Summary of A Queer Native Thanksgiving | TwinRabbit

00:00:00 - 00:15:00

The video discusses the history of the Queer Native movement, focusing on the Gay American Indian (GAI) organization founded by Barbara Cameron and Randy Burns in San Francisco in 1975. The organization remained active for several years before Randy passed away, but Barbara continued to be active until her death in 2013. The Queer Native movement has been responsible for the rediscovery of pre-Wester Expansion records from the very cultures that had done the damage in the first place. The revival and revitalization effort is complex and becomes quickly interwoven with identity, politics, disease, and appropriation.

• 00:00:00 This Thanksgiving, TwinRabbit discusses the LGBTQ+ history of Native Americans. Though there is no one definitive book that documents all Native American tribes and their ceremonies, oral tradition is the most common method of recording history. Some tribes had no written language, while others had documents but the documents contained in-culture references that were not comprehensible to European explorers. European historians and anthropologists are left with a few surviving stories and the records of explorers who had their own agendas and interests. In order to undermine indigenous identity, impose Christian ideas of sin, and maintain the process of erasure, Vasco Núñez de Balboa chose a target of respect and debased it- he took people of honor and dishonored them. Eventually Europeans settled on a new insult- "berdache." This term was perfunctory, collectively summarizing anyone who did not behave or dress in a way that European explorers found appropriate. Handily it wasn't just an insult, it was also a method for flattening all the vast and amazing peoples and traditions they were observing.
• 00:05:00 This video discusses the history of queer Native Americans. English speakers were aware of these traditions as well, and one such chronicler who used it repeatedly was George Catlin. He traveled along the Mississippi River Valley in the 1830s and during his travels he also sent regular correspondences to his friends back in Washington DC about what he was seeing. Letter 56 is quite the wellspring of information because he includes with the letters illustrations of the groups he visited and the ceremonies he witnessed. He is used as a primary source to this day. One such illustration was what he titled “Dance to the Berdashe”, which he recorded while visiting the Sac and the Fox. His description of the dance is extremely informative if one reads between the lines. He ends by saying “Such, and such only, are allowed to enter the dance and partake of the feast, and as there are but a precious few in the tribe who have legitimately gained this singular privilege, or willing to make a public confession of it, it will be seen that the society consists of quite a limited number of ‘odd fellows’.
• 00:10:00 The video discusses the history of the Queer Native movement, focusing on the Gay American Indian (GAI) organization founded by Barbara Cameron and Randy Burns in San Francisco in 1975. The organization remained active for several years before Randy passed away, but Barbara continued to be active until her death in 2013. The Queer Native movement has been responsible for the rediscovery of pre-Wester Expansion records from the very cultures that had done the damage in the first place. The revival and revitalization effort is complex and becomes quickly interwoven with identity, politics, disease, and appropriation. One of the first organizations in this revitalization was the Gay American Indians, which formed in 1990 after a conference where over a dozen regional societies decided to confront the centuries old insult of "berdache". The term is difficult to summarize, but it is meant to separate the overt sexuality of words like homosexual or berdache, and instead focus on cultural difference and unique gender systems. Several Native leaders, like Cherokee elder and Professor Benny Smith, have used the same term to refer to walking between two cultures. As the influence of the two-spirit movement grew, retranslations of ancient texts revealed spirits, guides, and beings every bit as gender creative and loving
• 00:15:00 The speaker discusses their identity as a queer Native, and provides links to videos about the Two-Spirit movement and history. They thank their Patreon supporters, and ask that others do the same.