Two-Spirit

It is pan-Indigenous, it is deliberately in English, and it is not available to non-Indigenous people.

What Two-Spirit does not do

It does not replace nation-specific words, and this is the most-missed point on the whole subject.

Two-Spirit is an umbrella built in English for organising, for coalition and for talking across nations. It sits above hundreds of distinct traditions, in hundreds of distinct languages, that were never a single thing. The Canadian Museum for Human Rights puts it directly: the term "was not meant to replace specific terms for non-binary sexuality and gender in Indigenous languages", and functions instead "as a contemporary umbrella term that fosters pan-Indigenous interconnections".

Some nation-specific terms, with the meanings the nations themselves give:

• Nádleehí (Diné / Navajo), often rendered "one who is transformed" or "one who changes". Diné tradition recognises more than two gender positions, generally described as four. Hastiin Klah (1867 to 1937), a renowned weaver and ceremonial practitioner, is the best documented nádleehí of the historical record.
• Lhamana (A:shiwi / Zuni). We'wha (1849 to 1896) was a lhamana weaver, potter and cultural ambassador who travelled to Washington in 1886 and is among the most documented gender-diverse Indigenous figures of the nineteenth century.
• Winkte (Lakota), a contraction of winyanktehca. Winkte historically held ceremonial responsibilities including the giving of names. Contemporary usage within Lakota communities varies considerably, and not all winkte identify with Two-Spirit or with pan-Indian organising.
• Niizh manidoowag (Anishinaabemowin) is the phrase Two-Spirit translates, rather than a role name, and it is worth knowing that the English term has an Anishinaabemowin origin.

We deliberately do not publish the long lists of "tribal terms" that circulate online. Most of them are copied from nineteenth and early twentieth-century ethnography written by outsiders, frequently with wrong spellings and wrong meanings, and reproducing them does the opposite of what this page is for. Where a nation has published its own terminology, that is the source to use.

An important note

Two-Spirit is not available to non-Indigenous people. Not as an identity, not as a flattering comparison, not as a way of saying you feel both masculine and feminine. Using it if you are not Indigenous is appropriation, and Two-Spirit organisations have said so consistently since 1990.

It is also not a synonym for gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender or non-binary. Some Two-Spirit people also use those words. Many use Two-Spirit precisely because those words do not describe a role that is spiritual, social and communal as much as it is personal. And some Indigenous LGBTQ+ people do not use Two-Spirit at all, preferring their own nation's term or none: Indigiqueer is used by some, and is a separate word with its own history.

Flag

There is no single official Two-Spirit flag. Several designs circulate, commonly using medicine wheel colours or paired feathers. The absence of one standard is not an oversight. A single flag would imply a single tradition, and there is not one.

Two-Spirit was adopted in 1990 at the third annual Intertribal Native American, First Nations, Gay and Lesbian Conference, held near Beausejour, Manitoba, outside Winnipeg.

Myra Laramee, a Cree educator and elder, brought the term to the gathering. She has described its origin in a dream in which she encountered seven spirits, two of whom named her niizh manidoowag, the Anishinaabemowin phrase meaning two spirits. Albert McLeod, of Nisichawayasihk Cree Nation and Métis descent, proposed and championed its adoption at the conference as a term for the Indigenous LGBTQ+ community, and has spent the three decades since building the organisations and language around it.

The purpose was specific. Delegates wanted a word that came from Indigenous frameworks rather than from the gay and lesbian movement, and they wanted to be rid of berdache, the term anthropologists had used for a century. Berdache reached English through French from a Persian and Arabic root meaning a kept boy, and it was never a word anyone used about themselves. It is now considered a slur, and where you meet it in older ethnography, that is what it is.

In Canada, Two-Spirit is placed first in the acronym 2SLGBTQIA+, acknowledging Indigenous peoples as the first communities on that land to recognise this diversity.

Contested history, honestly

Two claims are often made about precontact Indigenous societies: that gender-diverse people were universally revered, and that every nation had a recognised third gender. Neither survives contact with the evidence.

Traditions varied enormously. Some nations had defined roles with ceremonial standing. Some did not. In some the position was respected; in others it was ordinary; in others again the record is thin or the tradition was destroyed before anyone recorded it. Indigenous scholars, including the contributors to Queer Indigenous Studies, have been sharply critical of both the outsider ethnography that flattened this variation and the well-meaning contemporary retelling that turns it into a single uplifting story.

What is not contested is what colonisation did: missionary schools, residential and boarding schools, criminalisation, and forced assimilation deliberately targeted these roles, and much of what was lost was lost on purpose.

• Myra Laramee, Cree educator and elder, who brought the term niizh manidoowag to the 1990 Winnipeg gathering.
• Albert McLeod, of Nisichawayasihk Cree Nation and Métis descent, who proposed and championed the adoption of Two-Spirit in 1990 and has built organisations around it since.
• We'wha (1849 to 1896), A:shiwi (Zuni) lhamana weaver, potter and cultural ambassador who travelled to Washington in 1886.
• Hastiin Klah (1867 to 1937), Diné weaver and ceremonial practitioner, the best documented nádleehí of the historical record.
• Kent Monkman (born 1965), Cree painter who identifies as Two-Spirit and is known for decolonial art.