Dr....Rocal only

AMERICAN INDIAN. CULTURE AAD RESEARCHJOURNAL 30:2 (2006) 1-15

Unrestricted Territory: Gender, Two

Spirits, and Louise Erdrich's The Last

Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse

DEIRDRE KEENAN

Borders are set up to define the places that are safe and unsafe, to distinguish

us from them. A border is a dividing line, a narrow strip along a steep edge.

A borderland is a vague and undetermined place created by the emotional

residue of an unnatural boundary.... The prohibited and forbidden are its

inhabitants.

-Gloria Anzaldua, Borderlands: The New Mestiza

One night, in Louise Erdrich's novel, The Last Report on the Miracles at Little

No Horse, the main character, Father Damien Modeste, now more than one

hundred years old, begins one of his final letters to the pope, this time to

reveal the secret of his identity. In it, he recalls the flood that swept Agnes

DeWitt away from her deceased lover's farm and the idea that carried her

north to the reservation at Little No Horse, confessing, "I now believe in that

river I drowned in spirit, but revived. I lost an old life and gained a new." 1

Even before the flood, Agnes had contemplated the "absurd fantasy" of a

new missionary life after meeting the other priest-the first Father Damien

Modeste-who was traveling to his resented assignment to "missionize the

Indians," where, he says, "the devil works with shrewd persistence" and God

must enter "the dark mind of the savage." 2 When she emerges from the flood

to find the priest's dead body caught in a branch, Agnes "already knew." 3 She

puts on the priest's clothes, cuts her hair with a pocketknife, buries the body

with her shorn hair ("the keeper of her old life"), and "begins to walk north

into the land of the Ojibwe." 4 For the next eighty years, Father Damien marks

the day of his arrival on the reservation as the beginning of "the great lie that

Deirdre Keenan is an associate professor of English at Carroll College in Waukesha,

Wisconsin. She has written on ethical and practical issues of non-Native work

in American Studies and is currently working on the overlapping stories of the

Anishinaabeg and Irish immigrants in Michigan.

I AMERICAN INDIAN CULTURE AND RESEARCH JOURNAL

was her life, the true lie ...the most sincere lie a person could ever tell." 5

That "true lie" is an identity that transgresses the boundaries of mainstream

gender norms, an identity that is accepted and honored in the unrestricted

territory of the Ojibwe culture.

Mainstream culture, however, is a restricted territory for those who do not

adhere to its strictly constructed sex-gender norms. In the United States (and

throughout the world), women and men cross sex-gender borders in danger

and secrecy, often at personal and professional risk, and always against the sanc-

tion of mainstream society. 6 Even in lesbian and gay communities, transgender

people are often reluctantly accepted or overtly excluded. 7 Yet it is estimated

that as many as one in five hundred people experience intense transgender

feelings and ultimately cross the border of sex-gender norms through cross-

dressing, hormone treatment, and sex reassignment surgery (SRS).8-9 Many

more with transgender feelings remain within a restricted territory monitored

by mainstream society and unable to cross its constructed boundaries into

sex-gender identity freedom. My purpose here is to examine Louise Erdrich's

representation of Father Damien in The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No

Horse in the context of mainstream attitudes about transgender identities and

Native American gender systems. In this context, Erdrich's novel provides a

theory and practice of gender identity formation that challenges mainstream

concepts and the intolerance that rises from those concepts.

Transgender is an inclusive term for any individuals who transgress socially

constructed gender "norms" or transgress sex identities assigned at birth.' 0

Because of their perceived transgression, transgender people face difficult choices in the United States. SRS costs tens of thousands of dollars and is not

covered by health insurance.II Those who seek counseling can be diagnosed

with Gender Identity Disorder (GID) according to the American Psychiatric

Association (APA), a label of "abnormality" that can severely limit access to

employment and future health care coverage.1 2 Notably, the APA identifies

the prevalence of GID as only one in thirty thousand, a blatant underesti-

mate that conceals the reality of transgender prevalence.' 3 According to the

American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), only three states have explicit anti-

discrimination laws that protect transgender individuals.1 4 Only seven states

include the transgender population in hate crimes.1 5 Antidiscrimination

employment laws on the basis of disability exclude transgender, despite its

official identification as a disorder because it is "not a protected disability."' 6

And only recently have some courts begun to interpret state laws against sex

discrimination as including transgender people.1 7 Events such as local pride

celebrations create temporary sites of liberation and limited protection for transgender people, and neighborhoods in some large urban areas provide

territories for lesbians, gays, bisexuals, and transgender people (LGBT),

although these borderlands are vulnerable to acts of harassment and violence

against the LGBT population.

The ultimate foundation of 'this restricted territory for transgender

people is the Western-constructed sex-gender dichotomy, which is based on an assumption of only two sexes assigned at birth on the basis of the body

with commensurate gender expectations. The hegemony of this constructed

2 dichotomy is so powerfully reinforced by cultural institutions of law, science,

religion, education, and social practice that few in mainstream culture are

willing to or capable of imagining a multiple sex-gender system that refuses

to see anyone as "deviant."

