BIPOC Trans-spiritual Communion on Native American Land

Dr. Alex Wilson

Click on her picture to hear the first 15 minutes of her talk.

Gendered Versus Genderless Concepts of God

The Abrahamic religions regard God as definitely male and its pronouns are He/Him. Dr. Alex Wilson is a Cree scholar who discusses Weesageyachak - her people's genderless world creator. She explains how their ungendered concept of the divine engenders a pragmatic spiritual concept of relationality. Along with the centrality of relationality in what she calls their land-based education also goes their notion of accountability.

Emphasizing these twin concepts Dr. Wilson reminds her people to leave living space not just for themselves but even for the colonizers and all living things. This practice, she explains, includes making room for third gender children and adults on the land, in the classroom, at sites of activism, and in sacred space. In the same vein, Dr. Wilson reminds her people that they must never exclude or deny the centrality of two spirit or third gender people to their culture. Instead, she demonstrates the need to elevate them, once again, to their proper ritual status, operating in close relationship to the land.

A Plea for Accountable Relatedness

Rallying the youth to stop polluting the environment and killing people to reap profits, Michael Jackson set out to launch a global tour before he died. He had planned to have millions of his fans singing his love song to the Earth (below). This anthem is not just listing the harm done but it also is connecting mind and heart in a demand that we heal the damage done and restore humanity and the environment. It calls for change and reminds our planetary population how we must change spiritually to change our way of life. We must acquire respect for ecological relationality if we aim to be be accountable to Mother Earth and all living beings.

The First Ecological Warning in America Was an Indigenous One

Some pre-colonial indigenous nations strove to avoid ecological imbalance, says Carolyn Merchant. They based their ecological methods on their spiritually informed notions of land care. They saw themselves intimately related and accountable to Mother Earth, whom they construed as a spiritual being.

Merchant explains how the indigenous people warned the colonizers that their land management methods were short-sighted and hostile to Earth. They warned that such expedient settler agricultural and settlement practices would produce ecological strain leading to societal breakdown. Indigenous people went to Washington, and even to the United Nations, with environmental warnings that fell on deaf ears.

Today, after the colonizing culture has abused the people and the land, modern ecologists are learning from Native Americans how they might better manage the land. Merchant envisions a hopeful future. She suggests that the traditional indigenous cosmologies might inspire humanity to achieve sustainability and renew our planetary resources. But western society splits off the sacred from its agricultural and urban planning practices. In contrast, indigenous land care principles did not exist in Native societies as a science apart from spiritual beliefs about their intimate relationship with the land.

Indigenous people felt a part of and accountable to the Earth. They were led by mahu, third gender, two spirit, and other shamanic figures to commune with the land, the animals and the plants. Each indigenous nation had their own terms for such people who taught the secrets of nature, life, duty, freedom, and love. Plants and animals also taught them that people will thrive when they replenish the land and treat Earth not as a thing to be commoditized but as a person worthy of respect and cooperation.

Respecting the third gender, two spirit people is part and parcel of respecting the Earth in which all things are related. The two spirit/third gender people practiced spirituality among all keepers of spiritual practices. Their land, animal, and people knowledge was rooted in deep wisdom about the inseperable sacred tie between the spiritual and the material.

Influential Indigenous Knowledge

Accountable relationality is an indigenous way of knowing. It entails knowing one's role in the sacred. Yet, the colonizing culture construed their way of knowing the sacred as evil and western science viewed as backward. Tremendous damage consequently has been done to life on Earth, and global healing is required.

New breakthroughs are helping western society to value the indigenous wisdom that honors the third gender wisdom of spiritual leaders in their communities. Is that wise indigenous leadership still influencing today's world of the colonizers? The answer seems to be yes.

Consider, for example, Lydia Hiby, who communes with animals, like indigenous Americans have done. As a child Hiby was never discouraged nor told what she was "hearing" was ridiculous or impossible. As an Animal Health Technician, she worked in animal clinics, like the nationally known Cat Practice in New York City.

