This novel is more than just an exciting story of Native Americans in the Civil War era. Drawing upon Diné philosophy, it presents a positive way to approach life. It calls for acknowledging and respecting the important role that eroticism plays in a person’s existence. It provides a sense of humanity in its recognition that people, who would today be identified as transgendered or gay, were always part of the Diné way of life. Above all, this book—I hope—will provide the means for Americans to look at, if not re-look at, the Native population which has been pushed into the cracks between the pages of American history textbooks.
—Wesley K. Thomas, Ph.D. (Diné), Assistant Professor Anthropology and Gender Studies, Indiana University
With its sweet and triumphal love story, Two Spirits is a welcome addition to the literature of the real West and the hidden history of same-sex people. It gives a whole new meaning to “how the west was won.”
—Bo Young, Editor, White Crane Journal
Two Spirits is a story of compassion, and of love between males—one of them a person of “two-spirits,” a berdache. It is a tale of spirituality, injustice, and courage set against the stark tragedy of the Navajo experience of the 1860’s.
—Ruth Sims, author, The Phoenix
Two Spirits is a spectacular tale based on the 1860s eviction of the Navajo people from their sacred homelands. The reader is transported to an earlier era where little-known spiritual traditions were, until recently, unmentionable outside some Native American cultures. With an obvious love and deep respect for the Navajo, Williams and Johnson expose a clash of cultures that will stun many. Two Spirits, a treasure to read, is a rare combination of historical fiction and spiritual wisdom at its absolute finest.
—W. Randy Haynes (Cherokee), author, Cajun Snuff
The Spirit and the Flesh: Sexual Diversity in American Indian Culture
Indian Leadership
Southeastern Indians Since the Removal Era
Javanese Lives: Women and Men in Modern Indonesian Society
Black Americans and the Evangelization of Africa
Overcoming Heterosexism and Homophobia (with James Sears)
Homophile Studies in Theory and Practice (with W. Dorr Legg)
Gay and Lesbian Rights in the United States (with Yolanda Retter)
The Myth of the Great Secret
In Search of God in the Sexual Underworld
The Fourth Quill
Getting Life in Perspective
An Appreciation of Joseph Campbell
Gay Spirituality
Gay Perspective
Secret Matter
Finding Your Own True Myth:
What I Learned from Joseph Campbell
With beauty before me, beauty behind me, beauty above me, beauty below me, beauty all around me. In beauty I walk the pollen path. (Navajo/Diné Invocation)
With beauty before me, I give appreciation to Toby Johnson, for applying his writing skills and gift of characterization to transform a tragic history into a fictional plot that is interesting and entertaining while also evocative of a larger philosophical and spiritual message.
With beauty before me, I give appreciation to the Arch and Bruce Brown Foundation for awarding this book an Historical Fiction Prize.
With beauty before me, I give appreciation to the University of Southern California, the UCLA American Indian Studies Center, and the University of Cincinnati for funding my research trips to the Navajo Nation, from the 1970s to the 1990s.
With beauty before me, I give appreciation to Steve Berman of Lethe Press, for having faith in this project, for giving valuable suggestions that made the story more compelling and exciting, and for bringing this book to completion and spreading its message throughout the land.
With beauty before me, I give appreciation to Dr. Wesley Thomas, a professor of anthropology at Indiana University, who through his own Diné upbringing has absorbed a knowledge and a sense of spirituality about Two-Spirit and gender variant people, and whose friendship and advice about the cultural accuracy of this book has been invaluable.
With beauty before me, I give appreciation to all the other Diné people who have been so forthcoming to me, and whose provocative, intriguing, and precedent-setting wisdom about everything that matters—from spirituality to sexuality—has been so transforming in my own life.
In beauty I walk the pollen path.
Walter L. Williams
Los Angeles 2006
Sa’ah Naagháii Bik’eh Hózhó
“Continuing, Re-occurring Long Life in
an Environment of Beauty and Harmony.”
Dream Time
I dreamed in a dream of a city where all men were
like brothers,
O I saw them tenderly love each other—
I often saw them, in numbers, walking hand in hand;
I dreamed that was the city of robust friends—
Nothing was greater there than manly love…
The manly dear love of comrades.
Historical Time
While the protagonists of this novel and their personal adventures are woven out of the imaginations of the authors, this story is based on indigenous traditions of the Diné or Navajo people and on real historical events that happened to them at Fort Sumner, New Mexico Territory, in the 1860s.
Though the complexity and timeframe of the events have been simplified and compressed, the suffering and the injustice—as well as the ultimate triumph—described in the plot was the actual experience of the Diné.
After the story, the authors discuss the accuracy of this historical anthropological novel and their reasons for collaborating on this project. Following that, Diné anthropologist Wesley Thomas provides a commentary contrasting his culture’s ancient wisdom with changing concepts of gender among Diné people today.