Two-Spirits

The story of the first Hwami: One day Mastamho [the Great God] sang a song to a young woman. He asked her if she could repeat the song back to him; she could, without mistake. “This is very good,” said Mastamho. “You have understood my song perfectly.” This is the story of the first Hwami (p. 85); according to this Mohave tale, “Hwami” is a “woman who lives like a man.”

In his 2002 Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, and Transgender Myths (from the Arapaho to the Zuni), Jim Elledge examines the Native American understanding of LGBT people through mythology, uncovering a “literature of gays, lesbians, bisexuals, and transgendered individuals [preserved through oral culture, that] existed in the territory now known as the United States long before the arrival of European colonists.” (p. xiv) As the Holy Week known as Gay Pride is upon the city, I thought the relative acceptance and tolerance of Queer Folks- Two-Spirits- in Native American culture to be worthy of comment.

“It is of utmost importance to those interested in Native American literature to be aware that the socially recognized role of two-spirit is one aspect shared among most of the Native American tribes, and that its appearance  in tribal mythology sanctions the two-spirit role for those tribes. For Native America, two-spirit persons have existed since the dawn of time and, in fact, were often at least of equal standing with other members of their tribe, if not more powerful than those in whose midst they existed.” (p. xv) Most Native American tribes considered that Two-Spirits “were decreed to exist by deities or were among the pantheon of gods”; in many myths (including many Creation myths), the Two-Spirit is the principal figure. (p. xvii)

Perceiving Two-Spirits (or LGBTQ folks) as part of the natural order of the world (not as some aberration against normalcy), Native Americans were often able to adapt themselves to gender-variance. We are told that Two-Spirits would often recognize their “alternative gender status” while young (in a process frequently accompanied, like the onset of a shamanic orientation, by dreams and visions). Often a rite-of-passage ritual was performed, acknowledging publicly the individual’s transition to Two-Spirit status, which could include adopting the clothes, habits, and social roles of the opposite sex; a Two-Spirit man would generally begin to live with another man as his “wife,” while a Two-Spirit woman would live with another woman as her “husband.” (In the 1877 photograph above, the gentleman on the couple’s right is the “husband” of the two, named Osh-Tish ["Finds Them and Kills Them"]; the gentleman beside him is apparently his “wife,” known as The Other Magpie and Osh-Tish’s companion in the Battle of Rosebud.)

A powerful irony, that Gay Marriage was once among the most Native of American customs.

In story after story in this book, we find Gay people described and represented, such as in “The First Alyha” (p. 77), which relates how a Mohave boy was uninterested in learning how to operate a bow; instead he gravitates towards the girls as they play with dolls, and so the community decides to teach the boy to laugh like women laugh. (I can’t explain how much simpler the lives of so many gender-non-conforming kids would be, if we could just adapt ourselves to a similar social point-of-view.) ”Warrior Girl” (p. 93) tells the story of a woman who defends her people against enemies so well that they decide that ”even if she was a girl, she was a man, too,” so they make her a war chief. In “The Hehe’ya Trick Hui’ki” (p. 153), the Hehe’ya (“Men Whom Women Will Not Marry”) are seen as tricksters, playing a sexual prank on both the men and women of their tribe, whom they appear to shuttle back and forth between; another sexual trick is played by Lizard upon Coyote, in “How Lizard Sodomized Coyote” (p. 87) A Comanche legend from 1903 details how “Eight Young Men Became Women” in the course of a long hunting trip, and various stories describe one man disguising himself as a woman in order to marry another man, sometimes (as in “Nanabushu Pretends to be a Woman,” [p. 129]) even pretending to become pregnant in the process.

All told, this is a remarkable volume for anyone curious about the accomodation of gender-variance within a culture or social group, demonstrating a belief in the Two-Spirit as a Child of the Gods as surely as any One-Spirit. And so, in that spirit- Happy Gay Pride Weekend, Jugglers!