Proud spirits
Gay Native Americans balance ethnic, gay identities

By ZACK HUDSON
Friday, November 17, 2006

Harlen Pruden can walk the walk down the streets of New York, but to some of his neighbors, he’s ill equipped to talk the talk.

“People speak Spanish to me all the time, and I don’t know Spanish,” he says. “Then they get really upset with me when they have to speak to me in English. They think I’m turning my back on my culture.”

But as culture clashes go, Pruden is well versed.

“I have to say, ‘I’m not Spanish, I’m Indian,’” he says.

Indian as in Native American, specifically, Cree. And he’s gay. He
knows about upholding a brown culture in a white world, he says.

“One of the things that I’ve found is that as a person of color, I am
constantly counting,” Pruden explains. “If you walk into a room, you
count where the other people of color are. Any room, you’re like,
people of color, gay folk, and you’re judging whether or not it’s safe
space.”

As a co-founder of the Northeast Two Spirit Society, Pruden is a leader
among a struggling culture of gay and lesbian Native Americans. While
fighting to preserve the culture that white American history has
relegated to the sidelines, Native Americans, who represent only about
one percent of the U.S. population, are also locked in a battle with
HIV, addictions and poverty — all of which appear in disproportionately
high rates among people of indigenous heritage.

In April 2006, the Atlanta-based Centers for Disease Control &
Prevention reported that Native Americans have the third highest rate
of HIV infection among non-white populations in the U.S. It’s a problem
worsening as millions of dollars in research and media campaigns are
spent targeting other groups.

“There were significant resources looking at why the transmission rates
were what they were, and what was going on within, the African-American
community,” Pruden says. “And just like there were lessons to be
learned with the African-American community, there are lessons with the
Native community.”

ONE WAY LEADERS FIGHT THE ECOnomic and social disparity that separates
gay Native Americans is the soon-tolaunch Two Spirit Alliance, a
unified collective of gay Native groups from across North America. The
alliance plans a website launch in 2007 that they hope gay Native
Americans and non-Natives can use as a starting point to learn about
the group’s special concerns.

A key glossary term in any lesson about gay Natives is “Two Spirit.”
The term, in hundreds of different forms, has loosely meant an
alternate gender that, in many of the Native American nations, was a
revered and mystified tradition that helped establish centuries of
acceptance for homosexual and transgender people.

But that acceptance started evaporating shortly after Columbus docked
in the Caribbean, says Karen Vigneault, a lesbian and leader of the
Nations of Four Directions, a gay Native American organization in San
Diego.

“Traditionally in our culture, it was a part of our culture,” Vigneault
says. “The creator makes no mistakes, and it wasn’t until the people
who came to Turtle Island, what you guys call America, they’re the ones
who put their beliefs on us.”

For every image of the proud Native heritage displayed by colorful
Wind-Catchers, practical crafts and nature paintings, there remains a
defiance among Natives like Vigneault, who says that gay Natives not
only have to struggle with being gay among their nations of origin, but
are largely ignored by gay people and gay historians.

“What the hell’s wrong with the gay community? Why aren’t they
acknowledging us? We are the beginnings of homosexuality on Turtle
Island,” she asserts.

“The gay history didn’t start with Stonewall. We were the groundbreakers.

We are the history of gay, but it’s not even talked about in the gay
culture. It’s very frustrating. It’s like we’re fighting everybody and
having to educate everybody.”

And don’t get her started about Thanksgiving.

“We’re still teaching our children this crap. Our kindergartners are
still wearing the stupid bandana with fake feathers coming out. What is
that crap? I do not celebrate it,” she says. “I do celebrate the fact
that if people just want to come together to love one another, and
celebrate the unity of their families and have a good time, that I’m
down for. But don’t feed me the bullshit that ‘this is Thanksgiving,
and this is what these Indians and these pilgrims did.’”

LIKE THEIR GAY NEIGHBORS ACROSS the U.S., some gay Native Americans are struggling to start a new marriage tradition.

A Cherokee Nation high court upheld the nuptials of Dawn McKinley and
Kathy Reynolds, a Cherokee lesbian couple, in 2004 and 2006. The
marriage is valid on the Cherokee reservations, but not in Oklahoma,
where the women live.

A legal battle to ratify the marriage in Oklahoma remains ongoing.

The dual-personality struggle that many gay men and lesbians confront
when coming out mirrors the dichotomy of life as a gay Native American.
Like Vigneault and Pruden, Kevin VanWanseele had to mix being gay into
his existing identity struggle as a Native American in the largely
white culture of the San Diego suburbs, where he grew up after his
family left the Barona Indian Reservation.

“I have my mother’s shame, and she has her mother’s shame,” VanWanseele
says. “Fifty years ago, [Native Americans] tried to curl their hair
like white people and wear poodle skirts, and try to be as white as
possible, only to know that they were brown and feel less than. It’s
been a long journey, definitely, to come to acceptance with being gay.”

On the reservation, Kevin learned about his history. In the suburbs, he
learned how the outside world works. As an adult in New York, he
learned filmmaking at NYU, as well as the ins-and-outs of being gay.

He says his friends largely see him as white, but VanWanseele says that
his ethnic heritage, as well as his reservation, are always on his
mind. His film, “Reserved Wealth,” documents the changes that a
gambling casino brought to the Barona Reservation.

As another leader with the Northeast Two Spirit Society as well as the
Two Spirit Alliance, VanWanseele is at the forefront of the fight gay
Natives are waging to establish their identity in the overall culture.

THE FIRST TIME THE NORTHEAST Two Spirit Society entered a float in New
York City’s Gay Pride parade, spectators didn’t even blink, which
VanWanseele thinks is because they had no idea who or what the group
represented. The next year, with the addition of some traditionally
recognized Native American paraphernalia, people seemed to get it, he
says.

“We realized that we had to dip a little bit into that, that necessary
evil of having more of what you would call quote ‘Indian,’” he says.
“We invited a dancer from a local powwow, and people liked that. It
worked better for us.”

New York and Los Angeles have the two largest concentrations of Native
Americans in urban settings, according to 2000 Census reporting. For
gay Native Americans, the call to city life can conflict with the
responsibility to uphold the communities and culture of the
reservations.

It’s another challenge gay Natives face, but one with which VanWanseele, Pruden and Vigneault are resigned.

“I have to deal with more white people stuff. I have to deal more with
trying to fit in to the society here rather than if I’m isolated,”
Vigneault says. “I’ve got to pay rent; I’ve got to deal with a job; I’m
more on the firing line living in the city where I got one foot in my
Indian life and one foot in my assimilation life.”

Pruden agrees.

“I’m an Indian, and I live on the Upper West Side,” he says. “Kevin is
an Indian and he lives in Chelsea. And we’re no less of an Indian
because we don’t live on a reservation.”