Research reveals strong cultural acceptance in the past

By Paul Galinski | reporter@prpeak.com
Published: Wednesday, November 5, 2008 4:19 PM CST

Research shows historically, diffuse gender identification was a celebrated component of first nations culture, according to a Powell River researcher. However, Western contact swayed the positive recognition and has contributed to two-spirited people being ostracized as homosexual people, he added.

Michael Thoms, who has a doctorate in history and teaches history at Vancouver Island University’s (VIU) Powell River campus, said one of his specialties is ethno-history, “which is a fancy way of saying specialized in fields of first nations cultural, ecological and social relationships,” he said.

“For 15 years I’ve been a researcher for a group called two-spirited people of the first nations, and also for the Canadian Aboriginal AIDS Network.

“One of the problems, as we know, is first nations people are marginalized in society,” Thoms said. “They experience issues with poverty, poor self-esteem, lack of advanced education and these kinds of things. One group within first nations society that is particularly vulnerable are those that we in the West would call gay or lesbian.”

Thoms said first nations people have a tradition that predates contact with the West.

“They don’t use the word gay or lesbian. They use the term two-spirited. They embody the spirit of both men and women.

“People of first nations origin don’t look at this in terms of the West, where it tends to be sexual orientation. Two-spirited people are much more of a gender than they are sexualities. So, they are rather a third gender.”

Thoms said Western explorers coming to North America in the 1500s and 1600s didn’t know what to make of these people. In pre-contact settlements, there were women in camp, and the men went off to battle, but there was an entourage moving often with these war groups with the skills of medicine.

“They can help the wounded, they are stretcher bearers, they are also seen as somewhat shamanistic,” Thoms said. “They have some powers that they can bring to the battlefield in the same way that priests would be with a caravan in an English army.

“They were not dressed in what Europeans would call men’s clothing. If anything, their appearance is more feminine in the eyes of Europeans. The Europeans are so confused by this group.”

Thoms said there are constant reports of seeing these groups march and that they were called hermaphrodites because the Europeans couldn’t conceive of something that was neither male nor female, but which occupied a distinctive role in society that combined the two sexes.

“The natural response is they must have the biology of the two sexes,” Thoms said. “The Jesuits working out of Montreal, they start to discover the fact that this is a third gender and they give them an Arabic term, which is the best they could come up with.”

The term was berdashe. Thoms said it loosely translates to boy-slave or something similar, which is not an appropriate fit.

“What Europeans are encountering over and over again are people who are two-spirited,” Thoms said. “What I’m seeing, and it’s all based in what we call primary literature or archival documents, is that these people are not only identifiable or visible, they are recognized and accepted. Almost stunning to the Jesuits is that these people are revered. They perform special functions.”

If there were an important council meeting they ensured that a two-spirited person was there to give that perspective to the activities, Thoms said.

“These people are held in very high esteem and regard by their people. They are seen as people of great power, in fact elevated to the level of manitous, meaning a spirit person.

“Regrettably, what happens is they are treated with contempt by the Europeans. They go to great lengths to chastise these people. They go to the parents and try to tell the parents their kids are going to burn in hell.

“They should stick to the spheres of the masculine and feminine. They shouldn’t be blurring the spheres because it can only lead to trouble.”

Thoms said to the astonishment of the Europeans, the parents answered that they were quite proud of their children and felt fortunate to have given birth to a two-spirited child. They also indicated to the Jesuits that the child’s sexuality was their own choice, which, of course, the Jesuits found really astonishing that a child would be free to choose their lifestyle, their sexuality and their reproductive behaviour, he added.

“Ultimately the Jesuits prevail and instill homophobia in communities,” Thoms said. “The outgrowth of this is a lot of first nations, not so much in BC but definitely across the West, through Ontario, Quebec and the Maritimes, consistently reveal that first nations communities are quite homophobic. There has been a lot of violence exerted against two-spirited members. They have been chased out, threatened, attacked, had their houses burned, their cars trashed.

“So they are leaving; they are going to the city. Like other first nations people, they are vulnerable because of a lack of urban skills and they often end up in the sex trade. The great concern is if they enter the sex trade without the proper education, they may become susceptible to HIV infection.”

Thoms said he has been working for 16 years helping attain grant money. Health Canada has been very supportive.

“I’ve been working with the federal and provincial ministries and groups like Corrections Canada and they’ve come to realize the best group to deal with an ethnic minority is the ethnic minority,” he said.

“We have been working hard, first at education, but in my latest studies, education is not the problem. Consistently, over 99 per cent of the people we study in large study groups know the transmission methods of HIV.”

Thoms said one question animates his most recent work.

“Given the high knowledge of how to practice safer sex and how to avoid infection, why are aboriginal people still being affected at a much higher rate than non-aboriginals? Being a social scientist, I’ve isolated variables and conducted a lot of focus groups across the country. Consistently, what comes across is low self-esteem. We know that a person’s willingness to protect themselves is directly connected to the self-esteem.”

Thoms said the object is to help people improve their self-esteem.

“All of the posters and advertisements are having no cultural impact on first nations people,” Thoms said. “What I have found in all my focus groups conducted across the country, all in major urban centres where people have been exiled, is a group of displaced people. They have been displaced from their communities by homophobia. Homophobia is not an aboriginal value. It’s been learned.

“A whole whack of anonymous sex is not going to help self-esteem. What’s going to help is being accepted by their families and the community. What really hurts is being estranged from family. A lot of these people are dying.”

Thoms said one of their greatest wishes is to die at home and that’s impossible for them, whereas it’s something others take for granted.

The primate of the Anglican Church provided money to the two-spirited people of the first nations organization and Thoms is writing a book on identifying as much of the historical archival materials that will demonstrate that two-spirited people were an accepted, recognized and honoured people prior to European contact.

“I will have a manuscript ready in about a month,” he said. “The research is very hard work. The fur traders didn’t index their sources and if they did they wouldn’t have indexed them for sexual activity. They would have kept that stuff discrete.

“Anyway, it’s an enormously complicated task, plus you have know your religious background, you have to know biblical terms that the Bible would have used. You have to understand where the church is coming from, English history, French history, missionary history, then you have to have a firm understanding of first nations’ cultural histories. It’s an enormously challenging task but I’m happy to say that I can establish somewhere in the area of 80 examples of well-documented cases of two-spirited people living in communities in Canada that were honoured and held in high esteem.”

Thoms said as first nations communities decolonize themselves and work toward self-government, they have to also realize they have within themselves some colonized values, such as homophobia, and that accepting two-spirited people should be part and parcel with their whole decolonization movement.

“These people are incredibly creative assets to their community,” Thoms said. “We want to see them take back up their historic roles as an alternate gender. People are two-spirited for two reasons. Men and women have repeatedly explained the reason they took up the role of a two-spirited person is that they had a dream one night that their role in life was two-spirited. It had no sexual urgings toward the same sex. It really isn’t caught up with sex. It’s caught up more with being in something other than male and female.

“They have this dream and dress the next morning as the opposite sex. They announce to the community that they’ve had this dream and they live out their lives in this way. Others, when they are children, their parents observe girls playing with boys’ toys, boys playing with girls’ toys, and they immediately do not discourage this, historically, but encourage them to move in the gender direction that they show a predisposition toward.”

Thoms said he has not received any resistance to his research. He added that what the first nations community decides to do with the research is ultimately its decision.

“I don’t tell people what’s best for them. Those days are over,” he said.

For more information, readers can visit www.2spirits.com and www.caan.ca.