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Many people ask what I know about the berdache -- that sacred person in the
native world who is said to be "Two Spirited" -- both female and male.
The questioners have read my historical novel One Is the Sun, which is a
historical novel about 19th-century native Medicine women. They have also
noted the thread of native people through my gay novels. Berdaches, it's
said, were accepted in the native world, and viewed as having mystical powers.
They were colorfully portrayed in the 19th century art of George Catlin and
other artists. Some in the gay community today feel a great connectedness
with the berdache, and a yearning to be similarly powerful and accepted in
American society. Walter Williams has written feelingly of the berdache in
his book The Spirit and the Flesh : Sexual Diversity in American Indian
Culture. GLBT youth like to hear about the berdaches.
Centuries ago, this person was the essence of deity and prayer.
I am a Montana metis (pronounced may-TEE by Montanans...it comes from a French
word meaning mixed-blood). There is Cree, Cherokee and Lakotah woven through
my German, Irish and English ancestry. Through the 1980s, as I wrote One Is
the Sun, I searched for my native-American family roots, and found relatives
in different tribes, including the Northern Cheyennes. They shared some
amazing and hair-raising information that is not in books.
The information forced me to unlearn my assumptions about many things,
including the berdache. To understand how a berdache saw himself/herself, or
how others in the tribe or band saw this person, a 20th-century American --
even a gay or lesbian American -- has to put aside all the traditional Judaeo-
Christian beliefs about sexuality, and even the western European non-Christian
humanistic notions of sexuality. You have to step through the looking glass,
into a different world.
Christianity's perspective on personal and sexual identity is radically
different than those of many native American cultures and spiritual systems.
So the Christianized person has a hard time getting a fix on different non-
Christian social types in the native world -- the berdache, peace chief,
Medicine person, sacred clown, male and female warrior, buffalo caller,
SunDancer, Dog Soldier, sorcerer, storyteller, camp crier, healer, keeper of a
Medicine Lodge, native-style prophet. These have no functional counterparts in
today's American society.
Christian European assumptions about cultures and people go so deep in many
Americans that we have a hard time understanding the folk tales and historical
traditions of native people...what the symbols mean, what the stories are
really talking about. At first I stumbled in my attempts to step through the
looking glass -- away from my own ingrained assumptions, struggling to see how
native women healers of the mid-1800s lived and saw the world, so I could
write One Is the Sun. (The book was eventually published in 1991).
To open up the question about berdaches, I'm going to follow a looping round-
about trail, over hills and through valleys -- like my native grannies often
did when I asked a question! It is a complex subject, so I'll do no more
than a few loops in this article. The prophet is a good place to start,
because prophets are so familiar to Americans from the pages of the Bible.
Non-native Americans insist on seeing the native prophet/preacher as a male --
and as an Indian Jesus or "Christ-like" figure. Some anthropologists insist
that native spiritual traditions are really pre-figurations of Christianity.
This is because some classical anthropology operates off an arrogant western
European belief that all human spirituality evolves towards monotheism -- the
Judaeo-belief in one male God, and the Judaeo-Christian belief in that God's
redeemer named Jesus Christ, that are the foundation of today's western
civilization. This belief assumes that monotheism is "better," "more
civilized," "the only truth." Whereas systems that honor a God and Goddess,
or many gods and goddesses, are viewed as primitive, barbaric and untrue.
Stories of native prophets are often called "redemptive allegories" by
anthropologists.
Peter Powell, a noted anthropologist who was also an Episcopal missionary,
made his reputation looking for Jesus and prophets and "redemptive allegories"
among the Northern Cheyennes. In the 1980s I studied Powell's works Sweet
Medicine and People of the Sacred Mountain. In his view, much in the old
Cheyenne way was a preparation for Christianity. A case in point was his
interpretation of the Cheyenne "culture figure" Sweet Medicine as a Jesus-
like prophet. Powell meant well, and was trying to give the Cheyennes some
political protection during that painful period (from the 1880s till the
1970s) when the federal government still criminalized native American beliefs
and ceremonies. He wanted to destroy the historical stereotype that Indians
were painted devil-worshippers -- he desired to create a dignified and
positive image of the Cheyennes as a deeply spiritual people. I can't fault
him there. Unfortunately much of the real meaning of this old Cheyenne stuff
actually stands in direct contradition to Christian doctrine.
