Two-spirited Individuals

“Little girl, you have niizhin ojijaak (two spirits) living inside of you,” said Ma-Nee Chacaby’s kokum (grandmother) to Ma-Nee when she was about four or five years of age. At the time Ma-Nee’s kokum told her this, Ma-Nee Chacaby did not know or understand what “two spirits” meant. Her kokum had explained two-spiritedness to her as special individuals in the Native community who encompass both a male and a female spirit inside of them (Chacaby 64). In Anishinaabe communities, two-spirited individuals played important roles and performed various tasks and duties to serve the community, such as adopting children who have lost their parents, “keeping fire, healing people, or leading ceremonies,” (Chacaby 65).

It took Ma-Nee Chacaby many years after that to be able to fully understand and embrace her two-spiritedness and the role it played in her life of being a lesbian, Ojibwa-Cree woman in Thunder Bay, Canada. In her autobiography, A Two-Spirit Journey: The Autobiography of a Lesbian Ojibwa-Cree Elder, one would be able to witness the persistence, strength, and resilience that Chacaby encompassed, as she has had to overcome numerous violent and sexual assaults, abuses, and systemic oppression, while on her journey to finding happiness, freedom, and peace. Her kokum had correctly forewarned her that moving forward, two-spirit individuals would “no longer be understood or valued in the same ways” that they had been in the past, due to recent shifts in social representations and views inside and outside the Native communities (Chacaby 65). This can be seen in the ways in which two-spirited individuals are rarely, if ever, represented in modern media and culture.

It shouldn’t come as a surprise to people that Native and indigenous people are continuingly being silenced and oppressed by white, patriarchal supremacy every day. By incorrectly labeling Native and indigenous people as uneducated, illiterate, poor, wild, and raging alcoholics in modern media and culture, Native and indigenous people are constantly being represented in a negative light. Two-spirited Native individuals, unlike their white counterparts, must constantly carry the extra burden of trying to survive and be heard in spaces within and outside of the Native community that continue marginalize and scrutinize two-spirited/queer people. Social and institutional structures continue to determine the worth of Native and Indigenous people based off of incorrect and stereotypical representations and hence, Native and Indigenous people will often have a difficult time navigating the workforce. Ma-Nee Chacaby’s autobiography shares a time when she was looking to participate and apply for a training program that would allow for her to become an alcoholism counsellor. The employment officer, who would be the one to view and process her application, quickly rejected Ma-Nee Chacaby’s application as he believed that she was “unteachable,” (Chacaby 111). Perhaps Mr. Percy’s quick and discriminatory judgement was influenced by the ways in which Native and Indigenous people have been represented in the media and culture. Due to Ma-Nee Chacaby’s identities of being a Native lesbian woman, Mr. Percy was able to make the incorrect assumption that she was “unteachable” because Native and Indigenous individuals have been historically portrayed as poor and illiterate in the past by individuals of European decent.

In another instance following an interview Ma-Nee had participated in at a public protest, Ma-Nee found herself facing much hostility and being shunned from the Native community that was around her because she was tired of hiding her two-spiritedness identity. When she openly spoke out about the injustices that gay and lesbian groups faced in society, her Native community in turn responded angrily. She wrote, “others were mad because Anishinaabeg already were struggling with prejudice, and they thought that I was making it worse by leading white people to believe that Native people were gay too,” (Chacaby 144). Her own cousins and family members have sought her out to inflict pain and violence onto her, due to her coming out. This illustrates the importance of social portrayal and representation, as it can either draw more positive light and encourage the voicing of marginalized individuals, or it may cause for further silencing and discrimination towards queer and marginalized individuals in Native communities.

While there are few movies and television shows which accurately portray—or even merely include—Indigenous people, there are even fewer which acknowledge two-spirit people. In, especially mainstream, film and television, representations of the intersections of queer and native identities are more often than not lacking. Some films that are specifically focused on Indigenous people, fail to include those with two-spirit identities. Alternatively, in films about queerness, indigeneity, the identities of two-spirit people and the long history of native queerness are often left out. While some films succeed in representation of Indigenous people, they fail to recognize queer natives, and some queer films fail to bring include Indigenous identities.

Mainstream films which have at least one Indigenous character, normally do not portray said character as queer. More popular and somewhat recent films that are centered on indigeneity, like Smoke Signals, fail to include two-spirit characters in their storytelling. Most American queer films and television shows center on white characters, such as Queer as Folk, Transparent and the upcoming mainstream film Love, Simon. This lack of represented intersectionality for queer indigenous people in film show highlights problems they often face in real-world situations, in which they are “forced to choose” between embracing “family and nation in the silence of desire,” or embracing “sexuality at the expense of tribal and familial alliances,” (Queerness of Native American Literature).

Over the past few decades, however, some native filmmakers have promoted inclusion of people with two-spirit identities in media, and even focused entire films on them. Filmmaker Thirza Cutland has made several short films which explore two-spirit identities and gender variance, as well as “challenge static identity constructions by interrogating intersections of Indigeneity, gender [and] sexuality,” such as Boi Oh Boi and 2 Spirit Introductory Special (Sexual Rhetorics 122). One longer film which does this acknowledgement of two-spirit people is a documentary film released in 2009, entitled Two Spirits. The film looks into the life of Fred Martinez, a two-spirit person who “in an earlier era… would have been revered,” but “instead… was murdered.” The film also explores the stories of other two-spirit people, and Indigenous histories which valued and embraced two-spirit identities. Fire Song, a 2015 drama film, follows the story of “a closeted two-spirit teen whose dreams of going to college are derailed by the suicide of his sister,” and shows the struggles of being both native and queer, along with the implications that come with these identities.

With growing awareness and accessibility of filmmaking, new two-spirit “films emerge from growing Two-Spirit cultural movements,” and representations of queer indigeneity become more possible and common (Estrada 106). Mainstream and popular portrayals of two-spirit people and their stories, however, have a continued absence in Hollywood, and two-spirit people continue to struggle to have their identities recognized, in both films which portray Indigenous people and films about queerness. There certainly is hope that future Hollywood films will feature accurately what queer, Indigenous individuals are and how they live, in their truest form and representation, as this may be the first and vital step into bridging back the once believed notion that two-spirited individuals are special and respected for who they are and what they’re able to bring into their communities.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wAELYAcZSwQ

In this video, we can see that there are conflicts within the intersecting identities for some individuals that identify as both Black and Indian. While this video does not necessarily touch on the topic of two-spirited identities and their representation in popular media and culture, we wanted to share this video in hopes it may raise light to the continuing adversity and obstacles that Native and Indigenous individuals must face when it comes to their existence and their burden of constantly having to prove “how Indian” they are to be accepted.

Chacaby, Ma-Nee, and Mary Louisa Plummer. A Two-Spirit Journey: the Autobiography of a Lesbian Ojibwa-Cree Elder. UMP, University of Manitoba Press, 2016.

Estrada, Gabriel S. “Two-Spirit Film Criticism: Fancydancing with Imitates Dog, Desjarlais and

Alexie.” Post Script: Essays in Film and the Humanities, vol. 29, no. 3, 2010, pp.

106–118.

Tatonetti, Lisa. “Affect, Female Masculinity, and the Embodied Space between: Two-Spirit

Traces in Thirza Cuthand’s Experimental Film.” Sexual Rhetorics: Methods, Identities,

Publics, Taylor and Francis, 2016, pp. 121–133.

Tatonetti, Lisa. “Forced to Choose: Queer Indigeneity in Film.” The Queerness of Native

American Literature, University of Minnesota Press, 2014.