Below the break is the paper. It's extremely long (9 pages when single spaced), but it's that length because I had so much information to write about, not because I was bullshitting in order to hit the page requirement. I think at the end it gets a little bit...over-reachy in it's conclusion about plays about non-binary genders, because in truth, there wasn't a ton of material out there about it.
Why am I posting this? Because I learned an incredible amount and this isn't information they just teach you in schools, but it's so interesting and important. Hopefully this doesn't read like this: http://www.smbc-comics.com/index.php?db=comics&id=2525#comic
Reclaiming
Native Sexuality from Western Culture
Sex, gender, and sexual orientation:
what are they and how are they expressed through artistic expression? In recent years, gender studies has been
popularized as a field of study, yet the fact remains, that many people do not
know the difference between the three categories above. Sex, gender, and sexual orientation are often
related, but by no means are they the same.
Sex refers to a person’s biological features: man, woman, intersex –what
previously was referred to, incorrectly, as hermaphroditism (Case 2-3) . Gender, despite the
common western perception, is not inherently tied to a person’s sex. The commonly known Western genders are male
and female, but as this paper will explore, many other societies, numerous
Native American tribes among them, are not bound to simply two genders. The final category of sexual orientation is
not as fixed as people would believe and pairings of same sex, opposite sex,
same gender, and opposite gender are only some of the options. Western culture is bound by an idea called
the gender binary, which is the strict binding of biological man to a male
gender and biological woman to a female gender (Erickson
2010). This paper seeks to differentiate
the Western belief system from the more fluid Native system.
Historically, the majority of Native
American tribes had institutionalized third and fourth (or more) genders. The people who identified as these genders
were frequently revered by their individual societies (Lang 1998). Unfortunately,
as the indigenous people of North America were “Westernized” by incoming
settlers, this gender tradition became abhorred and little used (Williams
1986). Recently, American Indian peoples
have reawakened to this tradition and sought to reclaim it through many means,
theatre and performance art included among them (Gilley 2005). Ultimately, despite people of nontraditional
genders historically holding a place of influence and respect in Native
American cultures, Western culture has focused, both consciously and
unconsciously, on eradicating this way of life; however, recently Native
American theatre has worked to restore prestige to those that do not conform to
the gender binary.
While gender is by no means as rigid as Western
culture makes it out to be, it does have many components. As Sabine Lang says in regard to gender,
[Gender] has
three basic components. Gender identity reflects a person’s
subjectively felt experience of being masculine, feminine, or ambivalent. Gender
role is the observable expression of gender identity in the social context.
And gender status is the social
position of an individual with reference to the other members of his culture as
a woman, man, or someone belonging to additional gender status separate from
both. (Lang 1998:47)
These categories are important because
they help establish a vocabulary for gender change. Gender identity is the hardest to identify
from the outside, because it is internally decided, but gender roles and gender
status are both observable, and thus useful when determining an individual’s
gender, in this case, an individual in Native American societies. Many Native American societies allowed for
both permanent and temporary changes of gender roles and also allowed a full
institutionalized change of gender status.
In historical Native American society,
the male gender role typically included hunting, warfare, shamanism, and
medicine. The female gender role
included craftwork, farming, cooking, child care, and, frequently, property
ownership. Like Western culture, each
gender did have different spheres of domain, but in American Indian society the
roles were rather more flexible. Even
Inuit tribes, who did not have institutionalized gender role changes in any
form, traditionally allowed women to change genders when men were scarce and their
tribes needed hunters (1998:280-282).
There has been much debate over what to
call Native American people that are not of the feminine or masculine
genders. Recently, it has been decided they
will be called two-spirit, but this term applies more to present day peoples,
and thus I will call historical two-spirit people by Sabine Lang’s terms woman-man
and man-woman. A woman-man is a person
who was born biologically a man but identifies as female and a man-woman is a
person who is biologically woman but identifies as male.
Women-men are much more heavily
documented than men-women, and thus there is inherently more information
available about them. Women-men
typically performed everyday tasks that were traditionally in the women’s sphere
of domain and generally were renowned for performing the tasks well, frequently
even better than the female women of the tribe.
