The Sacred Hoop: Recovering the Feminine in American Indian Traditions

Carpenter, Michael Wilken, John (Fire) Lame Deer, Hamilton
Tyler, John Gunn, and various contemporary gay and lesbian
American Indian poets and writers, Grahn writes a lengthy
chronicle about the place gays held among many American
Indian peoples. Grahn cites anthropologist Sue Ellen Jacobs as
listing eighty-eight tribes whose recorded cultural attributes
include references to gayness, with twenty of these including
specific references to lesbianism. According to Jacobs, eleven
tribes denied any homosexuality to anthropologists or other
writers (which doesn’t necessarily mean it wasn’t openly
sanctioned and practiced, acknowledged, or valued), and those
denials came from tribes located in areas of heaviest, lengthiest,
and most severely puritanical white encroachment. Among the
eighty-eight tribes who admitted homosexuality among them and
referred to it in positive ways are the Apache, Navajo,
Winnebago, Cheyenne, Pima, Crow, Shoshoni, Paiute, Osage,
Acoma, Zuñi, Sioux, Pawnee, Choctaw, Creek, Seminole,
Illinois, Mohave, Shasta, Aleut, Sac and Fox, Iowa, Kansas,
Yuma, Aztec, Tlingit, Maya, Naskapi, Ponca, Menomini,
Maricopa, Klamath, Quinault, Yuki, Chilula, and Kamia—
indicating the presence of lesbianism and homosexuality in every
area of North America. 4
Some of the native names for gays that Grahn lists include
Alyha and Hwame (Mohave), Nadle (Navajo), Siange
(Winnebago), Winkte and Adi-wa-lona (male) and Koshkalaka
(female) (Lakota), Mingu-ga (Omaha and Ponca), Ko’thlama
(Zuñi), Wergern (Yurok), Bo-te (Crow), Kwerhame (lesbian)
and Elxa (homosexual) (Yuma), and Joya (Chumash). About this
last name, Grahn writes:
Gay queens among the Indians of the Santa Barbara region
were called “Jewel,” and so the Spanish recorded it as
“Joya” …
The European soldiers, trappers, explorers, and settlers