The sad thing about this refusal to recognize the constructed nature of the

Western sex-gender dichotomy is that it suppressed older traditions among

many Native American, First Nation, and indigenous cultures that recog-

nized, accepted, and even honored multiple gender identities. The earliest

European colonizers observed those Native traditions, and anthropologists

documented individuals they identified as Berdaches and Amazons-terms

that many Native Americans now regard as "inappropriate and insulting." 18

Yet colonial culture incorporated none of this Native knowledge into main-

stream concepts of sex, gender, sexuality, or community.

Despite pervasive suppression by mainstream culture, many American

Indian people and groups have maintained and recuperated their variant sex-

gender traditions. Many tribes have alternative gender categories and terms in

their own languages. In Changing Ones: Third and Fourth Genders in Native North

America, Will Roscoe identifies more than eighty North American groups

with documented cases that span a 450-year period since colonization. 19Jim

Elledge has identified more than one hundred alternative sex-gender myths

among Native American groups. 20 Berdache and the less common feminized

term, Amazon, have been replaced by the pan-Native American term, Two

Spirit, established by Native Americans. 21 According to Anguksuar, a Yup'ik

Indian activist and artist, the term was officially adopted in 1990, at the third

annual spiritual gathering of gay and lesbian Native people in Winnipeg,

Canada. 22 As Anguksuar explains, the term in no way determines "genital

activity"; Two Spirit determines "the qualities that define a person's social role

and spiritual gifts." 23 According to Beverly Little Thunder (Standing Rock

Lakota), Two Spirit is a term of honor that resists the Western "label of desig-

nated other." 24 It also represents variant gender traditions that include third

and fourth, and perhaps fifth and sixth, gender categories.

Let me briefly acknowledge the problem of language in talking about

these traditions. As Alice Kehoe points out, the term Two Spirit is not adequate

in its translation because of its unintended but implied dichotomy associ-

ated with the Western binary. 25 Beatrice Medicine (Standing Rock Lakota),

an honored elder and anthropologist who recently passed away, wrote that

the term is "not intended to be translated from English to native languages"

because it "changes the common meaning [the term] has acquired by self-

identified two-spirit Native Americans." 26 Historical documentation of cases

and current discussion of Two Spirit traditions remain tied linguistically to the

binary sex-gender categories in describing, for example, "men acting women"

and "women acting men" even though they represent distinct gender catego-

ries. Beatrice Medicine also cautioned those who use the term Two Spirit to

appreciate its association with sacredness and to understand what that means

within Native American and First Nation communities. 27

Louise Erdrich's novel The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse

provides valuable ways to understand multiple sex-gender systems that resist

3 Unrestricted Territory AMERICAN INDIAN CULTURE AND RESEARCH JOURNAL

the exclusionary, arbitrary, and judgmental nature of the Western dichotomy and what Anguksuar identifies as "the intellectually and spiritually backward view that only two genders exist." 28 In a system of variant gender categories, no one would be forced to live in stealth within the confines of a restricted territory or need to cross unsafe borders to claim a personal gender identity.

A LITERARYJOURNEY ACROSS CULTURAL BORDERS

In "Religion and Gender in The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse," Maria Orban and Alan Velie locate their discussion of Father Damien's sex- gender identity in three primary contexts: in literary traditions that play with characterization, postmodern gender theories, and Native American trickster traditions. 29 Each of these contexts illuminates Erdrich's treatment of Damien in Last Report, but each isolates Damien from Two Spirit traditions of gender variance and the related social roles historically defined within Native American cultures. In situating Damien within. literary traditions that play with charac- terization, Orban and Velie cite Erdrich's non-Native influences and her skill in morphing characters that reappear in multiple stories. 30 This perspective helps to distinguish the radical gender alteration that occurs in Damien from Erdrich's other character changes. But this context also limits gender variance to a literary device and ignores the distinct roles it created within American Indian societies. In situating discussion of Damien in postmodern gender theories, Orban and Velie emphasize gender as construction, performance, and social perspective, as represented in work by Judith Butler and Michel Foucault. 31 This discussion effectively reveals the illusion of a fixed sex-gender identity location or stability. But locating Damien in this context implies theo- retical insight that displaces a system of sex-gender variance among Native American cultures that operated long before modern and postmodern theory. Discussions of Damien as a trickster or shape-shifting figure foregrounds a distinctly cultural role often associated with gender variance in Damien's char- acterization, even though Damien is non-Native. However, these discussions also identify Nanapush, Leopolda, and Fleur as tricksters and shape-shifters, a multiplication that diffuses the meanings of those terms. 32

Damien, I argue, embodies Two Spirit traditions shared among many Native American cultures, including the Ojibwe-Anishinaabeg represented in Erdrich's novel. Placing discussion within this context helps to recuperate Native American understandings of gender identity formation and the trans- formative potential of those traditions. Agnes's new identification as Father Damien is no mere whim where she chooses to pass as a Catholic priest merely to enter the land of the Ojibwe. Nor is she transgendered in the sense of feeling that her female body is a mistake of birth that belies a fully masculine psyche (this is admittedly an oversimplification of the complexities in trans-

gender identity formation). As Father Damien, Agnes becomes both male and female, masculine and feminine, and in claiming this identity she responds to a spiritual (not a religious) calling. Admittedly the assertion of a genuine Two Spirit nature is problematic because Father Damien is born Agnes DeWitt, a white woman, into a culture of gender dichotomy (a point I will return to

