3 Myths and Misrepresentations

When the modern Indigenous Timucua first contacted Europeans in 1564, over 200,000 Timucuans lived in what is today Northeast Florida and South Georgia. By 1595, the Timucuan population had dropped to 50,000; by the 1700s, fewer than 1,000 existed. Timucuan culture died out primarily because of European colonialism and Christian beliefs. By applying Eurocentric gendered Christian beliefs to Timucuan culture, the Timucuans, specifically the Two-Spirit Timucua people, suffered a second death at the hands of twentieth and twenty-first century academia. These practices caused specific harm to Two-Spirit Timucuans and their unique identities that persist in modern North American Indigenous communities today. Given the prominent status afforded Two-Spirit people within the Timucuan culture, why did sixteenth-century missionaries and explorers knowingly try to obliterate their true identity and status, and why did scholars perpetuate assumptions made by the sixteenth-century French and Spanish for over 300 years?¹

Timucuan Two-Spirits were non-binary individuals who were afforded high status within Timucuan society because of their ability to transverse between the Timucua’s cosmology of pure, impure, and polluted. Binary Timucuans could not go between states, so Two-Spirits took on the roles of nursing, battlefield medics, and diplomats because of their spiritual dexterity to navigate the states more easily.

Throughout time most cultures romanticized saving soldiers on the battlefield, tending to the sick and diseased, and being part of a diplomatic corps. Mother Teresa was given a Nobel prize for humanity in 1979 and canonized as Saint Teresa of Calcutta in 2016 for tending to the poor and sick in slums. Rudyard Kipling immortalized a battlefield water boy in his epic poem, Gung Din, ending with the famous line, “By the livin’ Gawd that made you, you’re a better man than I am, Gunga Din!”² However, explorers, missionaries, historians, and anthropologists chose to denigrate Two-Spirit Timucuans for doing precisely the same roles as Saint Teresa and Gunga Din.

Other than archaeological artifacts, all we have left of Timucuan culture are a few written accounts from French and Spanish explorers, missionaries, adventurers, and later interpretations of those accounts from modern historians and anthropologists. What little those sources expressed about the Timucuan Two-Spirit was derogatory and misidentified them as inferior people in Timucuan society. Instead of giving Two-Spirits the same respect that Timucuan society bestowed upon them or that Europeans gave other similar binary-gendered people performing the same roles, twentieth and twenty-first century academics chose to perpetuate the sixteenth-century French and Spanish derogatory stereotypes of Two-Spirit people and turn those same admired roles into minor or peripheral ones.

Societal Roles within the Timucuan Culture

The Timucua oriented their societies around villages. Each village had its own individual hierarchy and was a matrilineal society. In a matrilineal society ancestral lineage and inheritance are traced through the mother, not the father. The next in line for becoming a chief would come from a niece or nephew through his sister. Although a matrilineal society, it was not matriarchal, so women usually did not lead as chiefs, shamans, or medicine men. Timucuans did not conform to a two-gender binary of male and female. They accepted a third gender, now known as a Two-Spirit in the modern English language. A Two-Spirit person is of neutral gender and can go between Timucuan’s ordered world of purity, impurity, and pollution. The Timucuans made sense of their world or cosmology using a trinity model of purity, impurity, and pollution, forming a synthesis within the Timucuan culture. Purity is the highest state of the trinity, and pollution is the lowest. Impurity was the state between pollution and purity and where the Timucuan believed you lived your everyday life. Binary-gendered Timucuans stayed in one state of their cosmology, while Two-Spirit Timucuans held the special privilege or skill of traveling between the states. Two-Spirit people could blend in and out of complicated societal standings that single-gendered people could not.

