Native Americans, prior to colonization, knew up to 5 genera.
EDITORIAL GAYLES.TV.- In Europe we have hardly heard of "People of two spirits", but in America it constitutes a whole movement of struggle. "Two spirits" It vindicates the authentic cultural and social history of the Indian tribes regarding the issue of gender before its ideology was laminated by the Catholic faith imposed by the colonizers.
And it is that the Native Americans ignored any kind of rules of gender conduct that had to be fulfilled to be accepted as a "normal" member of the tribe. In fact, the children were not assigned gender roles at birth and their clothes tended to be neutral, what today we would know as "unisex". Beyond the supposed masculinity or femininity, people were valued for their contribution to the tribe. They had no previous ideas about how someone should love, it was simply understood as a natural act that arose without any kind of prosecution.
Contrary to the marginalization with which the West isolates the difference, in the pre-Columbian America the people of "two spirits" were venerated because it was understood that someone who gathered in their person masculine and feminine characteristics, was able to understand both sides of everything, to see the world with the eyes of both spirits and that was a gift from the Creator.
According to a study on the page "Indian Country Today", tribes like the Navajo, Cheyenne or Cherokee recognized, with nuances in the denomination, roles as woman, man, woman of two spirits, man of two spirits and transgender. The Navajo speak of "Nádleehí" which means "one that was transformed", in the Lakota environment it is mentioned "Winkté" in reference to men who behave like women and the Cheyenne named as "Hemaneh" who are "half man, half woman".
Of course the colonization ruined all this and the Europeans made an enormous effort to make disappear from history any kind of reference to the culture of "the two spirits", arriving some catholic monks to destroy Aztec codices to make disappear the stories and traditional native beliefs. From there the Indians were forced to dress and act according to the new gender roles imposed by the colonizer. Needless to say, cinema has just established the idea that native cultures reproduce Western gender roles. Perhaps among those who read these lines someone will remember the game of letters of families, the negritos, the Indians, the Chinese, children, dad, mom, grandfather, grandmother, a way to transfer ideology like any other.
A clear example of how these tribes lived the gender issues is that of the Lakota warrior Osh-Tisch which means "he who finds them and kills them". He was born male and married a woman, but he used to dress in women's clothes and lived his daily life as one more woman of the tribe. Curiously, he would go down in history for a feat performed at the Battle of Rosebud Creek in 1876, when he saved the life of a man from his tribe.
It is important to know the treatment that other civilizations and cultures have given to questions of sex and gender in order not to fall into the absurdity of the reductive binarism of Christian and Western morality.
Source: lamula.pe
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