4 later). But Damien's refusal to conform to this cultural hegemony and his

liberation under the influence of the Ojibwe people demonstrate gender

alterity within a multiple sex-gender social system. 33

I propose that Agnes's background as daughter, nun, and lover leads to

the discovery of her genuine Two Spirit identity. Part of that discovery-long

before she imagines herjourney into the land of the Ojibwe-is Agnes's recog-

nition of the constructed nature of gender. She realizes that even as a woman, "the heart of her gender is stretched, pounded, molded, and tempered for its

hot task from the age of two." 34 For Agnes, then, her gendering in the forge

of binary oppositions, her identification as "woman" is no more natural than

her forged identification as Father Damien.

As Damien travels north to Little No Horse, she notes the respect

afforded her maleness and experiences "an ease within her own mind, she'd

never felt before." 15 When Agnes crosses the borders of the reservation, "she

felt a largeness move through her" and already believed that "she had done

the right thing. Father Damien Modeste had arrived .... The true Modeste

who was supposed to arrive-none other. No one else." 36

The text's language reflects her transition from Agnes to Father Damien-

a transgendering-in shifting pronouns (often within a single sentence). In

her first official act, for example, when she performs a mass for the nuns,

the text reads, "She had only to say the first words and all followed, ordered,

instinctive," and "in the silence between the parts of the ritual, Father Damien

prayed for those women in his charge" (italics added). 37 There is, however,

no sudden reformation of Father Damien's gender identity. Later that same

evening Damien prepares a list of ten "Rules to Assist My Transformation"

and begins to replace the learned gesturies of womanhood with those of

the masculine. The next day, when Agnes is forced to cope with "the misery

of concealing the exasperating monthly flow," she suddenly feels "an eerie

rocking between two genders." 38 In his early years at Little No Horse, Father

Damien struggles with the hardships suffered by the Ojibwe, with the miseries

of his early misguided efforts and their terrible consequences, and with the

emotional residue of transgressing the binary gender dictates of mainstream

culture. Here the text reads, "These days, Agnes and Father Damien became

one indivisible person in prayer. That poor, divided, human priest enlarged

and smoothed into the person of Father Damien." 39 At the same time, "it

came to her that both Sister Cecelia and Agnes were as heavily manufactured

... as was Father Damien." 40 The priest wonders, "Between these two, where

was the real self ... what sifting of identity was she?"41

AN UNRESTRICTED TERRITORY

I have briefly suggested the ways that Louise Erdrich's Father Damien Modeste

represents a Two Spirit concept characteristic of shared Native American

traditions that displace the Western sex-gender dichotomy. This assertion

immediately raises the question: How can a white Catholic missionary

represent Native American tradition? The representation of traditional

gender variance is not solely dependent on the subject of Father Damien.

Unrestricted Territory 5 AMERICAN INDIAN CULTURE AND RESEARCH JOURNAL

More importantly, the representation substantially depends on ways the

Anishinaabeg at Little No Horse perceive him and recognize his Two Spirit

status. That is, Two Spirit traditions represent an understanding of gender

variance and familiar categories to absorb various identities. When the Ojibwe

man first meets Father Damien at the train stop, for example, Kashpaw imme-

diately perceives a "girlish openness" in the priest. And during much of the

journey into the heart of Little No Horse, Kashpaw maintains a thoughtful

silence as he considers the priest's gender:

[H]e sensed something unusual about the priest from the first.

Something w'rong.' The priest was clearly not right, too womanly.

Perhaps, he thought, here was a man like the famous Wishkob, the

Sweet, who had seduced many other men and finally joined the family

of a great war chief as a wife, where he lived until old, well loved,

as one of the women. Kashpaw himself had addressed Wishkob as

grandmother. The priest is unusual, but then, who among the zhaaga-

naashiwag [white people] is not strange. 42

Kashpaw's sense of "something wrong," of something "clearly not right," signals

no disapproval. It reveals only a discrepancy between Damien's presentation

as a Catholic priest and his gender as "too womanly." Kashpaw's quick associa-

tion with the famous Wishkob the Sweet signals a ready context for Kashpaw's

understanding of Damien's gender identification. That Kashpaw recalls his

own address to the "grandmother" implies his easy acceptance of the priest's

gender variance. It also indicates the.honored role of the Two Spirit among

the Ojibwe as one "who was well loved." The reference to his seduction of

many men and his marriage to the great war chief indicates acceptance of

same-sex relationships and same-sex marriage. Most importantly, Kashpaw's

association reveals Father Damien's potential Two Spirit status among the

Ojibwe, a status independent of blood quotient.

