For example, if "two-spirit" were translated into one of the Athapaskan languages (such as Navajo or Apache) the word could be understood to mean that such a person possesses both a living and a dead spirit-not a desirable situation. In some cultural contexts, translating it to a Native language could even be dangerous. To do so may change the common meaning it has acquired since the early 1990s by self-identified two-spirit Native Americans. The English phrase two-spirit, which originated primarily in urban Native American/First Nations contexts where English serves as a lingua franca to bridge cultural and linguistic differences, is not meant to be translated into Native American languages and terms. In the introduction to their 1997 book Two-Spirit People, a collection of articles on Native American gender and sexuality, editors Sue-Ellen Jacobs, Wesley Thomas, and Sabine Lang write: Two-spirit, however, is not a universally accepted term, and even those who regard it as a valuable addition to the language recognize that it has its limitations. Now, some American Indian gays and lesbians contend, European biases have replaced those old traditions. Some Indians said that, before boarding schools and white missionaries erased many traditional tribal beliefs, “two-spirit” people-gays and lesbians-held places of honor in native cultures. From the Minneapolis Star Tribune of 9 September 1991: By this time Spotted Eagle had her own schedule changed so many times without being consulted that she decided to opt out.īy that fall, two-spirit was appearing in mainstream newspapers as an adjective, albeit in quotation marks. However, in solidarity with Spotted Eagle, the group did not perform. The Two Spirited Dance Troupe, a Native American company, was scheduled to open the Thursday night plenary session. An article in Boston’s Gay Community News of mentions a scheduled performance of that group at the National Lesbian Conference in Atlanta, held 24–28 April 1991, that was cancelled because of organizational and diversity concerns: The earliest written use of two-spirit I have found is in the name of an Indigenous women’s dance troupe. There is testimony as to the coinage of the term at the 1990 Winnipeg conference, but as far as I can tell there are no written proceedings from that meeting. But a new term was needed because the usual English ones, such as gay or lesbian, did not reflect the unique aspects of gender variability in Indigenous cultures. This word and its English variant bardash also have the sense of a male prostitute, and as a result, despite being widely used in scholarly literature, berdache and bardash are considered to be slurs. It was deliberately invented as a replacement for the French word berdache, which had been borrowed into English by anthropologists in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Two-spirit was coined at the Third Annual Inter-Tribal Native American, First Nations, Gay and Lesbian American Conference held in 1990 in Winnipeg, Manitoba. But from its coinage, two-spirit has been used as an umbrella term, including people from across the spectrum of gender variability, including those who in settler-colonist contexts would be labeled as gay, lesbian, bisexual, pansexual, queer, transgender, non-binary, drag queen, or butch. Two-spirit evokes the concept, present in some Indigenous traditions, of a person who presents the affect of both male and female genders, while biologically conforming to either the male or female sex. Such terms include: nádleehé (Navajo), winkte (Lakota), warharmi (Kamia), hwame (Mohave), and lhamana (Zuni). The concept of gender variability is not consistent across Indigenous North American cultures, and different tribes have their own terms with meanings that fit the cultural contexts of each particular group. It is a relatively recent coinage, created as a calque of the Ojibwe niizh manidoowag, but that phrase has no traditional cultural significance or currency in Ojibwe culture. Two-spirit or two-spirited is a term for Indigenous North American people who do not conform to the cis-heterosexual norm of white, settler-colonist society.