peans’ accounts, the colonists discovered some form of gender-bending individuals or behaviors. If this wasn’t described in every Native community, historian David Greenberg opined, it’s only because researchers haven’t gone deeply enough. These practices, however, were almost universally condemned and stigmatized as forms of sodomy, “infamous vice,” savagery, pederasty, immorality, eunuchism, and hermaphroditism. Generally, this justified the “civilizing mission,” forced conversion, or brutal elimination of Indigenous practices and people. These scandalous reports date from the earliest encounters. Christopher Columbus’ doctor, Diego Alvarez Chanca, in a letter of 1494 describes how Carib Natives captured young boys from enemy islands, “cut off their member, and served themselves of them [sexually] until adulthood, and then sacrifice and eat them during festivals.” One of the terms frequently used by explorers to describe these diverse people was “berdache.” As noted, the term “Two-Spirit” was coined in part to replace this disfavored term, which was still used by scholars and Natives until the 1990s. It was first used by 18th-century French explorers, perhaps alluding to the medieval European and Arab terms bardajeor bardadj, referring to effeminate or cross-dressing boys sold into slavery and prostitution. Historian Richard Trexler in Sex and Conquest (1995)—a scholarly exploration of the original language accounts of the conquest of the Americas—takes these pancontinental texts as describing diverse Native institutions of enforced regendering, cross-tribal enslavement, and sexualized political order. Smithers dismisses such interpretations of European accounts as uncritical of the colonizing, racist, and homophobic prejudice of the conquerors. His alternative, decolonizing reading of these accounts holds that they prejudicially document the diverse First Nations’ appreciation of gender fluid members, and their elevation to special, ceremonial roles as intercessors between genders and/or spiritual domains. He switches with a bit too much facility between accounts spanning centuries and continents to make the case for a unified Two-Spirit phenomenon, which Smithers repeatedly equates with “gender fluidity.” However, he has to acknowledge that the different Native words for natal boys or girls who cross-dress or take on special roles refer to different cultural crystallizations of gender and sexuality. Some Native cultures (like Suquamish) do not have a word, or it has been lost (along with many First Nation languages). Even through the eyes of Christian conquerers, these practices are quite diverse: some Two-Spirits are indeed healers or priests, but some simply have cross-gender occupations (e.g., male basket weaver or warrior woman). Nevertheless, the individual accounts, whether from translations or recent scholarship on particular First Nations, are fascinating and make it clear that the gender / sexuality spectrum is not a 21st-century Western phenomenon. WeWha (1849-1896) is one of the best documented lha’mana. Will Roscoe, a non-Native independent scholar, drew interest to her story inThe Zuni Man-Woman(1991). Dubbed by the press as a “Zuni princess,” WeWha was a natal boy who had been initiated in early childhood into thelha’manarole. Matilda Coxe Stevenson, an anthropologist with the Smithsonian Institution’s Bureau of American Ethnology, brought WeWha on a tour to Washington in 1885, where she displayed her weaving skills and was introduced to dignitaries, including President Grover Cleveland. WeWha was apparently a clever diplomat as well, as she convinced the President to replace the Mexican Indian agent with an American one more sympathetic to the Zuni. Shifting to his interviews with contemporary LGBT Natives, Smithers richly documents the emergence of lesbian and gay Native activism since the 1970s. Barbara May Cameron (Hunkpapa Lakota) and Randy Burns (Northern Paiute) receive well-deserved attention as founders, in 1975, of GayAmerican Indians (GAI) in San Francisco. These and other early activists were inspired by feminist and gay rights politics, but also had to contend with racism within those broader movements. The AIDS crisis formed an important backdrop, as Native activists contended with homophobia to develop AIDS education and care tailored to their First Nation communities that were all too eager to consider homosexuality as foreign to Indian Country. Another challenge is overcoming resistance to same-sex marriage in some Indian tribes’ laws (independent of the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2015 decision in favor of same-sex unions). Some tribal leaders insist on the foreignness of same-sex marriage and uphold conservative Christian values instead. Some tribes, such as Navajo Nation, have passed specific laws prohibing same-sex marriage in tribal courts. Aside from thoughtful accounts of Native LBGT+2S activists, Smithers delves into the papers of Harry Hay at the San Francisco Public Library. Hay is widely praised as a labor activist and cofounder, in 1950, of the Mattachine Society, an early “homophile” rights organization. Decades later, Hay and several friends founded the Radical RECLAIMING TWO-SPIRITS Sexuality, Spiritual Renewal and Sovereignty in Native America by Gregory D. Smithers Beacon Press. 368 pages, $28.99 16 The G&LR WeWha, a Zuni Berdache (date unknown). John K. Hillers photograph. Smithsonian Inst.
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