Faun Harjo felt clammy and hot under his regalia. The June air was thick with dust and smoke from the wildfires that were then raging across the West Coast; as the sun filtered through the ash, the sky glared neon pink with dark gray streaks. Internally, he was panicking as prepared to dance Southern Traditional — a powwow style he had never performed publicly — for a crowd at the 2021 Montana Two-Spirit gathering.
“Everything's on fire around us, and everything looks very alien,” he laughs, recalling the day. “Didn't make it particularly easier to not be scared.”
He had never danced powwow, let alone worn men’s regalia while doing so, but today he was going to make his auntie proud. Of course, there’s added pressure when your auntie is Landa Lakes, co-founder of the Bay Area American Indian Two-Spirits (BAAITS), one of the largest Two-Spirit organizations in the country. With his heart beating out of his chest and blood roaring in his ears, Harjo adjusted the porcupine roach atop his head and stepped forward.
Prior to this weekend, the closest Harjo had gotten to performing at a powwow was shaking shells and wearing a Chickasaw dress as a baby, a role typically reserved for girls and women. Like everyone else at the 2021 gathering, however, Harjo, a member of the Muscogee (Creek) and Chickasaw nations, is Two-Spirit, an umbrella term popularized in the ‘90s by Native activists to describe gender identities that don't don't conform to a Western binary across the Indigenous nations of Turtle Island and beyond.
Rather than simply describing Indigenous people who are queer, Two-Spirit specifically refers to gender variant people who hold sacred positions within their communities. And while being Two-Spirit can mean different things to different people, Harjo says it’s about mentorship, kinship, and the role you play in your community. “You can be Native and be gay or lesbian and not be Two-Spirit,” Harjo says. “Being Two-Spirit is in a separate category. It’s a gender role; it's passing along knowledge; it's learning from your elders to continue to pass on that knowledge."
For some Two-Spirit people, storytelling and dance are their community roles; for others, it’s medicine and healing; for Harjo and his auntie, it’s mentorship. “She took me under her wing and was like, ‘you're okay, you're safe, you're normal,” he tells Them. “In fact, you're not just normal. You're revered.’”
Prior to European invasion, many Indigenous nations venerated Two-Spirit people, as they often held sacred roles in healing, spiritual, and ceremonial traditions in their communities. Unfortunately, as a result of colonization, forced assimilation, and erasure of Two-Spirit and Indigiqueer people at the hands of the government, many communities have lost that knowledge. Indian boarding schools, which sought to strip Native children of their cultural traditions and traumatized generations of youth, played an especially sinister role in burying these customs by enforcing Christian views of gender and sexuality on students. As tribal leadership in different Nations were forced to adopt Christianity and its attendant practices through both federal policies and societal pressure, Two-Spirit people were erased from many of their cultures.
When it comes to gender and sexuality roles, “a lot of what we understand to be traditional comes from assimilation through the boarding schools, which is really unfortunate,” Harjo explains.
As a result, Two-Spirit and Indigiqueer people aren’t always welcome in community spaces like powwows today, whether through dance rules that subtly exclude same-sex couples or explicit harrasment. It’s this exclusion that drives the goal of community spaces like the Montana Two-Spirit Gathering and BAAITS Powwow: to remind people that Two-Spirit people belong in Native spaces and hold sacred roles within them.
Rediscovering Indigiqueer Histories
Harjo’s family has been in Oklahoma since the 1830s, when they were forcibly relocated by the U.S. government from their tribal lands in the Southeast. He grew up in a rural community on Muscogee (Creek) Nation that Harjo describes as identical to the one portrayed on Sterlin Harjo and Taika Waititi’s Reservation Dogs, down to the show’s tribal housing developments. Just like the FX series depicts, the breadth of Native experience found there is vast. While some people grow up knowing cultural practices like their mother tongue, beading, and powwow dancing, many don’t have that privilege — including Harjo. “It's pretty lucky to be able to grow up with that knowledge and for it to be shared to you, but my parents didn't do that,” Harjo says.
It was his auntie, Two-Spirit drag performer and activist Landa Lakes, who first brought him to powwows, taught him the Chickasaw creation story, and introduced him to cultural traditions in his teens, including the concept of Two-Spirit identity. Harjo was 15 when he came out as queer to his auntie and uncle, who both told him they were drag performers in response. Soon after, Lakes took him to his first Two-Spirit gathering, where he encountered Two-Spirit people of all gender presentations and experiences adorned in the regalia of their choosing, including his auntie. “That was the first time I saw her in women's regalia,” he recalls dreamily. He spent the day in awe of the Two-Spirit power surrounding him at the gathering.
While he didn’t fully understand the wide array of Two-Spirit experience his auntie was trying to show him at the time, Harjo was amazed to see the variety of Indigenous gender variance around him. “I thought it was really cool, but I was shocked,” Harjo says. “I was like, ‘This is allowed? This is okay? This is something that people aren't going to get reprimanded for?’”
Nearly 16 years later, Harjo (now 31) has only continued to learn from his auntie. “I try not to take it for granted,” Harjo says. “I have my auntie directly teaching me everything about our people or language or family, and doing it from a Two-Spirit person to another Two-Spirit person.” Since moving to San Francisco two years ago, Landa has entrusted Harjo with more responsibilities as a BAAITS board member, where he has grown to mentor other Two-Spirit people looking for community.
Unfortunately, not all Two-Spirit and Indigiqueer youth have relatives who understand or accept their experience. Many face familial and community rejection, as well as increased rates of houselessness, self-harm, and substance abuse, crises that are already prevalent in some Indigenous communities due to centuries of colonial violence and disenfranchisement. Anthony Khangi Thanka, an Oglala Lakota, Sicangu Lakota, and Northern Cheyenne Two-Spirit activist and artist, tells Them that growing up Two-Spirit on the Pine Ridge Reservation — one of the poorest counties in the U.S. — was far from easy.
