Two-spirit powwow dancers represent LGBTQ2S pride in traditional Native spaces: 'I would have appreciated seeing people like me as a youth growing up'
For two-spirit Native American powwow dancers Adrian Stevens (Northern Ute/Shoshone-Bannock/San Carlos Apache) and Sean Snyder (Navajo), dancing has been a part of their lives since before they could walk.
And when each of the Indigenous LGBTQ2S artists did start walking, dance became a way of life. Little did they know at the time, however, just how meaningful their dancing would be when it came to opening minds and changing rules.
“I grew up going to local powwows. My family took us all over the place,” Stevens (he/they/them) tells In The Know by Yahoo about the traditional Native ceremonies that incorporate dance, drum circles, singing, food and community.
“That was kind of my childhood,” Snyder (they/them) adds. “If I really think about it, my best highlights and best memories are all around these celebrations and traveling here to there with my family.”
As “inseparable” two-spirit partners who met on the powwow circuit and have been together for nearly a decade, both Stevens and Snyder have taken the opportunity to educate their social media followers as well as powwow audiences about what the 2S in LGBTQ2S means — a gender fluidity that’s infused with tribal nuance.
“It’s about spirituality, not sexuality,” Stevens says, adding that being two-spirit is about “being able to walk within spiritual and ceremonial spaces that are often held for masculine roles or feminine roles.”
“We represent over 500 tribes just in the United States alone,” Snyder explains, referring to the 574 federally recognized tribes in the U.S. “That’s over 500 different ways to understand your own personal identity as a two-spirit person. And that’s so important to encourage people to reconnect with their own tribal understandings of what it means to be queer or gender different in any kind of way.”
Sweetheart dancers
In that effort of encouragement and understanding, the pair have even helped rewrite rules and expand definitions within traditional spaces like powwows, which have often created sharp gender divisions in dance categories. In fact, Stevens and Snyder were the subject of a short film, Sweetheart Dancers, by Ben-Alex Dupris that won the Outfest LGBTQ film festival‘s Grand Jury Award in 2019.
The film covered their challenges as the first two-spirit couple to enter a Sweetheart Dance contest on the powwow circuit. The rules at the time called for one man and one woman to participate in the dance, and they were even disqualified at one point for not fitting into that box.
“Through their story of tenacity, we see a glimpse of the front lines that Indigenous Two-Spirit youth are fighting,” Dupris wrote in a post for PBS about his film. “They are pushing outdated social norms back to a traditional time, where all human beings were honored.”
In the four years since the film’s debut, LGBTQ2S visibility and acceptance have grown in these spaces, thanks in no small part to Stevens’s and Snyder’s positive efforts. In fact, two-spirit powwows have been popping up across the country ever since the first one was held in 2012, established by the Bay Area American Indian Two-Spirits (BAAITS) organization. Snyder recounted that they were able to carry in the two-spirit flag during the Grand Entry at the Gathering of Nations powwow in Albuquerque this year, an especially meaningful honor at the largest powwow in North America.
“It’s a credit to our community that has really not only embraced us, but pushed us forward to champion this message for everybody. And we’ve really seen a change not only in powwow circles, but just general, like Native communities moving toward this language and our community celebrations being more open and inclusive where rules are being changed,” Snyder says. “That’s just more momentum for all of us.”
And that momentum is helping to raise visibility about the two-spirit community so that the younger generation can see themselves represented in the powwow circle and beyond. Snyder says that they and Stevens take that role as Native change-makers very seriously.
“Whatever you do, you want to put your best foot forward, and we try to make our families proud of us and all the work that we do,” Snyder says. “I would have appreciated seeing people like me as a youth growing up. And so we just continue to publicize every little event we’re going to, every big event that we go to, just to keep showing our youth that we’re out here. We’re out here doing it.”
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