At their first meeting, Fleur, too, sees an "unmanly priest," and Nanapush

finds him "oddly feminine." 43 Never, in these initial meetings, do the Ojibwe

confront the priest about his gender identity. In fact, Father Damien spends

a decade believing that no one knows his secret because he has learned to

conceal his femaleness. So he is completely caught off guard during a game

of chess with his old friend when Nanapush suddenly asks, "What are you...

a man priest or a woman priest?" 44 For Nanapush, the question about gender

identity is mere tactic to distract Father Damien from the chess game so that he

can claim victory. But for Damien, the question opens up years of suppressed

anxiety and emotional residue from the deviance of passing. Seeing the

priest's "terror and confusion," however, Nanapush gently continues, asking

Damien, "Why... are you pretending to be a man priest?" 45

Their conversation reveals the long Ojibwe tradition of recognizing

variant gender identities beyond dichotomy and, more notably, respecting

them. Nanapush tells Father Damien, "[W]e used to talk about it, Kashpaw

and myself, but when we noticed that you never mentioned it, we spoke of this

to no one else." 46Still Nanapush expresses his curiosity by asking, "Are you

6 Unrestricted Territory

a female Wishkob? My old friend thought so at first, assumed you went and

became a four-legged to please another man, but that's not true. Inside that

robe, you are definitely a woman." 47 Grappling with his own self-conscious-

ness, Damien tries to escape back into the chess game, but Nanapush pursues

the conversation; "So you're not a woman-acting man, you're a man-acting

woman." 48 Nanapush's conjectures reveal the Ojibwe assumption of third

and fourth gender categories, as well as additional categories, which include

gay men and, by implication, lesbians. They also reaffirm Damien's accepted

status within the Two Spirit tradition among the Ojibwe at Little No Horse.

Moreover, Nanapush's curiosity to understand Father Damien and his

assurance that "when we noticed that you never mentioned it, we spoke of it to

no one else" illustrate the respect (rather than scorn in mainstream culture)

awarded to identification within the Two Spirit tradition. And his note that

he and his Ojibwe wife, Margaret, remember only a few man-acting women

such as Father Damien emphasizes the role of elders as cultural memory in

maintaining suppressed traditions. In Men as Women, Women as Men: Changing

Gender in Native American Cultures, Sabine Lang points out that often traditions

of gender variance were forgotten, denigrated, or repressed with the "massive

impact of Western culture" and the Christianization process. 49 Notably,

the only Ojibwe person on the reservation who scorns Father Damien and

attempts to blackmail him on the basis of gender is Leopolda, a converted

religious zealot turned nun. All of the other Ojibwe respect Father Damien's

gender identification and his apparent desire for secrecy, necessitated by the

intolerance of the Catholic Church and mainstream culture.

In contrast, the outsider, Father Jude, a papal emissary sent to investi-

gate Leopolda's background, has no cultural frame of reference to absorb

the gender alterity he too senses in Father Damien. Here in one of his first

conversations with Father Damien, Father Jude experiences sudden insight

but immediately dismisses it: "In that instant, a strange thing happened. He

saw inhabiting the same cassock as the priest, an old woman.... He shook his

head, craned forward, but no, there was Damien again." 50 Later Father Jude

again senses a gender discrepancy when "a troubling sensation once more

came upon him .. .a problem of perception. A distinct uncanny sense he

could only name in one way" (146). Again FatherJude forces his perception

into the familiar dichotomy by asking Father Damien if he has a twin. 51 For

Father Jude the possibility of a female twin could account for a perceived

gender discrepancy with the priest's male body. Father Jude's nagging suspi-

cion of some unidentifiable secrecy surrounding the priest resolves itself

when he discovers Damien's name inadvertently recorded as father/parent

on a birth certificate. For Jude, the assumption of violated celibacy makes

far more sense than gender variants he cannot begin to imagine or tolerate

within mainstream culture and the institution of the priesthood.52

Similarly, when Father Gregory, another outsider, discovers the female

body concealed under Damien's cassock and finds their attraction irresist-

ible, he pleads with Agnes to run away with him, marry, and have children.

But Damien refuses by explaining, "I cannot leave who I am." 53 For Gregory,

angered by the refusal, Damien's gender is not negotiable. "You are a woman,"

7 AMERICAN INDIAN CULTURE AND RESEARCH JOURNAL

he insists, invoking the mainstream dichotomy. 54 When Damien asserts, "I am

a priest... I am nothing but a priest," Gregory lashes out at Damien's gender

transgression in "the worst way he could summon.... You're a sacrilege." 55

Gregory's anger reflects the dominant hegemony of a sex-gender system that refuses variance within a Catholic context that prohibits female priesthood and

in a social context that scripts specific roles for women and men and condemns

deviance. 56 Gregory's condemnation demonstrates the consequence of that

refusal. As Will Roscoe points out in Changing Ones, "When one believes that

sex is given by nature in-two incommensurable forms, the attitude toward that

which is non-binary shifts from ambivalence and awe to horror and scorn."

