Bruce Bagemihl - Biological Exuberance

16

Miller, “People, Berdaches, and Left-Handed Bears,” pp. 277-78; Drucker, P. (1951) The Northern and Central Nootkan Tribes, p. 130, Bureau of American Ethnology Bulletin no. 144 (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution); Clutesi, G. (1967) “Ko-ishin-mit Invites Chims-meet to Dinner,” in Son of Raven, Son of Deer: Fables of the Tse-shaht People , pp. 62-69 (Sidney, B.C.: Gray’s Publishing); Sapir, E. (1915) Abnormal Types of Speech in Nootka, Geological Survey, Memoir 62, Anthropological Series no. 5 (Ottawa: Government Printing Bureau).

17

Teit, J. A. (1917) “Okanagon Tales,” Memoirs of the American Folk-Lore Society 11:75-76 (reprinted in GAI and Roscoe, Living the Spirit, pp. 89-91); Mandelbaum, M. (1938) “The Individual Life Cycle,” p. 119, in L. Spier, ed., The Sinkaietk or Southern Okanagon of Washington, pp. 101-29, General Series in Anthropology no. 6 (Menasha, Wis.: George Banta); Brooks, C., and M. Mandelbaum (1938) “Coyote Tricks Cougar into Providing Food,” in Spier, The Sinkaietk , pp. 232-33, 257; Kroeber, “The Arapaho,” p. 19; Kenny, “Tinselled Bucks,” p. 22; Jones, W. (1907) “The Turtle Brings Ruin Upon Himself,” in Fox Texts, pp. 314-31, Publications of the American Ethnological Society no. 1 (Leyden: E. J. Brill); Radin, P. (1956) The Trickster: A Study in American Indian Mythology, pp. 20-24, 137-39 (New York: Greenwood Press). Other, more tangential, associations between homosexuality and turtles occur among the Fox people. In a cautionary tale of two women who had an affair with each other, for example, the erect clitoris of one woman during lesbian sex is described as being like a turtle’s penis, while the child that resulted from their union is compared to a soft-shell turtle (“Two Maidens Who Played the Harlot with Each Other,” Jones, Fox Texts, pp. 151-53).

18

Brant, B. (Degonwadonti) (1985) “Coyote Learns a New Trick,” in Mohawk Trail, pp. 31-35 (Ithaca: Firebrand Books) (reprinted in GAI and Roscoe, Living the Spirit, pp. 163-66); Steward, D.-H. (1988) “Coyote and Tehoma,” in GAI and Roscoe, Living the Spirit, pp. 157-62; Cameron, A. (1981) “Song of Bear,” in Daughters of Copper Woman, pp. 115-19 (Vancouver: Press Gang); Tafoya, “M. Dragonfly”; Robertson, D. V. (1997) “I Ask You to Listen to Who I Am,” p. 231, in Jacobs et al., Two-Spirit People, pp. 228-35; Brant, B. (1994) Writing as Witness: Essay and Talk, pp. 61, 69-70, 75, 108 (Toronto: Women’s Press); Chrystos (1988) Not Vanishing (Vancouver: Press Gang); Chrystos (1991) Dream On (Vancouver: Press Gang); Chrystos (1995) Fire Power (Vancouver: Press Gang).

19

George Catlin’s original 1867 description of the ritual homosexuality and other sexual imagery in this ceremony was considered so scandalous at the time that it was eliminated from most published versions of his monograph. Only a few copies of the first edition of the book that were delivered to scholars included this material, and even then it was set aside in a special appendix. Catlin, G. (1867/1967) O-kee-pa: A Religious Ceremony and Other Customs of the Mandans, pp. 83-85, centennial edition, edited and with an introduction by J. C. Ewers (New Haven and London: Yale University Press); Bowers, A. W. (1950/1991) Mandan Social and Ceremonial Organization, pp. 131, 145-46 (reprint of the 1950 University of Chicago Press edition) (Moscow, Idaho: University of Idaho Press); Campbell, J. (1988) Historical Atlas of World Mythology, Vol. 1: The Way of the Animal Powers, Part 2: Mythologies of the Great Hunt, pp. 226-31 (New York: Harper & Row).