Powell also failed to convey the true degree of bitter philosophical and
political disagreement among the Northern Cheyennes at that time. He talked
mainly to one faction...the one closest to his own viewpoint, naturally.
Part of the disagreement was over the role of women in the tribe -- could they
be Keepers of sacred things, or not. Predictably, as a typical patriarchal-
minded Christian, Powell didn't talk to many learned women who were still
living among the Cheyennes. With the exception of one -- Josie Head Swift
Limpy (who was distantly related to my cousins) -- he confined his interviews
to men. So Powell missed the boat on things that women could have told him.
My Cheyenne cousins, who were educated in the old traditions, were both amused
and irritated at Powell's interpretations. "Typical white man stuff", they
said.
They explained that Sweet Medicine was not a Messiah type figure, nor even a
real historical person. "Sweet Medicine" was a tradition of "renewal of law"
that filtered north from Mexico about a thousand years ago. It carried a body
of pacifist teachings against war and violence that stands in sharp contrast
to, say, the record of Christian conquest, war and violence down through
European history. The Sweet Medicine tradition also opposed human sacrifice
and slavery as practiced in Mexico and in some North American tribes. The
Cheyennes were one people who took the Sweet Medicine movement to heart. The
figure of Sweet Medicine in the Cheyenne stories is only a personification, in
the same way that we personify the U.S. as "Uncle Sam."
When Sweet Medicine people first encountered Christianity, they found the
story of Christ's torture and death on the cross, and God's willingness to
sacrifice his son, to be revolting and incomprehensible. The influence of
this pacifist tradition among the Northern Cheyennes was what steeled them to
resist European conquest and Christian missionizing for such a long time. To
this day, in spite of long-time mission presence on the Northern Cheyenne
reservation in Montana, a significant percentage of the tribe still follow the
Old Ways.
I was intrigued at how Powell dismissed women. He penned a single line that
went something like, "There were traditions of great women chiefs, and women
of great spiritual power." Then, having whetted the reader's curiosity, he
proceeded to say nothing more about these great women! Powell mentions only
in passing that "sweet medicine" is a Cheyenne name for a medicinal root that
makes women's milk flow better. Later, during my OITS studies, I was able to
access yet-unrecorded oral traditions about some of these great historical
women -- Temple Doors, Black Swan, Earth Thunder (whom my book was about) and
others.
The very name of Sweet Medicine tells us, through symbol, that women had a
central role in that peace movement. Enlightened women have always opposed
violence and war and human sacrifice and wastage of human life, since they are
the ones who nurture life most closely. So an anthropologist who believes in
a male God and a male Saviour and a male priesthood, has a hard time making
sense of a culture where women were priestesses, chiefs, fighters, great legal
minds, prophets, magicians and healers!
Generally, U.S. anthropology during that period -- from the science's infancy
in the late 1800s till after World War II -- was oblivious to information
about women's power in the native traditions. George Bird Grinnell was one of
the few who talked to Indian Medicine women. This was because white
anthropology reflected the then-prevailing Christian view that women ought not
to hold any authority within U.S. society. White women couldn't be ministers,
medical doctors, judges, lawyers, soldiers, politicians. So the fact that
much anthropology skips over native women reflects the biases of
anthropologists, not the reality of the native world being studied!
After Catholicism reached many of the North American tribes, there was a rash
of Indian people having visions of the Virgin Mary. In western Montana, some
Indian children saw Mary at the St. Ignatius Mission, shortly after the
Jesuits started teaching there in the 1840s. Good Montana Catholics still
make pilgrimages to that spot! My Cheyenne cousins gleefully pointed out that
it was natural for native people -- who had so intensely loved Mother Goddess
Life, known by loving names like Wakan, Wakanada, Wyomee, Wyola, Essewan,
Essewan-Kwan -- to see Mary. After all, the European love of Mary has its
roots in pagan Goddess traditions. Indeed, the Protestant Reformation tried
to rid Europe of "mariolatry" ...on grounds that loving Mary was pagan.
