General Discussion
Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsBefore European Christians Forced Gender Roles, Native Americans Acknowledged 5 Genders
It wasnt until Europeans took over North America that natives adopted the ideas of gender roles. For Native Americans, there was no set of rules that men and women had to abide by in order to be considered a normal member of their tribe.
In fact, people who had both female and male characteristics were viewed as gifted by nature, and therefore, able to see both sides of everything. According to Indian Country Today, all native communities acknowledged the following gender roles: Female, male, Two Spirit female, Two Spirit male and Transgendered.
Each tribe has their own specific term, but there was a need for a universal term that the general population could understand. The Navajo refer to Two Spirits as Nádleehí (one who is transformed), among the Lakota is Winkté (indicative of a male who has a compulsion to behave as a female), Niizh Manidoowag (two spirit) in Ojibwe, Hemaneh (half man, half woman) in Cheyenne, to name a few. As the purpose of Two Spirit is to be used as a universal term in the English language, it is not always translatable with the same meaning in Native languages. For example, in the Iroquois Cherokee language, there is no way to translate the term, but the Cherokee do have gender variance terms for women who feel like men and vice versa.
The Two Spirit culture of Native Americans was one of the first things that Europeans worked to destroy and cover up. According to people like American artist George Catlin, the Two Spirit tradition had to be eradicated before it could go into history books. Catlin said the tradition:
..Must be extinguished before it can be more fully recorded.
/snip http://bipartisanreport.com/2016/06/19/before-european-christians-forced-gender-roles-native-americans-acknowledged-5-genders/
Response to Photographer (Original post)
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rjsquirrel
(4,762 posts)The op cites "Indian Country Today," which is a newspaper that reports well and has a good reputation but also publishes opinion pieces and discussion of disputed scholarship.
OP -- how about an actual link to your primary source?
There are definite ethnographically attested cases of specific nations and cultures having complex gender categories (to be clear, so does English and modern American culture "recognizes" diversity but also has conflict over it, so the romantic impulse in the op is utopian). Two-spirit is an attested identity category. But it certainly wasn't universal among New World aboriginals ("Native American" as a category comes much later than influence of European gender norms!).
The other side of this is that Western culture has not always been the same either, and ideas about gender identity have changed a lot over the last millennium or so (see Foucault's monumental "History of Sexuality" . So contrasting a particular historical formation of western culture with a timeless primitive "other" is comparing unlike ontological categories.
This sort of New Age generalization creates a stereotype of Native people. It doesn't have any bearing (or much, anyway, there's a little movement in Indian country to revive this stuff as modern LGBTQ politics) on the experience of modern living Native people. In fact homosexuality remains highly stigmatized in many Native communities and violence and rejection against LGBTQ Native people is a serious problem, as is HIV infection and economic and social marginalization.
The reality is complicated. These just so stories make it harder to see that reality.
yellerpup
(12,252 posts)I can't speak for all tribes, but in my tribe the language definitely includes four genders that I know of - not sure that there is a designation for transgender, though. Men who felt like women were welcomed into the women's camp for of their superior upper body strength because the women did the heavy work of farming, harvesting, hauling water when necessary, etc. Women warriors were fierce and effective whether they were women who felt like men or not. It's in the history and the language and existed then as it does today. It was not originally a shame and children who were recognized early as two-spirit were not stigmatized or corrected for it. Centuries of oppression under colonial rule and foreign religion changed all that.
rjsquirrel
(4,762 posts)But he existence of categories in a language doesn't simply map on to how those categories are used in social life. Words for transgender and gay people have existed in European languages at least for centuries. Foucault writes about how they don't refer to the same things over time and across different contexts.
It's also important to note that the vast majority of modern Narive Americans do not speak an ancestral language at all or do so minimally, or only in ceremonial or intimate contexts. Most speak English and are members of the same cultural world as any American.
I guess the point of criticism of the OP here is that t creates an idealized and universal and ahistorical version of Native culture (and fails to acknowledge the vast diversity of languages and cultures and practices in the pre-contact New World -- or today). Homophobia and LGBTQ as a protected social category with rights are both present in the cultural lives of Native Americans now. We are 400+ years into the colonial genocide and occupation of the Native New World. We can only really speculate about subjects like this "pre-contact" despite ethnographic descriptions of many traditional cultures dating back to the mid 19th century and less sophisticated accounts going back to the dawn of the invasion and occupation era (my preferred terms to "colonial," since it was the European powers that considered their theft to be "colonial" rather than "genocidal" .
Every culture in the world has gender-ambiguous members and words for that category, and has some degree of same-sex sexual behavior, sometimes ritualized or otherwise treated as a normal part of life. But every human culture also has a male/female binary at the heart of its social organization because we are mammals and that's how we reproduce, which is the most important work "culuture" does for us.
Many non-western cultures, including Amerindian and other indigenous ones around the world, also have historically stigmatized gender non-conformism or ambiguity or homosexual sex too. It's not just a Western thing.
Photographer
(1,142 posts)Socal31
(2,484 posts)This is not one or them.
Bernardo de La Paz
(48,957 posts)Squinch
(50,911 posts)Crash2Parties
(6,017 posts)"Vasco Núñez de Balboa, during his exploration of Quarequa, in the Isthmus of Panama, in 1513, upset with "a brother of the king and other young men, obling men, [who] dressed effeminately with women's clothing [... of those which the brother of the king] went too far with unnatural" temerity, threw forty of them as food to the dogs."
