon to give secret names to children, names believed to carry protection. Beverly Little Thunder, a Lakota two-spirit woman and Sundance leader, has written and spoken about her work to reclaim winkte ceremonial standing and to confront the internal homophobia that boarding schools and missions installed in indigenous communities. Her Sundance, held for two-spirit and women practitioners, has been one of the visible institutional sites of two-spirit ceremonial recovery.

The Navajo recognized at least four genders: feminine woman, masculine woman, feminine man, and masculine man. The nádleehi — "one who is transformed" — could move between gender roles or hold a permanent third position. Nádleehi were considered fortunate to have in a family, often associated with wealth and weaving, and they partnered following their assumed gender role rather than their birth sex. Anthropologist Wesley Thomas, himself Navajo, has documented the persistence of this category despite intense pressure from boarding schools and Christian missions. The nádleehi role is not a Navajo version of "gay" or "trans"; it is its own thing, embedded in a specifically Navajo cosmology of gender.

The most famous individual two-spirit person in American history is We'wha, a Zuni lhamana born around 1849. We'wha was born male but lived as a woman and was one of the most respected ceremonial leaders of the pueblo. In 1885 the anthropologist Matilda Coxe Stevenson brought We'wha to Washington for six months, where she met President Grover Cleveland, attended cabinet wives' receptions, and was widely admired as "the Zuni princess." Nobody in Washington realized her birth sex. Will Roscoe's biography The Zuni Man-Woman recovered We'wha's story and made it one of the central documents of two-spirit history. We'wha's ceremonial role at Zuni continued for decades after her return.

The Mojave of the lower Colorado River recognized the alyha, persons born male who lived as women, and the hwame, persons born female who lived as men. George Devereux's mid-twentieth-century ethnography documented elaborate rituals marking the transition, including a public ceremony in which the candidate's status was confirmed by their dance. Alyha and hwame partnered following their assumed gender. The Mojave system was not merely tolerant; it had specific ritual and economic positions for these persons that nobody else could fill. Colonial pressure and missionization reduced the system to memory by the mid-twentieth century.

Across many traditions, two-spirit identity was understood to be marked by spirit rather than chosen by the individual. A dream of a particular kind — often involving Double Woman among the Lakota, or specific birds and animals elsewhere — would indicate the role. To refuse the dream was considered dangerous. To accept it was to enter a recognized position with its own duties and protections. This grounding in dream and vision matters because it removes the modern Western framing in which sexual orientation is a personal preference or identity. In the indigenous frame, two-spirit was a calling, recognized by the community, with religious weight.

Anthropologists who first encountered two-spirit partnerships often described them as homosexual, but this is a Western imposition. From the indigenous perspective, a partnership between a man and a nádleehi who lived as a woman was a heterosexual partnership — it was between two different genders. The category of "homosexuality" requires a prior commitment to defining gender by birth sex, which most indigenous traditions did not share. This is the deepest difficulty in translating two-spirit traditions into modern Western LGBTQ vocabulary, and it is why two-spirit elders frequently resist being called gay or trans. Their map is different.

In 1513, the Spanish conquistador Vasco Núñez de Balboa, encountering same-sex partnered and cross-dressed persons among the Quarequa of present-day Panama, had forty of them torn apart by his war dogs. The episode, recorded by Peter Martyr, was the opening note of three hundred years of Spanish, French, and English colonial assault on indigenous gender systems. The pattern repeated. Wherever Europeans encountered two-spirit traditions, they responded with violence, mockery, and legal suppression. The systematic destruction of the role was not incidental to colonization; it was central to it.

Beginning in the late nineteenth century, U.S. and Canadian governments removed indigenous children to boarding schools where they were beaten for speaking their languages, practicing their ceremonies, and deviating from imposed gender norms. Boys who showed any inclination toward women's work or dress were singled out for particular punishment. The schools functioned as gender-disciplinary institutions whose job was to produce normatively masculine boys and normatively feminine girls who would integrate into the colonial economy. The damage to two-spirit traditions was severe and continued well into the late twentieth century.