It was through these means that women-men accumulated great wealth. The Navajo women-men or nadleeh, were among the most profitable in their tribes because of
their skills in the female domain, such as rug weaving (1998:68-72).
In addition to every day female tasks,
women-men almost always had a spiritual component associated with them. Since the women-men did not have children of
their own, they were expected to serve the community, specifically
children. They did this frequently by
becoming medicine men or shamans (Williams 1986). Among the Araucanians and Mapuche of central
Chile all shamans were women-men, but when Spanish colonials started to destroy
that tradition instead of making men shamans, women took over the job of
shamanism. Williams states, “So strong
was the association of femininity with spiritual power that if androgynous
males could not fulfill the role, then the Indians would use the next most
powerful persons” (1986:41).
As well as cross-acting in the form of
women’s activities and shamanism, women-men also frequently cross-dressed. Cross-dressing was actually one of the
components that fluctuated most between tribe to tribe. Much of the data indicates that most
women-men from most tribes did cross-dress.
Yet, among the Nevada Shoshoni an institutionalized woman-man tradition
did exist, however their women-men did not cross-dress (Lang 1998:61). In addition to the Nevada Shoshoni, there
were several other tribes that had no instances of women-cross dressing, thus
showing that for a person to be a women-man, cross-dressing was not
essential. At other times,
cross-dressing was the only aspect of being a woman-man taken up by a
person. For instance there was a Peigan
medicine man name Four Bears who received a vision that told him he must dress
as a woman, or else his power would be taken from him (1998:64-65). There was also a renowned warrior who
received a vision saying he must become a women-man, but the man could not bear
to give up fighting, so he wore women’s clothes while within is tribe but
doffed them when the time for fighting came (1998:62-63). These examples show that while
cross-dressing could be a part of being a woman-man, the institution of the
women-men was not strictly defined by cross-dressing, and was not considered an
integral part to the practice, unlike the Western term transgender, which
general carries with it the association of cross-dressing.
As I have mentioned previously, most
Native American tribes had an institutionalized status of women-men, and that
institutionalization came about through many different ways. At times, children and, less frequently,
adults had visions that spoke to them telling them that they were a
woman-man. From the time of that vision
onward, the person then took on the characteristics of a woman, acting like one
and frequently dressing in women’s clothes.
At other times, the community took notice of a child that was different
and gently guided them toward the path of being a man-woman. The Yuma peoples had a tradition of offering
their children a choice of toys. If a
boy child chose the feminine toy, then they were guided toward the path of a
woman-man (Beauchemin, Levy, Vogel 1991). Sometimes adult men would receive visions
telling them to change gender, though this was rarer. Nevertheless, regardless of when a person
became a woman-man the position was generally respected.
In contrast to the impressive amount of
documentation on women-men, the documentation on men-women is significantly
less. Part of the reason for this is
that men-women were not as institutionalized as the status of women-men. There are many accounts of women hunting or
participating in warfare, but less on how those people participated in day-to-day
society. Sabine Lang calls these women
who hunted and went to war: independent women; meaning, that although they
participated in some manly pursuits, they did not necessarily fit into the
gender status of man-woman. A man-woman
was very similar to woman-man because they performed male tasks such as
hunting, warfare, shamanism, and marrying women. Like women-men, men-women also frequently
cross-dressed and chose from the time of childhood to follow the path of the
woman-man.
While both women-men and men-women are
often considered homosexual or transsexuals by Western standards, these
standards are falsely applied. For
instance, a Lakota winkte said of the
matter, “A winkte has two spirits…As a winkte I accept my feminine nature as
part of my being. I dress as a man, but
I feel feminine and enjoy doing women’s things.
