One who changes - nádleeh
There is a word in my novel that I had no right to use.
It appears five times in the story, and again at the back of the book, in a paragraph where I admit I took it. This essay is the longer version of that admission, because I want its use to be warranted by the people who own it. The true history also turned out to be better than anything I could have invented.
The word is two-spirit.
In The Change I presented it as both ancient and Amazonian. It is neither. It is thirty-six years old and it comes from Manitoba. There was no word I could find in the language of the tribes I wrote about for the thing I needed to describe, and the word that fit perfectly belonged to people four thousand miles north.
In the summer of 1990, Indigenous people from across North America gathered at a wilderness site on the Brokenhead River, outside Winnipeg, for the third of their annual gatherings.¹ A Cree woman named Myra Laramee arrived carrying a dream. In the history kept by the Canadian Museum for Human Rights, she had dreamed of seven spirits, shifting between male and female forms, and two of them had told her what she was: niizh manidoowag.² The phrase is Anishinaabemowin, and it means, simply, two spirits.³ Laramee brought it to the gathering, the people there argued it out, and they took it up.⁴ Her own account of it is one sentence long: Two-Spirit came to us in a dream for our people and community, and I was merely the vessel.⁴
They took it up in order to throw something else away.
The word they were replacing was berdache, and its history explains why the new one mattered. Berdache entered English in 1806, by way of the French bardache, from a southern Italian dialect word before that, and before that the Arabic bardaj, a slave, and behind that the Persian bardag, a prisoner.⁵ In French and Italian it meant a boy kept for sex. Europeans used it like a blanket across Indigenous peoples, and anthropologists then kept it in the literature for the better part of two centuries, writing it into the record as though it were a finding rather than what it was, which was an insult.⁶ Follow the experts’ word for these people far enough down and it means captive.
History does this often, and once you see it you cannot stop seeing it. The English word Welsh comes from the Old English wealh, which the Anglo-Saxons used for the Britons and, more generally, for foreigners. The Welsh word for the Welsh is Cymry, which comes from a Brittonic root meaning fellow countrymen.⁷ Same people. Two names. One of them says stranger and the other says kin, and which one you grow up hearing is decided entirely by who is doing the talking.
So what happened in Manitoba in 1990 was not primarily a statement about gender. It was a statement about a name. A people took the pen out of the hand of the person who had been describing them using a derogatory terms, and wrote a different word, and the word they chose had come to a woman in a dream. That is the part that stayed with me, and the visions of spirits in my novel came directly out of reading about it.
Now the part that gets misused, which is most of it.
It is not a synonym for LGBTQ. It is not a decorative older word for gay, or for transgender. It describes a braid of gender, sexuality, spiritual identity and social role inside a specific community, and the braid does not come apart cleanly into Western categories.⁸
It is not available to everyone. Two-spirit belongs to Indigenous people of North America, and its adoption by non-Native people is widely regarded within those communities as appropriation.⁹ I want to be exact, because I am not Indigenous. I used the word respectfully, in a novel, to describe a fictional indigenous people. I did not claim it.
And, it is not one tradition. This both surprised and then didn’t. There is a comfortable story in circulation in which every Native nation honored a third gender until Europeans arrived and ruined it. Nations differed, and where such roles did exist they had their own words in their own languages: the Lakota winkte, a contraction of winyanktehca, to be as a woman;¹⁰ the Diné nádleeh. Those words are not translations of each other and none of them is a translation of two-spirit.
And it is not tidily a third gender. Some people use it that way. Others reject the framing hard, on the grounds that counting to three still concedes the premise that people come in countable kinds.¹² The Diné writer charlie amáyá scott has argued that rendering these identities in English at all bends them toward a settler understanding of gender they were never shaped by.¹³
The one place the word sits at the very front is Canada’s official acronym, 2SLGBTQI+, and the government’s own explanation of why is the cleanest sentence anyone has written on the subject: the 2S at the front recognizes Two-Spirit people as the first 2SLGBTQI+ communities.¹⁴
So why did I use it?
The people in my book live on the upper Ucayali, in eastern Peru, more than four thousand miles from Manitoba. They would not have used this word. I looked for one from their part of the world and found nothing I could use that had a similar meaning.
The alternative was to invent one, and I believe inventing one would have been the worse sin. A made-up word for a made-up tribe would have quietly let me claim the idea was mine. It is not mine. Borrowing at least leaves a trail back to the people it belongs to, which is the whole reason the acknowledgements name the gathering, the dream and the woman who brought it. If a reader goes looking, they will find Myra Laramee. They will not find me.
