RECLAIMING TWO-SPIRITS: Sexuality, Spiritual Renewal & Sovereignty in Native America

RECLAIMING TWO-SPIRITS: Sexuality, Spiritual Renewal & Sovereignty in Native America
GREGORY D. SMITHERS (foreword by Raven E. Heavy Runner)
Beacon Press
$29.95 hardcover, available now

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Rating: 5* of five

The Publisher Says: A sweeping history of Indigenous traditions of gender, sexuality, and resistance that reveals how, despite centuries of colonialism, Two-Spirit people are reclaiming their place in Native nations.

Reclaiming Two-Spirits decolonizes the history of gender and sexuality in Native North America. It honors the generations of Indigenous people who had the foresight to take essential aspects of their cultural life and spiritual beliefs underground in order to save them.

Before 1492, hundreds of Indigenous communities across North America included people who identified as neither male nor female, but both. They went by aakíí’skassi, miati, okitcitakwe or one of hundreds of other tribally specific identities. After European colonizers invaded Indian Country, centuries of violence and systematic persecution followed, imperiling the existence of people who today call themselves Two-Spirits, an umbrella term denoting feminine and masculine qualities in one person.

Drawing on written sources, archaeological evidence, art, and oral storytelling, Reclaiming Two-Spirits spans the centuries from Spanish invasion to the present, tracing massacres and inquisitions and revealing how the authors of colonialism’s written archives used language to both denigrate and erase Two-Spirit people from history. But as Gregory Smithers shows, the colonizers failed—and Indigenous resistance is core to this story. Reclaiming Two-Spirits amplifies their voices, reconnecting their history to Native nations in the 21st century.

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My Review: Start here, from the author's Prologue:

Why was this new terminology needed?...Answering this question requires us to dig deeper; it is therefore one of the main focal points of this book. It requires a reexamination of colonialism's ongoing destructiveness and its different forms of violence—disease, physical acts of war and genocide, the cultural destructiveness caused by boarding scools, and the corrosive impact of corporations and capitalism on Indigenous communities. In spite of five centuries of colonialism, it is still possible for Two-Spirit people to reclaim their traditions, identities, roles and their sacred status. For other Native people the term "Two-Spirit" is a starting point for telling new stories.

Many, if not most, languages in the world do not use gendered pronouns. The existence of them, their mere presence, requires duality: like "she" can't exist without "he". Or so we are told in our language classes. The mere notion, like the current drive to accept and use broadly the singular "they", is causing such a huge amount of angst in those whose world is dualistic, almost Manichean, in its foundations. I tremble (with repressed laughter) contemplating these poor souls (yes, I mean "poor" as in "impoverished") even conceptualizing a world like that inhabited by Diné people with its five human genders! Something we in the so-called Western world can learn from Two-Spirit people is that the male-female gender (not biological sex, in other words) binary is not a natural but a historical invention. And even the biological sex binary isn't anything like as absolute as we're taught in US schools.

Which is something I want to mention to my majority-white readership of all sexual natures: This is a book about Native/Indigenous/First Nations sexual and gender natures and it does not center (in any positive way) our settler/Euro/Judeo-Christian/Muslim world view. It is not meant to. It was not designed to. And that needs to be okay with you before you consider whether you're the audience for this richly textured, information-dense read. Do not go into the book thinking you're going to get spoon-fed some lightly seasoned apologia or even apology for "our" (in quotes because I, too, feel alienated from that culture in its broader outlines) actions towards the first inhabitants of this continent. The identity "Two Spirit," very much centered in this study, is not without contested and resisted facets. There are elders (people my exact chronological age!) who regard this new, "pan-Indigene" term with some caution. Many are the pitfalls on any newly blazed trail. The language of Two-Spiritedness is, like identities always will be, evolving. That being said, I trust you to decide what you want to do next.

I encourage you to read this book because it doesn't center you, or your concerns. It isn't fiction so it isn't here to amuse; it's serious and scholarly, and while it's not obscurantist in writing style, it's not novelistic either.

In a certain way, that's a shame. It's a wide-netted story that begs for a whole corpus of films, books, plays. The story of the American Indian AIDS Institute would serve as a kind of corrective to the damaging myth of "Patient Zero" that gay journalist Randy Shilts blew up into a cultural touchstone with his And the Band Played On bestseller-cum-film; something that muddles facts with homophobic stereotypes and racist myths. We need the stories of Barbara Cameron and Randy Burns, correctives to the anthropological Arabic-language-based and offensive term "berdache" for Two-Spirit people; we need them to reach a wide audience, and it's usually fiction that does that best. I think Catawba Nation queer activist and artist DeLesslin George-Warren, quoted by Smithers, said it best: "History is not a listing of facts, it's a mythology with citations." No matter that I call history "factual" it is, and of necessity must be, his-story, a story for all its pretensions to scientific rigor.

The fact is I can holler at you all day long and even beg real fancy for you to pay attention to people unlike you, doubly unlike you straight readers. I wish I had the powers of persuasion to make the read sound as fascinating as I found it. It wasn't written by a Native American/Indigenous person. Instead, Author Smithers is Australian, straight, and a scholar; he has, with those Othered-from-Two-Spirit foundations, built a book about Otherness that is culturally sensitive, pluralistic in its aims and outlook, and a finely crafted pleasure to read.