{"id":34267,"date":"2013-11-05T22:54:00","date_gmt":"2013-11-06T06:54:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/library.josephy.org\/2013\/11\/congress-catching-up-with-the-indians\/"},"modified":"2013-11-05T22:54:00","modified_gmt":"2013-11-06T06:54:00","slug":"congress-catching-up-with-the-indians","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/library.josephy.org\/2013\/11\/congress-catching-up-with-the-indians\/","title":{"rendered":"Congress catching up with the Indians"},"content":{"rendered":"


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A couple of weeks ago I wrote about the photographer John Fouch and his pictures of Plains Indians and Chief Joseph and other Nez Perces at Fort Keogh in Montana in the late 1870s\u2014and I promised more. Today\u2019s news from the Senate\u2014the 61-30 vote for cloture on the \u201cEmployment Nondiscrimination Act,\u201d also known as ENDA\u2014seems like the right occasion to consider another Fouch image. <\/span><\/div>\n
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<\/a>ENDA would make it illegal to discriminate against someone on the basis of sexual orientation or gender identity. Fouch\u2019s relevant photo is of \u201cSquaw Jim\u201d and a companion\u2014maybe his wife. They are Crow Indians and the time is the late 1870s. <\/span><\/div>\n
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The literature refers to cross gender Indian people as \u201cBerdache,\u201d a French word derived from a Persian word referring to male-male attraction. This from the \u201cEncyclopedia of the Great Plains\u201d:<\/span><\/div>\n
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“In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, French explorers, traders, and missionaries in the Mississippi Valley occasionally encountered Native Americans who could be classified neither as men nor women. They called such individuals berdaches<\/i>\u2026. In fact, Plains Indian berdaches are best described as occupying an alternative or third gender role, in which traits of men and women are combined with those unique to berdache status. Male berdaches did women’s work, cross-dressed or combined male and female clothing, and formed relationships with non-berdache men.<\/span><\/div>\n
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“Plains Indian women often engaged in hunting and warfare, but a female role equivalent to that of male berdaches, although common west of the Rockies, has been documented in the Plains only among the Cheyennes (the hetaneman<\/i>). Even so, some Plains Indian women became notable warriors and leaders and behaved much like berdaches. In the early nineteenth century, Running Eagle of the Piegans wore male clothing on war parties, while Woman Chief of the Crows had four wives.”<\/span><\/div>\n
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The entire interesting entry is at http:\/\/plainshumanities.unl.edu\/encyclopedia\/doc\/egp.gen.004<\/span><\/p>\n

In other places Indians are referred to as \u201ctwo-spirited,\u201d and in fact contemporary Indians promoting respect and equality for gay, lesbian, and trans-gender tribal members now prefer \u201ctwo spirit\u201d to Berdache, which is culturally loaded.<\/span><\/p>\n

The loading was done by Christian missionaries, who could not accept Indians that challenged their ideas of gender boundaries, and were in fact often accorded respect for special access to spiritual worlds provided by their dual-gender, dual-spirit personas. Walter Williams, who has written extensively on the subject, explained things this way in The Guardian<\/i>:<\/span><\/p>\n

Rather than emphasizing the homosexuality of these persons, however, many Native Americans focused on their spiritual gifts. American Indian traditionalists, even today, tend to see a person’s basic character as a reflection of their spirit. Since everything that exists is thought to come from the spirit world, androgynous or transgender persons are seen as doubly blessed, having both the spirit of a man and the spirit of a woman. Thus, they are honoured for having two spirits, and are seen as more spiritually gifted than the typical masculine male or feminine female.<\/span><\/div>\n
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I expect that many tribes and tribal members have gone on with old beliefs and practices, and two-spirited Indians have continued to enjoy respect and \u201cnormalcy\u201d in many if not most cases in the years from Fouch and his 1870s photos until now. And I think it is interesting that the mainstream American public and our politicians, who sometimes lead but most often struggle to follow their vocal supporters, and who just a few years ago were busy promulgating a \u201cDefense of Marriage Act,\u201d and considered the \u201cDon\u2019t Ask Don\u2019t Tell\u201d policy \u201cliberalizing\u201d to our military, are coming to the conclusion that \u201ctwo spirited\u201d people should be treated equally in the workplace.<\/span><\/div>\n
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A couple of weeks ago I wrote about the photographer John Fouch and his pictures of Plains Indians and Chief Joseph and other Nez Perces at Fort Keogh in Montana in the late 1870s\u2014and I promised more. Today\u2019s news from the Senate\u2014the 61-30 vote for cloture on the \u201cEmployment Nondiscrimination Act,\u201d also known as ENDA\u2014seems […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":16,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[929,927,930,726,931,928],"tags":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/library.josephy.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34267"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/library.josephy.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/library.josephy.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/library.josephy.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/16"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/library.josephy.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=34267"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/library.josephy.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34267\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/library.josephy.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=34267"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/library.josephy.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=34267"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/library.josephy.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=34267"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}