After the affair with Father Gregory when Damien spirals into suicidal despair, Nanapush provides the traditions that can reconcile the priest's

divided self and prepares a sweat lodge. Here, surrounded by Ojibwe men,

Damien finds peace. Although the priest acknowledged that "according to

Church doctrine it was wrong for a priest to worship god in so alien space,

Agnes simply found herself comforted." 57 She emerges a recuperated Father

Damien who "not only loved the people but also the very thingness of the world," signified by a language "unprejudiced by gender distinctions.'" 58

Damien re-signs the world in Ojibwe terms as inanimate or animate, "a

quality harboring a spirit," which resists binary reduction between alive or

dead, for "amid the protocols of [this] language, there is room for personal preference." 59 As Will Roscoe writes, "As long as the language for talking

about gender is confined to mutually exclusive binary terms," those who

are different are reduced to "defective, counterfeit, or imitation men and

women." 60 Anishinaabemowen (Ojibwe language) provides terms that refuse a

gender dichotomy bound to the biological body and instead admits multiple variations freed from the body and animated by spirit. Moreover, his inclu-

sion in an exclusively male ceremony shows that the Ojibwe men identify and

accept Damien's Two Spirit status. 61

GENDER ALTERITY AS POWER62

At the end of the conversation I referred to earlier, when he finally confronts

the priest about his gender, Nanapush concludes, "[T] hat is what your spirits instructed you to do, so you must do it. Your spirits must be powerful to

require such a sacrifice." 6-3 Nanapush's understanding of a spiritually moti-

vated gender identity reflects one of the most important elements in Two Spirit traditions. As Lester Brown writes in Spiritual Warriors, "gender" in many

Native American cultures is a spiritual calling, "not determined by a person's

anatomy." 64 According to Brown, "individuals who are spiritually called into

gender variance are believed to have special powers ... because of the differ-

ence." 65 Duane Champagne also emphasizes the "sacredness of alternative gender" founded on an individual's personal mission. 66 In Louise Erdrich's

novel, Agnes believes there was something spiritually ordained in the moment

she emerges from the flood and puts on a dead priest's cassock to cross into

the Little No Horse reservation. Among the Ojibwe, Damien is able to realize

a true Two Spirit identity.

8 Another element among Two Spirit traditions is a common role as

mediators. Will Roscoe explains a distinction from concepts of androgyny that

function only as "a mediating device in the essentialism of binaries." 67 Within

the system of gender dichotomy, he asserts, "androgyny can never be the onto-

logical basis for a social identity." 68 In this system, "What disappears," Roscoe

states, is "the materiality of the third [gender]-the actual roles, identities,

and lifestyles based on those mediating devices." 69 Historically, among Native

cultures, he notes, "individuals seen as bridging genders were often elected to

perform other mediations as well." 70

Father Damien performs many mediations. As a Catholic missionary,

he mediates between Christianity and Ojibwe sacred beliefs and practices.

But it is not to bring the Ojibwe to Christianity (for he had come to think of

conversion as a "most loving form of destruction"). 71 Rather, Father Damien's

mediation reveals the limits of Christian orthodoxy, the recuperative potential

of Ojibwe spirituality, and the possibility of a spirituality that arises from two

traditions. Ultimately, however, Damien personally rejects Christian dogma,

including its concepts of evil and redemption, choosing, in the end, to enter

the Ojibwe heaven. 72

In developing an Ojibwe dictionary, Father Damien also mediates

between mainstream and traditional Ojibwe cultures. But again his transla-

tions serve to displace mainstream concepts with Ojibwe meanings. When

Father Jude asks him, for example, about rumors of scandals on the reserva-

tion, Damien says that he "prefers to think of them as profound exchanges

of human love." 73 He points out to FatherJude that "the Ojibwe word for the

human vagina is derived from the word for 'earth,"' and adds, "a profound

connection, don't you think?" 74 Surprised by Damien's apparent lack of

moral judgment, Father Jude asks if he "condones such irregular behavior,"

a question that reveals mainstream puritanical attitudes toward sexuality

and the body. Damien answers, "I do not condone it ... I cherish such occur-

rences, or help my charges to at least" (italics added).75 In his mediation

between Father Jude's mainstream brand of sexual morality and his own

understanding under Ojibwe influence, Damien rejects Jude's simplistic

binary system-right and wrong, black and white, male and female. Life as

a priest among the Ojibwe and'his proficiency in Aniýhinaabemowen has

fundamentally restructured Damien's sense of reality, wherein truth is subjec-

tive, matters of right and wrong are always gray, and the only real, immoral

actions are those that hurt others. 76

In each of his mediations between mainstream and Ojibwe culture-in

matters of spirituality, faith, conversion, language, culture, and morality-

Father Damien provides not merely opposing opinions on mainstream issues

but new meanings. Similarly, in matters of gender, Native American traditions

provide new meanings. As Will Roscoe writes, the Two Spirit tradition "is

not merely a matter of different judgments of the same phenomenon, but

completely different perceptions of what that phenomenon is."77 Likewise,

Louise Erdrich's transformation of Father Damien Modeste out of Agnes

DeWitt (or Agnes out of Father Damien in Love Medicine and Tracks, Erdrich's

earlier novels) provides a close look at gender variance. 78Erdrich's novel also

Unrestricted Territory 9 AMERICAN INDIAN CULTURE AND RESEARCH JOURNAL

provokes reconsiderations about what sex and gender mean and how they

operate in identity formation; why mainstream culture guards the borders of gender dichotomy and punishes transgression; and why mainstream society continues to endorse ideas that promote intolerance and violence against

individuals perceived to transgress those ideas.

