Are men and women the foundation of society? No. It is a recent system fuelled by Christianisation, colonisation and capitalist society. Many cultures recognised as many as 165 different genders

Gender as a spectrum, not a binary switch

It is estimated that there were at least 165 different tribal gender traditions in North America, differing both in the number of recognised genders and in their content and roles – it was therefore a mosaic of local systems, not a single universal model.

What we now collectively refer to as ‘two-spirit’ is an umbrella term of modern origin – not an indigenous word. It was only coined in 1990 at an international gathering of Indigenous gay men and lesbians in Winnipeg as a replacement for the derogatory term ‘berdache’, which was introduced into ethnographic literature by French colonisers and originally referred to a ‘kept boy’. The co-creators of the term wanted a word that would reflect a combination of masculinity and femininity in people who adopt gender roles different from those assigned to them based on their sex. The term itself is an English translation of the Odzibwe phrase niizh manidoowag.

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Sources: Wikimedia Commons, loveyourself, Legacy Project Chicago, JS

Behind this umbrella term, however, lie dozens of specific, linguistically and culturally distinct concepts: the Navajo had nádleehí (“one who is constantly changing”), the Lakota had winkte, the Zuni had lhamana (the best known being We’wha, a Zuni cultural envoy who represented her people in Washington in 1886), and the Prairie Cree had a’yahkwêw. This was not primarily a matter of sexual orientation, but of gender – that is, the role expected of a person within the community, rather than with whom or how they had sexual relationships.

Gender spectrum
Photo: JS

In a video in which a representative of the Penobscot Nation describes his people’s seven genders – and which thus reflects the customs of a single community – seven categories are identified: women, men, women who love women, men who love men, women who become men, men who become women, and finally two-spirit people, described as those who carry within themselves the female and male spirits in equal measure. It is important to understand this list as one of many tribal versions, not as a universal ‘seven genders of Native Americans’ – precisely because there were over 165 similar traditions, each with its own structure and number of categories.

What roles did two-spirit people fulfil?

Across the sources, the same theme recurs: two-spirit people were not merely tolerated, but were often actively revered as healers, mediators and guardians of traditions and creation myths. In many matrilineal societies (that is, societies where kinship, inheritance of property and status are traced through the maternal line, not the paternal; women often hold significant decision-making powers, including, for example, deciding when the community will go to war – ed.), two-spirit people served as advisers because they were seen as capable of ‘seeing both sides’ – that is, to foresee the consequences of war both for the men going into battle and for the women and children remaining in the community. They also acted as adoptive parents to orphaned children, as their dual nature enabled them to be both a mother and a father to the child.

The Two-Spirit flag
Photo: Wikimedia Commons

Gluskabe and the ash tree

Gluskabe (or, in other records, Gluscabi, Glooskap or Klose-kur-beh) is the central cultural hero of Wabanaki mythology, to which the Penobscot people belong. According to one of the traditional versions, Gluskabe shot an arrow into a brown ash tree, thereby splitting both the tree and its spirit into two parts. When he breathed life into these halves, the first man and woman came into being. From the remaining essence of both parts, Gluskabe then created the first two-spirit person. An earlier account of this story, published as far back as 1884 by the collector Charles G. Leland, describes an almost identical version in which Gluskabe (transcribed as “Glooskap”) shot arrows into ash trees and the first humans emerged from their bark – which shows that this is a long-established myth, not a recent invention. Indeed, reverence for the ash tree endures to this day in traditional Penobscot basketry, which is still made from ash wood.

What colonisation did to this – and why

The arrival of European colonisers marked a catastrophic turning point for this system. Christian missionaries arrived with a strictly binary, Victorian understanding of gender and a rigidly heteronormative conception of the family – to them, Indigenous people who were gender-diverse were evidence of ‘barbarism’ or moral decay. Two-spirit people, once revered, became the targets of persecution, shame and violence – their roles were demonised as ‘sodomy’ or ‘perversion’ and their spiritual gifts were rejected as ‘pagan’.

Why, specifically, a binary division into merely “man” and “woman”? Christian theology was based on the Book of Genesis, where humankind is created “male and female” in the image of God – this became the normative framework, which made no provision for any third or other variants. Moreover, this theological foundation became intertwined with the logic of colonial power: the imposition of strict gender binaries and heteropatriarchal patterns was a necessary condition for successful colonisation, as it made it possible to dismantle the gynocentric structures of many indigenous societies, where women held central, rather than subordinate, roles, and to replace them with the European model, in which men control the family, property and land. In other words, the suppression of gender diversity was not a by-product of colonisation, but one of its tools.

