Becoming Two-Spirit: Gay Identity and Social Acceptance in Indian Country

Notes

Difference and Social Belonging 191 Notes 1. seeking self- and social acceptance 1. I use the term “Two-Spirit” as the men in this book use it, which will become clearer and more specific as the book progresses. In this same way I use the term “gay” in preference to the word “homosexual,” which is a problematic term used to discriminate against and pathologize same-sex relations. 2. A “lulu” is a trill where a person vibrates the tongue on the roof of the mouth to make a “lululu” noise. It is a form of expression commonly used by women to express approval or intensity of emotion. What is called “lulu-ing” is a common form of expression in Native culture in general. 3. Walter Williams’s The Spirit and the Flesh (1986), Will Roscoe’s The Zuni Man-Woman (1991) and Changing Ones (1998), and Sabine Lang’s Men as Women, Women as Men (1998) fully and expertly document gender diversity among the majority of Native peoples in North America . Scholars have also pointed out that there were female-bodied persons who fulfilled third-gender categories. However, a great deal less is known about the female third gender. Sabine Lang (1998) gives the most attention to this topic, and Roscoe (1998) devotes a chapter to it. 4. In describing the historical institution of male-bodied persons, I will forgo the use of the term berdaches per Thomas and Jacobs (1999). Instead, I will use the terms women-men from Lang (1998), or thirdgender men, for better understanding, because these signal both alternative gender status as well as bodily sex. 5. William Trexler (2002:9) argues that Natives “in effect were determining for an infant or young child, a gender that child could not possibly have arrived at by a free action of his other will.” And,“Wherever we encounter parents or elders imposing gender upon children through such alleged tests, this is really an exercise in parental or other adult authority and not of the child’s free will.” 6. Early anthropological descriptions of the sexual behavior of third- 192 gender men are vague, with the exception of works by Devereaux (1937). For the most part, early anthropologists considered the gender mixing and sexuality of the “berdache” to be pathological and abhorrent . An example is George Catlin’s description of the Sac and Fox “dance of the berdaches”: “This is one of the most unaccountable and disgusting customs, that I have ever met in the Indian country . . . and where I should wish that it may be extinguished before it be more fully recorded” (1973:215). The famous anthropologist Alfred L. Kroeber’s (1902) descriptions of Arapahoe haxu’xan sexuality are written in Latin, presumably to hide their explicit nature and get them past censors. These biases reduce possible conclusions to simply knowing that sexual relations between third-gender men and other men were recorded by anthropologists and travelers and were part of the local lore among some tribal peoples. 2. from gay to indian 1. The 1969 riot at the Stonewall Inn, a gay social club in New York City, is considered the event that began the modern gay liberation movement. 2.I use“supratribal”and“supratribal consciousness”in the same way that Stephen Cornell (1988) uses them in The Return of the Native. 3. Reservations were broken up and allotted to individuals in the late 19th century after the U.S. Congress passed the General Allotment Act of 1887, also known as the Dawes Act. Because of the local Native population and tribal headquarters there, certain areas and cities in Oklahoma are associated with particular tribes, such as Tahlequah for the Cherokee and Anadarko for its association with the former Kiowa, Apache, Comanche reservation. 3. adapting to homophobia among indians 1. All the major works on Native gender diversity emphasize the ways in which some Two-Spirit people are accepted in their communities (Lang 1998; Roscoe 1991, 1998; Thomas and Jacobs 1999; Williams 1986). By emphasizing the rare occurrences of familial and community accepNotes to Pages 26–54 193 tance, they are ignoring the majority of Two-Spirit people who see themselves as not accepted in their tribal and local communities. Weston points out that “intellectual projects” on the institutionalization of variability in sexual practice and gender variation had as their goal to document and assess the degree of tolerance for homosexuality among“other...