“A big part of what our Two-Spirit communities face is substance abuse,” Thanka says. “I could tell you firsthand that. I'm a recovering addict, and my culture was the thing that grounded me and the thing that saved me. But not everybody makes it through. There's so many Two-Spirit people I know in my community that are my age and on hard drugs, and then they're just gone.”
Thanka is not alone. According to the NCAI Policy Research Center, 56% of trans, gender non-conforming, and Two-Spirit Indigenous youth have attempted suicide at least once. At least 26% of all Two-Spirit and Indigiqueer youth were forced out of their house after coming out. Across the board, LGBTQ+ Native adults also face the highest unemployment rate (26.5%) and food insecurity rate (55%) of any ethnic group.
While these disparities are sometimes attributed to homophobia and transphobia within Indigenous communities, it’s important to consider deeper historical context. Dr. Alán Pelaez López, a queer Zapotec migrant, writer, and artist originally from Oaxaca, explains it often isn’t homophobia or transphobia at the root of the issues impacting Indigiqueer and Two-Spirit people; it’s a response to centuries of settler colonization.
From roughly 1887 to 1935, during what historians call the Assimilation and Allotment Era, the U.S. government set out to “re-socialize” Indigenous people by stripping them of their traditions and introducing them to Anglo-American ways of life. This involved the Bureau of Indian Affairs abducting Indigenous children and “re-educating” them at Indian boarding schools, where many were deeply traumatized and even killed. According to Pelaez López, a lesser known aspect of this era was the use of insane asylums to control Indigenous adults who practiced their traditions, especially Two-Spirit and Indigiqueer people. After decades of surveillance and punishment from the U.S. government, Indigenous people were offered citizenship — but only if they practiced all aspects of Anglo-American life, including compulsory heterosexuality. It’s this conditioning and trauma that lingers.
“It's not necessarily homophobia, or transphobia, or a denial of Two-Spirit people that is being experienced,” Pelaez López says. “It's actually settler colonialism working as it is supposed to work in the exclusion of these communities.”
The scars of the Assimilation and Allotment Era can still be felt today, from Two-Spirit people not being able to dance powwow in certain spaces to facing heightened rates of violence. For Thanka, the church and its teachings on Two-Spirit and Indigiqueer people is the specter that hangs over their community. “I feel like the biggest challenge Two-Spirit youth face is the church, and the way our community just allows the church and people associated with the church to disrespect us and disregard us as human beings,” Thanka says.
Even for families with Two-Spirit members, the idea that queerness and whiteness are tied is pervasive. Harjo recalls that his father’s side of the family was initially skeptical of the Two-Spirit traditions his auntie introduced him to. “They didn't believe that I was learning about traditional roles or history from my auntie,” Harjo says. “They felt like queerness itself was inherently white, and that this was a very revisionist history perspective that my auntie was bringing me into.”
This is what makes spaces of Two-Spirit reclamation, like BAAITS and the Montana Two-Spirit gathering, life-saving.
Pushing Back and Reclaiming Space
Thanka was actually in the crowd of Two-Spirit community members at the 2021 Montana Two-Spirit Gathering, looking on as Harjo stepped forward to dance. Harjo says his mind went blank as he followed the beat, but after reviewing photos of the event, he could tell just how nervous he was. “It was so far out of my comfort zone that I was just scared,” Harjo says. Fortunately, he was surrounded by a supportive crowd of other Two-Spirit people ready to cheer him on.
“I'm really lucky to have that space to be able to do that, because it was the perfect place to be. I grew up knowing these people. They'd never seen me dance Powwow before, and they're all Two-Spirit people. If I was going to start dancing anywhere, it definitely wasn't going to be a powwow without Two-Spirit people.”
Thanka says the importance and power of these spaces goes beyond individual gatherings, pointing to the kinship and mentorship fostered among attendees. Two-Spirit-centered spaces are inspiring more Indigiqueer people to seize their power and create their own community gatherings, like a Two-Spirit Camp that Thanka attended last year on the Pine Ridge Reservation.
“Being surrounded by all of these other Indigenous people who just had the most beautiful regalia on — and I got to have my regalia on — we just got to exist with each other,” Thanka recalls. “The fact that I got to experience things there that I never thought I would get to experience in a heterosexual world was very emotional and empowering.”
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The U.S. government and colonization attempted to eradicate Two-Spirit people, but these gatherings prove that they are here and reclaiming their power in droves. BAAITS celebrated hosting their 12th annual international powwow last February, with guests hailing from as far as Abya Yala (Latin America). The Montana Two-Spirit Society held their 26th gathering this June. Thanka is planning on establishing their own Two-Spirit powwow closer to home in South Dakota. Two-Spirit and Indigiqueer kinship lies at the root of them all.
Just a year after the first time he danced powwow, Harjo returned to the Montana Two-Spirit Gathering. This time, he was adorned with regalia he beaded by hand, passing along his old regalia to usher another Two-Spirit friend into the space.
“As my auntie brought me in and taught me, I've been able to bring more people in — whether it's our family, or friends that are also indigenous and Two-Spirit who want to connect to those spaces,” Harjo says. “It really is like going home. It's always like going home.”
This story is part of a collaboration with the Transgender Law Center highlighting systemic violence and barriers that Indigenous trans, Two-Spirit, and gender-variant Pasifika people face — and the movements to overcome them. Read more here.