5/13/2023 0 Comments The zuni man woman by will roscoeNonetheless, Matilda and We’wha forged an enduring friendship, and the anthropologist immediately identified We’wha as someone remarkable. At this point, the Zuni tribe had little contact with Western colonists, and no Zuni people spoke English. The Stevensons met and befriended We’wha in Zuni, which is ancestral territory located in the Southwest of North America. We’wha arrived in Washington in December of 1885 with Matilda Coxe Stevenson and James Stevenson, a husband-and-wife team of anthropologists who had been doing research for the newly-formed Bureau of Ethnology. More recent scholarship coined the term Two Spirit "as a means of unifying various gender identities and expressions of Native American / First Nations / Indigenous individuals." Existing outside of the Western gender binary, lhamana have always inhabited a special role in Zuni society, as intermediaries between men and women, who perform special cultural and spiritual duties. Alongside being a pottery maker and cultural ambassador, We’wha was a lhamana, who in the Zuni tradition are male-bodied people who also possess female attributes. had never seen a person quite like We’wha. (Source: Wikipedia)īefore 1885, We’wha had never seen a city, and the city of Washington, D.C.
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