Celebrate Native American Heritage Month

  • Native American Heritage Month (USA)
Native American Heritage Month is observed every November across the United States as a time to honor the vibrant, living cultures of Native American and Alaska Native peoples — their languages, their histories, their art, their spiritual traditions, their continuing contributions to the country whose soil they have inhabited for several thousand years, and the continuing struggles for sovereignty and recognition that shape their lives today.
The month’s core premise is a simple and often-forgotten one: Native peoples are present, not past. There are 574 federally recognized tribes in the United States, with populations ranging from a few hundred to several hundred thousand members. There are many more tribes that are state-recognized or unrecognized but no less real. The living Indigenous presence on this continent is older than any other national story that is told here, and it is still here.
For a men’s community whose work includes the honest reckoning with gender, spirituality, and tradition, Native American Heritage Month is particularly resonant — and not least because many Indigenous traditions carry, in the figure of the Two-Spirit, one of the oldest explicitly queer spiritual traditions anywhere in North America.

History

The campaign for a national observance honoring Native Americans dates to the early twentieth century. Dr. Arthur C. Parker, a Seneca scholar and museum director, persuaded the Boy Scouts of America to set aside a day for the “First Americans” for three years starting in 1912. The Reverend Red Fox James, a Blackfeet, rode on horseback from state to state in 1915 asking governors for formal recognition of a day honoring Native Americans.
State-level observances accumulated across the twentieth century. In 1976, President Gerald Ford declared a single week in October as “Native American Awareness Week.” A proper month-long observance finally came in 1990, when President George H. W. Bush signed a joint congressional resolution designating November as National American Indian Heritage Month. The name has since been updated — Native American and Indigenous Peoples’ Heritage Month are both in current use — and the proclamation is renewed each year.

Observances

The month offers a national platform for Indigenous-led programming of every kind: film festivals, museum exhibitions, book launches, powwows and intertribal gatherings, panels and lectures at colleges and universities, legislative awareness events, and the daily cultural work of Native-led institutions. The Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian hosts major programming through the month; the Library of Congress curates reading lists; PBS airs film programming; and local observances across every region take whatever form their local Indigenous communities and allies create.
The month’s themes shift year to year, often spotlighting a particular current struggle: the recovery and repatriation of ancestors held in museum collections, the reclamation of Native languages, the work of healing from the federal Indian boarding school system (which operated for more than a century and tore tens of thousands of Native children from their families and cultures), and the ongoing fight for the protection of sacred lands.
A private observance of the month can be as simple as learning the name of the Indigenous nation whose land you live on, reading a book by a Native author, supporting a Native-led organization, attending a public event hosted by Indigenous communities in your region, or including a land acknowledgment at your Thanksgiving table.

Male Perspective

Native American Heritage Month is for every man in Jonathan’s Circle. The brotherhood includes men of every orientation and gender identity, and every one of us lives on land whose Indigenous history is far longer and far more alive than the public conversation usually admits.
The month invites each brother into some specific work. Begin by learning whose land you are on. The Indigenous nation that the ground beneath your feet belongs to has a present-tense story, a government, a language, and a cultural life that your schooling almost certainly did not teach you. Websites like Native-Land.ca are a good first step. Reading an Indigenous author — Louise Erdrich, N. Scott Momaday, Tommy Orange, Joy Harjo, Robin Wall Kimmerer, Billy-Ray Belcourt — is a good second. Attending a powwow open to the public, if there is one near you, is a good third. For brothers with Indigenous heritage of their own, this month is also an occasion to deepen the practices and connections that are already part of your life.
Native American Heritage Month also carries a specifically queer chapter worth every brother’s attention: the long, deep tradition of what are now called Two-Spirit people in many Indigenous nations.
The term Two-Spirit was coined in English in 1990 at the Third Annual Inter-tribal Native American/First Nations Gay and Lesbian Conference, held in Winnipeg. It was proposed as a pan-tribal English umbrella term for the specifically Indigenous queer and gender-diverse traditions that exist, in varying forms, in many nations. (The term is not meant to replace the words that particular nations use for these people in their own languages — for instance nadleehi in Diné, winķte in Lakȟóta, lhamana in Zuni, māhū in Kanaka Maoli — but to offer a shared term for the common tradition in English.)
Across many Indigenous nations before European contact, people who did not fit the standard man-or-woman binary were widely recognized as holding specific spiritual and social roles — as healers, as artists, as mediators between worlds, as keepers of ceremonies that others could not keep. The Zuni cultural leader We’wha (c. 1849–1896) — who met President Grover Cleveland in Washington in 1886 as part of a delegation from Zuni Pueblo — was lhamana: assigned male at birth and living in both masculine and feminine roles throughout life. Osh-Tisch (c. 1854–1929), a Crow boté, was a famed warrior who fought at the Battle of the Rosebud in 1876 and was publicly honored and defended by the Crow chief Pretty Eagle against federal agents who tried to force him into men’s clothing.
The arrival of European colonizers and the imposition of Christian missions, boarding schools, and the gender norms that came with them did enormous damage to these traditions, which were explicitly and often violently suppressed. Over the past half-century, Two-Spirit elders and organizers have been doing the slow, essential work of recovery — reconnecting with ceremonial traditions, documenting elders, and building the networks of Two-Spirit community that are visible today in annual gatherings like the Montana Two Spirit Society’s summer gathering and the Bay Area American Indian Two Spirits’ powwow.
For every brother in the Circle this November, the invitations are the same: learn whose land you are on, read an Indigenous author, and give thanks that this chapter of men’s history was not lost.

Summary

Native American Heritage Month honors the living cultures, histories, and continuing presence of the First Peoples of this continent. For the men of Jonathan’s Circle, November is a month to learn, to listen, to acknowledge the land we stand on, and to let the deep Indigenous tradition of Two-Spirit life remind us that the integration of gender, sexuality, and spirit is older on this soil than any other spiritual tradition we might name.