Two-Spirit

Two-Spirit is a term coined in 1990 at the Third Annual Inter-tribal Native American/First Nations Gay and Lesbian American Conference in Winnipeg, chosen to replace the anthropological term berdache (itself a colonial misnomer derived from a French corruption of an Arabic word for a kept boy). The term names both a contemporary political identity — Indigenous people who hold masculine and feminine spirits, or who occupy gender and sexual positions outside the colonial binary — and the historical fact that gender diversity existed across Indigenous nations before colonization and was targeted for elimination as part of the colonial project.

Two-Spirit is not a synonym for “Indigenous and queer.” It names a specifically Indigenous understanding of gender and sexuality that precedes and exceeds the Western categories (gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender) through which it is often misread. Many nations had their own terms — winkte (Lakota), nádleehí (Diné), hwame (Mohave) — for people whose gender roles, spiritual responsibilities, and relational positions did not map onto the male/female binary. These roles were embedded in kinship systems, governance, and spiritual practice, not defined primarily through sexual object choice.

The colonial suppression of Two-Spirit people was not incidental to settler colonialism but constitutive of it. Missionaries, boarding schools, and colonial law targeted gender-variant Indigenous people as evidence of the “savagery” that justified dispossession. The imposition of the gender binary was a technology of colonial governance: it reorganized kinship, inheritance, labor, and authority along lines legible to the colonial state. Qwo-Li Driskill and other scholars in queer Indigenous studies argue that recovering Two-Spirit traditions is inseparable from the broader project of Indigenous resurgence and decolonization — it is not an addition to decolonial politics but a dimension of them.

The concept matters for relational ontology because it demonstrates that gender is constituted through specific relational systems — kinship, ceremony, governance, land — rather than being a property of individual bodies. When those relational systems are destroyed, the gender positions they constituted become unintelligible. Two-Spirit recovery is therefore not merely a matter of identity recognition but of rebuilding the relational worlds in which Two-Spirit personhood is constituted.

Related terms

• Kinship — the relational system in which Two-Spirit roles are embedded
• Settler colonialism — the structure that targeted Two-Spirit people for elimination
• Decolonization — the project to which Two-Spirit recovery belongs
• Indigenous resurgence — the renewal of governance and knowledge that includes gender diversity
• Qwo-Li Driskill — queer Indigenous studies scholar
• Heteronormativity — the colonial norm imposed through the elimination of Two-Spirit traditions
• Queer-of-color critique — the broader tradition analyzing how racialization and colonialism organize sexuality