Two Spirits

Tomorrow night (Tuesday) on PBS (you know that network that the Republicans hate and wanted to cut their funding) the show [i]dependent Lens is about the murder of a Navajo male-bodied person with a feminine nature teenager. The Native American’s call transgender people “Two Spirits” and they were sometimes held to great esteem by their tribes, many of them were Medicine Woman/Men or sages.

Fred Martinez murder was brutal and savage like many other hate crimes of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender people. The hate of the murder is borne by the victim.

This June 16th, 2011 will mark 10 years since his brutal murder at the hands of someone who targeted him simply for being different. For being himself. For being honest and true to his spirit. Attacked seems like an inadequate word. He was bludgeoned to death with a rock, fighting for his life, trying to climb a rock wall over which he could see the trailer park he called home.
Two Spirits: The Last Thing Fred Saw
Bilerico
Filed By Cathy Renna | June 12, 2011

From the Independent Lens website:

Two Spirits interweaves the tragic story of a mother’s loss of her son with a revealing look at the largely unknown history of a time when the world wasn’t simply divided into male and female and many Native American cultures held places of honor for people of integrated genders.


Fred Martinez was nádleehí, a male-bodied person with a feminine nature, a special gift according to his ancient Navajo culture. He was one of the youngest hate-crime victims in modern history when he was brutally murdered at 16. Two Spirits explores the life and death of this boy who was also a girl, and the essentially spiritual nature of gender.

Two Spirits tells compelling stories about traditions that were once widespread among the indigenous cultures of North America. The film explores the contemporary lives and history of Native two-spirit people — who combine the traits of both men and women with qualities that are also unique to individuals who express multiple genders.

The Navajo believe that to maintain harmony, there must be a balanced interrelationship between the feminine and the masculine within the individual, in families, in the culture, and in the natural world. Two Spirits reveals how these beliefs are expressed in a natural range of gender diversity. For the first time on film, it examines the Navajo concept of nádleehí, “one who constantly transforms.”

In Navajo culture, there are four genders; some indigenous cultures recognize more. Native activists working to renew their cultural heritage adopted the English term “two-spirit” as a useful shorthand to describe the entire spectrum of gender and sexual expression that is better and more completely described in their own languages. The film demonstrates how they are revitalizing two-spirit traditions and once again claiming their rightful place within their tribal communities.

Two Spirits mourns the young Fred Martinez and the threatened disappearance of the two-spirit tradition, but it also brims with hope and the belief that we all are enriched by multi-gendered people, and that all of us — regardless of ethnicity, gender, sexuality, or cultural heritage — benefit from being free to be our truest selves.

Why did their culture of “Two Spirits” die out… simply because it did not fit the beliefs of the Christian missionaries.

The show focuses on the murder of a Navajo Two Spirit teenager and the police investigation of the teenagers death. Firedoglake has an article by Wendy Davis who writes.

Fred’s mother Pauline Mitchell had alerted the local police on June 16 that her son had disappeared. When the body of a dead, bludgeoned-by-rock and teen was found south of Cortez, she wasn’t notified until five days later. The ensuing investigation and lack of communication with Pauline was callous to the point of cruelty, and only with the aid of coverage by Aspen Emmet and Gail Binkley at the local Cortez Journal, the local and national PFLAG groups and other LGBT organizations who sent people to help, was the ongoing process made more transparent.
[…]
Local elected officials in Cortez pretended none of it was happening. I remember reading the Mayor’s own news section in the paper that week; he actually spotlighted a group of Christian teens that had zipped into town to do chores for the elderly or something: that was what he chose to write about instead. When I went to his office to task him for it, his excuses were pathetic. He didn’t show up for Fred’s memorial service, nor did any representatives from the police or sheriff’s office as far as I know.

You can find when the show will be carried by your local PBS station here.