Beyond two-spirit: Indigenous people look to revive traditional LGBTQ terms

For Benny Michaud, learning how to explain their identity has been a lifelong journey.

Growing up in the Métis community of St. Boniface in Winnipeg, Michaud says they always knew they were neither a boy nor a girl, but finding the right words to help people understand how they view themselves has taken a lot of energy.

They refer to themselves as a tasta-ee-iniw, which means a person who is "in-between" in the Michif and Cree languages. 

"For me, that's a term that is really important, because I find that it allows that part of me that I value to be understood by other people," says Michaud. "So, it helps to locate me within the many genders that exist in the world as being somebody that is not a woman and not a man, but someone that is sacred and that deserves a place within the circle and deserves to be respected as a sacred being among all other beings in Creation." 

In recent decades, many LGBTQ Indigenous people have begun using the umbrella phrase "two-spirit," while others are embracing terms from their own nations, in their own languages.

Many Indigenous communities have their own terms for gender and sexual identity. Explore some of them here:

Traditionally, two-spirit people in Indigenous communities would fulfill various roles in society, and this still holds true in some places. Two-spirit people were caretakers of children and the elderly, medicine people, matchmakers, treaty negotiators, beaders and dancers.

Colonialism then introduced the idea that there are only two genders.

"Reclaiming space within the community is a really important part of the work that we're trying to do, because the impact of colonialism has meant that in our communities, the myth of the gender binary — that there's only two genders — is really pervasive," says Michaud, the director of the Centre for Indigenous Support and Community Engagement at Carleton University. "And it's impacted everything in our communities to the way that we interact with each other as human beings, to our ceremonies, to how we translate our languages into English."

While living in Regina, Melody Wood began to understand the traditional way of life, and an Elder shared with her the term nāpēkan, which means "man-like" in Cree.

"One of the things that has been consistently shared with me is that our cultures, our way of life is embedded in the language," says Wood, a nêhiyaw from Little Pine First Nation in Saskatchewan. "And to truly know and understand our cultures, we need to know the language."

Wood now lives in Saskatoon, working at the Aboriginal Friendship Centres of Saskatchewan where she mentors two-spirit youth for OUTSaskatoon. She has spent most of her adulthood raising other people's children — once a traditional role of two-spirit people in some Indigenous communities.

"I am pleased to know that I am taking on a traditional role, inadvertent as it was."

WATCH | Indigenous people explain the terms they use to describe their identity, in their own language: