Gender in Native American societies pre-European colonization was complex. It was conceived in various forms that expanded beyond the gender binary that modern, mainstream society has constructed and normalized. In Men as Women, Women as Men: Changing Gender in Native American Cultures, Sabine Lang centers their discussion of gender role change in North American Native Societies on what are more traditionally known as ‘berdaches’ or ‘Two-Spirit’ people. Lang breaks down the many ways that the designation ‘berdache’ changed overtime to refer to different phenomena including: transvestism, effeminacy, the execution of female tasks and activities, entering into homosexual relationships, and intersexuality (7).There have been many attempts to allocate a specific definition to berdache, however definitions vary significantly among the literature on berdaches. The foundation of one of the significant definitions Lang presents is the concept of “gender-mixing” (7), which Lang discusses as comprehending a combination of masculine and feminine gender statuses as opposed to a solid switch from one gender to another. This combination is not rigid, as it encapsulates a spectrum from quasi-masculine to quasi-feminine role, makeup, and organization (Lang 7).
In “The ‘Berdache’/’Two-Spirit’: A Comparison of Anthropological and Native Constructions of Gendered Identities Among the Northern Athapaskans”, Goulet also examines the definitions of the ‘berdache’ or ‘Two-Spirit.’ Despite the variation among definitions, the scholars that Goulet cites recognize two means thought to have been used to achieve the status of berdache. In many tribes, a child who had a tendency to associate with people of another gender and to participate in the activities of that other gender would become progressively socialized and would dress as a person of that gender. Also, in some tribes, males became a berdache through early adolescent vision quest (Goulet 685). Goulet describes these two methods of gaining the status of ‘berdache’ as not mutually exclusive. Among the Kaska people, Callender and Kochems cite a third mode of recruitment to the ‘berdache’ status. They claim that this mode occurred when parents were unable to have a son so instead chose a daughter to be ‘like a man’ and hunt for the family later in their lives.
The tribe that Goulet focuses on in his article in analyzing berdache is the Northern Athapaskan. Prior to Callander and Kochems’ assertion that there was a widespread presence of ‘berdaches’ among the Northern Athapaskens, one scholar, Jacobs, found no mention of the berdache among the population in her review of the literature. The evidence that Callander and Kochems employ for their assertion comes from the work of Honigmann. Honigmann reported that sometimes, in the past, Kaska parents would select a girl to be ‘like a man.’ He refers to this practice in a discussion of homosexuality in Kaska culture. “Sometimes if a couple had too many female children and desired a son to hunt for them in later years, they selected a daughter to be ‘like a man’. When she was about five years old the parents tied the dried ovaries of a bear to her inner belt. She wore this amulet for the rest of her life in order to avoid conception. The girl was raised as a boy…” (Lang 687). It is debated as to whether Kaska girls being raised as boys actually means they occupied the status of berdache, but with the berdache status being complex and fluid, this example gives insight into the intricacies of gender in Native Societies pre-colonization.
Gender in Native Societies 