Turn-of-the-twentieth century photo of We’wha, a Zuni lahamana, a male-bodied person who wears a mixture of men’s and women’s clothing and performs social and ceremonial roles associated with women. A Zuni person in traditional dress sitting on the floor and weaving.
21 July 2021
Two-spirit or two-spirited is a term for Indigenous North American people who do not conform to the cis-heterosexual norm of white, settler-colonist society. It is a relatively recent coinage, created as a calque of the Ojibwe niizh manidoowag, but that phrase has no traditional cultural significance or currency in Ojibwe culture. Two-spirit is an English-language term.
The concept of gender variability is not consistent across Indigenous North American cultures, and different tribes have their own terms with meanings that fit the cultural contexts of each particular group. Such terms include: nádleehé (Navajo), winkte (Lakota), warharmi (Kamia), hwame (Mohave), and lhamana (Zuni).
Two-spirit evokes the concept, present in some Indigenous traditions, of a person who presents the affect of both male and female genders, while biologically conforming to either the male or female sex. But from its coinage, two-spirit has been used as an umbrella term, including people from across the spectrum of gender variability, including those who in settler-colonist contexts would be labeled as gay, lesbian, bisexual, pansexual, queer, transgender, non-binary, drag queen, or butch.
Two-spirit was coined at the Third Annual Inter-Tribal Native American, First Nations, Gay and Lesbian American Conference held in 1990 in Winnipeg, Manitoba. It was deliberately invented as a replacement for the French word berdache, which had been borrowed into English by anthropologists in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. This word and its English variant bardash also have the sense of a male prostitute, and as a result, despite being widely used in scholarly literature, berdache and bardash are considered to be slurs. But a new term was needed because the usual English ones, such as gay or lesbian, did not reflect the unique aspects of gender variability in Indigenous cultures. Thus, two-spirit was coined.
There is testimony as to the coinage of the term at the 1990 Winnipeg conference, but as far as I can tell there are no written proceedings from that meeting. The earliest written use of two-spirit I have found is in the name of an Indigenous women’s dance troupe. An article in Boston’s Gay Community News of 25 May 1991 mentions a scheduled performance of that group at the National Lesbian Conference in Atlanta, held 24–28 April 1991, that was cancelled because of organizational and diversity concerns:
The Two Spirited Dance Troupe, a Native American company, was scheduled to open the Thursday night plenary session. However, in solidarity with Spotted Eagle, the group did not perform. By this time Spotted Eagle had her own schedule changed so many times without being consulted that she decided to opt out.
By that fall, two-spirit was appearing in mainstream newspapers as an adjective, albeit in quotation marks. From the Minneapolis Star Tribune of 9 September 1991:
Some Indians said that, before boarding schools and white missionaries erased many traditional tribal beliefs, “two-spirit” people—gays and lesbians—held places of honor in native cultures.
Now, some American Indian gays and lesbians contend, European biases have replaced those old traditions.
Two-spirit, however, is not a universally accepted term, and even those who regard it as a valuable addition to the language recognize that it has its limitations. In the introduction to their 1997 book Two-Spirit People, a collection of articles on Native American gender and sexuality, editors Sue-Ellen Jacobs, Wesley Thomas, and Sabine Lang write:
The English phrase two-spirit, which originated primarily in urban Native American/First Nations contexts where English serves as a lingua franca to bridge cultural and linguistic differences, is not meant to be translated into Native American languages and terms. To do so may change the common meaning it has acquired since the early 1990s by self-identified two-spirit Native Americans. In some cultural contexts, translating it to a Native language could even be dangerous. For example, if "two-spirit" were translated into one of the Athapaskan languages (such as Navajo or Apache) the word could be understood to mean that such a person possesses both a living and a dead spirit—not a desirable situation. If "two-spirit" were translated into Shoshone, the literal translation would be "ghost." As a generic term for Native American gays, lesbians, transgendered individuals, and other persons who are not heterosexual or who are ambivalent in terms of gender, it is used in urban and rural environments, but not by all Native Americans who are, for example, self-identified as "gay," "lesbian," "bisexual," "transgender," or "third gender" (that is, people who are neither women nor men within systems of multiple genders). Some reject the term just as others reject "berdache."
And Cherokee scholar Daniel Heath Justice, in his 2018 Why Indigenous Literatures Matter, notes:
It was coined to affirm the spiritual and cultural groundings of queer Indigenous folks, and to argue that Indigenous gender diversity and same-sex relationships included but were more than sexual acts or proclivities. It’s an important term of self-affirmation, and one that many people use today, especially in Canada. But it’s also a pan-Indigenous term that in many cases presumes a generic similarity across cultures, which is decidedly not the case, and does not translate well into many culturally specific understandings from communities with historical roles that we might today identify as similar to gay, lesbian, bisexual, or transgender identities. That doesn’t mean we didn’t or don’t exist in these communities—that we didn’t or don’t matter. It just means that the broad concept of “two-spirit” might not be the best terminology for describing the culturally specific realities of gender diversity and sexuality expressions in all contexts.
Sources:
BonaDea, Maridee. “‘The Point Is We Tried’; The National Lesbian Conference Was at Times Contentious, at Times Victorious.” Gay Community News (Boston), 25 May 1991, 9. ProQuest: Magazines.
de Vries, Kylan Mattias. “Berdache (Two-Spirit).” Encyclopedia of Gender and Society, Jodi O’Brien, ed. Thousand Oaks, California: SAGE Publications, 2009.
Driskill, Qwo-Li, Daniel Heath Justice, Deborah A. Miranda, and Lisa Tatonetti, eds. Sovereign Erotics: A Collection of Two-Spirit Literature. Tucson: U of Arizona Press, 2011, 4–6.
Jacobs, Sue-Ellen, Wesley Thomas, and Sabine Lang, eds. Two-Spirit People: Native American Gender Identity, Sexuality, and Spirituality. Urbana: U of Illinois Press, 1997, 2, 3–4. HathiTrust Digital Archive.
Justice, Daniel Heath. Why Indigenous Literatures Matter. Waterloo, Ontario: Wilfrid Laurier UP, 2018, 102–03.
Kelly, Suzanne P. “Gays Seek Niche in Minority Communities: Balancing Racial and Sexual Identities Can Be Difficult.” Star Tribune (Minneapolis), 9 September 1991, 9A. ProQuest Historical Newspapers.
Lang, Sabine. “Various Kinds of Two-Spirit People.” In Sue-Ellen Jacobs, Wesley Thomas, and Sabine Lang, eds. Two-Spirit People: Native American Gender Identity, Sexuality, and Spirituality. Urbana: U of Illinois Press, 1997, 100, 103. HathiTrust Digital Archive.
Oxford English Dictionary, draft additions, June 2015, s.v. two, adj., n., and adv.
Photo credit: John K. Hillers, c.1871–c.1907. U.S. National Archives. Public domain image.