In the first Brace Student Fellow Presentation of the year, Elliot Weir ’26 delivered his presentation, entitled “Two-Spirit People in Native American Communities: Pre-contact, Colonization, and Decolonization” in Abbot Hall on November 11.
In his presentation, Weir honed in on the lives of two-spirit people — a marginalized subset of Native Americans that do not conform to binary, Eurocentric standards of gender — through different time periods and phases of colonization, detailing a story of resilience behind the curtain of convention. As a member of the Chickasaw tribe, Weir conveyed the motivation behind his project, hoping to uncover the unknown history of gender identity and the two-spirit community.
“I have some family members in the two-spirit community… Not many people know about the people I’m going to talk about. Their places in the community are significant, and in the past, [their numbers] have dwindled. Just keeping in mind the unfortunate history that is theirs is important as well… Our thoughts about [gender identity] and our society are vastly different than they were for the Native American societies before colonization. Even thinking about that is kind of mind-boggling, and gender identity was just so different,” said Weir.
As someone who already had some knowledge of two-spirit people, Dr. Patricia Har, Brace Center Director, described why Weir’s topic stood out to her. She mentioned the importance of having a wide variety of topics studied in the Brace Program and specified that Weir’s specific topic and personal connection made his presentation compelling.
“[Elliot’s subject] was really a terrific topic that seemed personally relevant to him. Having a real connection to a topic tends to make for really strong work… His research proposal was solid, we hadn’t had a paper on two-spirit identity, especially in connection with North American, Indigenous populations in any recent years that I can recall. It was a topic that met a lot of our hopes for what kind of a program we’d be able to offer this year,” said Har.
Weir elaborated on some of the main challenges he faced while researching his topic, mainly acquiring primary sources. Weir used sources from older journals, explorers, anthropologists, drawings, as well as interviews with living two-spirit people.
“One of the challenges is the lack of sources on [subjects] like this because prior to colonization, there weren’t any concrete historical records. Much of these records were dictated by European explorers, so [they] could be biased. One way I got around that was using the first records that explorers kept when they first came here. You can kind of get a sense of what life was like before they came because they hadn’t affected things here [yet],” said Weir.
Allison Lee ’28, an attendee at Weir’s presentation, noted the most intriguing aspects of Weir’s topic, especially the loss of history and knowledge of two-spirit people to colonization. Lee expanded on preconceived notions that “two-spirit” was a role or tradition.
“Something that was really interesting was that there is so much that we do not know about how two-spirit people used to exist in native culture. I’ve heard of them before, but I always just assumed that there was much more of an established role that people were stepping into, or an established tradition. It is very interesting and sad as well to see how much historical evidence we’ve lost as a result of destructive colonization,” said Lee.
Aurelia Zhang ’27 shared how Weir’s presentation succeeded in giving people a different way to think about gender constructs. Zhang brought up the benefit of educating others about two-spirit people, both within and beyond the LGBTQIA+ community.
“Information [about the two-spirit people] will help [LGBTQIA+] people to go on knowing that [defying gender roles] is something that has been done in history. They don’t have to build everything from the ground up by themselves. For people who might not identify with the [LGBTQIA+] community, it’s still very helpful because gender roles themselves are imposing restrictions on how people live and how they understand themselves. It’s important to recognize that. This is just a helpful new paradigm for people to learn new practices that are also for everyone,” said Zhang.