One additional example that illuminates Two Spirit traditions occurs in

the context of Father Damien's retelling the story of Leopolda's genealogy. 79

The cruelty that marks Leopolda's nature begins three generations earlier in a feud that develops between a hunting party of Ojibwe and French

traders, which included her ancestors, and a Bawaanug (Lakota) hunting party. To avert a battle, Leopolda's grandfather, a French trader, challenges

any Bawaan man to best his wife (Leopolda's Ojibwe grandmother) in a

running contest,,with death to the loser. The Bawaanug choose one of their fastest runners, a winkte, a "woman-man," an ikwe-inini in Ojibwe, after a long

debate as to whether the winkte can count as a man for the purpose of the race. 80 Although several Ojibwe initially contest the winkte's participation

due to his female spirit, others conclude that "as the winkte would run with

legs that grew down along either side of a penis.., he was enough of a male

to suit the terms." 8'

The passage reveals three characteristics of Two Spirit traditions. First, the

inclusion of the Lakota term,, winkte, and the Ojibwe term, ikwe-inini, shows

that both cultures recognize a third gender category. Second, the debate

occurs only for the purpose of the race, suggesting that sex-gender categoriza- tion is not fixed, limited, or generally required. Third, no one in either party

reacts when the winkte, adorned with a tortoiseshell hand mirror around his

neck and eyes rimmed with smoky black, shrugs off his deer hide dress to reveal a body "astonishingly pure and lovely, in nothing but a white woman's

lace-trimmed pantalets."1 82 The lack of reaction to the winkte's appearance

suggests the familiarity of cross-dressing in multiple gender practice.

THE ETHICS OF CROSSING BORDERS

In the first chapter in the anthology Two Spirit People, the editors address the motive of research into Native American gender diversity and sexuality. 83 They

acknowledge the ethical implications of writing about Native American alter-

native gender categories when some "American Indian scholars, academics,

political leaders, and others are not sympathetic and in fact would prefer the issue be dropped."8 4 Beatrice Medicine and Beverly Little Thunder, among

many others, have commented on the kinds of discrimination, isolation,

alienation, and punishment many Native Americans suffer within their own cultures because of attitudes transposed from mainstream culture. 85 Beatrice

Medicine has also raised concerns about the romanticization and misrep-

resentation of Native American gender and sexuality. 86 Others address the appropriation of Native traditions for personal gain and the stereotyping of

Native icons of liberation. These are important considerations if we are to learn

anything about respect from Native American concepts of sex, gender, and

sexuality and, at the same time, avoid neocolonialism.

10 At the same time, Duane Champagne argues that "Native traditions provide

cultural resources for the reevaluation of sexuality and gender relations." 87

"The gift of sacred being," marked by gender variance, Champagne says, "can

be carried as a gift to the world." 88 Champagne asserts a responsibility even to

grant access to Two Spirit knowledge and wisdom to others whose traditions

are not so inclusive. 89 Louise Erdrich's representation of Father Damien and

the Ojibwe people of Little No Horse provides that access.

Erdrich's novel cannot provide a panacea for the gender troubles in

mainstream culture. It is fiction, after all. In the endnotes to The Last Report,

Erdrich anticipates her readers' skepticism about the possibility of "a lifelong

gender disguise" and cites a work of nonfiction on a transgender subject.

Erdrich also comments on the source of her fiction, acknowledging a voice

that spoke to her in dreams, as if mediating the stories. She writes, "I feel sure

they originated in my own mind, those stories .... Yet sometimes, as I scruti-

nize the handwriting in those early drafts, I wonder. Who is the writer? Who

is the voice?" 90 Deliberately confusing the border between fiction and nonfic-

tion, Erdrich intimates the transformative potential of fiction, the power of

stories to direct our lives.

Just as American Indian wisdom reshapes mainstream understanding

of storytelling, history, spirituality, kinship, environment, and community,

it can also reshape concepts of sex, gender, and identity. Still, a society that

legislates discrimination against the transgendered is a long way from a

society whose legislation prohibits discrimination, and this is a far cry from

a culture that even without legislation values gender variance. In the current

political struggles between those who advocate for lesbian, gay, bisexual, and

transgender rights and those who would amend suppressive and exclusive

legislation, Native American Two Spirit traditions-whether represented in

fiction or nonfiction-could mediate a vision where all individuals' gender

identities and sexualities could be honored.

Acknowledgments

I wish to acknowledge my gratitude to several people including Sidney Martin

(Potawatomi), George Martin (Ojibwe), Shannon Martin (Ojibwe-Potawatomi),

and Lorraine, Dave, and Carly Shananaquet (Ojibwe-Potawatomi) for their

friendship and trust, and for passing on the teachings necessary to my under-

standing of Anishinaabe culture. Also to my friend, Merry Wiesner-Hanks,

who provided intellectual and financial support and encouragement that

made this project possible; and my mother, Mary Aileen Keenan, whose Irish

ancestors first led me to the land of the Anishinaabeg.

NOTES

1. Louise Erdrich, Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse (New York: Harper

Collins, 2001), 41.

2. Ibid., 35-36.

3. Ibid., 44.

11 Unrestricted Territory AMERICAN INDIAN CULTURE AND RESEARCH JOURNAL

4. Ibid., 44-45.

5. Ibid., 61.

6. Blackwood and Wieringa's FemaleDesires and Leslie Feinberg's Transgender Warriors are among many texts that look at transgender roles across international cultures.

7. At the recent Women's World Congress June 2005 in Seoul, Korea, a session

on the young lesbian activist movement erupted in heated argument over including transgendered women in lesbian activist groups, reflecting a recent position among some lesbian separatists to exclude and attack transgender interests as a threat to a

lesbian agenda.

8. Transgenderfeelings refer to any type of feeling that one's body and/or sex assigned at birth is incommensurate with one's psychological and emotional sense of self. They are by no means limited to a desire for reassignment as the opposite sex. "9. Lynn Conway, "How Frequently Does Transsexualism Occur?," http://www.

lynnconway.com (accessed 26 May 2005). Lynn Conway is Professor Emerita at the University of Michigan and a male to female (MtF) transsexual, whose personal expe- rience and professional research provides an excellent source on transgender and

transsexual issues.

10. The term, transgender, is sometimes intended to include those who transgress

heterosexuality (i.e., homosexuals).

11. I want to emphasize here that transgender is not limited to the desire for sex reassignment or to the notion that only two genders exist. 12. Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, 4rth ed., rev., DSM-1V-TR

(Washington, DC: American Psychological Association, 2000), 576. The APA defines

GID as "a strong and persistent cross-gender identification, which is the desire to be, or the insistence that one is, of the other sex." Notably, the APA limits the definition

of GID to gender association with the opposite sex, instead of considering the broader

and more inclusive definitions given by transgender individuals.

13. Ibid., 579. The APA cites no prevalence studies in the United States or

considers the wide spectrum of transgender expression; its estimate of one in thirty thousand is based on European studies of individuals who sought SRS.

14. Nan D. Hunter, Courtney G.Joslin, and Sharon M. McGowan, eds., The Rights of Lesbians, Gay Men, Bisexuals and Transgender People: An American Civil Liberties Union Handbook (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2004). The three states

with explicit protections for transgender people are Minnesota (1993), Rhode Island

(2001), and New Mexico (2003), 172-73.

15. Ibid., 172. Those seven states with hate crimes amended to include trans- gender people are Minnesota, California, Hawaii, Missouri, New Mexico, Pennsylvania,

and Vermont.

16. Ibid., 172-91. The ACLU handbook on LGBT rights outlines in detail what

legal protections do and do not cover transgender people.

17. Ibid., 174.

18. Sue Ellen Jacobs, Wesley Thomas, and Sabine Lang, eds. Two Spirit People:

Native American Gender Identity, Sexuality, and Spirituality (Urbana: University of Illinois

Press, 1997), 3.

19. Will Roscoe, The Changing Ones: Third and Fourth Genders in Native North

America (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1998), 213-22.

12 20. Jim Elledge, ed., Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, and Transgender Myths from the Arapaho

to the Zuni (New York: Peter Lang, 2002).

21. In Grandmothers of the Light: A Medicine Woman's Source (Boston: Beacon Press,

1991), Paula Gunn Allen (Laguna Pueblo) explains her understanding of pan-Native

spiritual traditions, writing, "I have believed for some time that the similarities in world

view and spiritual understanding are marked because the supernaturals that live on this

continent with us possess marked similarities among themselves, and so their teachings are

similar, varying because of locale and because of the language and histories of the various

people they instruct" (205). She goes on to assert that the emphasis on distinctly different

Native cultures is colonially motivated to divide American Indian people (205-6).

22. Jacobs, Two Spirit People, 221.

23. Ibid., 221.

24. Ibid., 203.

25. Ibid., 269.

26. Ibid., 147.

27. Ibid., 148.

28. Ibid., 218.

29. Maria Orban and Alan Velie, "Religion and Gender in The Last Report on

the Miracles at Little No Horse," European Review of Native American Studies 17, no. 2

(2003), 27-34. For further discussion, see also Thomas Matchie, "Miracles at Little No

Horse: Louise Erdrich's Answer to Sherman Alexie's Reservation Blues," North Dakota

Quarterly 70, no. 2 (Spring 2003).

30. Ibid., 27.

31. Ibid., 28.

32. Ibid., 27-28. See also Kate McCafferty, "Generative Adversity: Shapeshifting,

Pauline/Leopolda in Tracks and Love Medicine," American Indian Quarterly 21, no. 4 (Fall

1997), 729-51.

33. Throughout my discussion, I employ the masculine pronoun in reference to

the character as Father Damien. Social protocol honors a transgendered individual's

choice of gender identification (or without gender identification) regardless of the

gender assigned at birth.

