Reclaiming Two-Spirits

Reclaiming Two-Spirits first corrects a common misconception: Two-Spirit is not one ancient, uniform identity that can replace “Indigenous LGBTQ+.” The English-language, intertribal term was adopted at a 1990 gathering of Indigenous gay and lesbian people in Winnipeg, in part to reject the colonial anthropological slur berdache, with its histories of enslavement and sexual degradation. It is a modern political and spiritual creation that responds to much older—but mutually distinct—tribal traditions. Holding those two times together is the book’s point of entry.

Before European colonization, Indigenous nations across North America had their own terms, social roles, and spiritual relations, including aakíí’skassi, miati, okitcitakwe, and many others. They did not all mean the same combination of masculine and feminine spirit, nor map directly onto gay, trans, or nonbinary identity. Some concerned clothing, labor, marriage, ceremony, healing, or particular kin relations. Gregory D. Smithers repeatedly returns readers from abstract identity to national difference: Two-Spirit can enable intertribal solidarity without canceling the authority of each people to name itself.

The historical spine of the book is the colonial attack on gender and sexual sovereignty. Spanish invaders, missionaries, administrators, and later boarding schools imposed Christian binary gender and heterosexual marriage as tests of civilization. Massacre, inquisition, clothing rules, divided labor, language prohibition, and child removal targeted people who did not conform. Gender discipline was not a cultural side effect of land seizure. Colonial states sought to restructure family, inheritance, and political authority, and making Indigenous bodies classifiable and governable was part of dispossession.

Smithers draws on colonial writing, archaeology, art, oral tradition, and contemporary Two-Spirit testimony to recover people obscured in hostile archives. Colonial authors used “sin,” “deviance,” and berdache to reduce complex roles to sexual behavior; the archive’s form therefore already performs violence. Historical method must do more than extract facts. It must ask why a recorder used a particular name, which voices could not be preserved, and why oral knowledge should not remain permanently subordinate to verification by colonial writing.

This is not a one-directional story of destruction. Families and communities carried ceremonies, narratives, dress, and knowledge of roles underground, sustaining them through persecution. Late-twentieth-century Two-Spirit organizers linked HIV/AIDS activism, cultural gathering, language renewal, and intertribal networks. The 1990 naming did not invent a fashionable identity out of nothing; it made shared political room for surviving relations. Reclamation now includes individual recovery from denied identity and the power of nations to decide who belongs and who may hold spiritual or public responsibilities.

That is why the book connects gender history to sovereignty. If colonial authority has defined which bodies are normal, adding Two-Spirit people to a state or corporation’s LGBTQ+ diversity list is insufficient. Land, water, language, ceremony, education, and tribal self-government determine whether gender traditions can live. Two-Spirit participation in water protection and cultural renewal is not an environmental issue appended to identity politics. It restores relations among body, territory, and nation that colonial government attempted to sever.

Any synthesis spanning centuries and many nations has limits. An English-language account compresses nation-specific knowledge into a narrative legible to a mass audience, while the quantity of colonial records risks giving perpetrators’ language disproportionate space. Smithers’s attention to living voices cannot substitute for histories by each nation’s scholars, elders, and Two-Spirit writers; some knowledge is not open to non-Indigenous publics. Reading the book does not authorize a non-Indigenous gender-diverse person to claim Two-Spirit identity, nor support the myth that every precolonial nation uniformly “revered” an identical role.

Keep three levels distinct: each nation’s terms and roles, the intertribal Two-Spirit name used since 1990, and LGBTQ+ or trans terms individuals may also choose today. They can overlap without replacing one another. For every colonial passage, ask what the recorder sought to govern, then countercheck with Indigenous authors and the nation concerned. Read with Before We Were Trans for caution about retrospective labels, and with work on land return, boarding schools, and Indigenous feminism for political context. Gender reclamation is not an extra identity added to an archive; it returns authority over living relations to living nations.