In the United States, we often date the beginning of LGBT+ history to the 1960s, with events such as the Stonewall and Compton Cafeteria riots. In reality, LGBT+ history in the Americas predates the “discovery” of the new world, as many Native American societies were diverse in their gender expressions and sexual proclivities. The prevalence of queerness, an umbrella term that encapsulates all LGBT+ identities, in Native American societies not only calls into question the false notion that LGBT+ people have emerged only just emerged in recent history, but it also challenges the idea that the gender binary is innate to human existence.
When discussing queerness in pre-colonial Native American societies, it is important not to project post-colonial notions of gender identity and sexual orientation. In the absence of systematic homophobia and transphobia, the pathologized identities of “transgender” or “gay” did not exist, and sexual and gender diversity was more normalized. This piece explores the presence of queerness in Native societies and its modern-day implications through a limited lens. I am not part of an indigenous community and cannot indepthly speak of their history or culture. I share the history that I know or have researched and analyze that research through my own lens as a queer American.
The main spectrum that has been found in Native American communities consists of four genders: masculine woman, feminine woman, masculine man, and feminine man. Many tribes also have people who fill third-gender roles, a role outside man or women, which are now referred to as two-spirit. The term two-spirit cannot be neatly applied to an LGBT+ Native American person, as it has less to do with sexual attraction or gender identity as it does with a sacred spiritual and ceremonial role that is recognized by the community.
The main spectrum that has been found in Native American communities consist of four genders: masculine woman, feminine woman, masculine man, and feminine man.
Evidence of mainstream acceptance of queerness in Native American societies can be found linguistically. In the Cree language, there are words that describe gender variance, including a man who dresses a woman, a woman who dresses as a man, a man dressed/living/accepted as a woman, and a woman who is dressed/living/accepted as a man.
Queer (In)justice– The Criminalization of LGBT People in the United States depicts the ways in which the presence of accepted queerness in Native American society was used by European Powers to colonize the Americas. European colonizers and religious authorities promoted the idea of native populations as sexual and gender deviants in order to frame colonization as a means of saving Native people from damnation by preventing them from engaging in sinful activities, such as sodomy and cross-dressing. Painting native populations as hyper-sexual deviants gave legitimacy to the genocide and religious conversion of indigenous populations while enforcing race, class, and gender hierarchies that originated in Europe. Systematic homophobia and transphobia did not exist in the Americas prior to colonization, as Native American societies did not have the same rigid notions of sexual orientation or a gender binary. Thus, the implementation of homophobia, transphobia, and a gender binary society was integral to the colonization and subsequent control of North and South America.
Along with homophobia and transphobia, Europeans used racism to colonize the Americas, painting indigenous populations as uncivilized and unintelligent. Once the gender binary was implemented and enforced in the Americas, Europeans continued to police sexuality and gender through legal statutes. These laws were unevenly enforced and were usually applied to people of color. Historically, black men have received harsher punishment for breaking sodomy laws than white men and land-owning white men. The uneven enforcement of sodomy laws created an association between people of color and so-called sodomy, thereby criminalizing and depicting non-white communities as immoral. Although white men were certainly not exempt from these laws, they received a more protected status than black men who were accused of breaking sodomy laws; these laws were not an isolated occurrence but existed to enforce existing race, gender, and class-based power structures.
While there were direct laws criminalizing queer men, the persecution of queer women existed in a larger context of female persecution. For example, Witch trials often cited the defendant’s “sexually deviant” activities as reasons for punishment; the persecution of queer women did not require statutes, as there were already systems in place that heavily criminalized women in the colonial era.
When we think about the treatment of LGBTQ+ people in the United States, we must understand that this mistreatment is based on a history of criminalizing queer people that is not equally felt by the entire community. Just as the Native populations who were converted and massacred on the basis of sexual deviance and black men prosecuted under sodomy laws, queer and transgender people of color face the highest amount of criminalization at the hands of the police and the criminal legal system. When we organize around queer issues, it is a mistake to do so through a lens that the queer movement began at the Stonewall riots, that Western notions of queer identities are universal, that the gender binary is innate, or that white cis queer people face the same problems as LGBTQ+ people of color. The fight for Queer liberation needs to be an intersectional one, one that bases its political analysis on the history of indigenous queerness and the criminalization of people of color in modern-day America.
