I'd say two-spirit is a really simplified English term to represent a set of very complex concepts. For me, in terms of my own position around being two-spirit, I've been following the breadcrumbs to figure out, first of all, my Cree Métis history and whether there is a word for two-spirit within the people who I come from. I've been able to track my ancestry back to a particular territory in Montana where there is, from the colonizers who came to that community and researched the community, a very long word that I can't pronounce within that Blackfeet community that my ancestors come from.
It's a very complex concept. There were women, folks who were assigned female at birth, who took up roles that were seen as more masculine in the communities, very capable women who could tan hides as fast as the men, who owned property and didn't lose their property when they married a man. They sometimes had multiple partners. That's how the anthropologists at the time described those two-spirit people. There's probably a richer history to all of it that predates the records.
For each person, there's an invitation to search back to the people that one comes from and to figure out if there was a gender-diverse part of the community and what that was about in that community. I think we'd find it's very different from nation to nation. That's what we've heard when we've engaged with two-spirit researchers or two-spirit people themselves. It's unique to the indigenous person and the community they come from.
It's very hard to pin down.