The most brutal instrument of this erasure was the boarding/mission schools for indigenous children, which operated in the USA until 1978 and in Canada until 1996. In these schools, children were forcibly separated from the language, traditions and spiritual beliefs of their communities, and any gender-non-conforming behaviour was severely punished – leaving behind intergenerational trauma, the consequences of which (internalised homophobia and transphobia) persist in Indigenous communities to this day.

Gender, capitalism and the ‘performance machine’

A similar, albeit differently driven, process of suppressing gender and bodily diversity took place at the same time in Europe itself – and it is worth noting because it shows that gender binaries and hierarchies are not merely religious but also economic constructs. In her work *Caliban and the Witch* (2004), describes how the early modern witch hunts of the 16th and 17th centuries served to create and enforce a new social role for women, reduced to the unpaid reproductive labour required by the emerging capitalist order. According to Federici, capitalism needed to transform the human body into a ‘machine’ capable of regular, quantifiable labour, and to do so it first had to forcibly divide society along gender and racial lines – separating men’s ‘productive’ (paid) labour of men from the ‘reproductive’ (unpaid) labour of women, whilst simultaneously destroying alternative social arrangements that resisted this division, including female healers, unmarried women living independently, and other figures who did not fit into the new economic order.

The connection between the two processes – the colonisation of North America and the European witch hunts – is striking: in both cases, it involved the forced alignment of gender diversity into two rigidly defined, hierarchically organised categories, because such a simplified system was easier to control, measure and utilise for the emerging industrial and colonial capitalism. The system we live under today in the West – based on performance, productivity and consumption – is therefore by no means a ‘natural’ state of affairs, but a historically relatively recent construct, part of which was the enforced simplification of gender into two rigid categories.

What can we take away from this?

The indigenous gender systems of North America were not uniform – they varied from nation to nation, and what the speaker from the Penobscot Nation describes in the video is one specific, culturally rooted tradition amongst many, not a universal ‘Native American’ model. Across them all, however, one pattern recurs: gender was understood as a spectrum of roles within the community, not as a binary switch determined by anatomy, and people outside this binary were often regarded as bearers of special gifts, not as deviants.

What is presented in the West today as a natural, time-honoured order – two genetically determined genders, the man as breadwinner and head of the family, the woman in a subordinate, reproductive role – is in fact the result of specific historical processes: Christianisation, colonisation and the rise of industrial capitalism, which reinforced one another and shared a common interest in simplifying and controlling both the human body and society. A look at the indigenous cosmologies of North America is therefore not intended to serve as an exotic curiosity, but as a reminder that the system in which we live – and which we often mistake for ‘natural’ – is merely one of many possible forms of human organisation; and that other forms not only existed but functioned for millennia.

A clear explanation of identity (gender), sexual orientation, biological sex and gender expression
Photo: loveyourself

References

• Gomez, A. R. (2022). Two-Spirit Indigenous Peoples Building on Legacies of Gender Variance. The Revealer. therevealer.org
• Native Languages of the Americas. Gluscabi Stories and other Penobscot Legends. native-languages.org/penobscot-legends.htm
• Native Languages of the Americas. Native American Indian Ash Tree Medicine, Meaning and Symbolism. native-languages.org/ash-tree.htm
• Wood, J. (2017). In the Beginning – Wabanaki Creation Stories (transcribed by Charles G. Leland, 1884, *The Algonquin Legends of New England*). johnwood1946.wordpress.com
• Brown, J. K. Klouskap and the Origin of the Penobscot, in: The Ash Tree origins of the Penobscot. Sensualanimist.com (2012)
• Wikipedia. Penobscot. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penobscot
• Pullin, Z. Two Spirit: The Story of a Movement Unfolds. Kosmos Journal, via Native People’s Magazine
• Skoden / eCampusOntario. Two-Spirit People. ecampusontario.pressbooks.pub/skoden
• Globalnews.ca (2022). Being Two-Spirit and trans in Canada: How colonisation shaped the way we view gender diversity.
• Diversify Outdoors (2022). Gender was Never Binary: An Exploration of Two-Spirit Identities.
• NATIFS (2022). Completing the Circle: Two-Spirit as an Act of Decolonisation and Re-Indigenisation.
• O’Higgins, C., supervised by S. Sellers. Two-Spirit Indigenous Americans: Fact not Fiction. The Cupola, Gettysburg College (student project, independent study)
• Federici, S. (2004). Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation. Autonomedia. (Discussed, amongst others, in: Liberation School; Hampton Institute; Progress in Political Economy; Wikipedia – Caliban and the Witch)