I would be terribly scared to be considered a man” (Williams
1986:196). A historical woman-man or
man-woman would consider it offensive to be called gay because their partners were
of a different gender than themselves (Lang 1998:208). As stated previously, gender and sexual
orientation are not the same. The Western
concept of homosexuality simply does not apply to women-men and men-women
because homosexuality implies the couple are of the same gender. Native American cultures did not generally
permit same gender pairings. However, as
long as the genders were opposing, Native Americans allowed men-women and
women-men to marry their partners.
Another important factor in particularly
a woman-man’s relationships, were that they were always expected to take the
passive role in sex. Though they did not
take the active role, women-men were believed to possess sexual power, which
was transferred to their partners during sex (Lang 1998:209). Less is known about men-women’s sexuality,
but accounts do exist in regard to both gender categories stating that their
relationships and sexual orientations were of a more transient nature. Women-men and men-women were of a more
ambivalent gender status and while it is true that women-men more frequently
paired with men and men-women more frequently paired with women, this was not
always the case. The biggest constant is
that there are no documented instances of a man-woman pairing with a man-woman
or with a woman-man pairing with a woman-man (1998:211).
In more recent times, Native peoples
sometimes identify as both two-spirit and gay.
One modern Lakota man proclaimed that the historical term of winkte no longer applied to him and
instead identified as gay. He said,
As I learned
more about winkte and their historical role, I learned that the description did
not fit me. According to the information
to which I had access, if I was winkte
I was submissive in sex, cross-dressing, and responsibilities defined by female
gender roles…What I did find that matched me was the expectation that I would be
‘in service’ to my community. (Red Earth 1997)
In contrast, Doyle Robertson did
identify as winkte, but also
identified as gay: “I am proud to be a first-generation, off-the-reservation,
mixed-blood winkte…[but] I am not,
nor do I want to be, the stereotype of a cross-dressing, man/woman, sexually
anal-passive individual best suited to sewing, beading, and carrying wood in
for the fire on which to cook supper” (Robertson 1997). In truth, the issue has become much more
complicated in modern times, but even American Indians who identify as gay, as
opposed to two-spirit, hold the historical institution in respect. And, despite that Westerners gave men-women
and women-men the title of homosexual, and some modern two-spirit people also
identify as gay or lesbian, using the term homosexuality to describe men-women
and women-men is incorrect.
Though the tradition of men-women and
women-men persisted throughout the years, Western societies did their absolute
best to eliminate the practice. This
systematic eradication of beliefs began with the Spanish settlers in Central
and South America. Like many North
American native peoples, the natives of Central and South America believed in
more than two genders, and the Spanish were one of the worst civilizations that
could have dealt with more than two genders.
Spain was staunchly Catholic and had some of the harshest laws against
sodomy of the 1500s. “Sodomy was a
serious crime in Spain, being considered second only to crimes against the
person of the king and heresy. It was
treated as a much more serious offense than murder” (Williams 1986:132). It was with this frame of mind that the
Spanish people dealt with the natives of Central and South America. If they caught two people of the same
biological sex engaging in sexual activities then the people were killed,
frequently by being fed to savage dogs.
Spain’s offense at the crime of sodomy was so great that they used this
reason as part of their excuse to invade Central and South America.
As the Spanish, and later other
countries, began to colonize North, Central, and South America the men-women and
women-men went into hiding. Though,
despite the pressure, men-women and women-men did not completely lose their
acceptance. Today in some regions of
Central and South America, such as Yucatan, there exists a high degree of
acceptance for same-sex relationships (1986:142-151). The pressure to assimilate to white culture
was nearly overwhelming for indigenous people however.
Once colonization was well under way,
missions began to be established, which served as the first attempt by the
white man to assimilate indigenous people, as opposed to kill them outright. Though the missions did not kill American
Indians outright, they were also not adverse to them dying. For instance, at Acoma pueblo the
missionaries made the Native Americans carry fifty foot trees from the forest far
away to Sky City, on top of a tall cliff in order to build a church. If the logs ever touched the ground than the
log was decreed no good, and the Native Americans were forced to start over. Many native peoples died during the process
of erecting this church (Chapman 2011).
