Winkte

The lexicographic record is thin to the point of comedy. Wiktionary's Lakota section for winkte is a single line making it an alternative spelling of wíŋkte, and the longer entry on the same page belongs to an unrelated German verb. Almost everything printed about the word in English has come through ethnography, a novel, a radio feature, and a handful of memoirs, and none of it through a dictionary.

What the neighbouring nations call their roles

The word is not a general term for Indigenous gender variance and it is not portable. Each nation had its own vocabulary in its own language, and those words are not translations of one another any more than they are translations of this one. The Human Rights Campaign, writing with the American Indian College Fund, sets out a few of them beside the Lakota word, and the Navajo set is the useful contrast because it is a set and not a single term.

The same guidance records what people holding roles of this kind did, on the account of the Indian Health Service: many were expert craftspeople, working as potters, basket weavers and leatherworkers, some held religious roles as "healers, shamans, and ceremonial leaders", and in some nations they were held to be lucky in love and able to pass that luck on. It also notes that many Indigenous LGBTQ people now use the vocabulary of the wider LGBTQ community alongside or instead of a word from their own language, so the two sets of terms are in use at once.

What the old accounts say about winkte

The historical accounts disagree with each other and the disagreement is the finding. Most of them treat the winkte as an ordinary member of the community, not marginalised in any way. Others hold the winkte as sacred, occupying a liminal third position and born to fill ceremonial roles that neither men nor women could fill. Both readings are in the record and neither has been shown to be the whole of it.

What survives as instruction is more modest than either. A Lakota speaker quoted in the etymological literature recalls being taught as a child that there are these individuals, in all cases male, that they are different, that they are winkte, that they should not be laughed at, and that they are also Lakota. That last clause makes the teaching one of membership rather than of status. John Fire Lame Deer, in Lame Deer, Seeker of Visions, told Richard Erdoes that winktes dressed, acted and looked like women, by their own choice or in obedience to a dream, and that the Great Spirit made them winktes and the people accept them as such. Lame Deer was himself heyoka, a sacred clown, and spent part of his working life as a rodeo clown under the name Alice Jitterbug, which is a reminder that the Lakota categories he was describing were not the only ones with a ceremonial reversal in them.

What a winkte did before the ambush

The most specific surviving account of a ceremonial function belongs to a single morning. On 21 December 1866, near the forks of Peno Creek in the Powder River country of Wyoming, a coalition of Lakota, Cheyenne and Arapaho warriors prepared an ambush on the Bozeman Trail. A young winkte whose name was not recorded rode out towards the enemy lines on a sorrel horse, in a black hood, carrying a whistle made of eagle bone, and returned four times until the vision he brought back promised a decisive victory. The commanders acted on it. What followed is known as the Fetterman Fight, the Fetterman Massacre, or the Battle of the Hundred in Hand.

The occasion explains why a seer was wanted. Gold was found in south-eastern Montana in 1863, the Bozeman Trail was cut from Fort Laramie through the Big Horn Mountains to reach it, and Red Cloud and the other chiefs answered the intrusion with a campaign of harassment that became Red Cloud's War. Colonel Henry B. Carrington was sent to guard the trail and had built three posts along it by the summer of 1866. The historian Shannon Smith Calitri records that by the middle of December nearly seventy soldiers and civilians had been killed in more than fifty skirmishes. Dee Brown put the number of warriors assembled on the headwaters of the Tongue in mid-December at close to four thousand, and traced the pattern for the ambush to 6 December, when decoys drew Lieutenant Horatio Bingham and two others to their deaths.

South Dakota Public Broadcasting, which set the episode out in 2016, records that the winkte were regarded as wakan, sacred, and gives winyanktehca the alternative translation of two-souled person, which is not the gloss the etymological sources prefer. The Lakota novelist Joseph M. Marshall III fictionalised the same battle in Hundred in the Hand, in which the Oglala medicine man High Eagle recruits a young dreamer among the Miniconjou. The same feature holds that numerous historic accounts establish that a winkte was deployed as a clairvoyant that morning, whatever the novel adds.

How the meaning of winkte has narrowed

Contemporary Lakota usage is not the same as the historical usage. The word now generally refers to a gay man, whether or not that man is gender non-conforming in any other respect, so the ceremonial and sartorial content has largely dropped out of the everyday sense. Attitudes in Lakota communities today are recorded as running from accepting to homophobic.

Contemporary winkte may or may not consider themselves part of the wider gay or LGBTQ communities, and may or may not place themselves under the pan-Indigenous umbrella. That is a choice made person by person, and the word itself does not settle it.

Why the pan-Indigenous umbrella is not this word

Two-spirit was coined in 1990 by the Fisher River Cree elder Myra Laramee as a modern pan-Native English term, intended to put Native identity at the centre of Indigenous LGBTQ space and to replace labels applied from outside under colonialism. It is an umbrella covering many nations and many quite different categories, and it is roughly a century and a quarter younger than the winkte account above.

The two words therefore do different work. Winkte belongs to one language and one people and carries a specific etymology; the umbrella belongs to a continental political vocabulary in English and carries no etymology at all. Treating them as synonyms flattens the first into the second, which is the same operation that Third gender performs on culture-specific categories elsewhere and that Transgender performs when it is used as a translation rather than as a description.

Why the older roles needed reclaiming at all is on the record in the same guidance. The Indian Health Service, quoted by the Human Rights Campaign, lists conquest, disease, missionaries, government agents, boarding schools and settlers as the causes, states that roles of this kind were singled out for condemnation, interference and violence, and records that in many nations the practices went underground or disappeared. The Great Plains historian Mari Sandoz described the period of less than a quarter century between the Grattan Fight of 1854 and the final confinement of the last holdouts on reservations in 1877 as the destruction of a whole way of life and the expropriation of a people from three hundred and fifty million acres. Crazy Horse, a decoy at Peno Creek that morning, was dead at Fort Robinson eleven years later.

Who is entitled to use the word

The question of who may speak with the word is live and the sources handle it carefully. The musician Georgie Jessup, in a 2005 essay, opens by asking whether it is accurate to say I am winkte or only to say that the identification is with the Lakota winkte tradition, given that Jessup is not Lakota, and reports having first read the word in Lame Deer's book. Jessup's answer is that the word has an owner, and the tradition it names is not a general spiritual category available to anyone who finds it congenial.

Jessup's own account of what the word describes is nonetheless the clearest short statement in this material of why the historical sense resists a modern gloss. Being winkte, the essay says, is not a physical thing; Lakota names changed through life with visions, dreams and deeds, and were held to record a person's relation to the rest of creation rather than anything about the body. A word attached to that kind of naming does not map cleanly onto a category defined by birth assignment, which is a large part of why the substitutions made for it in English keep going wrong.