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Two-spirit Histories in Southwestern and Mesoamerican Literatures Gabriel S. Estrada This critical review of existing Greater Southwestern and Mesoamerican historical and contemporary literatures regarding two-spirit roles interrogates the discrepancies in findings across indigenous, U.S., and Latino borders. While U.S. Southwestern-centered writings often affirm the value of historical two-spirit genders , Eurocentric histories focused on Hispanic writings and Mesoamerican indigenous nations tend to designate very low status to two-spirit sexualities. For example, while Walter Williams documents the ceremonial importance that surrounds Pueblo two-spirit peoples,1 Richard C. Trexler theorizes that these same roles were only the most degrading products of sexual abuse and dominance.2 Primary documents upon which Southwestern and Mesoamerican two-spirit histories are based were often written centuries apart, and the interpretations of these documents are often ideologically opposed. American Indian Southwestern scholarship mostly relies upon oral traditions, exploration narratives, and ethnographic accounts of the 1800s and 1900s in order to suggest vibrant two-spirit roles in earlier centuries and precolonial cultures.3 Paula Gunn Allen’s The Sacred Hoop is one of many two-spirit historical revisions that defends these traditions.4 These positive two-spirit histories contrast starkly with many geographically overlapping Mestiza/o and U.S. Euro-American writings that find homophobia, to use a modern term, throughout the Southwest and Mexico.5 Eurocentric writings mostly rely on primary documents from first-contact, Inquisition, and colonial accounts from the Spanish in the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries and do not consider contemporary indigenous methodologies that could help reinterpret the homophobia of colonial documents. This essay argues that two-spirit historians are rightly critical of accepting Spanish and Eurocentric voices as the sole authorities on their cultures’ sexual and gender traditions. Throughout this essay the contemporary term two-spirit is employed because American Indian scholars and activists made convincing spiritual and cultural arguments for using this term at the seminal third annual intertribal Native American First Nations gay and lesbian conference held near Winnepeg, Canada, Gabriel S. Estrada 166 in 1990. Within a growing body of two-spirit creative works,6 Qwo-Li Driskill embraces the spiritual eroticization of diverse two-spirit bodies as resistance to historical sexual, political, and cultural colonization.7 Despite white queer-positive representations of historical American Indian berdaches,8 most Native American and conscientious scholars refuse to use the term berdache, noting its Eurocentrism and roots in historical Old World and Arab concepts of “male prostitution .”9 While two-spirit roles include queer sexuality, they are more often linked with mixed-gender roles reflected in work or other relations. First Nation Native American scholars often reject sexually leaning gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, and queer (GLBTQ) identities in favor of two-spirit identities that reflect various indigenous nation affiliations as well. Brian Joseph Gilley reports that some twospirit groups feel that only those who practice two-spirit ceremonies or reconstruct two-spirit traditions can self-identify as two-spirit.10 Others prefer to use gender and sexual terms in their own language. For example, Diné author Carolyn Epple attests that only the term nádleehí can truly represent a mixed gender role specific to her Navajo people and cosmology.11 Two-spirit Historiography of the Greater Southwest Deborah Miranda’s article “Extermination of the Joyas: Gendercide in Spanish California” offers key insights into the usage of Spanish colonial documents for contemporary two-spirit cultural reconstruction. Based upon Sandra Holliman’s gender reconstructions published in Handbook of Gender in Archaeology and Miranda’s own familial research, Miranda’s description of California Indian joyas is worth quoting at length because it forms the core of her scholarly reclamations of these traditions. Miranda makes important definitions of broad California Indian two-spirit undertaker roles, especially focusing on the male-bodied, twospirit roles of the Chumash ‘aqi: “The journey to the afterlife was known to be a prescribed series of experiences with both male and female supernatural entities, and the ‘aqi, with their male-female liminality, were the only people who could mediate these experiences. Since the female (earth, abundance, fertility) energies were so powerful, and since the male (Sun, death-associated) energies were equally strong, the person who dealt with that moment of spiritual and bodily crossing over between life and death must have specially endowed spiritual qualities and powers, not to mention long-term training and their own quarantined tools.”12 In other words the mixed-gender ‘aqi would have to...

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