Friday at Oneida Family Services, 2640 W. Point Road. The Two-Spirit Pride Month Social event’s drive-through portion will be from 11 a.m. Torres will speak at an event Friday that is meant to bring awareness about the Two-Spirit community in Oneida. “No one talks about it (being Two-Spirit),” he said. He returned to Wisconsin about 18 years ago and since started work as the store manager of Turtle Island Gifts in Ashwaubenon on the Oneida Reservation.īut Torres found many in his own Oneida community still weren’t highly welcoming of Two-Spirit people in the mostly conservative Green Bay region, and he blames assimilation from the boarding schools and conversion to Christianity as a result of colonialism. “A lot of tribes have forgotten about what it means,” Torres said. And some women might join the men on the excursions.Įveryone was accepted and everyone had their essential roles. For example, some men might stay behind in the village to take care of the children and cook while the other men went hunting or on a war party. He said Two-Spirits were medicine men, name-givers and held other places of high positions and even Crazy Horse, the famous Lakota war leader, would take Two-Spirits with him into battle for good luck.īyran Halona, a youth mentor and advocate for the Oneida Nation’s Family Services Division who’s organizing a Two-Spirit awareness event, said some tribes in the past may have referred to Two-Spirit people as Man-Woman or Woman-Warrior.īut the identity would describe a role a person had in tribal society.
And there was no such thing as 'coming out.' It just was." "Before colonialization there was not only a place for us (in our tribal nations), but were also revered," Torres said. In many tribes, Two-Spirits were not considered either men or women, but were an alternative gender. The West wants to put us in a box, but it’s more spiritual.” “It’s someone with both masculine and feminine energies, or non-binary. “It’s not necessarily about sexual identity,” Torres said. Someone who identifies as Two-Spirit may also identify with the Western concept of LGBTQ+ community, or it may describe an Indigenous person of Turtle Island (North America) in a more spiritual sense. The term Two-Spirit was coined at the Third Annual Native American/First Nations Gay and Lesbian Conference in Winnipeg in 1990. “It was very empowering, very enlightening to see that as Native Americans we have a place in society and we were considered gifted because we had two energies,” Torres said.
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