Reclaiming Two-Spirits: Sexuality, Spiritual Renewal & Sovereignty in Native America

 

 Reclaiming Two-Spirits: Sexuality, Spiritual Renewal & Sovereignty in Native America by Gregory D. Smithers (2022) 332 Pages

I read this book for a paper in my Cultural Anthropology class. Having anthropological historical and modern accounts of two-spirit people is incredibly important as there are very few that exist. The accounts span multiple cultures and tribes, throughout the southwestern and northern areas of the present-day US. The historical accounts that do mention two-spirit people are mostly from the white settler-colonial point of view, which mostly reflects ethnocentric biases and does not reflect the true lives of these people. Native Americans have always struggled with anthropologists and ethnographers in this way, and this book goes to the source and talks with those who are two-spirit and how they exist in modern society today, and historically. This book recounts historical archaeological evidence, oral storytelling traditions, art and written accounts. This reclamation of the two-spirit identity gives a voice to those Natives who have been silenced by the colonizers.