NorthEast Two-Spirit Society

Vintage Article: Rainbow and Red

This article, 'Rainbow and Red', was originally published online at InTheFray.com dated Dec. 6, 2004. The writer Emily Alpert received a GLAAD Media award for Online Journalism. NE2SS has come a long way since its founding days. Let's take a look back at what it was like when the society first started up...

“There was a time on this land in which we did have full equality,” he comments. “There was a gender analysis with an open acceptance of same-sex couples and relationships. There was a place for all of it, and I think that it’s a shame that it’s been ignored.” Pruden sees this history as crucial to current two-spirit identity. “There is a model there that can be reactivated, claimed and worked on”, he says, although he adds hastily, “There is no going back to a traditional model.”

NE2SS CALLS FOR TRUTH AND FOR GLAAD TO HELP SET THE RECORD STRAIGHT

Last week on September 27th, Annenberg Political Fact Check, (www.factcheck.org) a nonpartisan, nonprofit, "consumer advocate" for voters that aims to reduce the level of deception and confusion in U.S. politics, investigated a recent TV advertisement for Republican House candidate Vernon Robinson. Robinson accuses Democratic Rep. Brad Miller of voting to spend money on silly-sounding sex studies into masturbation, prostitution and "...something called the Bisexual Transgendered and Two-Spirited Aleutian Eskimos, whoever they are…" while trying to deny "…soldiers the body armor they need to save their lives."

Factcheck.org found the ad misleading on several counts. Miller did nothing that would have denied body armor for troops. There was no connection between the National Institutes of Health (NIH) studies in question and funding for body armor. And despite the misleading way the ad belittles these studies, the sex studies had such stated goals as slowing the spread of HIV/AIDS, understanding the Two-Spirit community and improving the lives of senior citizens as their sexual function declines.

HIV/AIDS Rising Among American Indians and Alaska Natives

WASHINGTON—Some 1,000 Native American community representatives, and federal, state and local health officials gathered in early May in Anchorage to address concerns over the growing incidence of HIV/AIDS among American Indians and Alaska Natives (AI/AN).

Data collected by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) show that the disease is a significant and rising problem in the Native American population, said Frank Canizales, MSW, a management analyst and HIV/AIDS coordinator for the Indian Health Service’s Division of Behavioral Health in Rockville, Md., as well as a federal government advisory member for the conference planning committee.

“But if you’re looking at the diagnosis of HIV/AIDS among [AI/AN] in the year 2001, [it] was 9.5 per 100,000, and it went up to 11.1 per 100,000 in 2004. So, it’s increasing each year,” Canizales advised. “One of the things with the increase is [that] the size of the population is affected much more severely, because we have a small population to begin with. So it becomes more significant.”