<u>Becoming Two-Spirit</u> is not a text without a wealth of issues, but it is also an enlightening look into Two Spirit life, particularly in Denver and Oklahoma, in the early 2000s (the book was published in 2006). I'm going to start off with the ways in which this text was weak: 

Brian Joseph Gilley opens the book, in the Preface and in the first few pages of the first chapter, letting us know that he is not Two-Spirit himself. While some people apparently seem to think this will make the book more academic or something because he'll somehow lack bias or whatever (no one lacks bias, fyi), Gilley straight up admits that he was excluded from a number of events and likely opinions because of the fact that he wasn't Two Spirit, and I am sure there were a number of men who wouldn't speak to him. I also wonder just how much he actually understood some aspects. For instance, one of the Two-Spirit individuals he spoke to lost often was someone named Shiela, a Two-Spirit person who was perceived to be a male at her birth, but lives life as a woman and uses feminine pronouns. Yet Gilley continuously referred to her as a Two-Spirit man, and referenced her as a man a number of times, and I spent nearly every time she came up wondering if she truly identified as a man or if that was only how Gilley understood things. 

Gilley also did not have access to any Two-Spirit women, as apparently the men and women kept quite a lot of space between them, and so it lacks entirely the perspective of more than half the community. 

Finally, and this is no fault of Gilley's at all, but the book is nearly twenty years old and so it's quite dated. This is only my first book in my research into Two-Spirit identities, but I am very positive that the acceptance levels in Indigenous communities has shifted radically in the last two decades, and I am excited to see how that shift has happened. 


Those criticisms aside, this was a very insightful book into the Two Spirit movement. It discusses the history of Two Spirit community members pre-colonization -- at least as much is known -- and how and why the identity started to form following the AIDS crisis. It speaks a lot about what it means to be Two Spirit -- how it's just as much about being Indigenous as it is about being queer, and you can be a "gay Indian" (as the book calls it), but if you do not embrace the culture of your Nativeness, you cannot be considered Two-Spirit. It talks a great deal of their role in communities, and their roles in ceremony, and I learned quite a bit in this very short book about identity and social acceptance.