Similarly, Monica Gagliano - is a new kind of ecological scientist because she is a plant communicator. Her spiritually inspired book, Thus Spoke the Plant, transcends the colonial way of seeing plants only as material objects. Gagliano was taught by plants to rethink the scientific view of plants only as things to be managed and commoditized. She learned from plants to regard them in indigenous terms as beings with subjectivity, consciousness, and volition. They have voices needing to be heard, she says, and their knowledge is available to be known.

Hiby and Gagliano, two people of European descent, are accountably related to the animal and plant beings with whom they communicate. Many Americans are known for relating with animals, especially pets, but most are not so good with regarding plants, livestock, or other humans as relatives. In contrast, Gagliano reminds us that all plants and humans share an intimacy as equal children of Earth: "We breathe each other in and out of existence, one made by the exhalation of the other.

MAGA man shoots an Indian celebrating removal of a violent colonizer's memorial.

If Your God is Love, Why Celebrate Genocide?

Despite a growing ecological movement, the whole of Christianized America, like all post-industrial nations, has been unkind to the Earth and its living things. Establishing sacred space for BIPOC trans communities, therefore, has been no easy task. Getting Christian America to make space for trans-spirituality also is no easy task. Recognizing the sacredness of trans people and their right to sacred space is difficult to sustain in a country that wrecks the planet and violates the animals and humans. So, in what American space can the BIPOC trans community safely exist?

Spirituality becomes a refuge for colonized people, and safety in their sacred practices seems illusive. This was illustrated when Ryan David Martinez, a pro-Trump MAGA cultist, shot a Native American at the end of September 2023.

Martinez attended a non-violent celebration of the county's decision to postpone putting back up a statue that had been removed due to protest. It is a statue that memorializes the Spanish colonizer, Juan de Oñate. It shows him arriving on horseback at the Rio Grande river in 1598. Based on the wisdom of their land-based knowledge, many Native Americans residing in Rio Arriba County, New Mexico regard Oñate as a war criminal. After much protest and many meetings, they finally were able to get the Oñate statue removed from its public plaza in 2020.

Martinez was visibly disturbed by the indigenous celebration of the decision to keep the Oñate statue down. Observers' videos reportedly show Martinez accosting attendees while shouting racist obscenities at children. Perhaps he believed that the Native Americans should never have won their battle to bring down that colonizer's statue. To oppose the Oñate statue in public, cost them blood.

Scott Williams, son of Denise Williams, was shot in 2020, along with several Native women, in this struggle over Oñate's statue. In an earlier 2020 incident, Steven Ray Baca, the white male shooter, had a weapon not registered in his name. He arrived to the scene of the sacred indigenous celebration with right-wing armed militia to defend the statue. District attorney Raul Torrez reported that two undercover officers who were present at the incident did nothing to intervene in the escalating conflict that would prevent the shooting. They did nothing when Baca, as recorded on video, began assaulting Native women while other Native people were trying to pull down the Oñate statue with a pick ax and chain. When Native people gave chase, Baca hit them in the face with pepper spray and in self defense, they hit him with a board. Baca then started shooting.

After the shooting, Torres reports that the Albuquerque PD "made it impossible for key witnesses to the event to actually make statements."

Three years later, the Martinez shooter seemed to be a lone actor, but at the same event a few other far-right men also were harassing Native people engaged in ceremony.

Why? Perhaps Martinez felt Native Americans were going too far. Not only were they asking to keep that Oñate statue down; they additionally were asking now for the intersecting Oñate Street to be renamed Tewa Valley Road after the local indigenous people. His sentiment as a settler descendant might have been: How dare they?

After his MAGA hat was knocked off in a scuffle, Martinez pulled out his gun and shot Jacob Johns, a Native American climate activist before speeding away in a white Tesla. John had blocked Martinez from defiling the altar the Native Americans had set up on the concrete platform where the Oñate statue formerly stood.