In addition, like all European people, the missionaries despised sodomy
and anything they viewed as homosexual relations, so they did their best to
stamp out women-men and men-women. One
commissioner of Indian affair for the Hopi Indians stopped a Hopi ceremonial
dance when a Hopi clown displayed a huge artificial penis. The commissioner said, “I went up to him and
stopped the performance…and told him that if he ever did a thing like that
again, I would put him in jail. He told
me that he did not know it was wrong, that it was a Hopi custom” (Williams
1986:178). The Western suppression of
sexuality confounded most Native Americans, who simply did not realize that
most expressions of sexuality were considered sinful in Christian, Western
cultures.
Once Christianity had firmly taken root,
Indian Bureaus were established, which, on face value, were supposed to help
relations between the white man and Native Americans. These Bureaus were generally filled with
corrupt officials, who made it no secret that they hated the people they were
meant to help. (Lang 1998, Williams 1986).
One Crow bade (woman-man),
Osh-Tisch, was arrested by an agent of the Bureau of Indian Affairs named
Briskow in the late 1890s. Briskow cut
Osh-Tisch’s hair and forced manual labor of the bade. It was not until the
Crow’s chief intervened that Osh-Tisch was released. It was shortly after this that the bade tradition died out entirely (1986:179). This incident was by no means uncommon, but
it is the most documented. One pioneer
ethnographer commented on the situation, “An Indian agent has absolute control
of affairs on his reservation…more nearly absolute than anything else that we
in the country know of…the Courts protect citizens; but the Indian is not a
citizen and nothing protects him.
Congress has the sole power to order how he shall live and where”
(1986:177).
After the Bureaus were established, the
use of boarding schools for Native Americans became common practice. These boarding schools were intended to take
American Indian children and “civilize” them.
They took the children from their families at a young age and shoved
them together, divided by gender, into dormitories. Walter Williams recounted a tale of a Native
American woman-man in a boarding school,
What happened…is
indicated by a Navajo woman who remembered being taken to Carlisle Indian
School, in Pennsylvania. Her cousin, a nadle, was also taken there. Since he was dressed as a girl, school
officials assumed he was female and placed him in the girl’s dormitory. The Navajo students protected him, and he
went undiscovered. Later, however, there
was a lice infestation. The white
teachers personally scrubbed all the girls, and were shocked when they found out
that the nadle was male…He was taken
from the school, and he never returned again…The family still does not know if
the boy was sent to another school, or prison, or was killed. (1986:180)
Boarding schools were completely devoted
to assimilating and acculturating young Native Americans into Western
society. This acculturation led to the
younger generations having no knowledge of women-men and men-women.
The missions, Bureaus, and boarding
schools all preached Christianity and actually had a fair amount of success by
the late 1800s with converting many Native Americans. This conversion of Native Americans created a
divide between traditionalists and assimilationists, which was the single
biggest contributing factor for the near extinction of the institution of
men-women and women-men. When
missionaries converted Native Americans, those Native Americans no long spoke
of the man-woman and woman-man traditions.
One Hopi convert, Talasnimtiwa, said this to a bureau official of his
tribe’s sexual practices, “I am telling these awful things about Hopi Indians
only because I have become Christian and I want these evil things known to the
Government, so they might be stopped among my peoples” (1986:188). Another Christian man, from the same Hopi
tribe said: “There is nothing good in the Hopi religion. It is all full of adultery and
immorality. I cannot tell all the dirt
and the filth that is in these ceremonies” (1986:188). So thoroughly did many converts repudiate the
practices of their people that many moved off the reservations or no longer
associated with those who kept the traditional ways on the reservation.
This created the initial divide between
the new assimilationists and traditionalists, but the split was accentuated
when children were taken to boarding schools.
Growing up in boarding schools, young Native American children were
never, or only briefly, exposed to the traditions of their native
backgrounds. This meant that they never
learned about the tradition of men-women and women-men and the knowledge began
to fall by the wayside. It was only
later, when some of the children of this generation grew up and found
themselves struggling with their sexual identities that the older generations
explained about men-women and women-men.
