Two-Spirit

Why the word was coined in Winnipeg

The term was worked out across a series of five conferences and settled at the third of them, the Inter-tribal Native American, First Nations, Gay and Lesbian American Conference held in Winnipeg in 1990. Primary attribution goes to Albert McLeod, of Nisichawayasihk Cree Nation, who has consistently credited the wider group of participants; in 2021 Myra Laramee, of Fisher River Cree Nation, said she had put the phrase to the gathering after it came to her in a dream. The Ojibwe rendering niizh manidoowag, built from niizh and manidoo, was constructed afterwards, to honour the language of the territory the conference sat in.

The purpose was separation rather than description. Early adopters wanted a word that marked Indigenous understandings of gender and sexuality off from those of non-Native lesbians and gay men, and off from the vocabulary that arrived with them. Michelle Cameron, of the Carrier First Nations, has described it as an Aboriginal-specific term of resistance to colonisation, and one that does not transfer to other cultures. The anthropologist Sabine Lang made a related point from outside: at the centre of the identity is ethnicity, an awareness of being Native rather than of being anything else.

Why berdache had to go

The word it displaced was berdache, the term non-Native anthropologists had used for Indigenous people who did not keep to European-American gender roles. It means the passive partner in sodomy, or a boy prostitute, and it had been offensive to Indigenous people for as long as it had been in print. The journalist Mary Annette Pember, of the Red Cliff Ojibwe, has written that replacing it was the motive conference participants themselves named. The new word has since had considerably more academic and social acceptance than the one it replaced. The Canadian government writes 2SLGBTQI+, with the coinage at the front of the acronym rather than appended to it.

How colonial law pushed the roles underground

Colonisation in Canada was not only a matter of territory. Albert McLeod has described the imposition of Christian gender roles as central to the whole project: after 1867 new law enforced Christian marriage, criminalised polygamy and same-sex relationships, and removed children into residential and day schools where boys and girls were divided by dormitory, classroom and curriculum, and where a child who broke that division was punished. Ma-Nee Chacaby, an Oji-Cree elder born in 1950 in the remote community of Ombabika in northwestern Ontario, was called a devil child for being too masculine; her grandmother, born before Canada existed, remembered a period in which such people were respected and told her granddaughter to develop her own gifts. By the middle of the twentieth century the Indian Act, the reserve system and the churches had between them driven the roles out of sight, including inside the communities that had held them. Organised resistance began in the late 1960s.

How Indigenous languages name these roles

None of the older vocabulary translates as two spirits. Cree carries at least six expressions, among them ayahkwêw, a man who dresses, lives or is accepted as a woman, and înahpîkasoht, a woman who dresses, lives or is accepted as a man. Anishinaabemowin has at least four. Lakota speakers use winkte. Ojibwe has ikwekaazo and ininiikaazo, built on endeavouring to be like a woman and like a man.

With 574 federally recognised tribes in the United States alone, critics inside Native communities argue that a single umbrella risks flattening those vocabularies, and that a term carrying no ceremonial content can loosen the roles from the ceremonies they belonged to. At the conferences themselves, some attendees said plainly that reservation communities would scorn the idea and never take the word up. Others have described it since as a concession to urbanisation, intended to reconnect people with a spiritual dimension and not working as intended.

Who may call themselves this

Early adopters stated that the identity makes no sense outside a Native American or First Nations framework, and that use by non-Native people is a form of cultural appropriation. That position has held. The line drawn inside the communities is not between a Native person who is gay and one who is not: elders will tell somebody the difference, Joey Criddle said in the New York Times in 2006, and being gay and Indian does not by itself make a person two-spirit. Harlan Pruden and Se-ah-dom Edmo have written that most people now associate the term with LGBT Natives, while the work of two-spirit organisations sits closer to the traditional understanding.

What is disputed about the coinage

Attribution is unsettled. The non-Native anthropologist Will Roscoe receives much of the public credit, which Pember notes while pointing out that Native contributors, among them Wesley Thomas of the Diné, also shaped it. Roscoe's involvement with the Radical Faeries, a non-Native group that borrowed Native spirituality, is part of why that credit is contested.

The objection to the concept is older and separate. Two spirits, one female and one male, is a Western picture: it assumes the binary the term was meant to sit outside, and it locates the matter inside a person rather than in a role a community recognises. Set against that is a defence of the umbrella as a reference to several genders, sexes and sexualities at once, and as a way for Native people to reconnect gender and sexual difference with culture and religion instead of with Transgender or Genderqueer as those words are used elsewhere.