"Native people have been seeing Mary in their personal vision quests for
endless centuries," my cousins told me. "After the whites conquered us, these
visions were a good way for some of the tribal people to fool the
missionaries. This way, they could keep the old ways alive under cover of
the white man's religion."
Most likely, all this "redemptive allegory" was injected into native
traditions after first contact with whites. This process started five
centuries ago. By the 1500s, the Spanish took over South and Central America
and the American Southwest, while northern Europeans began invading the rest
of North America in the 1600s. So when you read old native traditions that
were recorded a mere 100 or 150 years ago, and you see "Christian-like
material" there, you can't assume that this material represents the primordial
"pre-contact" tradition in all its purity! Most likely that the "Christ-like"
material was included in post-contact times.
The Northern Cheyennes, some of whom traded as far south as Mexico, were
influenced by Spanish culture as early as the late 1700s. Trading Cheyennes
were bringing back strange prizes -- horses, woolen blankets, heavy silver
crosses -- to their families and clans on the northern plains. Some brought
ideas from Spanish missionaries they met. In the earliest 19th-century
photographs of Cheyennes, you can see these trade crosses being worn by some
noted chiefs. But those crosses have no ancient history in the Cheyenne arts!
They don't appear till after contact with missionaries. In his important
book Seven Arrows, the Cheyenne writer/thinker Hyemeyohsts Storm touches on
these intense conflicts in the 1800s, between Indians who started accepting
Christian ideas, and Indians who thought the idea of burning in hell forever
was horrifying and ridiculous.
Today it has been impossible to maintain these old native traditions in all
their purity. By the 1930s, when the U.S. government finally began to ease up
on missionizing, all but a few North American tribal people who knew anything
about ceremony, history, herbal medicine, etc. had been either killed or
silenced. In a single generation, the loss of vital cultural information can
be devastating. Today, with their oral traditions largely devastated, and
most native Americans being alumni of the government boarding-school system,
many of them have to go to the writings of white anthropologists, in order to
eke out what tribal elders might know. Consequently the way native people now
retell their own historical and spiritual tales, is often highly colored by
recent non-pagan influence.
As my cousins said, "We read the same National Geographics articles about
Indians and watch the same "Discovery" specials as everybody else."
Another problem is the assumptions by anthropologists, about what some key
native words and key symbols mean. Sometimes there were deliberate
mistranslations. An example is the word "Manitou", which is familiar to many
Americans from casual reading on native American spirituality. It is commonly
translated into English as "God." Imagine my surprise that the word actually
means "Goddess." "Ma" is an almost universal syllable meaning "mother" -- it
even means "mother" in ancient Egyptian. If an anthropologist knows a native
language well enough to hear the informant say "Goddess," and then
deliberately writes down "God," we have to ask how scientific and ethical he
(or she) was being. If he (or she) didn't know the language and relied on a
translator, we have to ask what ax the translator was grinding.
Likewise, the phrase "Great Spirit" is commonly translated as God or Holy
Spirit, though its real meaning does not show any tie to Christian theology at
all. A more accurate translation might be "the great collective spirit and
consciousness of all things existing in the Universe" -- meaning that all
things, starting with the tiniest molecule of carbon floating in space, are
alive and able to enjoy some level of will and consciousness. Whereas the
European Christian tradition distinguishes between "animate" and "inanimate"
things. So it's easy for a Christianized American to read these
mistranslations and happily believe that peoples in other cultures are leaning
towards his own understanding of "God" ..when in reality what he is reading
is only the translator's bias.
