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Making the American berdache: Choice or constraint?
Journal of Social History, Spring, 2002 by Richard C. Trexler
(51.) This happened to a Sioux awaiting the vision at puberty; J. Dorsey, "A Study of Siouan Cults," Bureau of American Ethnology 11th Annual Report (1889-90), 378. Desy, "L'hommes-femmes," 72, refers to four different peoples' tests, and S. Jacobs examines the phenomenon in California: "Berdache: A Brief Review of the Literature," in Ethnographic Studies of Homosexuality, eds. W. Dynes and S. Donaldson (New York, 1992), 276.
(52.) Among the Plains nations, who made their berdaches when the boys were in adolescence, the situation is however not so simple. See further below.
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(53.) R. Hauser, "The Berdache and the Illinois Indian Tribe during the Last Half of the Seventeenth Century," Ethnohistory 37 (1990): 45-65, esp. 55, where he argues that those adults forced to dress as women so as to shame them were not "true berdaches." This conflicts squarely with the historical record, and, as shown above, is based on a misreading of Callender and Kochims. Hauser cites an unidentified Frenchman of c. 1700 to the effect that "perhaps no nation in the world scorns women more than these [Illinois] savages usually do.... The bitterest insult that can be offered a savage is to call him a woman."; ibid., 55.
(54.) Reproduced in color on the dust cover of my Sex and Conquest, and in black and white ibid., 119.
(55.) R. Landes, The Prairie Potawatomi: Tradition and Ritual in the Twentieth Century (Madison, 1970), 26.
(56.) Desy, "L'homme-femme," 63, cites the whole relevant passage of Dumont de Montigny with details on their clothes, division of labor, and confirmation that these chefs were "abused' by the active Natchez 'barbarians." Berdaches often seem to have served in peacetime as the heads of economic units composed of women. See Trexler, Sex and Conquest, 137. The "ribald" was a somewhat comparable European male who was a "chef des femmes" in medieval European armies, responsible for disciplining female camp followers in medieval European armies, but he never transvested; R. Trexler, Dependence in Context in Renaissance Florence (Binghamton, 1994), 123-25.
(57.) The Texans, who did not carry bow and arrow, identified themselves as "women of the men of war"; J. Arlegui, Cronica de la provincia de NSPS Francisco de Zacatecas, 143-44. Also: "In this nation [in the province of Texas] abound the hermaphrodites [i.e. berdaches] which they call the Monaguia. These go out with the Indians on the campaigns to serve them as well as to drive the herd of horses and mules that are stolen while they fight those who come to take them away"; "Diary of a Visit of Inspection of the Texas Missions Made by Fray Gasper Jose de Solis in the Year 1767-68," Southwest Historical Quarterly 35 (1931): 44. For the mislabeling "hermaphrodite," see Trexler, Sex and Conquest, 67, 215.
(58.) For the Cheyenne, see G. Grinell, The Fighting Cheyennes (Norman, 1956), 236-64; for the Kootanie "bowdash," "permitted to go from all the camps, without molestation, to carry any message given her to either camp," see "The Unpublished Journal of William H. Gray from December, 1836 to October, 1837," Whitman College Quarterly 16 (1913): 46f.
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