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You are here: Home > June 2006 > What Your Dreams Make You

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June 22, 2006

What Your Dreams Make You

Posted at June 22, 2006 10:54 AM in Two Spirit .

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By Rae Trewartha
Thursday, June 22, 2006

Native Americans not only accepted lesbian and gay people, they also respected them as prophets, hunters or healers. Rae Trewartha looks at homosexuality in traditional culture.

To be lesbian or gay in modern Western society is to walk a tightrope. Every time you meet a new situation you have to decide how many steps forward you can take - just how ‘out’ you can be without offending the sensibilities of people who are afraid of the differences you force them to confront.

It is encouraging, therefore, to learn about the place of lesbians and gay men in traditional North American Indian society and to re-discover that homophobia is not some sort of genetic trait indigenous to all cultures. Indeed, many North American Indian tribes so valued ‘gayness’ that people who displayed these characteristics were picked for special office.

Gay traditions were prevalent in most American Indian tribes.1 There are reports of both women and men living in same-sex marriages, of women who dressed and acted as men and men who acted and dressed as women.

The European chroniclers who first came across such behaviour and customs described them in terms that belonged to their own world. So American Indian homosexual men were called ‘berdaches’ - French for ‘slave-boys’, used to refer to passive male homosexuals. The name stuck - although its servile connotations were quite inappropriate in the Native American context where berdaches were accorded considerable social prestige.

Indeed, gay transvestites were often the shamans or healers of the tribe. Sometimes they had specific religious duties. Among the Crow Indians, for example, the tree that was used in the Sun Dance ceremony would be cut down by homosexual men. Berdaches were regarded as having special intellectual, artistic and spiritual qualities. They were also reputed to be hard workers. Their ability to combine female and male qualities often put them into the role of mediators between the sexes. When asked ‘when you die ... what will you be in the spirit land? A man or a woman?’, one Sioux ‘winkle’ naturally replied ‘both’.

It appears to have been fairly easy for women in North American Indian societies to take traditionally male roles and live as men. Girls in the Yukon who declined marriage and child-bearing would dress as men and take part in hunting expeditions, reported Edward Carpenter in the late nineteenth century. This was also true of Sioux women who became warriors and married women. In the Kaska Indian families of Canada, parents would raise one of their daughters to become a warrior. Her sexual experiences would be with other women. Indeed, if there was sexual contact with a man it would ruin the lesbian’s luck with game.

But it was not all hunting and war-making. The Kutrenai Indians of the Plateau speak of a woman who left the tribe for a year and married a white man. When she returned she had changed her name to ‘Gone to the Spirits’ and from then on behaved ‘as a man’. She went on to achieve fame not only as a hunter and warrior, but also as a shaman, healer, prophet and guide.

The distinction between homosexual and heterosexual was not always clear or constant. Friendship rather than identity could determine the course of events. As women spent most of their time with women and men with men they were often emotionally closer to members of their own sex than to members of the opposite sex. A nineteenth-century army officer, who studied Indian customs closely, reported on male pairs, saying: ‘They really seem to fall in love with men and I have known this affectionate interest to live for years.’2

The union of two men was often publicly recognized in a ‘friendship dance’. Historian Walter M Williams argues that these friendships were not necessarily homosexual, but that for all males who felt erotic attraction to other men, these relationships provided a natural avenue for same-sex behaviour. He cites a report from the 1920s saying that for the Yumas: ‘Casual secret homosexuality among both men and women is well known. This is not considered objectionable.’

Spirit
But what was it about American Indian cultures that gave them such a relaxed and positive attitude towards homosexuality? To understand this we must look at their view of the world.

Indian society did not conceive of the universe as being composed of absolutes and polarities of black and white, male and female, good and evil. Nor did it automatically equate gender identity and sex roles with biological sex characteristics.

Similarly, the spiritual and the physical were not separate. An understanding of the spiritual informed a tribe’s every institution, custom, endeavor and pastime. What was ‘natural’ to a person was what the spirits told that person to be. So, if the spirits told someone, through visions or dreams, to act and dress as a person of the opposite sex, for that person not to do so would be to go against their culture and to endanger their own lives. Or in the words of one Indian elder: To us a man is what nature or his dreams make him. We accept him for what he wants to be’.3

Some tribes believed that ‘gayness was something people were born with. Others believed it came to a person in a dream or a vision. While others had special ceremonies to test whether a boy or girl was gay. For instance, in Californian tribes a child was seated on the ground with tools or weapons representing men’s work on one side and those representing women’s work on the other. The grass was set alight around the child and their future was determined by which pile they chose something from as they ran from fire to fire.

Western responses
It was hard for Westerners to grasp such a philosophy - especially when it clashed so fundamentally with their own sexual taboos. So early writers would incorrectly describe the berdaches as hermaphrodites (people who have both male and female sex organs). Many tribes did use a term meaning half-man, half-woman’ to describe the berdache, but this referred to a person’s spirit or character, not to ambiguous genitalia. Western society was unable to understand that Indian society provided, through the berdache system, an alternative gender role.

This had some brutal consequences. For the colonizing forces the prevalence of homosexuality only served to reinforce their belief that they had a divine right to destroy Native American culture and its peoples. Only tribes which have had little or no contact with European civilization have been able to retain their sexual diversity. In the 1950s and 1960s anthropologist Tobias Schneebaum was studying the Amakaeri people of Peru, living in the depths of the Amazonian rainforest. They maintained a culture where homosexuality was the norm and heterosexuality only occurred for purposes of reproduction.4 A similar situation exists in parts of tribal Polynesia.5

Today, gay North American Indians are involved in a struggle to recover the wisdom of their ancestors in relation to homosexuality. It is not an easy job. But some tribes have managed to retain more than others. According to lesbian North American Indian activist Barbara Cameron, the Pueblo Indians are ‘probably the most together tribe in the country, the ones who have best retained the old ways and traditions ... gay people are still accorded positions of respect in the tribe. Some are healers, medicine people…’6

Twenty years after the Stonewall Riots in New York, which seemed to pave the way to gay liberation in Western societies, we are still fighting for the right to have homosexuality accepted without prejudice. It would appear that as a community we will, in all our rich diversity, continue to walk a tight-rope and only dream of being accepted for ‘what our dreams or nature make us’.

Source: QueerPlanet

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