The ability to traverse Timucua society gave the Two-Spirit people abundant practice in diplomacy, making them great negotiators between different tribes and incoming European explorers. Tamara Shircliff Spike explains, “Their transgender identities embodied and symbolized their purpose as intermediaries between men and women, war and peace, sickness and health, purity and pollution, life and death.”³

European colonial writers belittled Two-Spirits by using derogatory names such as “berdache” and “hermaphrodites” even while describing noble acts that European Christians valorized.⁴ French explorer René Laudonnière’s cartographer and illustrator Jacques Le Moyne de Morgues wrote:

When a chief goes out to war, the “hermaphrodites” carry the provisions. When any Indian is dead of wounds or disease, two “hermaphrodites” take a couple of stout poles, fasten cross-pieces on them, and attach to these a mat woven of reeds. On this they place the deceased… … Persons having contagious diseases are also carried to places appointed for the purpose, on the shoulders of the “hermaphrodites”, who supply [those ill] with food, and take care of them, until they get quite well again.⁵

Le Moyne also wrote about the “hermaphrodites” bringing drinks to the warriors during battle, like Gunga Din but again with contempt and derision.⁶ René Laudonnière also wrote of noble Two-Spirits acts during the same expedition using derogatory connotations:

There are in this country a large number of “hermaphrodites” who do all the heaviest labor and bear the victuals when the group go to war. They paint their faces and fluff out their hair with feathers in order to make themselves as repulsive as possible.⁷

These noble acts of military and civilian humanitarianism by the Two-Spirit Timucuan, as recorded by Le Moyne and Laudonnière, did little to win over the French explorers as La Moyne further claims they “are considered odious by the Indians themselves, who, however, employ them, as they are strong, instead of beast of burden.”⁸ Through the Eurocentric colonists’ eye, Two-Spirits are not respected within their own community, tolerated only because they have great strength, whereas binary people doing the same work are considered heroes.

Tamara Shircliff Spike’s work on Timucuan healing and burial practices counters the false assumptions made by Laudonnière and La Moyne. Spike’s research shows how significant and valuable working with the dead and sick was within Timucuan society, which translates into the high esteem in which their tribes held Two-Spirits. According to Spike, Two-Spirits bore the loads of sacred and pure which put them as intermediaries between the Upper and Under Worlds. She concludes that Two-Spirits, along with shamans and healers, could enter a state of purity which meant they could enter “the Upper World, the place of the gods and the ancestors, a place of order,” within the Timucua cosmology.⁹

The Distortions of Twentieth-Century Historians and Anthropologists

Laudonnière and La Moyne’s misrepresentations persisted well into the twentieth century. The “berdache” label continued to be used until the 1980s and came to be associated with social failure based on gender misidentification. Eventually, when scholars began to place Two-Spirit people in their rightful status within Indigenous communities, they still used derogatory terms and excluded Indigenous voices from the conversation. The derogatory term “berdache” was still used in the late twentieth century to describe Two-Spirits as this quote from Thayer’s 1980 essay in the Journal of Anthropology illustrates, “The ‘berdache’ can best be analyzed as a symbolic figure who occupied an interstitial place in the religious and social systems of the Plains.”¹⁰

The term “berdache” morphed within the Western academic culture from the sixteenth-century names of “hermaphrodites.” They suggested that if you are a biological male with White Eurocentric values but do not present as “male,” then you are not man enough and have to become more feminized. This same scenario applies in reverse for biological “females.” Sabine Lang describes it as the “‘ failure’ paradigm.”¹¹ If you fail at being your biological gender, you try to become another gender. The eminent father of child psychology, Erik Erikson, even contributed to this “failed” warrior paradigm as he studied Indigenous children in the 1940s.¹² He first proposed his famous stages of childhood development in his book Childhood and Society published in 1950.

Reckonings and Reflections: Historians and Anthropologists in the 1990s

The 1990s became a decade of self-reflection for academics. In the 1980s, a push for gay rights and acceptance became more mainstream while gender and sexuality studies became accepted and encouraged in academia. In popular culture, more movies included gay characters, including ones shown in loving and stable relationships, such as the 1993 Academy Award-winning film Philadelphia. The film depicted a loving gay couple fighting unlawful dismissal for contracting AIDS. It humanized a much maligned and feared disease, thought at first only to affect gay males.