In the late 19th century, the Sweet Medicine Way collapsed under mounting
pressures from white armies and white settlers, who wanted all Indians dead so
they could occupy the land. Ultimately many Indians went beserk with grief
and loss and bloodshed. They abandoned the old peaceful way, and adopted the
"new way", meaning they waged the same kind of total war as the whites. This
resulted in wrangling among the Cheyennes and Sioux and other allied tribes,
between the old pacifist tradition -- as represented by peace chiefs like
Morning Star and Red Cloud -- and war chiefs like Crazy Horse who were ready
to kill or be killed in self defense.
The name Crazy Horse designates him as a leader of this nonpacifist "new way,"
because the horse was the symbol of new ways coming from the white man. The
word "crazy" doesn't mean mentally ill as Europeans understand it -- it means
something like contrary or contradictory or going against the grain. So
today, many white Americans thrill to the story of Crazy Horse's last-ditch
battles against the U.S. army, but they don't understand his Medicine name or
the real significance of his move to leadership.
This need to understand symbols is very fundamental to seeing what native
spiritual or sexual tradition really means -- including the berdache. If you
can unlock the symbols, you can crack the walnut of meaning.
Book of the Hopi, a favorite sourcebook of mine, tells of one such
misunderstood symbol. Frank Waters was a distant cousin on the tribal side,
related to my Cheyenne cousins, and I spent time with him and his wife at Taos
in the early 1980s. Decades before, the Hopi elders had asked Frank to write
the book because they were fed up with white misinterpretations about Hopi
tradition. In the book Frank relates a key Hopi story of how the tribe
"lived with the Ants" for a while. Most white anthropologists dismiss this
story as a "childish fantasy". How could a tribe of humans possibly go live
in an ant hill?
But I finally understood how an animal symbol, in a historical tale, has a
clear meaning and a biological origin, as created by people who observed life
closely. What do ants do? They live in highly organized societies, with
armies and slaves and intensive food culture. And they build complex
architecture shaped like.... pyramids. Oh...the light dawned for me! The
Hopi story was talking about the pyramid cultures of Central America, who were
fiercely militaristic and practiced slavery and had sophisticated agriculture.
According to the story, the tribe lived in Mexico for a while, before moving
north to their present territory.
All the things I've mentioned have some bearing on what a berdache is, or
isn't. Now that the reader's mind is bent this way and that (the way my
teachers bent mine!), let's go back to the berdache.
What did the name "Two Spirit" mean in this vanished native world?
Many spiritual systems of the Americas taught that all being, including Deity,
is twinned in nature -- both male and female. The symbol of the two Sacred
Twins is found throughout the native American world. Creeping patriarchy, as
learned from the whites, made both the twins male in some revised traditions,
but the symbol in its purest and most ancient form is female and male.
My native teachers pointed out that this philosophy of dualism used to be
found everywhere in the world. For male and female to exist in the Deity's
creation, these two powers have to exist in the Deity itself, creation's
source. Even the very word "Deity" in English comes from a root word related
to duo, that means "two." The teachers spoke of Goddess and God, Wakan and
Sskwan, and compared it to similar twinnings of Goddesses and Gods in the
pagan Mediterranean world -- Juno and Jupiter, Cupid and Psyche, etc. So the
concept of twinned nature is not exactly alien to the person with western
European roots. Christianity, however, took the "two" out of Deity and taught
that it was only "one," meaning male. "Monotheism" doesn't really refer to one
God vs. many Gods -- it really means "God minus His mate and female partner,
the Goddess."
In this view, all human beings are dual in nature as well -- male and female.
Humans are seen as minor relatives of the Goddesses and Gods, while animals
and plants do not live on this plane of duality. When a human person is
born, only one or the other twin usually comes into substance, into life on
Earth -- the other half remains in the spirit world as a "higher self." A
woman on Earth has a male higher self, while a man on Earth has his female
higher self. The higher self is still part of the "total beingness" that
each of us have. It can influence us and communicate with us. It can also be
hurt, and its powers even diminished, by hatred and nonacceptance by the twin
in substance. Men who hate women, or women who hate men, and war on them, end
up warring on their own higher selves. The higher self helps preserve and
protect the library of spirit knowledge and learning that each individual
accumulated through many lives.
