Historicizing Two-Spirit as a Concept, Identity, and Political Project

In the summer of 1990 a Winnipeg-based, Indigenous activist named Myra Laramee had a consequential dream. She dreamt of ancestral spirits who declared that LGBTQ people were niizh manidoowag -- an Ojibwe term that translates into English as “Two-Spirit.” Laramee shared her dream with Indigenous activists from across Canada and the United States who had gathered in rural Manitoba for an intertribal conference. Participants discussed, debated, and ultimately adopted the term Two-Spirit as a mode of identification that linked contemporary LGBTQ experiences with Indigenous histories and worldviews.

My poster for the Berkshire Conference will highlight my postdoctoral research into Two-Spirit’s emergence as a concept, identity, and political project in the late twentieth century. I will primarily employ materials drawn from the University of Winnipeg Archives’ Two-Spirit Collection. My poster will focus on three main areas. First, I will highlight a series of foundational Two-Spirit conferences that took place in Manitoba, Oregon, British Columbia, and Arizona in the early 1990s. Second, I will address Two-Spirit reclamations of Indigenous practices and understandings of gender and sexual diversity, which had been suppressed by colonial institutions such as Indian Residential Schools. Third, I will explore Two-Spirit demands for Indigenous health sovereignty, particularly in relation to the HIV-AIDS crisis. My poster will reproduce images of Two-Spirit t-shirts, buttons, posters, periodicals, photographs, and artwork. My poster will introduce viewers to my historical research on a topic that has received very little attention from historians hitherto.