Making the American berdache: Choice or constraint?

Journal of Social History, Spring, 2002 by Richard C. Trexler

From the time the Spanish Conquistadores first explored the western hemisphere, the American berdaches have evoked strong reactions in those who have encountered and studied them. If the missionaries detested them, today they have made something of a comeback, with some scholars asking gay readers to look back to them as to their spiritual ancestors. (1) The berdaches were usually biological males who their lifelong dressed and acted like women in all possible ways, but there were also occasional girls who acted like boys. That is, berdaches were one type of social personage distinguishable from others who, for instance, episodically not permanently crossed gender lines. Throughout the early European conquests, they everywhere met with persecution, but in the twentieth century they came to be eyed with fascination by Western anthropologists, who were engaged by the problems of gender and sexuality that these persons raised. (2)

Thus if during the Spanish Conquests the missionaries, all while recording a great deal of information about them, tended to view the berdaches as creations of the devils who reigned in these American regions, the historians and anthropologists who followed have viewed them in a more secular fashion. For many male and female field workers, they were somewhat repellent, cowardly creatures who just wanted to avoid warfare. (3) At the same time, however, some more sympathetic scholars, and their gay epigones, have perceived them as pure images of the free life style of the aboriginal American, creatures who chose to become what they were in a native American social regime that granted children liberty. (4) On the one hand there was the repressive, Anglo society which had in truth exterminated a good part of native America, on the other the freedom-loving and carefree Indian, whose berdache brother had chosen his own gender identity and was proud of it. (5)

Clearly, this notion of the freely sexual native American child is part of a larger view that as a general proposition, native children were tolerated and even spoiled by elders in a way foreign to Anglo culture. Alas this area of indigenous history--the rearing of native children--has to date not been the subject of much serious study. (6) Still, a mere glance at the scattered literature touching on the disciplining of children shows that native American child rearing was quite as complex a phenomenon as it has been in other human societies, though it must be said that determining that a culture did or did not physically punish a child does not make that culture more or less liable to have converted some of its children into berdaches. The results of future scientific attention being given the problem of native child rearing will doubtless be controversial but also fascinating--one thinks of the widespread native-American institution of an extra-familial elder charged with disciplining children so that the p arents could avoid this task. (7) But if native education is not the subject of the present paper, perhaps the latter can still contribute to a future history of native American education.

The idealized general image of the free-wheeling Indian child is, in turn, only part of a still larger field of imaginings indulged in by some students of native America. Overcoming a century in which the ancient Maya were portrayed as peace-loving farmers when not astronomers, recent students of that people, in deciphering their language and reading its steles have discovered a society whose leaders were saturated with concerns about blood, violence, and power. Now, students of the ancient Anasazi to the north are reaching a consensus that this people as well, far from the docile agriculturalists they have usually been cast as, were also capable of great violence. (8) And there is more. Only recently have scholars begun to disabuse the public of the notion that the indigenous population of North America had lived in a unique "Indian" harmony with nature, taking only what was necessary to its survival. This was in fact an ancient reverie that then swept the field again with the onset of the environmental move ment of the 1960s. (9) Finally, only in recent years has the work of certain archaeologists established with scarce room for debate that, as it was among their Toltec and later Aztec cousins far to the south, cannibalism was not unknown among some of the Anazasi nations of the American Southwest, and most strikingly at Chaco Canyon, in the period around 1200 A.D. (10) It is becoming increasingly clear that to an extent greater than has been imagined, earlier enlightened anthropologists' and historians' notions of the first Americans have in part been reactions against the vicious treatment of these early Americans by previous governments, businesses, and individuals up through the nineteenth century.

The romantic image of the unrepressed Indian child becoming sexually what he was, is, along with that of the environmental native who could not have been a cannibal, also of recent vintage--scarcely of a century's standing--and one with a limited geographical range. For the image usually applied only to the Indian nations of the present-day United States of America. But what of the rest of this ecumene, that is, of the rich cultures to the north and south of these United States? And what of the sources and times before legions of United States ethnographers spread out in the new American land empire in the latter part of the nineteenth century? Only recently, in fact, have berdaches and figures comparable to them been studied in these distant regions and for these earlier times. Only in the last forty years, indeed, have scholars in the Arctic Inuit regions discovered the existence of berdache-like figures amongst their ethnographic subjects, thus stimulating a discussion as to whether these personages can be compared to the famous berdaches of "the lower forty-eight." And only in 1995 did the present author publish a study of the berdaches that the Spanish soldiers and missionaries discovered and described on the frontiers of their empire from the late fifteenth to the eighteenth centuries, the first historical study of these fascinating persons.