Anthony Hudson – 2022 Indigenous Place Keeping Artist (IPKA) Fellow
I spent so much of my life looking for who I am: for the right words, for a box that fits, like a gay Grand Ronde Goldilocks seeking an identity and names—if not bears—that fit just right. One of my best-known works, a solo theatrical piece from 2016, alludes to this in its very title, Looking for Tiger Lily. It’s about growing up Grand Ronde and Siletz and German and gay and fat and gender-something-else. This show tells my story, but years of sharing it have taught me that so many of us feel like we’re not Native enough or queer enough or [insert your identity here] enough, leading us to decolonize, to find ourselves by looking back to our ancestors and where we meet with them today.
As my friend, the Cherokee academic Joseph M. Pierce, addresses in his talk The Cherokee Word for Queer, many LGBTQ Natives are searching for more traditional identities than the catch-all term Two Spirit, a modern name for queer pan-Indian identity coined in 1990 in Winnipeg. Thanks to the support of Grand Ronde’s Indigenous Placekeeping Artist Fellowship, I am now adapting Looking for Tiger Lily into a book, supporting my story with research into queer Indigenous histories and language within our own Tribes, plus interviews with queer Natives from our lands and beyond. What I found in these interviews is that many of us are still learning or yet to learn our own histories, and when it came to history, I was told immediately that a lot of what I was looking for wasn’t recorded—but what we do know is massive, revealing an ancestor we cannot afford to forget.
Shəmxi or Shumkhi was a Tualatin Kalapuya doctor in the 1800s who we might understand today as transfeminine. Her existence was documented in ethnographic works like the Clackamas Chinook Texts, Kalapuya Texts, and My Life by Louis Kenoyer, who was visited and healed by Shumkhi herself when Kenoyer was a young boy. She was known by settlers as Nancy Jack or Jack Nance, often identified in ethnographies as a “transvestite” who was paid with young men—one of which was her husband—and regarded across communities as one of our most powerful doctors. She was gifted with coyote power, with dead person power, and with skiyup power: the power to become woman.
According to Victoria Howard in the Clackamas Chinook Texts, “my father’s father’s sister was a shaman (and also a transvestite).” Like Kenoyer, Howard was healed by Shumkhi as a child. We even have audio, recorded on a wax cylinder in the early 20th century, of Howard singing Shumkhi’s power song as she heard it. What’s most incredible about Howard’s account is that she refers to Shumkhi, in Kalapuyan, with feminine pronouns. Unlike ethnographers who may have misgendered, belittled, or regarded Shumkhi as just a “transvestite” in their work—some field notes even feature translations of “her” written with telling quotation marks—Howard honored Shumkhi’s identity by calling her her.
For queer and trans people today, to be gendered correctly is to be seen. For Shumkhi to be seen by Victoria Howard in this way, when considered alongside Shumkhi’s skills as a doctor, her spirit powers, and her high standing socially, demonstrates a historical precedent that our queer—or Two Spirit, for lack of any known word—ancestors were normalized, accepted, respected, and honored within community. Looking outside of Western Oregon, accounts of the Klamath doctor White Cindy, who lived her life in brightly-colored women’s clothing, and who was also referred to as she/her, known by a female name, and highly sought by both Klamath people and settlers for healing, demonstrate that this cultural value of respect carried over regionally and was not exclusive to Shumkhi or the Tualatin Kalapuya.
It is crucial that we embrace and teach histories like Shumkhi’s. It is crucial that we remember her and that we remember the values of honor and respect that our ancestors practiced for her and for all their queer kin. We must do so not only to honor Shumkhi’s memory, but to honor our queer family today and to keep them with us: suicide is the second leading cause of death among young people and LGBTQ youth are four times more likely to attempt it than their peers, and the suicide rate for Native youth as a whole is more than double the national average. These numbers are so high because queer and Native youth don’t feel they have anywhere to turn, in part due to discrimination, bullying, and hate stemming from their perceived difference. But if their difference was understood as something traditional rather than something sinful, these numbers might tell a different story.
And, as my friend and colleague Felix Furby—a fellow Grand Ronde queer whose work on Shumkhi’s history and our languages is key to my research—has told me, this history isn’t only important to future generations, but to our elders too. Think of how many of them—of us—may walk on without seeing the kind of acceptance and love that pre-contact tradition afforded to them, and all because we continue to keep alive American “traditional values” of patriarchy, of sexism, of binaries and bigotry and assimilation and colonization and thou shalt nots that do not belong to us and never will.
After all this time, I may not have found my ancestors’ word for who I am. But for now, I’m fine with that word being Anthony. Or Felix. Or Shumkhi. Even if it were not for the histories I’ve been lucky to learn, I would still be part of a network of incredible, inspiring, funny, smart, and resilient queer Indians who show up for their communities. Regardless of lost histories and traditions that were suppressed or edited or protected or beaten out of us, we’re still here today, making new histories and honoring our ancestors and each other in the best ways we can—that’s a precedent worth pointing to.
But when it comes down it, we’re the only precedent we need. These are our traditional values, and together—with Shumkhi, with each other, and with your acceptance—these values will carry us into a future where we’re all worthy of love and honor, and what sets us apart are the powers that make us special.