PSY 211 Transcript for Why We Need Gender Fluidity[MUSIC PLAYING] [APPLAUSE]NICHOLAS METCALF: Hello, everybody. My name is Cetanzi, which means Yellow Hawk. I’m an enrolledmember of the Rosebud Sioux tribe. I’m Sicangu Oyate. I’m one of the Burnt Thigh people, and I’m two-spirited.One of the things I want to talk to you today about is being two-spirited. It’s a cultural concept. It’s acultural teaching in how we, sort of, are in the world. Gay and lesbian folks in indigenous tribes havebeen celebrated for many, many centuries, long before America was created. And when America camealong, I was, sort of—I always tell folks this, like, people were living here already, and so it’s important toremember that there were thriving societies here long before America was created. And I’m one ofthem.Two-spiritedness, it’s an embodiment of male and female identity. It’s an indigenous concept. One of thethings I do want to say is that it’s a sacred space. We’Wha is one of our more famous two-spirit folks.Will Roscoe studied her in the late 1800s, an anthropologist.She’s famous because she met Grover Cleveland—President Cleveland and the Zuni man-woman by WillRoscoe. And they did not discover she was a man until later in her life. In order to understand this sort ofconcept of two-spiritedness, I need you to step away from American culture and how you view andidentify gender and sexuality and all those sorts of things in order to look at native culture from thatpoint of view.Because one of the things, as I prepared for the talk today was really difficult, because folks really needto step into an indigenous worldview to understand that everything is sacred and everything has use andthe creator makes no mistake. And from our tribal communities, of the 566 tribal communities in thiscountry, most everybody has a two-spirited person. And in our languages, we actually have folks—in mylanguage, I’m known as awinkte. I’m a third-gendered person.And one of the things for us, we’re story—we’re storytellers. We’re sacred. We teach sacred ceremonieswhere the person that can go between men and women. So we’re, sort of, the bridge builder, and a lotof our creation stories talk about two-spirited people coming to save the world.In 1990, a group of native activists, gay and lesbian activists, coined the term two-spiritedness to combatthe idea that in anthropology we’re known asberdache, which means male prostitutes or slave. And sothese are some images of two-spirited people that I know and love. And so one of the things for us isthat reclamation process of identity, because we exist in multiple worlds in terms of the gay and lesbiancommunity and within our native communities.And I don’t want you to go away today, sort of, thinking that native and native culture that everybodyhas accepted two-spirited people. Because remember we have been colonized and assimilated intoAmerica, and so some of those values that we were taught are lost. And so right now a lot of two-spirited people are actually re-teaching those lessons.
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