The term "two-spirit" entered the English language in 1990, coined at the Third Annual Inter-tribal Native American, First Nations, Gay and Lesbian American Conference in Winnipeg. It was created by Indigenous people to describe — on their own terms — the gender and sexual diversity that has always been part of Indigenous cultures across Turtle Island and beyond.
The adoption of this term was also, explicitly, an act of decolonisation. European colonisers had spent centuries pathologising, criminalising, and violently suppressing Indigenous gender diversity. The creation of "two-spirit" as a self-determined identity was a reclamation of something that had been stolen, suppressed, and nearly erased.
Two-spirit traditions vary enormously across the hundreds of distinct Indigenous cultures in which they appear. In some nations, two-spirit people held sacred ceremonial roles. In others, they were mediators between genders, warriors who fought alongside either men or women, or healers with special spiritual gifts. What is consistent is that gender diversity was understood not as a deviation or a disorder, but as a particular kind of gift — a person who contained multitudes and could therefore move between worlds.
The ongoing revival of two-spirit traditions is happening alongside broader Indigenous cultural resurgence movements. Young two-spirit people are learning traditional languages, recovering ceremonial knowledge, and reconnecting with elders who remember how gender diversity was honoured before colonisation.
This work is not without complexity. The relationship between two-spirit identity and contemporary Western LGBTQ+ categories is contested. Many two-spirit people emphasise that their identity is specific to their culture and cannot be reduced to Western concepts of "trans" or "non-binary." Others find meaningful overlap. The diversity of two-spirit experiences resists any single narrative.
What is clear is that Indigenous gender diversity is ancient, is cultural, and is alive. It is not merely a historical curiosity or a political argument — it is a living tradition, carried forward by people who are both recovering their past and creating their future.
At Laseebo, we are committed to creating space for this full complexity — to honouring Indigenous traditions of gender diversity without appropriating or flattening them, and to listening when two-spirit community members speak about their own experiences.