Berdaches, it's said, were accepted in the native world, and viewed as having mystical powers. Some in the gay community today feel a great connectedness with the berdache, and a yearning to be similarly powerful and accepted in society. Walter Williams has written feelingly of the berdache in his book 'The Spirit and the Flesh : Sexual Diversity in American Indian Culture'. Centuries ago, this person was the essence of deity and prayer.
European assumptions about cultures and people go so deep in many people that we have a hard time understanding the folk tales and historical traditions of native people; what the symbols mean, what the stories are really talking about?
Prophets are a good place to start, because prophets are so familiar from the pages of holy books. Non-native Americans often see a Native American prophet as male, and as an 'Indian Jesus' or Christ figure. Some anthropologists insist that native spiritual traditions are really pre-figurations of Christianity.
This is because some classical anthropology operates from an arrogant belief that all human spirituality evolves towards monotheism. This belief assumes that monotheism is better, more civilised. Systems that honour a God and Goddess, or many gods and goddesses, are viewed as primitive, barbaric and untrue.
A case in point is the interpretation of the Cheyenne Sweet Medicine, often seen today as a Jesus like prophet. Sweet Medicine was not a Messiah type figure, nor even a real historical person. Sweet Medicine was a tradition of renewal of law that filtered north from Mexico about a thousand years ago.
It carried a body of pacifist teachings against war and violence. The Sweet Medicine tradition also opposed human sacrifice and slavery as practiced in Mexico and in some North American tribes. The Cheyennes were one people who took the Sweet Medicine movement to heart. The figure of Sweet Medicine in the Cheyenne stories is only a personification, in the same way that Americans personify the U.S. as 'Uncle Sam'.
When Sweet Medicine people first encountered Christianity, they found the story of Christ's torture and death on the cross, and God's willingness to sacrifice his son, to be revolting and incomprehensible. The influence of this pacifist tradition among the Northern Cheyennes was what steeled them to resist European conquest and Christian missionaries for such a long time.
After Catholicism reached many of the North American tribes, there was a rash of Indian people having visions of the Virgin Mary. In western Montana, some Indian children saw Mary at the St. Ignatius Mission, shortly after the Jesuits started teaching there in the 1840s. Good Montana Catholics still make pilgrimages to that spot!
My Cheyenne cousins gleefully pointed out that it was natural for native people, who had so intensely loved Mother Goddess Life, to see Mary: after all, the European love of Her has its roots in pagan Goddess traditions. Indeed, the Protestant Reformation tried to rid Europe of Her on the grounds that loving Her was pagan.
Likewise, the phrase Great Spirit is commonly translated as God or Holy Spirit. A more accurate translation might be the great collective spirit and consciousness of all things existing in the Universe - meaning that all things, starting with the tiniest molecule of carbon floating in space, are alive and able to enjoy some level of will and consciousness.
In the late 19th century, the Sweet Medicine Way collapsed under mounting pressures from white armies and white settlers, who wanted all Indians dead so they could occupy the land. Ultimately many Indians went berserk with grief and loss and bloodshed. They abandoned the old peaceful way, and adopted the new way, meaning they waged the same kind of total war as the whites.
This resulted in wrangling among the Cheyennes and Sioux and other allied tribes, between the old pacifist tradition - as represented by peace chiefs like Morning Star and Red Cloud, and war chiefs like Crazy Horse who were ready to kill or be killed in self defence.
The name Crazy Horse designates him as a leader of this nonpacifist 'new way', because the horse was the symbol of new ways coming from the white man. The word crazy doesn't mean mentally ill, it means something like contrary, or contradictory, or going against the grain. So today, many people thrill to the story of Crazy Horse's last-ditch battles against the U.S. army, but they don't understand his Medicine name or the real significance of his move to leadership.
This need to understand symbols is very fundamental to seeing what native spiritual or sexual tradition really means, including the berdache. If you can unlock the symbols, you can crack the walnut of meaning.
Now that your mind is bent this way and that (the way my teachers bent mine!), let's go back to the berdache.
The teachers spoke of Goddess and God, Wakan and Sskwan, and compared it to similar twinnings of Goddesses and Gods in the pagan Mediterranean world. Christianity took the two out of Deity and taught that it was only one, meaning male.
A woman on Earth has a male higher self, while a man on Earth has his female higher self. The higher self is still part of the total beingness that each of us have, it can influence us and communicate with us.
It can also be hurt, and its powers even diminished, by hatred and nonacceptance by the twin in substance. Men who hate women, or women who hate men, and war on them, end up, warring on their own higher-selves. The higher self helps preserve and protect the library of spirit knowledge and learning that each individual accumulated through many lives.
