Nádleehí

The word belongs to one people. Two-Spirit is a pan-Indigenous English umbrella coined at a gathering in 1990, and the nádleehí role differs from the roles it covers in being specific to Diné culture and Diné communities, with its own language behind it. Contemporary nádleehí may or may not take part in the pan-Indian two-spirit or LGBT communities at all.

How nádleehí translates into English

Changing one is the gloss given by Nick Manchester, a Diné writer whose account of the four genders was published by Chris Paige in January 2020. Paige set it down precisely because the online descriptions were wrong in a consistent direction: nádleehí carries neither the sense of two spirits inside one person nor the trans-feminine implication of the phrase feminine male, which is how most English-language articles render it. What it suggests instead is someone without a static expression.

The commonest English definitions still lead with the reading Manchester rejects. Wikipedia's opening line offers effeminate male and male-bodied person with a feminine nature, then immediately says that the role is fluid and cannot be described in terms of rigid gender binaries. The definition of record contradicts itself in its first sentence, and the contradiction is a reasonable measure of how the category has travelled into English.

How the Diné gender system is arranged

Diné society is matrilineal, and in Manchester's account the ordering of the genders reflects that: the first is feminine female, the second masculine male, and the two further terms follow. The set is usually given as four, and both the count and the boundaries move depending on who is describing them.

Manchester adds that some Diné divide nádleehí into three subgroupings and count five genders rather than four, one of those subgroupings being a more androgynous variation involving Intersex traits. Wikipedia gives a different four altogether, describing some Diné people as recognising feminine woman, masculine woman, feminine man and masculine man as general places on a spectrum. The two schemes are not reconciled anywhere in this material, and the older term dilbaa is the one at risk in both: Manchester describes it as an ancient word whose English equivalent is not known, and says plainly that it is barely used any more.

What nádleehí do in Diné communities

A nádleehí is typically recognised young, by ceremonial elders and by the family, as a child takes up the clothing and the work usually associated with women. Weaving, medicine and ritual leadership are the roles the historical record attaches to the category most often, and the value placed on them is generally explained by the double perspective the role is held to carry. Some ceremonial positions can be held only by people near the middle of the range.

The role reaches back into the creation story. The first children of First Woman and First Man were twins, turquoise nádleehí and white shell nádleehí, and the first nádleehí are credited with breakthroughs in technology as well as with mediating between men and women. Kayla Shaggy, a Diné and Anishinaabe artist writing for Indian Country Today, gives the same passage with its purpose stated: the Holy People made nádleehí in order to bring the men and the women back together at a point in the story where they had separated. Shaggy notes that this section is frequently left out by Diné who want only certain parts of the traditional stories circulated.

The best-documented individual is Hosteen Klah, a weaver and ceremonial singer who lived from 1867 to 1937, and whose standing as nádleehí is usually described as what allowed him to combine ceremonial knowledge with weaving. Shaggy records reading of families holding a celebration with other families when a nádleehí child was born.

How boarding schools broke the transmission

The difference between Diné and American readings of gender nonconformity was noticed early. A writer of the 1920s recorded that what caused anxiety in American society was taken in Diné society as good fortune.

What followed was a programme rather than a shift in attitude. Forced assimilation laws and missionary influence worked against the role directly, and the boarding schools enforced a strict binary on children, with physical punishment for resistance. Shaggy's account of the aftermath is the sharpest thing in the material: many nádleehí elders who could be alive now are not, and the hostility that remains is often internal, with Diné people mocking and misgendering relatives and treating the existence of gender nonconforming Diné as a white importation. The historical record runs the other way, and that is the ground on which Shaggy argues.

The murder of Fred Martinez is the case everything else is discussed around. Martinez was sixteen, lived in Cortez, Colorado, was recognised and accepted as nádleehí by his mother, his grandmother and others in the community, and was killed in June 2001 by a man whose motive was found to be connected to that status. The killing was never charged as a hate crime. A documentary on the case, Two Spirits, was released in 2009 and broadcast by PBS on Independent Lens in 2011. The sources on file do not use the same pronouns for Martinez: the encyclopedia entry uses masculine ones and Shaggy, writing as a nádleehí person, uses feminine ones.

Why anthropology's labels do not fit nádleehí

The most direct scholarly treatment is Carolyn Epple's article in American Ethnologist in May 1998, which examines what the categories berdache, alternate gender, gay and two-spirit each assume, and whether those assumptions hold for the way many Navajos construct the role. Her finding is a mismatch at the level of premises rather than of detail. Proponents of those categories pull traits out of their contexts and treat male and female as mutually opposed absolute values; many Navajos describe traits as inseparable from the universe and treat male and female as situational values instead.

Paige's objection to the pan-Indigenous umbrella runs alongside it. Two-spirit is described there as an important intervention that is nonetheless sometimes misleading, not taken up by every Indigenous nation and not compatible with every culturally specific understanding of gender, with the misrepresentations arriving as often when the term is being welcomed as when it is not. Will Roscoe's Changing Ones, published in 2000, carries a chapter on the nádleehí and takes its title from the same translation.

Where the record on nádleehí stands now

The role is recognised and valued among Diné communities today, and the reconnection is recent enough to be dated. The Navajo Nation held its first Diné Pride in Window Rock, Arizona, in June 2019, framed as a reclamation of traditional Diné teaching about gender after generations of concealment. Shaggy dates her own arrival at the identity to 2013, in college, after research she had to undertake herself because nothing had reached her at home.

Nobody has counted nádleehí, and no source on file gives a first recorded use of the word. What is dated is a person, a killing, a documentary and a Pride.