How San Francisco’s Two-Spirit Powwow Reclaimed an Indigenous Legacy

Editor’s note: This story is part of ‘Trans Bay: A History of San Francisco’s Gender-Diverse Community.’ From June 9–19, we’re publishing stories about transgender artists and activists who shaped culture from the 1890s to today.

Content warning: This piece contains descriptions of colonial violence that may be distressing for readers.

Every year, the Bay Area American Indian Two-Spirit Powwow draws thousands of people to San Francisco, from the Shoshone-Bannock Tribes of Idaho to the Standing Rock Band of North Dakota. Adorned in colorful jingle dresses, ornate beadwork and other regalia, attendees come together to connect with each other and their heritage.

Bay Area American Indian Two-Spirits (BAAITS) is a Mission District group that puts on the gathering. Since the first edition in 2012, the Two-Spirit Powwow has exploded into the largest Indigiqueer event in the U.S., one that allows Indigenous folks the space to reclaim and redefine what it means to be Two-Spirit.

The term “Two-Spirit” emerged in the ’90s as a way for queer Indigenous people to express their gender identities, beyond the Western binary of man or woman. Before colonization, different Native cultures throughout the Americas recognized third-gender and gender-variant people whose social and ceremonial roles varied from tribe to tribe.

Today, there is no one singular definition of what it means to identify as Two-Spirit. “When you say Two-Spirit, you know the person’s Indigenous, and you know they have some kind of spiritual practice,” says J Miko Thomas, a.k.a. Landa Lakes, who created the Two-Spirit Powwow with Ruth Villaseñor.

“How we think about gender is really in the middle,” explains Roger Kuhn, a Two-Spirit Poarch Creek psychotherapist who attends the powwow every year. Rather than a binary, or even a gender spectrum with “male” on one end and “female” on the other, “the difference would be if you took that straight line and bent it until those opposing forces were together, a circle.”

“You can go up, down, left, right, diagonal, around the circumference,” Kuhn adds, “as opposed to residing on just this binary of man, woman.”

At one point, Indigenous notions of gender were nearly lost to history as European colonizers wiped out language and culture related to third-gender and gender-variant people. In California, what little documented history remains was inaccurately written by Spanish missionaries. Now, thanks to BAAITS and other like-minded organizations, today’s Two-Spirit and Indigiqueer people are working to decolonize gender and reclaim their ancestors’ legacies.

“Because we don’t have that many elders in the Two-Spirit world,” says Kuhn, “suddenly I felt like I was carrying on this legacy of those that came before me.”

A colonial history of violence and forced assimilation

Little would be known about gender diversity in California if it weren’t for Deborah Miranda, a member of the Ohlone-Costanoan Esselen Nation and a professor at Washington and Lee University. For her 2010 paper “Extermination of the Joyas,” originally published in GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, Miranda read and translated archival sources from Spanish missions, including correspondence, newspapers, baptismal and death records and testimonies of missionized Indigenous people.

What Miranda discovered after translating the written records of the Spanish was horrific. Third-gender people, she wrote, weren’t just victims of what she described as “passive” tactics of genocide like starvation and disease, but victims of calculated, intentional means of extermination.

The Spanish also forced those with gender variance to assimilate by wearing foreign clothing and taking on new names, stripping them of their status and identity in their community. All the while, the Spanish soldiers and priests continuously referred to those with gender variance as “joyas.” (Spanish for “jewels.”)

“It seems doubtful that the Spaniards would retain a beautiful name like ‘jewel’ to describe what they saw as the lowest, most bestial segment of the Indian community,” Miranda wrote, “unless it was meant as a kind of sarcasm to enact a sense of power and superiority over the third-gendered people.”

“Joyas” was likely not meant to be understood as a complimentary term, but Miranda highlighted that it did genuinely reflect the way pre-contact Indigenous Californians regarded their gender-variant community members. Despite attempts to fully eradicate them and their culture, Miranda wrote, neither the spirit nor spiritual needs of the Indigenous community could be extinguished. Gender-variant Indigenous Californians, she argued, have re-emerged from the attempted gendercide through contemporary Two-Spirit identity.

Two-Spirit identity today

Because there isn’t a rigid definition or set way to be Two-Spirit, today’s Two-Spirit people are working both as a community and as individuals to define the identity for themselves.

“Is Two-Spirit a sacred role? Is Two-Spirit a traditional role?” asks Kuhn, the psychotherapist. “No one has a concrete definition.”

“This name, Two-Spirit,” wrote Miranda, “allows the reunion of spiritual and sexual roles into a whole and undivided gender role, a role still needed in human society.” For her, the name Two-Spirit is also a way to recognize one another and remind each other of the cultural and historical responsibility Two-Spirit people bear.

“We are still learning what this means,” she wrote. “There has been no one to teach us but ourselves, our research, our stories, and our hearts.”

Even the word “Two-Spirit” itself is fairly young, only formally emerging for the first time 35 years ago at an intertribal conference in Winnipeg, Canada. Both Thomas and Kuhn say its history stems from the desire to find an alternative word to “berdache,” an ill-fitting term cultural anthropologists tended to use in the 1980s.

Thomas says choosing an English word instead of an Indigenous one was also intentional. “It was coined to be an English word so that it didn’t feel like it was taking too much from a specific culture,” they say.

For example, Kuhn says in Muscogee (Creek) culture, they use the word “ennvrkvpv” (pronounced “in-NUTH-gah-buh”) to describe someone who is Two-Spirit; it’s their word for “Wednesday” or “middle of the week.” Zuni culture uses the word “Lhamana.” Culture to culture, some of these identities also come with unique social, cultural and ceremonial roles, like wearing clothing of the “opposite” sex, and performing tasks or fulfilling roles of the “opposite” gender.

It’s not easy to convey what exactly the “opposite” sex and gender is in this context, because using the English language to name and define how multifaceted and complex Two-Spirit identity is can be limiting. For that reason, some Indigenous people have mixed reactions to using English as the unifying language.

“Folks will say, ‘but, that’s an English word,’” Kuhn says. “It’s like, well yeah! Because you forced us to speak English.”

Others may wonder why the Western concept of trans identity doesn’t equate with Two-Spirit identity. Although gender variance does connect with aspects of trans experience, Two-Spirit identity is wholly unique in the way it defies Western concepts of gender, gender expression and sexual orientation.

Of course, adds Kuhn, there are Indigenous people who don’t agree with gender variance or support LGBTQ+ folks. Kuhn sees this as part of the legacy of colonization. “The assimilation tools worked,” Kuhn says.

For Kuhn, attending the BAAITS Two-Spirit Powwow is a step towards undoing that damage. He’s been to all but one of the powwows since their inception, and one year was even able to bring his mother along. The powwow has changed over time, but only to become more inclusive. Its dance categories, for example, are de-gendered so people can dance whichever category they feel fits them best.

“It’s a place where you can let go of this colonial haunting that we are all surviving under right now,” Kuhn says. “It’s a healing place.”