One of the harder pieces of two-spirit recovery work has been confronting the homophobia and transphobia that were absorbed into many indigenous communities through Christian missionization and boarding-school discipline. By the mid-twentieth century, many indigenous communities had internalized the colonial gender binary and rejected their own elders' traditions. Two-spirit people returning to reservations in the 1970s and 1980s often faced hostility from relatives whose Christianity had become indistinguishable from indigenous identity in their own minds. Recovery has meant patient teaching, ceremony, and the slow re-introduction of the old maps.

Will Roscoe's Changing Ones and Sabine Lang's Men as Women, Women as Men together constitute the best comprehensive documentation of North American two-spirit traditions across nations. Both authors worked closely with indigenous consultants and resisted the temptation to flatten the variety into a single category. Their bibliographies catalogue more than 130 nations with documented two-spirit traditions and dozens of distinct terms. Without their work the reclamation would have proceeded with much less archival weight, and the colonial archive would have continued to function as the only record of what had been.

Today two-spirit organizing exists across the continent. Gatherings rotate among host nations. Sundances welcome two-spirit dancers. Two-spirit elders mentor younger generations and sometimes work with non-indigenous LGBTQ communities while maintaining the distinctness of two-spirit identity as nation-specific and ceremonially grounded. The movement has its own publications, its own films — Sandy Hudson's Two Spirits, the PBS documentary on Fred Martinez — and its own seat at indigenous political tables. It has not fully restored what colonialism damaged, but it has changed the trajectory.

Two-spirit traditions teach that the gender map of a society shapes everything downstream: the categories of love, the partnership patterns, the ceremonial roles available, the way children are taught about themselves. A two-gender map produces one set of romantic possibilities. A four- or five-gender map produces a wider set. Neither is natural; both are constructions. The indigenous record demonstrates, with two centuries of ethnography and the living testimony of contemporary two-spirit people, that wider maps are possible and have been workable for centuries. The narrow map that colonial modernity imposed is one option, not the only one. The Manual records this so that the design space stays visible.

1. Roscoe, Will. Changing Ones: Third and Fourth Genders in Native North America. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1998. 2. Roscoe, Will. The Zuni Man-Woman. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1991. 3. Lang, Sabine. Men as Women, Women as Men: Changing Gender in Native American Cultures. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1998. 4. Little Thunder, Beverly. One Bead at a Time: A Memoir. Cleveland: Lit Cleveland, 2016. 5. Jacobs, Sue-Ellen, Wesley Thomas, and Sabine Lang, eds. Two-Spirit People: Native American Gender Identity, Sexuality, and Spirituality. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1997. 6. Williams, Walter L. The Spirit and the Flesh: Sexual Diversity in American Indian Culture. Boston: Beacon Press, 1986. 7. Driskill, Qwo-Li, Chris Finley, Brian Joseph Gilley, and Scott Lauria Morgensen, eds. Queer Indigenous Studies: Critical Interventions in Theory, Politics, and Literature. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2011. 8. Devereux, George. "Institutionalized Homosexuality of the Mohave Indians." Human Biology 9, no. 4 (1937): 498–527. 9. Gilley, Brian Joseph. Becoming Two-Spirit: Gay Identity and Social Acceptance in Indian Country. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2006. 10. Smedley, Audrey. Women Creating Patrilyny: Gender and Environment in West Africa. Walnut Creek, CA: AltaMira Press, 2004. 11. Allen, Paula Gunn. The Sacred Hoop: Recovering the Feminine in American Indian Traditions. Boston: Beacon Press, 1986. 12. Estrada, Gabriel S. "Two Spirits, Nádleeh, and LGBTQ2 Navajo Gaze." American Indian Culture and Research Journal 35, no. 4 (2011): 167–190.