The marriage is valid on the Cherokee reservations, but not in Oklahoma, where the women live.Ī legal battle to ratify the marriage in Oklahoma remains ongoing. LIKE THEIR GAY NEIGHBORS ACROSS the U.S., some gay Native Americans are struggling to start a new marriage tradition.Ī Cherokee Nation high court upheld the nuptials of Dawn McKinley and Kathy Reynolds, a Cherokee lesbian couple, in 20.
But don’t feed me the bullshit that ‘this is Thanksgiving, and this is what these Indians and these pilgrims did.’” “I do celebrate the fact that if people just want to come together to love one another, and celebrate the unity of their families and have a good time, that I’m down for. What is that crap? I do not celebrate it,” she says. Our kindergartners are still wearing the stupid bandana with fake feathers coming out. “We’re still teaching our children this crap.
It’s like we’re fighting everybody and having to educate everybody.”Īnd don’t get her started about Thanksgiving. We are the history of gay, but it’s not even talked about in the gay culture. “The gay history didn’t start with Stonewall. “What the hell’s wrong with the gay community? Why aren’t they acknowledging us? We are the beginnings of homosexuality on Turtle Island,” she asserts. “The creator makes no mistakes, and it wasn’t until the people who came to Turtle Island, what you guys call America, they’re the ones who put their beliefs on us.”įor every image of the proud Native heritage displayed by colorful Wind-Catchers, practical crafts and nature paintings, there remains a defiance among Natives like Vigneault, who says that gay Natives not only have to struggle with being gay among their nations of origin, but are largely ignored by gay people and gay historians. “Traditionally in our culture, it was a part of our culture,” Vigneault says. The alliance plans a website launch in 2007 that they hope gay Native Americans and non-Natives can use as a starting point to learn about the group’s special concerns.Ī key glossary term in any lesson about gay Natives is “Two Spirit.” The term, in hundreds of different forms, has loosely meant an alternate gender that, in many of the Native American nations, was a revered and mystified tradition that helped establish centuries of acceptance for homosexual and transgender people.īut that acceptance started evaporating shortly after Columbus docked in the Caribbean, says Karen Vigneault, a lesbian and leader of the Nations of Four Directions, a gay Native American organization in San Diego. ONE WAY LEADERS FIGHT THE ECOnomic and social disparity that separates gay Native Americans is the soon-tolaunch Two Spirit Alliance, a unified collective of gay Native groups from across North America. “And just like there were lessons to be learned with the African-American community, there are lessons with the Native community.” “There were significant resources looking at why the transmission rates were what they were, and what was going on within, the African-American community,” Pruden says. It’s a problem worsening as millions of dollars in research and media campaigns are spent targeting other groups. In April 2006, the Atlanta-based Centers for Disease Control & Prevention reported that Native Americans have the third highest rate of HIV infection among non-white populations in the U.S.
population, are also locked in a battle with HIV, addictions and poverty - all of which appear in disproportionately high rates among people of indigenous heritage. While fighting to preserve the culture that white American history has relegated to the sidelines, Native Americans, who represent only about one percent of the U.S. Any room, you’re like, people of color, gay folk, and you’re judging whether or not it’s safe space.”Īs a co-founder of the Northeast Two Spirit Society, Pruden is a leader among a struggling culture of gay and lesbian Native Americans. “If you walk into a room, you count where the other people of color are. “One of the things that I’ve found is that as a person of color, I am constantly counting,” Pruden explains. He knows about upholding a brown culture in a white world, he says. Indian as in Native American, specifically, Cree.
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