The Sacred Hoop: Recovering the Feminine in American Indian Traditions

were contemptuous of Gay traditions in their own cultures,
and several centuries of persecution under the Inquisition
had taught them to deny all Gayness. The heaviest
persecutions in Europe ran concurrent to the heaviest
periods of colonization of the Indians in North America …
Small wonder, perhaps, that Gay people were often the first
Indians killed and that even when tribes were tolerated by
the white people, their Gay people were mocked and
persecuted to the point of changing their behavior for the
sake of the safety of their people. Balboa, for instance, set
wild dogs on the Gay medicine men of California tribes,
killing them, the “Jewels” of their own people. 5
Recent scholarly work reveals the universal or nearly
universal presence of homosexuality and lesbianism among
tribal peoples, the special respect and honor often accorded gay
men and women, and the alteration in that status as a result of
colonization of the continent by Anglo-Europeans. These studies
demonstrate the process by which external conquest and
colonization become internalized among the colonized with
vivid clarity. Homophobia, which was rare (perhaps even
absent entirely) among tribal peoples in the Americas, has
steadily grown among them as they have traded traditional tribal
values for Christian industrial ones.
Gay historian Walter Williams records particularly poignant
stories about contemporary homosexuals in which colonization
is clearly linked to homophobia and racist colonial attempts to
eradicate tribal cultures. Citing numerous scholarly sources,
Williams refers to homosexuality among the Maya, Ojibwa,
various branches of the Sioux, the Sac and Fox, the Osage,
unspecified California and Alaskan Indians, the Papago, Crow,
Hopi, Navajo, Klamath, Winnebago, Yokuts, Zuñi, Iroquois,
Cheyenne, Omaha, and Aleut. 6