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“Beverly Little Thunder remembers her community’s reaction when she first came out on the Standing Rock reservation in the 1980s.
“I was told that women like me were taken to the desert and shot,” she said. “It was devastating.”
In the early 1990s, Little Thunder helped create the term “two-spirit,” an umbrella term for LGBTQ+ Native Americans. She vowed she would not return home “until all of my two-spirit brothers and sisters were welcome.”
Years later, on a cold October night in 2016, Little Thunder sat in car headed south on Highway 1806 from Bismarck, North Dakota. As the car slowed down and pulled up to a security gate at the #NoDAPL resistance camp, the elder rolled down her window and asked a young volunteer where she could find the two-spirit camp. That weekend, Little Thunder and other two-spirit leaders were officially welcomed by the Oceti Sakowin leadership in a grand entry ceremony organized by Lakota activist Candi Brings Plenty.”
– HuffPost, The Healing History Of Two-Spirit, A Term That Gives LGBTQ Natives A Voice.
“As a child, Timothy “Twix” Ward, thought he was “normal.” But his family saw something “special” about him.
Ward is a member of the San Carlos Apache Tribe in the southwestern state, Arizona.
“It wasn’t until I got older that I knew who I was, that I was different from everyone else,” Ward said. Ward identifies not as a man or a woman, but both — and neither: Twix Ward is a two-spirit.
The term was first used in Winnipeg, Canada, during a 1990 inter-tribal conference of Native American/First Nations gays and lesbians. Taken from the Ojibwe language, the term was chosen to serve for all Native Americans people who do not fit into traditional gender roles.
“Two-spirited people are not LGBTQ [Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgendered or Gender Queer], although some two-spirited people are LGBTQ,” said Ward. Ward added that a real two-spirit is someone who understands Native American culture and traditions.”
– LearnEnglish, Native American Two-Spirits Look to Reclaim Lost Heritage.
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Download the 18″x24″ poster (.pdf), Indian Country 52 #26 – Two-Spirit.
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Indian Country 52
Indian Country 52 is a weekly project by David Bernie that uses the medium of posters that promote issues and stories in Indian Country.
Creative Commons License
This work by David Bernie is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. You may download, share, and post the images under the condition that the works are attributed to the artist.