However, all laws of nature allow for variance and change. Now and then, a person's karma dictates that both male and female are coming into substance together. These are the two-spirit people. Sometimes their dual nature is actually visible in their genitalia, which may include both male and female features.
In deity, two are mysteriously also one. Thus the forked tree, key symbol of the Sun Dance, expresses that way in which all beingness is one. A woman may have her hidden male side, and a man may have his female side, and a two-spirit person may express both genders openly, but each of them are a single person.
If the people were laughing too much over something, the heyoehkah's job was to cry. If the people were crying too much, the heyoehkah laughed. heyoehkahs were indispensable at major ceremonies, because feeling and experience could get so intense that somebody needed to move in and lighten things up.
Some heyoehkahs were such artists at social commentary that they played an important role at law councils. They were the ones who formally raised issues, or introduced important questions of law into the debating circle.
Every four years, until late in the 1800s, the entire Cheyenne nation came together for a great council where they re-examined their body of law. The contraries helped this process along with great artistry and humour, acting out live scenarios that made people laugh about issues that had burdened them or terrified them. Or they made people cry about questions that needed to taken with more deadly seriousness. In this way the contraries helped the whole tribe understand why an old law was bad, or why a new law was needed.
Often the old-time contraries lived as the opposite sex, or simply wore clothing of the opposite sex. Some made a show of doing everything backwards, walking backwards, riding horses seated backwards, to be a living symbol that reminded people of the need for balance. Some Contraries were healers. Some two-spirit, known as winktes among the Lakota people, functioned as go-betweens when marriages were to be made.
Some heyoehkahs were what we might call transgendered people today. Others were what we might call gay, lesbian or bisexual. Yet other native people simply crossed over, and lived as the opposite gender, but weren't true two-spirit people.
The tradition has survived in some tribes. I have heard many stories of great heyoehkahs, both women and men, who were still active on the in the 1930-1980 period. I had an opportunity to know two of them -- a young bisexual woman and man who worked as a team in the mid-1980s.
They were incredibly funny at ceremonies, with a cutting-edge humour that was as contemporary as space travel. They loved to show their 'contrariness' to eagle feathers and other traditional trappings by pushing a noisy supermarket cart around the camp with their props in it, and turkey feathers tied to it.
Ironically, the contrary's unique brand of humour survives in that unique figure, the stand-up comic. Our greatest comics still know how to mirror the realities of life, and the needs for change. The contrary even finds a distant echo in a more improbable mainstream American arena, that of the rodeo. Native American peoples in the U.S. and Canada have participated massively in rodeo since its birth in the early 1900s. Many rodeo clowns have been Indians or mixed-bloods. Traditionally, even today, rodeo clowns are men who wear some items of women's clothing, even women's make-up.
Though today's West operates off the most relentless kind of Christian European machismo, nobody dares to impugn the rodeo clown. His job is to save lives and, incidentally, he keeps people laughing when things get too intense.
I thought of this irony recently, at the gay rodeo in San Diego, as I watched the rodeo clowns lure a brahma bull away from a fallen rider. At a gay rodeo, the clown's dress and make-up is not so radical as it might be at the Mesquite Rodeo in Texas. But I was thinking how the concept of a sacred, gay, two-spirited clown has finally come full circle.
These are only a few of my thoughts on that person known to anthropologists as the berdache. Human spirituality and human civilisation reveals an unending quest to know the nature of deity, and the nature of human destiny -- to know what is true.
Patricia Nell Warren is a Montana metis of Cree, Cherokee, Lakota, German, Irish and English ancestry. She is a writer and her published books include four books of poetry, written many articles and essays, and six novels including The Front Runner (which made The New York Times' best-seller list in 1974.
The full text to the article can be found at
www.whosoever.org/v3i3/berdaches.html
Page 24 : Assiniboin Fool dancer. The boys clothing is patterned after a womans dress. He carries a ratttle-staff dressed with deer dew-claws.
Page 25 : Berdache do not appear soly in Native American societies. This 'Soft Man' is a Chuckchi shaman from Siberia, where many male shamans 'become women' and woman shamsn 'become men'.
Page 27 : A Blackfeet woman storyteller dressed in her mask. Masks are a common feature of clowns and other ceremonial traditions in Native American spiritual ways.
Below : Masked Iroquois False Faces.
Taken from Sacred Hoop Magazine Issue Number 12
© Copyright Sacred Hoop Magazine 1996