3 Myths and Misrepresentations
The Distorted Image of the Timucua Two-Spirit People Across Three Centuries
Molly Paris
When the modern Indigenous Timucua first contacted Europeans in 1564, over 200,000 Timucuans lived in what is today Northeast Florida and South Georgia. By 1595, the Timucuan population had dropped to 50,000; by the 1700s, fewer than 1,000 existed. Timucuan culture died out primarily because of European colonialism and Christian beliefs. By applying Eurocentric gendered Christian beliefs to Timucuan culture, the Timucuans, specifically the Two-Spirit Timucua people, suffered a second death at the hands of twentieth and twenty-first century academia. These practices caused specific harm to Two-Spirit Timucuans and their unique identities that persist in modern North American Indigenous communities today. Given the prominent status afforded Two-Spirit people within the Timucuan culture, why did sixteenth-century missionaries and explorers knowingly try to obliterate their true identity and status, and why did scholars perpetuate assumptions made by the sixteenth-century French and Spanish for over 300 years?1
Timucuan Two-Spirits were non-binary individuals who were afforded high status within Timucuan society because of their ability to transverse between the Timucua’s cosmology of pure, impure, and polluted. Binary Timucuans could not go between states, so Two-Spirits took on the roles of nursing, battlefield medics, and diplomats because of their spiritual dexterity to navigate the states more easily.
Throughout time most cultures romanticized saving soldiers on the battlefield, tending to the sick and diseased, and being part of a diplomatic corps. Mother Teresa was given a Nobel prize for humanity in 1979 and canonized as Saint Teresa of Calcutta in 2016 for tending to the poor and sick in slums. Rudyard Kipling immortalized a battlefield water boy in his epic poem, Gung Din, ending with the famous line, “By the livin’ Gawd that made you, you’re a better man than I am, Gunga Din!”2 However, explorers, missionaries, historians, and anthropologists chose to denigrate Two-Spirit Timucuans for doing precisely the same roles as Saint Teresa and Gunga Din.
Other than archaeological artifacts, all we have left of Timucuan culture are a few written accounts from French and Spanish explorers, missionaries, adventurers, and later interpretations of those accounts from modern historians and anthropologists. What little those sources expressed about the Timucuan Two-Spirit was derogatory and misidentified them as inferior people in Timucuan society. Instead of giving Two-Spirits the same respect that Timucuan society bestowed upon them or that Europeans gave other similar binary-gendered people performing the same roles, twentieth and twenty-first century academics chose to perpetuate the sixteenth-century French and Spanish derogatory stereotypes of Two-Spirit people and turn those same admired roles into minor or peripheral ones.
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