At the start of the event, Native speakers acknowledged from the podium their fear of speaking out. One male native speaker said Oñate represents patriarchal male violence which is what they all feared, and oddly, that speaker failed to mention racial violence. Another two spirit Native speaker, "Celina Montoya-Garcia (Ohkay Owingeh), asked for her wife to stand with her at the front so she could feel safe."

Martinez and Baca want Native Americans to leave in place the memorials erected to colonizing white males who settlers celebrate for the violent roles they played in making this country. The far-right MAGA Christian does not see racism operating in the public display of such historic statues, or they see it, and want to celebrate what they see. They also insist that everyone else should celebrate the successful conquest that their colonial violence achieved on behalf of white supremacy. Their heros achieved genocide and also what Dr. Alex Wilson calls epistemicide - the killing off of the knowledge systems that land-based Native Americans built that contained their often ungendered notions of the sacred. 

On the same basis, BIPOC two spirit and trans people - mishandled and abused - have been excluded from the land, and from being represented in memorials, and from all kinds of space in America, particularly sacred space. How and why that exclusion began when indigenous nations encountered men like Oñate during America's colonial era is later explored in a historical retrospective delineating the origin of BIPOC communities.

162 Disheartening and Disfiguring Years to Eradicate the Spirituality and Cultural Predilections of Native American Children, and to Kill the Non-Compliant

Indigenous Knowledge is Not Exaggerated

When indigenous knowledge and sacred practice is still under attack, it is hard for indigenous communities to celebrate their third gender people and the sacred values they embody.

Perhaps epistemicide feels too harsh of a term, or maybe it seems exaggerated. If so, note here that the Department of Interior recently identified 408 institutions (having 53 sites where Native children's bodies were buried). These institutions were established in America and were run by the federal boarding school system. 

Operating between 1807 and 1969, these centers of epistemological indoctrination were organized to facilitate, "the cultural reprogramming of Native children;" and, more importantly, "to strip Native people of language, culture, tradition and ties to the land."

More recently NABS (The National Native American Boarding School Healing Coalition) extended this federal investigation by documenting the federal government's hand-in-hand collaboration with white Christians. The aim of their alliance was to indoctrinate Native children in programs of re-education. Nearly 50% of these schools received funding, infrastructure, and personnel from Christian churches.

To make this factual information available to their people and to the public to facilitate healing, NABS mapped the distribution of all 523 centers identified, so far, throughout North America. Some were federal and religious sites, and others were just federal sites. The initial number of 408 sites was extended in a second report to include an additional 115 'schools' that the Christian missionaries oversaw.

Audio Recording of Screaming Plants

Accountable Relationality Engenders Empathy

The indigenous principle of accountable relationality suggests that humans will not be sufficiently kind to each other if they are not kind to the Earth and its life. In the aftermath, all life responds with pain and distortion when abused.

BIPOC trans people are no different although anti-trans and anti-BIPOC voices dismiss reports about BIPOC trans pain as excessive and invalid. Opponent voices think such reports are cases of deceptive special pleading. They think that the voicing of BIPOC trans suffering deserves no serious attention. Nor do they believe that any serious response is necessary when BIPOC trans people protest the painfulness of their vulnerable situation in a country where too few people accept them.

One assumes this position of callous disregard only when viewing BIPOC trans people as the bane of society, as less human and unworthy of life. This distorted view of BIPOC trans people drives them down a spiritual path where they are seeking to resolve or at least withstand their constantly restimulated pain.

When opponents regard BIPOC trans people as brazenly demanding rights and remain insensitive to their pain, BIPOC trans pain seems not to exist in their opponents' point of view. They regard trans complaints about the lack of safe domestic, work, and sacred space as voices far too shrill. Yet, all living things respond to abuse.

Recent research reveals that even unsafe plants scream when hurt. The more distressed plants feel, the more they scream. Their recorded voices sound like ultrasonic pops or clicks beyond the range of human hearing.