34. Erdrich, Miracles at Little No Horse, 18.

35. Ibid., 62.

36. Ibid., 65.

37. Ibid, 68.

38. Ibid., 78.

39. Ibid., 109.

40. Ibid, 76.

41. Ibid.

42. Ibid., 64.

43. Ibid., 85.

44. Ibid., 230.

45. Ibid., 231.

46. Ibid.

47. Ibid., 231. Nanapush's initial impression that Damien may be one who

"became a four-legged to please a man" is a reference to same-sex sexual rela-

tions, which constitutes its own identity category. The description again implies no

Unrestricted Territory 13 14 AMERICAN INDIAN CULTURE AND RESEARCH JOURNAL

disapproval within the Ojibwe culture, which views humans and animals as spiritually

equal members of the creation.

48. Ibid., 232.

49. Sabine Lang, Men as Women, Women as Men: Changing Gender in Native American

Cultures (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1998), 107.

50. Erdrich, Last Report, 139.

51. Ibid., 146.

52. Orban and Velie note that Jude "cannot recognize what he sees because his

perceptions are governed by his expectations" of a man in a cassock (29). I suggest that

his expectations are hegemonic and deeply rooted in the Western gender dichotomy,

which is his only frame of reference.

53. Ibid., 206.

54. Ibid.

55. Ibid., 207.

56. Orban and Velie argue that Damien is unique among female characters in her

rejection of scripted gender roles. They suggest that other female characters desire "manly" displays by men, citing Pauline's mother (30). Their assertion on this point

fails to recognize the traditionally equal status of women and men among the Ojibwe

(especially before white influence) or to consider Fleur and Margaret's fiery strength

in this context.

57. Ibid., 215.

58. Ibid., 215 and 257.

59. Ibid., 257.

60. Roscoe, Changing Ones, 210.

61. I am indebted for Anishinaabe teachings to Sidney Martin (Potawatomi),

George Martin (Ojibwe), Shannon Martin (Ojibwe-Potawatomi), Lorraine, Dave, and

Carly Shananaquet (Ojibwe-Potawatomi), Edward Benton-Benai, and the people of

the Midewiwin Lodge. As it has been taught to me, the Ojibwe sweat-lodge ceremony

does not exclude women (although the Ojibwe view menses as women's natural

ceremony of purification). Rather, sweat-lodge ceremonies are conventionally gender

segregated, so the fact that Damien enters with men shows an acceptance of his chosen

identity within a variant gender system.

62. Alterity as power is a concept Gloria Anzaldua discusses throughout Borderlands.

Gloria Anzaldua, Borderlands: The New Mestiza, 2nd ed. (San Francisco: Aunt Lute

Books, 1999).

63. Erdrich, Last Report, 232.

64. Lester Brown, ed. Two Spirit People: American Indian Lesbian Women and Gay Men

(New York: Harrington Park Press, 1997), 5.

65. Ibid., 10.

66. Ibid., xix.

67. Roscoe, Changing Ones, 208.

68. Ibid., 208.

69. Ibid.

70. Ibid.

71. Erdrich, Last Report, 55.

72. Orban and Velie assert that Father Damien "remains a Catholic while

adopting beliefs of the Chippewa religion" (31). Ann-Janine Morey also discusses Damien's merging of religion systems, in her review of the novel, Christian Century

118, no. 26 (September 2001), 36, "Boost," http://0-webl7.epnet.com.piocat.cc.edu

(accessed 5 January 2006).

73. Ibid., 134.

74. Ibid.

75. Ibid.

76. Ibid., 135. See also Kate McCafferty for further discussion on the ambiguity of

Chippewa binary concepts.

77. Roscoe, Changing Ones, 210.

78. In Tracks (New York: Henry Holt and Co, 1988), published thirteen years

before the 2001 publication of Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse, Louise

Erdrich tells the stories of the same characters, focused on the year Father Damien

arrives on the reservation. In Tracks, Father Damien is identified only as a male priest,

but owns subtle personal traits that anticipate the revelation of a Two Spirit identity

in the later novel.

79. Erdrich, Last Report, 149.

80. Ibid., 153-54.

81. Ibid., 154.

82. Ibid.,. 155. Although they acknowledge Erdrich's representation of the winkte

within "a scale of degrees of maleness, not an either/or binary opposition" and

that "biology alone is not the decisive factor [in gender identity]," Orban and Velie

mistakenly characterize, I believe, the winkte as a "social construction based on the

perception of negative female stereotypes from a male perspective" (31), a character-

ization that reifies the binary opposition and ignores Two Spirit traditions.

83. Jacobs, Two Spirit People, 23.

84. Ibid., 26. Elsewhere I have written about a broad range of ethical issues

in "Trespassing Native Ground: Problems of Non-Native Work in American Indian

Studies," M/MLA, Fall/Winter 2000-2001, 3-4, no. 33-34, 179-89.

85. Ibid., 147 and 206.

86. Jacobs, Two Spirit People, 147.

87. Brown, American Indian Lesbian Women and Gay Men, xxi.

88. Ibid., xix.

89. Ibid., xxiii.

90. Erdrich, Last Report, 358.

15 Unrestricted Territory

Erdrich's |DdTh

SOURCE: American Indian Culture and Research Journal 30 no2

2006

PAGE(S): 1-15

WN: 0600204662004

The magazine publisher is the copyright holder of this article and it

is reproduced with permission. Further reproduction of this article in

violation of the copyright is prohibited. To contact the publisher:

http://www.sscnet.ucla.edu/indian/