Here is what the word is doing in the story.
A young man on the Ucayali wakes in the dark having changed in the night, and his first thought is not horror. It is that this is the two-spirit, the woman who had always lived inside him, stepping out to teach him something. His village does not cast her out. It reveres her. She becomes the Chosen One, and people walk nine days to see her.
Half a world away, a senator wakes the same way. Two months earlier he had stood in firelight and roared with a crowd as people were dragged to the stake for exactly this. His wife opens the door, looks directly at him, and runs through the house screaming his name in grief as if he were dead; which to her, he was.
The same change, five years apart. Two very different views.
And the reverence turns out to be its own kind of cage. The Chosen One cannot laugh out loud, is never left alone, cannot say a sentence that will not be replayed for alternate meaning. The title, as she comes to understand it, is not a weight that she must carry but a room she cannot leave. One village made a god of her. One nation, on the far side of the world, would have made a heretic of her. Neither of them would have asked her what she was.
That is the argument. Persecution and reverence look like opposites, and in every way that matters to the person standing there they are the same move: the category is treated as the whole of the human being. Fluidity is not a third position between those two. It is the refusal to answer the question they are both asking.
There is one more thing, and I have not been able to put it down since I found it, because it is what named the book.
The Diné word, nádleeh, is rendered by Diné writers as one who changes.¹³
References
Canadian Museum for Human Rights. “What is Two-Spirit? Part One: Origins.” https://humanrights.ca/story/what-two-spirit-part-one-origins. The gathering was held at a wilderness site near Beausejour, Manitoba, on the Brokenhead River, roughly 50 km northeast of Winnipeg. Sources differ on the event’s formal name; no written proceedings survive.
Canadian Museum for Human Rights, as above. Note that per CMHR the dream came to Laramee earlier, on the grounds of the Manitoba legislature during a child-welfare protest, and was shared at the 1990 gathering; other accounts place the vision at the gathering itself.
Smithsonian, National Museum of the American Indian. “LGBTQIA Pride and Two-Spirit People.” 2021. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/blogs/national-museum-american-indian/2021/06/23/lgbtqia-pride-and-two-spirit-people/
Two Spirit Journal (Harlan Pruden). https://twospiritjournal.com/?p=973. Albert McLeod, Métis of Nisichawayasihk Cree Nation, co-organized the gathering and became the movement’s leading advocate; the term itself is credited to Laramee. See also Broadview, “Albert McLeod.” https://broadview.org/two-spirit-albert-mcleod/
Merriam-Webster, “berdache.” https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/berdache
The Canadian Encyclopedia, “Two-Spirit.” https://www.thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/article/two-spirit
Word Histories, “Origin and history of the names ‘Wales’ and ‘Cymru’.” https://wordhistories.net/2016/07/28/wales-cymru/
Smithsonian NMAI, as above. See also Joey Criddle (Jicarilla Apache), quoted in The New York Times: “The elders will tell you the difference between a gay Indian and a Two-Spirit.”
Michelle Cameron (Carrier First Nations), “Two-Spirited Aboriginal People: Continuing Cultural Appropriation by Non-Aboriginal Society,” Canadian Woman Studies, 2005. See also Human Rights Campaign, “Understanding Native LGBTQ Identities.” https://www.hrc.org/resources/understanding-native-lgbtq-identities
Beatrice Medicine (Lakota), “Directions in Gender Research in American Indian Societies,” 2002.
Jacqueline Keeler, “’Two Spirit’ Tradition Far From Ubiquitous Among Tribes,” Rewire News Group, October 13, 2016. https://rewirenewsgroup.com/2016/10/13/two-spirit-tradition-far-ubiquitous-among-tribes/
TJ Cuthand (Plains Cree): “Some LGBTQ Indigenous people don’t feel comfortable with two-spirit because it implies dual gender stuff.” See also CBC, “Beyond two-spirit: Indigenous people look to revive traditional LGBTQ terms.” https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/saskatchewan/indigenous-lgbtq-words-1.6953445
charlie amáyá scott (Diné), “An Ever Changing One: ‘Two Spirit’ Limitations,” Diné Aesthetics. https://dineaesthetics.com/an-ever-changing-one/
Government of Canada, Women and Gender Equality Canada, “What is 2SLGBTQI+?” https://www.canada.ca/en/women-gender-equality/free-to-be-me/what-is-2slgbtqi-plus.html