Screaming plants are speaking the truth of their experience; but most humans do not hear them. Likewise, when BIPOC trans people scream, they are speaking the truth of their experience. Yet, most Americans don't hear as valid the screams of hurting BIPOC trans people who need sacred space in which to heal.

The later interviews indicate that some efforts to open sacred space to BIPOC trans people recently have been fruitful, but are not yet up to scale. For this reason, BIPOC trans-spiritual leaders and their allies dedicate themselves to helping Americans to make that change, to develop accountable relationality towards BIPOC trans people. To develop the kind of empathy that validates their needs and prompts one to address them.

Two Spirit People Are Reclaiming Their Land—and Their Identity

22 mins.

Surviving Climate Change: A Time for Sacred Communion on the Land

Climate change is showing the colonizing culture today how unaccountable it has been for its violent relationality towards the Earth and other beings. There also may be other natural factors at play but there is no doubt that man-made drivers of climate change also are real. Thus, we are witnessing Earth's sixth mass extinction.

Human survival relies now on adopting an indigenous approach to ecological balance. We need a new approach that infuses accountable relationality into new domains where before it has been subjected to epistemicide. Doing this knowledge work may help humanity to avoid the worst climate change predictions, or it can improve chances of human survival by advancing our commitment to building a caring community of mutual cooperation.

Indigenous people are now saying to the industrial and post-industrial settler societies that indigenous knowledge is required to heal the ecology and manage climate change. BIPOC trans-spiritual leaders are issuing a call for conservation of the natural world that sustains us. They encourage America, and the world, to ask indigenous people how they would repair the land and slow down the incredible mass of life going extinct.

Emphasizing a relationality that entails accountability, indigenous people model how to embrace the wilderness as sacred space. It is where they go to commune with nature and to spiritually heal and grow. Defiantly they return to the land by opposing privileged white access to land. They are returning to defend the Earth and its living things, and to elevate and recenter in their societies the third space, two-spirit people among them.

They are not dallying in discourses legitimating the judgement and rejection of others not like themselves; instead, they are growing indigenous movements in North America like #Idle No More, #Land Defense and #LANDBACK. By spiritually grounding themselves on the land and by protecting their ecological relations, they are planting their feet on the breast of Mother Earth in the era of climate change. They model the act of occupying and revering sacred space by defying the imposed legalities inscribing anti-black white rules of access.

According to LandBack activists, their movement "allows us to envision a world where Black, Indigenous & POC liberation co-exists. It is our political, organizing and narrative framework from which we do the work."

We are again at the nexus where the sacred is political. Perhaps the indigenous people's determination to ground themselves on the land will open up new sacred space in which the BIPOC trans-spiritual leaders can nurture their constituents and congregations. Perhaps this indigenous effort that includes queers will form new BIPOC coalitions and help humans be kinder to Earth and more loving to people and other living things.

A compassionate sea change would be a wondrous thing for BIPOC trans-spiritual people to experience, but they no longer are waiting. Within and beyond indigenous communities, BIPOC trans-spiritual leaders are doing the work to make this change a reality by defending the land and holding sacred ceremony on the land.

Repairing Land Loss: A Queer Sacred Quest

Since most BIPOC people historically have been deprived of land, their numbers include BIPOC trans people and other non-white members of the LGBTQIA community. Indigenous people lost nearly all their land to conquest and white racial practices like dispossession and forced migration. African Americans once held 15 million acres and lost it to similar practices of racist, technically legal land theft. Immigrants lost land when they left home to come to America. So, the BIPOC community largely is landless.

When the converted BIPOC trans people are confined to urban churches, they would like to feel safe but too often find that they are not. Perhaps it is the landlessness of BIPOC trans people that lends a religious contour to expressing their spiritual aspirations in a church or temple. But that is not the only possibility. For everyone knows that spiritual healing occurs when one spends time in nature. Getting feet on ground (free of pesticides) can infuse one with negative ions needed to neutralize or 'ground' the emotional lightning bolts too often set off in that anti-BPOC trans conflict that can emerge in the tense urban areas. Despite a BIPOC trans past in which being in nature has been unsafe, the land is calling the people to return, to be healed and spiritually grounded once again.