20

Extraordinary as it may seem, rites like this may be far more ancient and widespread than previously imagined. Among the Paleolithic cave paintings of Lascaux in France, for example, imagery combining anal penetration of bison bulls, shamanic and sexual ecstasy, hunting motifs, and hermaphroditic animal figures can be found—a striking echo of certain elements in the Okipa ceremony and other Native American belief systems. One picture, regarded as among the most important in the entire Lascaux complex, is of a shaman lying in rapture, with erect penis, in front of a bison bull. Penetrating the bull from behind is a spear that, according to Joseph Campbell, has “transfixed its anus and emerged through its sexual organ.” The phallic imagery of the bison is also combined with vulvar symbolism in the shape of the spilled entrails or wound of the beast. Elsewhere in the Lascaux caves, a startling and enigmatic figure of an apparently gender-mixing hoofed mammal appears prominently in one fresco. On the wall of a grotto known as the Rotunda is the image of a pregnant bull whose “two long, straight horns point directly forward from its head… and [whose] gravid belly hangs nearly to the ground.” Dating from around 12,000 B.C., these are probably the earliest known depictions of gender-mixing animals, and they are testimony to an ancient and profound association between variant forms of gender and sexual expression in animals and humans (see Campbell, Historical Atlas of World Mythology, pp. 58-66, for further discussion of these images). Campbell also draws a parallel between some of these figures and the contemporary shamanic practices of the Aranda people of Australia, which involve uncanny correspondences in terms of their mixture of phallic, anal, and male-female imagery. Perhaps not uncoincidentally, the Aranda also participate in a variety of homosexual practices, both overt and “ritualized” (see chapter 2 for discussion of Aranda penis-handling as a ritualized “greeting” gesture between men; for overt homosexual activities, see Ford, C. S., and F. A. Beach [1951] Patterns of Sexual Behavior, p. 132 [New York: Harper and Brothers]; Berndt, R., and C. Berndt [1943] “A Preliminary Report of Field Work in the Ooldea Region, Western South Australia,” pp. 276-77, Oceania 13:239-75; Murray, S. O. [1992] “Age-Stratified Homosexuality: Introduction,” pp. 5-6, in S. O. Murray, ed., Oceanic Homosexualities, pp. 293-327 [New York: Garland]).

21

Schlesier, K. H. (1987) The Wolves of Heaven: Cheyenne Shamanism, Ceremonies, and Prehistoric Origins, pp. 7, 14-15, 66-73, 78-111 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press); Grinnell, The Cheyenne Indians, vol. 2, pp. 285-336; Hoebel, E. A. (1960) The Cheyennes: Indians of the Great Plains, pp. 16-17 (New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston).

22

Powers, M.N. (1980) “Menstruation and Reproduction: An Oglala Case,” p. 61, Signs 6:54-65; Parsons, E. C. (1939) Pueblo Indian Religion , pp. 831-32 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press); Tyler, H. A. (1975) Pueblo Animals and Myths, pp. 98, 131, 148-50 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press); Duberman, M. B., F. Eggan, and R. O. Clemmer (1979) “Documents in Hopi Indian Sexuality: Imperialism, Culture, and Resistance,” pp. 119-20, Radical History Review 20:99-130; Du Bois, C.A. (1935) “Wintu Ethnography,” p. 50, University of California Publications in American Archaeology and Ethnology 36:1-148.

23

Hill, W. W. (1935) “The Status of the Hermaphrodite and Transvestite in Navaho Culture,” p. 274, American Anthropologist 37:273-79; Haile et al., Love-Magic and Butterfly People, p. 163; Luckert, The Navajo Hunter Tradition, pp. 176-77; Hill, W.W. (1938) The Agricultural and Hunting Methods of the Navaho Indians, pp. 99, 110, 119, 126-27, Yale University Publications in Anthropology no. 18 (New Haven: Yale University Press).

24

For overviews of ritual homosexuality and alternate gender systems in New Guinea and Melanesia, see Herdt, G. H. (1981) Guardians of the Flutes: Idioms of Masculinity (New York: McGraw-Hill); Herdt, G. H., ed., (1984) Ritualized Homosexuality in Melanesia (Berkeley: University of California Press). On the “third sex” category, see Herdt, G. (1994) “Mistaken Sex: Culture, Biology, and the Third Sex in New Guinea,” in G. Herdt, ed., Third Sex, Third Gender: Beyond Sexual Dimorphism in Culture and History, pp. 419-45 (New York: Zone Books); Poole, F. J. P. (1996) “The Procreative and Ritual Constitution of Female, Male, and Other: Androgynous Beings in the Cultural Imagination of the Bimin-Kuskusmin of Papua New Gunea,” in S. P. Ramet, ed., Gender Reversals and Gender Cultures: Anthropological and Historical Perspectives, pp. 197-218 (London: Routledge). For ceremonial transvestism and “male menstruation,” see, for example, Schwimmer, E. (1984) “Male Couples in New Guinea,” in Herdt, Ritualized Homosexuality in Melanesia, pp. 248-91; Lutkehaus, N. C., and P. B. Roscoe, eds., (1995) Gender Rituals: Female Initiation in Melanesia, pp. 16-17, 36, 49, 69, 107, 120, 198-200, 229 (New York: Routledge); A. Strathern, in Callender and Kochems, “The North American Berdache,” p. 464.