One Lakota winkte said, “…His
grandmother wanted to accept him but felt that her Christian beliefs told her
he should be heterosexual. His
grandfather (who was not Christian) was accepting” (1986:190). The stories of grandparents being more
accepting than parents are extremely common.
What is often the case is the parents grew up in boarding houses, while
the grandparents were raised in the traditional way on the reservation. This dichotomy often cause the most recent
generations to go running to the oldest generations for support, rather than
their own parents.
Frequently having no place to turn to
and having no knowledge of the traditions their heritage held, young Native
Americans sought acceptance in gay right groups. However, the vast majority of the people in
these groups were Caucasian, and native peoples felt out of place. It was for
this reason that Randy Burns and Barbra Cameron founded Gay American Indians in
San Francisco in 1975 (1986:210). Gay
American Indians (GAI) was the first group of its kind and countless other
groups sprung up, following GAI’s lead.
Barbra Cameron said of GAI, “We were the first and foremost group for
each other…bringing gay Indians together is our most important task”
(1986:210). GAI and the creation of
other groups like it was really the first step that younger generations of
American Indians took to take back their sexual heritage.
This increasing awareness of the
man-woman and man-woman led to a conference being held in 1992 called The
Wenner-Gren Revisiting: Berdache North America Empirically and
Theoretically. Throughout white
America’s history, the white man had called women-men and men-women the
disgusting term: berdache. The term
berdache comes from Persia and originally meant a young, male prostitute. It was later applied the Native American
men-women and women-men. A large part of
the reason the conference was called was to discuss the use of the word (Beauchemin, Levy, Vogel 1991). Out of this conference, the term two-spirit
was adopted in place of berdache. It was
taken from the Ojibwe term from women-men and men-women Niizh manidoowag, which translates directly as
two-spirit (Jacobs, Thomas, Lang 1997). The
term two-spirit does differ from the historical man-woman and woman-man. Historically, men-women and women-men were in
an institutionalized position, meaning that that they had to fulfill certain
roles in society in order to be considered a man-woman or woman-man. Two-spirit, in contrast is mostly
self-proclaimed and does not require the fulfillment of certain roles within
society. Doyle Robertson, a modern
two-spirit man had this to say of the matter, “I find it a bit problematic that
there seems to be an insistence in defining two-spirit people in terms of the
past. Two-spirit is a term contemporary
Natives, myself included, have chosen for ourselves as identifiers” (Robertson
1997:223). The idea of two-spirit gives
Native peoples a concept with heritage and most Native people find it preferable
to using the Western term, homosexual. There
are, however, many people who choose to call themselves both gay and
two-spirit. People often feel that
homosexual describes their sexual orientation, but two-spirit describes their
gender and their spiritual connection to their people. Though the adoption of the term two-spirit
was certainly a step in the correct direction, I do believe that it does imply
homogeny of peoples from all tribes. Two-spirit
traditions are different within each tribe, so the term two-spirit does fail to
take into account this fact.
Nevertheless, the adoption and creation of the term two-spirit was the
second step in native peoples taking back the tradition of breaking the gender
binary.
The final, and currently ongoing, step to native
peoples reclaiming and respecting their two-spirit heritage is reclaiming it
through artistic expression, particularly theatre. After the conference in 1992, many artists,
including playwright Muriel Miguel, began to call themselves two-spirit (Tousey, Eustis 2008).
The first gay Natice American playwright actually began writing long
before the Native American theatre movement began. Lynn Riggs was a closeted gay man, as
evidenced in his plays: The Cream in the
Well and The Year of the Pilar. In The
Cream in the Well a major in the Navy receives a dishonorable discharge for
prostituting himself to men and in The
Year of the Pilar a man from a Spanish family is supsected of having same
sex relations with a Mayan farmer. The
fact that Lynn Riggs was gay is not well known, but in July 2004, The Oklahoma
Press attempted to create an anthology of Lynn Rigg's plays. Leo Cundiff, Lynn
Rigg's grandson, who holds the rights to many of his plays, threatened to
withold these rights should the Oklahoma Press divluge the fact that Riggs was
gay. If a person reads the plays
mentioned above, it is fairly evident that Lynn Riggs used gay themes in his
works, so it is not a huge leap to assume that Riggs was also gay. (Womack 2005:113). Despite this however, Rigg’s grandson still
felt so ashamed, even seventy years after the plays were written, that he
refused to admit his grandfather was gay.