During this awakening era, anthropologists, archaeologists, historians, and other academics started to acknowledge and apologize for the harm inflicted upon the Two-Spirit community caused by misrepresentations. Historically, academics had repeated the same derogatory portrayals found in works by La Moyne and Laudonnière and left out Indigenous voices instead of doing actual research and observations on Two-Spirit peoples. In the 1997 anthology, Two-Spirit People, a collection of works and speeches of anthropologists and Indigenous voices, Sue Ellen Jacobs reflects on her past work and the harm academia caused to Two-Spirit Indigenous people:

This pressure, in all cases, has forced the “berdache” into a position of a stigmatized member of society. . . . I had reacted to what anthropologists and other social scientists had written about Native American cultural institutions; no Indian voices were in the writing I found. My observation was that European American colonialism and imperialism has resulted in the loss of status for members of society reported to have previously held specific, accepted positions in their tribes.¹³

In the same anthology, Clyde M. Hall writes of the on-going struggle to rectify the misrepresentations of the past: “I can tell you that it [the harm] should not be regarded as something that has come full circle, not even partially, not even a quarter of the way, or an eighth of the way.”¹⁴

The term Two-Spirit was first used in 1990 at the Winnipeg Native American/First Nations Gay and Lesbian Conference. It was the best English term Native Americans could use to help describe a complex cultural substructure of gender identity that has more than 300 ways of being described in Indigenous languages. In 1993, the American Anthropological Association Conference held a session called “Revisiting the North American ‘Berdache’ Empirically and Theoretically,” which was part of an apology tour of conferences, books, and papers starting in the early 1990s. The Winnipeg conference was the beginning of the end of derogatory terms used to describe Indigenous Two-Spirits but not the end of the harm and misinterpretation of how tribes treated Two-Spirits.¹⁵

Two-Spirit Representation in the Twenty-First Century

Despite these reckoning and apologies, Two-Spirit Timucuans are still seen through Laudonniére and La Moyne’s sixteenth-century lenses well into the twenty-first century. For example, an article written by Glenn Emery for the Jacksonville Historical Society describes Two-Spirits as “’berdaches’ [who] received the most demanding and unpleasant responsibilities. These included hauling provisions for men going to war, tending to people with contagious diseases, and preparing dead bodies for burial.”¹⁶ Emery manages in two sentences to use offensive terminology, demean the roles of the Two-Spirit within the Timucuan community, and further perpetuate the unfounded and disproven misinformation surrounding Two-Spirit Timucuans. In addition to the persistent use of derogatory language, some scholars in the early twenty-first century romanticize the Two-Spirit Timucua, which creates another kind of distortion. In 2013, Heather Martel argued in the Journal of the History of Sexuality that Pedro Menendez attacked the French Huguenots in Fort Caroline because the French were falling in love with the Two-Spirit Timucuans.¹⁷ Gregory D. Smithers writes that Timucuan Two-Spirits saved Laudonniére and his men’s lives by giving them water upon arrival.¹⁸ Maybe they did, but then Smithers makes the leap that Timucuan Two-Spirits were the keeper of the rivers. There has not been any evidence to support that Timucuan Two-Spirits purified or protected the rivers or waterways used by their tribes. Although romanticizing Two-Spirits is a step away from derogatory and demeaning representation, romanticizing still turns them into something they may not be, once again depriving them of their authentic selves.

A few months before Smithers released his water-keepers article, he released an excellent book entitled Reclaiming Two-Spirits. He does a brilliant job of laying out the history of Timucuan Two-Spirits and covers a broader swathe of Two-Spirits within North American Indigenous communities. Smithers then segues into the stories and voices of modern-day Two-Spirits, finishing with Two-Spirits reclaiming their past and how they can move forward for their present and future. Timucuan Two-Spirits deserve the work of Tamara Shircliff Spike and Gregory D. Smithers.¹⁹ Further re-investigation and reparation research is warranted to give Two-Spirit Timucuans the historical respect they truly deserve.

Is it possible for academics to re-examine past work for prejudicial mistakes? Dr. Ashley, associate professor of archaeology at the University of North Florida, explains that restorative archaeology work toward Timucuan Two-Spirits is made more challenging because of the Native American Graves Protection Repatriation Act (NAGPRA) of 1990.²⁰ Dr. Ashley says that archaeologists today are much more aware of their preconceived prejudices, and current peer-approved research does a better job of pointing out conclusions made from possible unrealized prejudices. Bill Delaney’s article “Florida LGBTQ History: Timucua Two-Spirits” gives hope of Two-Spirit Timucuans coming out of the shadows and presents how their historical examples of noble acts pave the way for today’s LGBTQ+ to be respected and revered for their noble acts just like binary Europeans.²¹