Off the Reservation: The Navajo Nation’s LGBT Refugees
Currents
The Navajo Nation is big. The Navajo, or “Diné” as they call themselves, are the largest Native American tribe by population, depending on how you count (just shy of Wyoming), and the largest reservation by land area (about the size of West Virginia). That comes with some historical baggage: a death march, internment camps, and a treaty that made them the only native peoples in the US to truly reclaim their land. To say that the Navajo have had to fight against second-class citizenship is an understatement. You have to first be considered human to be in any class at all. That’s not hyperbole. Chief Standing Bear of the Ponca, for example, had to argue in court in 1879 that he was legally a person. It’s only been about 100 years since Indians (or, as we say, NDNs — in-dee-ins) received US citizenship. That was 1924. As a reminder, former slaves in the US got citizenship in 1868.
The Navajo Nation has overcome many challenges, and as a people, they have truly seen a tough few centuries. Getting where they are today was no small feat. But there is another legal underclass within their midst: LGBT Navajos. These are native people who, in modern times, may enjoy more rights outside the reservation than on their own lands. For example, gay and bisexual Navajos looking to marry someone of the same sex need not apply. We now have tribal members essentially leaving their homes as equal-rights-refugees — driven off their land first by outsiders and now driven away once again from inside.
Tribal lands aren’t U.S. states. Tribes are generally considered sovereign nations, although the specifics get complicated in ways we don’t have space to cover in detail here. Suffice it to say that the 2015 Supreme Court ruling of Obergefell v. Hodges that enshrined marriage equality nationwide doesn’t apply. The Navajo in particular not only passed a ban on same-sex marriage, but after it was vetoed by the tribal president, the council overrode his veto. The sponsor of the bill, then council delegate Larry Anderson, said, in his best impersonation of the Christian right, that the purpose of the ban was to “promote strong families and strong family values, not discriminate.”
The problem, as we’ve all become numbingly accustomed to, is that “family values” are often little more than a euphemism for bigoted restrictions on personal freedoms. In this context, it means one penis and one vagina. I used to be a social worker, and I can tell you that having exactly one penis and one vagina involved doesn’t mean the kids will be immune from things like abuse or neglect. There was a time when the legal understanding of a “traditional marriage” meant no interracial marriage, and that husbands were entitled to rape their wives. When you blindly appeal to tradition, you sometimes find yourself making similar arguments to segregationists and folks who regard women as chattel. That’s not company you want to be in.
The resistance to legalizing same-sex marriage among the indigenous population has not been confined to any one place or people. It’s a problem several tribes have faced, though most have overcome it. The Cherokee reversed their ban in 2016. The Chickasaw followed even more recently, as have others. The Navajo are still holding out.
The irony is that there are various elements of native culture that are inherently queer-friendly and which indeed have been celebrated by the broader LGBT community. The Diné has a Navajo Pride Week for goodness sake. Many NDNs have a unique and generally recognized identity known as “Two-Spirit", which denotes individuals who embody the soul of both a female and male. It’s not quite transgender — that would imply transitioning from one “side” to the other. Two-Spirit people are often seen as simply both. It’s a concept that doesn’t precisely have a home in the popular English lexicon, but which holds a specific cultural and ceremonial role in many native cultures, including the Navajo.
Two-Spirit itself is an oversimplification. There are many distinct words, roles, and concepts surrounding it with a dozen or more identifiable meanings. The indigenous populations of North America are not “a people” but “peoples.” Good luck getting folks to agree on matters as subjective as gender identity.
What Two-Spirit isn’t is traditionally Western. It represents a kind of fluid and holistic understanding of gender that clashes with traditional Western thinking, which places greater emphasis on distinct and separate categories such as cis and trans. As you probably know, trying to fit a square NDN peg into a round Western hole has historically been a bit of a sore spot. It’s doubly damaging when we do it to ourselves.
