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ABSTRACT Since the sixteenth century, European and Euroamerican observers have puzzled over the identity, roles, and sexuality of the berdache, or what scholars now refer to as two-spirit people, in Native American societies in the Southeast. Over the past generation gender theorists and lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) scholars have produced fine studies that aim to demystify two spirits, formerly the domain of anthropological research, and decouple them from the racialized and heteronormative modes of thinking associated with settler colonialism in North America. As this activist scholarship continues to grow, historians of early America have at best played a marginal role in scholarly debates about two-spirit people. This essay represents a historical intervention in the current scholarly discussions about two-spirit people. Focusing particularly on the Cherokees in early America, the following analysis considers the methodological challenges associated with historical studies of two spirits and presents insights into how historians might effectively craft more sophisticated and nuanced analyses of people variously referred to as hermaphrodites, sodomites, berdaches, and two-spirit people in Native American societies of the Southeast.
Around 1825 a lone white traveler crossing through Cherokee country encountered a group of Cherokees. After stopping and engaging them in conversation, the traveler learned that "There were among them formerly, men who assumed the dress and performed all the duties of women and who lived their whole life in this manner."1 This report no doubt confused and confounded that traveler. During the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries, travel writers, traders, soldiers, and missionaries puzzled over the meaning of indigenous social conventions and cultural practices. Historians have spent considerable time analyzing and debating the significance of this vast cache of ethnographic observations.2 Less attention has been paid to berdaches, or what scholars now refer to as two-spirit people. For historians a dearth of written historical evidence hampers such inquiries. Indeed, that lone traveler's 1825 recollection constitutes a rare piece of written evidence pertaining to the existence of two spirits among the Cherokees in early America. How, then, can we as historians make sense of that solitary 1825 document? Indeed, can a single written document have broader implications for understanding Cherokee history in early America?
No evidence survives to give us a clearer sense of who that...