This article, ‘Rainbow and Red’, was originally published online at InTheFray.com dated Dec. 6, 2004. The writer Emily Alpert received a GLAAD Media award for Online Journalism. NE2SS has come a long way since its founding days. Let’s take a look back at what it was like when the society first started up…

“There was a time on this land in which we did have full equality,” he
comments. “There was a gender analysis with an open acceptance of
same-sex couples and relationships. There was a place for all of it,
and I think that it’s a shame that it’s been ignored.” Pruden sees this
history as crucial to current two-spirit identity. “There is a model
there that can be reactivated, claimed and worked on”, he says,
although he adds hastily, “There is no going back to a traditional
model.”

Creating a two-spirit community

In New York City, the
challenge of organizing two-spirit communities has been taken on by
Harlan Pruden, the square-jawed and impeccably put-together founder of
the newly-formed Northeast Two-Spirit Society. Leaning back at his desk
at New York’s Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender (LGBT) Community
Center, where he works as a coordinator of an anti-addiction program,
Pruden muses on history, surrounded by splashy photos of drag queens
and powwows.

“There was a time on this land in which we did
have full equality,” he comments. “There was a gender analysis with an
open acceptance of same-sex couples and relationships. There was a
place for all of it, and I think that it’s a shame that it’s been
ignored.” Pruden sees this history as crucial to current two-spirit
identity. “There is a model there that can be reactivated, claimed and
worked on”, he says, although he adds hastily, “There is no going back
to a traditional model.”

Much of Pruden’s own knowledge of
Native practices and attitudes regarding queer people comes from
anthropologist Walter L. Williams’ 1986 book, The Spirit and the Flesh.
Drawing on interviews in a variety of North American tribes, primarily
in the United States, Williams highlights how, prior to colonial
interference, two-spirit peoples were privileged to traverse the gender
line by walking freely between gendered tents, for example, or taking
on both types of gendered work — hunting and beadwork. In many cases,
specific ritual roles, like holding the eagle’s wing or blessing
marriages, were designated for two-spirit people. Compensation for
ritual services meant that two-spirit people often prospered within
their communities, and could use their financial wherewithal to support
adopted children.

Pruden notes that the current LGBT movement
traces its history from events that are largely European, Western, or
relatively recent, like New York’s 1969 Stonewall riots, in which gay
bar patrons protested a police raid. Of this limited perspective,
Pruden says, “To me, that’s bullshit.”

And there is evidence
to back him up. The 1980s and 1990s saw a host of publications and
research on gay Native traditions. Yet, while Pruden hopes to raise
awareness of Native communities’ traditional acceptance, tolerance, and
even reverence of gender-variant people, and to draw strength from an
authentic queer history, he has no illusions that a complete history
can be uncovered, or should be.

According to Pruden, the
history of acceptance toward queer identity in American Indian culture
has been concealed by two major factors: colonial suppression of Native
sexual tolerance, and Christian Indians’ rejection of traditional
practice.

Thus, for most American Indians, identifying as
two-spirit is a process of discovery, not an organic outgrowth of
living in modern communities. Pruden explains that, “even if there is a
reactivation or an honoring of two-spirit people, sometimes there’s not
even an explanation because of the stigma associated with it.”

Pruden
recalls being approached, after a lecture on his Woodlands Cree
reservation in Northeastern Alberta, Canada, by a woman who said she
finally understood why, during the men’s sweat lodge, the medicine men
permitted her gay cousin to hold the eagle’s wing — a role of honor
traditionally accorded to a two-spirit person. “[T]hat elder was
reactivating and staying true to the tradition,” explains Pruden, “by
finding someone who was queer-identified and giving him that high
office.” Prior to Pruden’s talk on two-spirit traditions, however, the
man’s cousin “had no point of reference, as a straight woman, to know
what was happening before her.”

“You have to start looking for
things that are incredibly subtle,” continues Pruden, “and if you’re an
outsider, or it’s not of your tradition, you can’t even see what’s
going on.”

(Read the whole article here.)