The Navajo Nation commissioned public hearings and issued a report in 2016 on the treatment of women and LGBT people. The prefaces by public officials are themselves truly painful to read. Vice Chair Valerie Kelly wrote that they had “learned so much” about the “unfair treatments of the LGBTQ community.” Profound words from a commissioner of human rights. I’m sure the commissioner was well-meaning, but her words felt a lot like an executive from Toyota saying they learned so much about how cars work. Commissioner Frank Bradley makes what I presume is supposed to be a positive assertion: “To live in a world where one is accepted and treated fairly should be an aspiration for all.” Excuse me, but in the modern developed world, fair treatment should not be an aspiration — it should be a reality. We “aspire” to go to Mars. We “aspire” to cure Alzheimer’s. For something to be an “aspiration” is a tacit admission that it ain’t happening today, and it ain’t happenin’ any time in the foreseeable future, but golly-gee it’s nice to dream.
By contrast, the community testimonials from that same report are littered with people who have experienced the very worst of life as a minority within a minority. One woman was abused by her partner but was ignored by police, despite the fact that they were both police officers themselves. Another person grew up in a transient family being sexually abused as a child and turning to drugs and alcohol as an adult, before getting sober and working in AIDS outreach. There’s the person who was raped weekly at school until they found refuge in a non-native family. And just picture the layered trauma of not only being repeatedly raped as a young man but standing up in a room full of strangers and recounting it in detail, including the deafening silence of school administrators not giving a shit. Callous school administrators and the inhumane treatment of native peoples is another sore spot.
As you might imagine, the report was less than successful at meaningfully addressing inequality. The report goes on to say:
“When analyzed from this perspective, the traditional Navajo marriage and the analysis of collective and individual rights, there is no violation of a person’s rights with the Diné Marriage Act.”
The Diné Marriage Act was the 2005 Navajo law that banned same-sex marriage. The language of the bill also links same-sex relationships with incest, comparing same-sex marriage to grandparents marrying their grandchildren.
What can be done? As with most Native American issues, the wider American public seems neither to notice nor care about the treatment of LGBT people on reservations and tribal lands. The first order of business, then, is for more people to know what’s happening and to give a shit. We — those who at least claim to support individual freedom and personal autonomy — either have sincerely held values or we don’t. I know it feels somehow wrong and uncomfortable to hold people who have suffered so much to the “Western” standards of their historical oppressors. The recognition that native peoples have endured grievous historical wrongs whose scars they still live with is the compulsion of empathy. It is also the compulsion of empathy to recognize self-harm. As Carl Slater said, “This is a public health issue. And we just have so many young people who don’t believe that they have a future on the reservation.” Kicked off your land and then kicked off again.
We in the liberal West have made a lot of headway in recognizing and establishing universal human rights. But universal human rights means you cannot take rights away from other people. Even my young daughter knows this. Similarly, the right to self-govern does not grant free rein to officially discriminate against segments of one’s own people. The answer is not to swoop in from the outside, force our way onto Native lands, and save the people there from themselves. We don’t need to boycott or harass tribal nations, but we do need to at least notice them. Without looking it up, across how many US states does the Navajo Nation span? If you’re like most people, you probably don’t know (the answer is three — Arizona, New Mexico, and Utah). If you don’t live on or around a rez, you probably don’t think about it at all. The story of indifference to the well-being of native peoples has been a recurring theme all along.
Disconnection from our histories and cultures is something that plagues the Native American community. In the event that anyone Navajo reads this, please don’t disconnect the disconnected. Please don’t push people away when so many are already adrift. As an NDN (though not a Navajo), I’m pained and frankly embarrassed by my own disconnectedness from my roots. I know what it is to be seen as the “other.” I’ve been spat upon. I have been physically attacked for the crime of being a brown guy in a relationship with a white woman. Let’s not alienate one another. The very least we natives can do is not punch down on our own people or expect less of them than we’d expect of any other group.
With regard to wider American society, indifference to discrimination is, at the very least, a small endorsement. The first step to influencing progress is to take notice and bear witness — to make the injustices on tribal lands an issue that is both known and discussed outside of rarified niches. Same-sex marriage has become the law of the land for most Americans, but not all Americans. Shouldn’t we all have the same rights? We — NDNs, Americans, and all people — measure what matters to us with our attention. If we care about the plight of LGBT Navajos, then it’s time to start paying attention.
Published Mar 15, 2024