Some native American people had a concept like what Eastern philosophies call
"karma," meaning the long-term consequences of our actions through many
lifetimes, through our struggle to learn and grow and discover what it means
to be human. Each time we die, our twin selves are reunited back in the
spirit world. The etymology of the word "die" has its root in the word for
"two" also. When we die, we become "two" again -- only to separate again upon
rebirth in another life. That is the real meaning of the word "death," which
even today -- despite Christianity's effort to purge ancient meanings out of
the dictionary -- shows clearly that Western language had an ancient
understanding of duality in all things.
However, all laws of nature allow for variance and change. Now and then, a
person's karma dictates that both male and female are coming into substance
together. These are the Two Spirit people. Sometimes their dual nature is
actually visible in their genitalia, which may include both male and female
features. In other cases, the influence of the spirit-world twin is simply
felt as an overriding influence coming from the invisible. This explains the
urgency with which some transgendered people wear clothing of the opposite
gender, or seek sex-change surgery. They are not imagining things when they
feel that they are "women in a men's body," or "men in a woman's body."
In Deity, two are mysteriously also one. Thus the forked tree -- key symbol
of the Sun Dance -- expresses that way in which all beingness is one. A woman
may have her hidden male side, and a man may have his female side, and a Two
Spirit person may express both genders openly, but each of them are a single
Person.
In pre-contact times, native American people had a great reverence for these
Two-Spirit people. Quite naturally they viewed Two-Spirits as extraordinary
sources of information about human nature. Two-Spirits were healers, artists,
prophets -- whatever their personal vision impelled them to be. The native
world had great respect for personal vision. If you were born a male, but
came back from your first vision quest at 13 years and said your vision told
you to live as a woman, your choice was honored. You even got a new name
celebrating your choice! Likewise the woman who said she wanted to live as a
man, love as a man, even fight as a man, was able to do that freely.
Few cultures in the native world had a central authority, as in Christianity,
that purported to know what was "right" and commanded each person to follow
its dictates. There was no Bible-type dictate against cross-dressing. In the
old Cheyenne "New Life Lodge" (Sun Dance), the men danced "in their woman,"
meaning that they wore skirts, while women celebrants often wore men's items
of clothing. At the center of the people's dancing circle was the two-forked
Sun Dance Tree, symbol of life. The Sun Dance was one of the Cheyennes'
biggest ceremonies, celebrating their awareness that New Life was not possible
without the magic energies that flow from twin-ness. They prayed that these
twinned powers would flow through the tribe all year.
Old photographs show how this ceremony was still done in early reservation
days, before the federal government banned it.
Some Two-Spirit people were prophets. Others took the role of sacred clown,
or Heyoehkah, so-called by some peoples of the northern plains. The clown was
a "contrary" whose role was to keep a camp's social dynamics balanced. If the
people were laughing too much over something, the Heyoehkah's job was to cry.
If the people were crying too much, the Heyoehkah laughed. Heyoehkahs were
indispensable at major ceremonies, because feeling and experience could get so
intense that somebody needed to move in and "lighten things up."
Some Heyoehkahs were such artists at social commentary that they played an
important role at law councils. They were the ones who formally raised
issues, or introduced important questions of law into the debating circle --
much as legislators introduce bills today. Every four years, until late in
the 1800s, the entire Cheyenne nation came together for a great council where
they reexamined their body of law. The Contraries helped this process along
with great artistry and humor, acting out live scenarios that made people
laugh about issues that had burdened them or terrified them. Or they made
people cry about questions that needed to taken with more deadly seriousness.
In this way the Contraries helped the whole tribe understand why an old law
was bad, or why a new law was needed.
This acting-out was called "mirroring," and it was important as a kind of
tribal "media." The mirroring included a cutting-edge Indian humor and social
comment that survived in the great part-Cherokee humorist Will Rogers, who
brought it to the white man's Broadway stage.
Often the old-time Contraries lived as the opposite sex, or simply wore
clothing of the opposite sex. Some made a show of doing everything backwards
-- walking backwards, riding horses seated backwards, to be a living symbol
that reminded people of the need for balance. Some Contraries were healers.