Had Lynn Riggs been writing today, it is liking he proudly would have
declared himself two-spirited.
Lynn Riggs
was by no means the only playwright to address sexuality and gender in his
plays. Beginning in the seventies,
Muriel Miguel and her sisters, Gloria Miguel and Lisa Mayo, created the
Spiderwoman Theater Company, which began putting out progressive pieces of
Native theatre. Muriel Miguel is an
openly gay woman and this was apparent even in her early work. In Sun,
Moon, and Feathers it is talked about how Muriel brought home women as
opposed to men, which initially shamed her sisters. From that point, Muriel’s acceptance of her
sexuality only progressed because she created two shows: Hot n’ Soft and Hot n’ Soft
II which purely addressed her life as
a gay woman. Neither play pulled any
punches and bordered on the edge of erotic (Miguel 1992a, 1992b, 1993). Muriel Miguel had this to say of her work, “I’m
a two spirit woman. And in Spiderwoman, it’s very important to somehow, in all
of our pieces, to talk about that and address that” (Tousey and Eustis 2008).
Spiderwoman
Theatre Company was not the only one working during that time to create pieces
of theatre that showed alternative sexualities, not commonly seen. Tomson Highway, though he has never adopted
the term two-spirit, is a gay man who has written several plays both indirectly
and directly addressing homosexuality in Native American societies. Both Rez
Sisters and Dry Lips Oughta Move to
Kaupksing follow families in which one of the members is discretely
gay. For example, in Rez Sisters one of the sisters, Emily
Dictionary, joined a motorbike, but when her female lover killed herself, she
returned to the reservation. Many of
Highway’s plays and works address homosexuality, but it is almost uniformly
portrayed as something that will get a person killed. In Highway’s semi-autobiographical Kiss of the Fur Queen two boys, Jeremiah and Gabriel Okimasis, are taken to a boarding
school where they are raped by the local priest. This causes both boys to question their
sexuality and, in the end, Gabriel falls into habits of extreme promiscuity and
ends up dying of AIDS. This death
parallels the real life death of Gabriel, Highway’s brother, who died under
very similar circumstances. Though
Highway does not address homosexuality in a positive fashion, he does address
it, and in that was much more progressive than other playwrights of the
seventies and eighties.
One
interesting thing to note is that it is only homosexuality that Highway tends
to treat harshly. In all three of the
above mentioned works, there is a dual gendered trickster character that
watched over the characters of the works.
Nanabush, a character in both Rez
Sisters and Dry Lips... was male
in Rez Sisters but female in Dry Lips…Traditionally, in Cree
mythology, Nanabush can be either gender and historically was frequently
referred to as two-spirited. Tomson
Highway said he struggled putting this concept into English terms, because the
English language is so limiting.
I'm
very angry at the English language. I wrote the book [The Kiss of the Fur Queen] in Cree, really, and translated it as I
went along. A character would speak to me in Cree, and I would translate it
into English to put it on the page. …Cree has no gender, the concept of god as
two-spirited - everything is so difficult to explain in English. And the
business of [circular] time doesn't translate. It was such a struggle, every
step of the way. (Methot 2010)
Many
playwrights struggle with this problem.
The English language is very limited when it comes to expressing
gender. In many Native American
languages, Sioux and Navajo in particular, there are no gender specific
pronouns. This means that when writing
in their own language, playwrights and authors do not have to deal with the clumsy,
gender-narrow pronouns like in English (Epple 1998).