"As conquerors, the Spanish sought to justify the subordination of native peoples. When they encountered cultures that sanctioned male-male sexual relations, they immediately labeled such behavior "sodomy," after the biblical city of Sodom, which was said to have been destroyed by God for the sinful behavior of its inhabitants. That the biblical sin in question was the failure to show hospitality to strangers was irrelevant in the light of subsequent ecclesiastical interpretation, which ascribed it to homosexuality. Thus homosexual behavior among many of the native peoples became one of several theological justifications for the destruction of their culture, subjugation of their societies, and conversion to Roman Catholicism."
"According to the statements of Fray Augustín de Vetancurt, those men who dressed as women (and vice versa) were hanged if they committed unspeakable sin and the priests were burned, a report that Fray Gerónimo de Mendieta confirms. Fray Gregorio García, in his Origin of the Indians of the new world (sic, 1607), assured that before the arrival of the Spanish "the men of New Spain committed huge sins, especially those against nature, although repeatedly they burned for those and were consumed in the fire sent from the heavens [... the indigenous people] punished the sodomites with death, executed them with great vigor. [...] They strangled or drowned the women who lay with other women since those also considered it against nature". Garcia attributed the cases of sodomy to the fact that the "miserable Indians act like that because the Devil has tricked them, making them believe that the gods they worship also practice sodomy and therefore they consider it a good and lawful custom"."
"During the Spanish Golden Age, the crime of sodomy was handled and punished in equivalent manner to that of treason or heresy, the two most serious crimes against the State. Initially the Inquisition was controlled by the local bishops, such as the archbishop Juan de Zumárraga (15361543), of whom a study of the cases judged shows that homosexuality was one of the main preoccupations of the court. The punishments for sexual sings tended to be fines, penance, public humiliation, and lashing in the most serious cases. In 1569 Felipe II officially creates the tribunal of Mexico City, but in the Viceroyalty of New Spain only civil law took charge of judging the unspeakable sin."
"In 1569, official inquisitorial tribunals had been created in Mexico City by Philip II. Homosexuality was a prime concern of the [episcopal] Inquisition, which inflicted stiff fines, spiritual penances, public humiliations, and floggings for sexual sins. In 1662, the Mexican Inquisition complained that homosexuality was common, especially among the clergy, and asked for jurisdiction on the grounds that the secular courts were not sufficiently vigilant. The request was denied. In fact, the civil authorities, under the 8th Duke of Albuquerque, had recently been extremely active, indicting a hundred men for sodomy and executing a substantial number. People accused of homosexuality were publicly executed by mass burnings in San Lázaro, Mexico City.
The first known burning of sodomites in Mexico was in 1530, when they burned on the Caltzontzin pyre for idolatry, sacrifice, and sodomy. Pedro Cieza de León also tells that Juan of Olmos, principal judge of Puerto Viejo, had burned "great quantities of those depraved and demonic Indians". In 1596, the viceroy Gaspar de Zúñiga, Count of Monterrey reported, in a letter sent to Philip II to justify the increase of the salary of the royal officials, that those had seized and burned some delinquents for the unspeakable sin and other types of sodomy, although he does not give the number of victims or the circumstances of the event.
In 1658 the Viceroy of New Spain, the Duke of Albuquerque, wrote to Charles II about a case of unspeakable sin in Mexico City in which he had "nineteen prisoners, fourteen of which [were] sentenced to burn". Lucas Matheo, a young man of 15 years, was saved from the bonfire thanks to his youth, but suffered 200 lashes and six years of forced labor by cannon. Among the documents sent to the king is a letter from the judge of the Supreme Court of His Majesty, Juan Manuel Sotomayor, who describes sodomy as an "endemic cancer" that had "infested and spread among the captive prisoners of the Inquisition in their individual cells and the ecclesiastical officials have also begun their own investigations". The letter from Sotomayor reports that between 1657 and 1658 they have investigated and sentenced 125 individuals, whose names, ethnicities, and occupations he lists next. The Viceroy as much as the Magistrate bases his rejection of sodomy on the Bible and religion, although they use stories sui generis, like Sotomayor, who writes "as some saints have professed, that all the sodomites have died with the birth of Our Lord Jesus".
Sources:
Chronology of Mexican Gay History, by Len Evans
Len Evans (October 2002). "Chronology of Mexican gay history".
Crompton, Louis (2006). Homosexuality & Civilization.
Aldrich, Robert (Ed.) (2007). Gleich und anders: Eine globale Geschichte der Homosexualität
Peter Herman Sigal. From moon goddesses to virgins: the colonization of Yucatecan Maya sexual desire.
Pablo E. Ben. "Latin America: Colonial".
Bernarda Reza Ramírez. "Propuesta para abatir el delito en el estado de Veracruz - Llave"
Spencer, Colin (1996). Homosexuality. A history.
Garza Carvajal, Federico (2002). Quemando Mariposas. Sodomía e Imperio en Andalucía y México
Alfonso Pozo Ruiz (2004). "Leyes sobre la sodomía en la Edad Moderna"
Sentido G (8 September 2005). "Historia de la homofobia en América Latina"
rjsquirrel
(4,762 posts)It's an opinion piece, written by Duane Brayboy. It's interesting and not as simplistic as the "bipartisanreport.com" you linked makes it seem. Brayboy is not a scholarly expert on this subject, albeit he asserts a Tuscarora identity (North Carolina Iroquoian)
However, read the comments below (yes, "read the comments!" for some strong (and in some ways homophobic) pushback from Native-identified respondents. Some positively reject this historical narrative as applied to their cultures.
Photographer
(1,142 posts)Elmergantry
(884 posts)Mendocino
(7,482 posts)a member of the tribe is inferred to be gay. I believe he is called a heemanee. The rest of the tribe treat him with respect.
TexasMommaWithAHat
(3,212 posts)I would doubt that all tribes had exactly five genders. That was an interesting article, though. I'd recently come across an article on American Indian female warriors, which I also found very interesting.