Here's What It Means To Be 'Two-Spirit,' According To Native People

You may have heard the term “Two-Spirit”tossed around without actually knowing the meaning behind it — perhaps because it’s often been co-opted by non-Native people.

Two-Spirit is a modern umbrella term to describe Indigenous people who embody both a feminine and masculine energy and have traditionally held a number of important social and spiritual roles in their tribes.

“As it’s been told to me, if the morning is male and the evening is female, then Two-Spirits are the dusk,” Cherokee Two-Spirit musician Tony Enos told HuffPost. “We were then, and are still, the balance-keepers in our living Indigenous cultures.”

The term was coined by Elder Myra Laramee in 1990 at a Native American and First Nation LGBTQ conference in Winnipeg, Canada, (though the concept has existed in Native cultures long before that) to unite the various queer identities and expressions among Indigenous people.

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