Some Two Spirits, known as winktes among the Lakotah people, functioned as go-
betweens when marriages were to be made. Here again, we can see some of these
things in the old photographs.
Some Heyoehkahs were what we might call "transgendered people" today. Others
were what we might call "gay," "lesbian" or "bisexual" -- though we can't
equate our 1990s political and social concepts of sexual orientation to those
of the 1890s, from other cultures and a more bygone day. Yet other native
people simply crossed over, and lived as the opposite gender, but weren't true
Two Spirit people. Such a one may have been the Blackfoot woman who is the
subject of Benjamin Capps' Woman Chief, a historical book that fascinated me
as a child. She lived and fought as a man in the late 1800s, and took a woman
as her wife. As the turn of the century approached, with native peoples
absorbing the white man's religious bans on sexual fluidity, she was
eventually murdered -- possibly by whites, possibly by newly biased people of
her own race.
Not surprisingly, European and American missionaries were shocked out of their
minds by the Two-Spirit people. Priests and preachers did everything they
could to wipe out all shadings of native sexual diversity. Today's fierce
U.S. biases against transgendered people have their roots in Old Testament
teachings, but they were honed even sharper by these missionary purges of the
tribes.
Yet the tradition has survived in some U.S. tribes. When I was with my native
teachers, I heard many stories of several great Heyoehkahs, both women and
men, who were still active on the northern plains in the 1930-1980 period. I
had an opportunity to know two of them -- a young bisexual woman and man who
worked as a team in the mid-1980s. They were incredibly funny at ceremonies,
with a cutting-edge humor that was as contemporary as space travel. They
loved to show their "contrariness" to eagle feathers and other traditional
trappings by pushing a noisy supermarket cart around the camp with their props
in it, and turkey feathers tied to it.
Ironically, the Contrary's unique brand of native humor survives in that
unique American figure, the stand-up comic. All great stand-ups, including
our own Ellen, trace their power to comment on American social foibles, and
their show-biz ancestry, back to Will Rogers. From there we must trace their
spirit bloodline to the reservation and the last of the great tribal
Contraries and Two Spirits. Our greatest comics still know how to "mirror"
the realities of American life, and the needs for change. Ellen, our most
celebrated Contrary, has her own unique offhand style of "mirroring" sexual
diversity to a society that is still stuck in monotheism.
The Contrary even finds a distant echo in a more improbable mainstream
American arena -- that of the rodeo. Native American peoples in the U.S. and
Canada have participated massively in rodeo since its birth in the early
1900s. Many rodeo clowns have been Indians or mixed-bloods. Traditionally,
even today, rodeo clowns are men who wear some items of women's clothing, even
women's makeup. Though today's West operates off the most relentless kind of
Christian European machismo, nobody dares to impugn the rodeo clown. His job
is to save lives and -- incidentally -- he keeps people laughing when things
get too intense.
I thought of this irony recently, at the gay rodeo in San Diego, as I watched
the rodeo clowns lure a Brahma bull away from a fallen rider. At a gay rodeo,
the clown's dress and makeup is not so radical as it might be at the Mesquite
Rodeo in Texas. But I was thinking how the concept of a sacred gay two-
spirited clown has finally come full circle.
These are only a few of my thoughts on that Person known to anthropologists as
the berdache. Human spirituality and human civilization reveals an unending
quest to know the nature of Deity, and the nature of human destiny -- to know
what is true. Today the Two Spirit person is here to tell us that U.S. laws
and social customs outlawing sexual diversity are bad laws, and ought to be
changed. The Two Spirit ought to be not merely accepted, but celebrated as in
those days of old,. That experience of twoness as "one" is a key stage of our
journey to learn what it means to be human.
Maybe the Two Spirit Person is closer to truly human than the rest of us.
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The Front Runner
Other Writings By Patricia Nell Warren:
The Differenct Between Conformity and Change
Choice in Sexual Orientation:
"And Liberty For All" in the South
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