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Making the American berdache: Choice or constraint?

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

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But that notion is little more than smoke. First of all, it seems that among these Plains peoples the first vision of an eventual berdache was precisely the occasion when parents or elders put him to one of the famous tests referred to earlier, and we have seen that in fact, these tests no matter the age of the inductees were fictions of choice and little more. (63) But the appearance of the figures of buffalo and the moon and the like, was also not happenstance, as we have already seen among the Californians. As Wissler studying the Oglala discovered long ago, future berdaches in some areas were in fact expected to have essentially identical visions involving such specific essences as the moon and the buffalo, or perhaps a dream of the Old Woman, all of which were sure signs of the berdache status the particular community of dreams expected one to assume. (64) To put it as graphically as did one American, the cost of resisting this mandate of heaven, once visible, was death. There was "no choice." (65)

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Since the tribes of this region usually had a canonical understanding of the significance of such images, therefore, any room for the illusion of choice on the part of the young man who envisaged one of these figures was greatly limited. Lame Deer, for example, made clear that adopting the role of the berdache among the Teton Dakota was not always an exercise in free choice. Rather, one became a berdache, in his words, "by one's own choice or in obedience to a dream" (my italics). (66) Of course, the fiction of choice is always preserved in the accounts of participants, for (formal) choice by the individual visionary--and these Plains visions were always said to be experienced by individuals-was the condition of the legitimacy of the oracle's pronouncement. But as we know from the history of oracles the world around, the reality is usually that the community arranges the vision, and we see this clearly when we take one step backwards to examine the context in which these figures actually appeared.

As has often been observed in the literature, youngsters expecting to have visions were at the mercy of their elders and often of shamans, who instructed them in advance what to look for, often were at their sides at the time of vision, to then tell them what they had seen, so to speak, and to interpret those visions for such neophytes. (67) In short, there is a wealth of evidence that in effect, visions, and especially those of the young, were to varying extents social events drawing on all the community's resources for extracting their (desired) meaning. Not for nothing did several tribes construct dream societies, whose one unifying thread was that all members had the same dream, just as it was a common feature of the individual American family in the vision areas that all its members had the same dream. Further, in several tribes of this region visions were bought, sold, and inherited. A vision was before all else, said Benedict, a matter of constraint imposed by the family and in effect represented a se rious attempt at family supervision. (68)

Making the American berdache: Choice or constraint?

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

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