Despite
struggles with the English language, an abundance of artists, not just theatre
practitioners, have sprung up in the last fifteen to twenty years that deal
with the new idea of two-spirit. Many
documentaries have been made about two-spirit peoples, the most famous of them
being Two Spirits. Two
Spirits is a movie that addresses the murder of a two-spirit man named
Fred. It seeks to education the general
populace about what being two-spirit means (Nibley 2009). Many powwows historically celebrated men-women
and women-men and gave them places of honor in the dances, but this tradition
had long died out. More recently, people
have begun to revive the tradition and two-spirit powwows are now frequently
held by various two-spirit societies (Gilley 2005). A final example of the influx of non-theatre
artistic expression is various drag shows that have been put on to help
celebrate and raise money for two-spirit societies. The Brush Arbor Gurlz are the most famous of
these drag groups and people praise their creativity and the work they do for
their society.
Like
non-theatre artistic expression, theatre has recently exploded with activity
involving two-spirit people. Hokti, written in 1997 by Annette
Arkeketa, does not strictly address being two-spirit, but it does talk about
young men and boys being forced to cut their hair in schools.
HOKTI: Are they going to have to cut their hair so they can go to
school?
WALTER: Oh, shot down by the school board as usual…, we are going
to have to go to federal court. Oral
arguments are February 18, in New Orleans.
We got an injunction so the boys could continue to go to school with
braids intact. When they returned to
class the teachers set up partitions to segregate them from the other
students. They couldn’t even see the
teacher! We had to get another
injunction from the courts to get the partition removed!
HOKTI: Same battle…second song. (Arkeketa 1997)
Though
the play was not directly about issues of gender and sexual expression, the
themes were present nonetheless. The
fact that in modern times people were so ignorant that they would not let boys
with long hair go to school is appalling.
The
most notable new play about two-spirit people I found is called Agokwe.
It is a one man play written by Waawaate Fobister, a twenty-six year old Grassy
Narrows First Nations playwright. It has
been applauded critically and toured around both Canada and the United States
since it first premiered in 2008. It
addresses what it means to be Agokwe,
the Anishnabe term for two-spirited, in
today’s Canadian society. The play has
been successful in both native and white crowds, and has finally pushed
information about two-spirits to a general white audience.
This push of new
theatre about two-spirit people has led to Caucasian people beginning to also
write plays about two-spirit people.
Julie Jensen, a native of Utah, recently wrote a play called She was my Brother. The play is set in the 1800’s and about a real
Zuni woman-man named We’Wha (Lamana in the play) and the male, Wilson, and
female, Tullis, anthropologists who ultimately fell in love with We’Wha. The two anthropologists studied We’Wha, and
ultimately brought her to Washington DC as an ambassador. So successfully did We’Wha pass as a woman
while in the city, that no one ever knew We’Wha was biologically a man (Hansen
2010). This play has been the subject of
much acclaim and much controversy. It
addresses an issue that has rarely been addressed by white society, but many
Native peoples have wondered if it is white society’s place to touch on an
issue that is so personal for them.
Regardless of the controversy however, She was my Brother has been extremely successful in educating white
society about two-spirit people.
In truth, white
society has made huge steps towards education about two-spirit people. Much of the awful destruction and
acculturation that occurred when white people arrived in North, Central, and
South America occurred because of the ignorance and narrow-mindedness of the
Western world. Native theatre is doing
much to try to educate the general public about the two-spirit tradition, both
historically and in modern day. Perhaps,
if Native theatre had been around and accessible from an earlier time, then the
Western world would not have destroyed so much of Native people’s cultures for
simply having a different idea of sexuality.
Traditional
Native American cultures, compared to Western culture, have a much more fluid
idea of sexuality. It does not possess a
damning gender binary, and thus naturally has less bias and prejudice. Most Native American societies believe that
gender, if not sexual orientation, exists along a continuum. They admit genders are multi-faceted and can
change any time throughout a person’s life.
Native people had given up for a long time trying to teach Western
society this, but now, theatre, more than any other art form, is seeking to
show Western society these beliefs and perhaps help break its staunch, static beliefs
about gender and sexuality and to help Native peoples remember their proud
heritage.
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