Winkte

The word is not a general term for Indigenous gender variance and it is not portable. Every nation had its own vocabulary in its own language: the Blackfoot ninauh-oskitsi-pahpyaki, manly hearted woman, and the Navajo set that runs from asdzáán and hastiin through nádleehí, are not translations of each other or of this.

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. 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.

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.

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. 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, and this is the change most often missed. 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, which is a plainer statement than most writing on the subject makes.

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 rather than a fact about the word.

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. The Indian Health Service, quoted by the Human Rights Campaign, records what colonisation did to the underlying roles: conquest, disease, missionaries, government agents, boarding schools and settlers destroyed many traditions, and roles of this kind were singled out for condemnation, interference and violence, so that in many nations the practices went underground or disappeared.

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. That self-correction is the useful part of the piece for a reference entry: the word has an owner, and the tradition it names is not a general spiritual category available to anyone who finds it congenial.

Against that, the Human Rights Campaign's guidance notes that many LGBTQ Native Americans use the vocabulary of the wider LGBTQ community alongside or instead of a tribal term. Both practices are current, and neither the tribal word nor the English one has displaced the other.