Spiritual Land-based Knowledge and Connections

The upshot is that BIPOC trans people's self-knowledge and spiritual journey requires land-based ecological knowledge. The educative function of their land must be restored, so their land loss must be repaire. BIPOC trans-spirituality, therefore, must be grounded, and aspirations in that direction do exist.

Hence, BIPOC trans people are starting to reclaim their access to land. They are striving to create sacred space not just in institutions but also in natural spaces that BIPOC trans people can enjoy with their allies. They are helping BIPOC youth to establish a more intimate and knowledgeable relationship with nature by learning accountability to our planet and local universe.

Octavia Butler caught this cosmological vision of no exclusion and conveyed it in her book, Parable of the Sower and also in its sequel, Parable of the Talents. Lauren Olamina, the central character, establishes a new theology and religion. It spiritually inspires and grounds her Earthseed Community in themselves and on the land as the world around her is collapsing. In one passage, Lauren declares: "We are a harvest of survivors."

BIPOC trans people are precisely that - a harvest of survivors - who can create similar spiritual communities as they become dedicated to reclaiming sacred space on the land and raise any children in their lives to embrace this spiritual philosophy. As George Washington Carver observed in 1907:

"There is probably no agent more productive of interest than children's gardens, which embody almost if not quite every phase of practical rural nature study. If properly presented new revelations and discoveries will constantly be unfolding before the pupil, increasing his enthusiasm and gradually enlarging his educational horizon." (George Washington Carver, in "The Value of Nature Study and Children's Gardens," The Cornell Countryman, v. 4, May 1907, p. 249-250).

As humans coming to see Earth and its life as conscious beings to be loved and respected, perhaps the same revelation will inform all humanity that BIPOC trans people are also conscious fellow humans to be loved and respected. That would be a good thing, but BIPOC trans-spiritual leaders no longer are waiting for this desired change to occur. They are forging ahead. They are helping their constituents and congregants to invest in their spirituality as an act of self-love.

Perhaps Reverend Valerie Spencer, a BIPOC trans-spiritual leader, said it best when addressing an audience of trans people:

Remember, to be trans is one of the most spiritual things one can ever be in and of itself — even should you never pray. We are the rare people that caught a glimpse of God being itself as us, dancing around as us. And when we begin to move toward that vision, that is divine. ...

You are not trans because of your genitalia. ...Do what you need to do, but know that you are trans because of your intuitive abilities to heal.

We hear spirit, we just do. We feel it, sense it, know it. And oh goodness, we call it different things. We call it "individuality." We call it "gender justice." We call it "being my true self." We call it "nonconforming." But make no mistake: you may feel your gender in your body, but your transness lives beyond it. That's spirit. That's divine.

What matters presently is that BIPOC trans people be accountable to their relationality. They are doing this by recognizing themselves as equally loved creations of their higher power as they conceive it. Some are doing this by becoming self-aware meditators. Some are doing this by remaining agnostic or atheists dedicated to doing good works. No matter their spiritual practice, they are rejecting and refuting the claim that they exist on Earth only to adhere to the dictates of others.

In the alternative, the self-recognition of BIPOC trans leaders inspires their spirit to celebrate and propagate goodness in the world. Hence, they strive to spiritually grow and give gratitude. They are changing themselves in order to change the world into what they dream that it could be. They are not acting in isolation but have allies who gain as much as they give.

BIPOC trans-spiritual leaders invoke the spirituality of all to recognize the spirituality that they, too, embody. They are seeing the consciousness of the cosmos as no less residing in the BIPOC trans body and community than it does in any other embodied being or community. Towards cultivating this enspirited self-awareness and commitment to others is where the leaders of BIPOC trans-spirituality and their communities are headed. May their quest be blessed.