Replies to '06/06 "I'm Gay, OK?"'

While I look "European-American" to most European-Americans and I have green eyes, I am a card-carrying member of the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma and I am even registered with the Department of the Interior's Bureau of Indian Affairs as Indian. But, I prefer to self-identify as a Native American who is also Cherokee. My English-origin last name, Doty, came to the northern hemisphere in 1620 on the Mayflower. The Cherokee line comes from my mother's mother's side.  

In my research of Native American Spirituality, I have also found that an overwhelming majority of Native American and Native Canadian tribal cultures, aka First Nations People, have an oral, ans sometimes documented in writing, history of what we might call homosexuals in their tribes.  

Before the Europeans arrived, many of the Cherokees' spiritual tribal leaders were not exclusively heterosexual. Robert Conley, who is a well-known western fiction writer in some circles, wrote and apparently is still writing, a historical fiction series on the Cherokees with the approval of the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma. The series is called the Real People Series (that's a translation of what Cherokees orginally called themselves). In the 2nd installment of that series, "The Way of the Priests," many of the priests are definitely homosexual. [The only negative part about that book is that those priests decided that they wanted to run the tribe according to their doctrines and take over the government of the Cherokees and the people rebelled with very few priests even living to tell about it by escaping from the tribe.] Conley had to get that information for Cherokee Oral History rather than was was published in his other sources of information.  

My friend, Tommy, who worked with a local Indian Clinic and was an AIDS Educator, told me that a Cherokee friend of his wanted to come out to his mother but was afraid of admitting that he was gay because the friend was not sure how his mother would accept it. Well, when the friend told his mother that he was gay, the friend's mother said, "Now all my friends will be jealous!"  

Tommy, who is also Cherokee, said that Indians don't always tell white man what they believe and practice because the non-Indian sometimes misinterprets those things. The situation in this case was that, as in many other tribes' traditions, to have a child who is not "heterosexual" is to be blessed by the Creator and that is parent and child are both divinely special.