Before the Missionaries: Sex, Marriage, and Gender Among NativeAmerican and First Nations Peoples What indigenous cultures across North America understood about sexuality — and what European colonization tried to erase

When French missionaries arrived in what is now Canada in the seventeenth century, they encountered something they had no framework for: societies in which sexuality was not organized around sin. The Wendat people — known to the French as the Huron — had attitudes toward sex that were, in the missionaries’ own horrified documentation, considerably more open and free than anything the French coming over from Europe were accustomed to. (Fair Observer, 2015)

This was not unique to the Wendat. Across hundreds of distinct nations spanning the continent from the Arctic to the Gulf of Mexico, indigenous peoples had developed richly complex attitudes toward sexuality, gender, marriage, and desire that had been in place for thousands of years before European contact. These attitudes varied significantly from nation to nation — there was never a single “Native American sexuality” any more than there was a single language or a single political system. But they shared certain broad characteristics that stand in sharp contrast to the European Christian framework that was imposed on them beginning in 1492. (Slater & Yarbrough, 2011)

This article examines those characteristics across four domains: pre-marital sexuality, same-sex relationships and gender diversity, marriage structures, and masturbation. It also examines what colonization did to these traditions and what has survived.

* * *

Pre-Marital Sexuality: The Expected Rather Than the Exception

Among the most consistent findings across the anthropological and historical literature on indigenous North American sexuality is this: prior to marriage, young people were expected to engage in sexual activities. Sex was not confined to marriage. (Native American Netroots, 2011)

This was not simply a matter of tolerance for something that happened anyway. In many nations it was actively encouraged as a natural and healthy part of development. The European missionaries who documented it were documenting something they found scandalous precisely because it was so open and so normalized within the cultures they encountered.

The Wendat of present-day Ontario and Quebec present one of the most thoroughly documented examples. Their longhouses, which could house between eight and seventy people from a single clan, were not organized around the private nuclear family unit that European settlers assumed was the natural human arrangement. Young people had recognized spaces and times for sexual exploration. The missionaries found the frankness of it deeply disturbing and said so in detailed and horrified correspondence that has since become some of the primary documentation of what pre-colonial sexual culture actually looked like. (Fair Observer, 2015)

The Europeans, and particularly the missionaries, had a great deal of difficulty understanding that women had power in Indian society and that they had the right to sexual freedom. Indian societies were not organized on the patriarchal, monogamous norms of European society. Christian missionaries were deeply shocked and offended by the fact that Indian women were allowed to express their sexuality openly. (Native American Netroots, 2011)

Trial marriage — the practice of a couple living together and engaging in sexual relations before formalizing a marriage bond — was documented across numerous nations. The Andean sirvinacuy is among the most studied examples, but the principle of establishing a genuine partnership through experience before commitment appeared across many distinct cultures. The idea that sexual compatibility and genuine knowledge of a partner should precede the binding legal and social contract of marriage was not a modern concept. It was a pre-colonial one. (Duke University Press, 1995)

The suppression of this tradition by European colonial powers was deliberate and systematic. Christian missionaries actively sought to criminalize pre-marital sexual activity, imposing concepts of sin and shame onto practices that had carried no such weight in their original cultural context.

* * *

Two-Spirit: Gender and Same-Sex Relationships

More than 150 pre-colonial Native American tribes acknowledged third genders in their communities. This is not a contested figure — it is drawn from the documented records of anthropologists, linguists, and historians who have catalogued the specific terms each nation used for people who occupied roles beyond the male/female binary. (Human Rights Campaign, 2024)

The term Two-Spirit was adopted in 1990 at the Third Annual Intertribal Native American/First Nations Gay and Lesbian Conference in Winnipeg, Manitoba. The conference delegates wanted a pan-Indian English term that could cover more than 150 distinct words across different Indigenous languages — each describing variations of people whose gender and sexuality moved between or beyond the categories of male and female. The older term “berdache,” which had been applied by European observers, carried colonial baggage and inaccurate associations with prostitution. (Gay & Lesbian Review, 2022)

Who Two-Spirit People Were

Two-Spirit people were not understood through the Western lens of homosexuality or transgender identity — these are modern Western categories that do not map cleanly onto pre-colonial indigenous concepts. Two-Spirit people were understood in their own cultural frameworks as individuals possessing a dual spiritual nature, often regarded as having special sensory and spiritual qualities that made them valuable to the community. They saw, heard, and understood things that people of a single gender could not. This was not a marginal or stigmatized identity. In many nations it was a sacred one. (Other Sociologist, 2013)

Two-Spirit people often took on wives and husbands. Their intimate relationships were with people of the same biological sex — what Western frameworks would classify as same-sex relationships — but within their own cultural context these were understood as the appropriate partnerships for a person of their gender role. A feminine Two-Spirit person would typically be partnered with a masculine husband. (Other Sociologist, 2013)

Female Gender Variance

Female Two-Spirit people — individuals assigned female at birth who lived in male gender roles — are documented across numerous nations including the Atsugewi, Blackfeet, Cocopa, Dakota, Flathead, Illinois, Ingalik, Klamath, Kutenai, Maricopa, Mojave, Navajo, Northern Paiute, Ojibwa, Quinault, Sanpoil, Shoshoni, Yuki, Yuma, and Zuni. (Library of Congress, 2024)

Among the most historically documented is Kauxuma Nupika of the Kutenai nation, known in the early nineteenth century as a “female berdache” — a person assigned female at birth who lived in a male role, took female partners, and served as a warrior and spiritual guide. We’Wha of the Zuni nation, a natal male who lived in the female lhamana role, visited Washington D.C. in 1885 and was received in the White House — the American public believing We’Wha to be a biological woman for the duration of the visit. (Gay & Lesbian Review, 2022)

What Colonization Did

Christian European colonizers condemned same-sex relationships and gender variance as sinful and used these beliefs to further dehumanize Indigenous people. The suppression was not merely cultural pressure but active criminalization — indigenous people who continued to live in Two-Spirit roles faced punishment, forced conversion, and in some cases execution. The tradition survived in many nations by going underground, preserved by people who understood that what they were protecting was essential to who their communities were. (Human Rights Campaign, 2024; Smithers, 2022)

* * *

Marriage: Polygamy, Flexibility, and Female Authority

In the beginning, America was polygamous. Singly-mated Europeans encountered Native Americans practicing status-based polygyny across the continent — one man married to more than one woman simultaneously was a recognized and respected social institution in numerous nations. (Key Reporter, 2020)

Polygyny — the marriage of one man to more than one woman — was fairly common throughout North America. In many nations, a man would marry sisters — a practice anthropologists call sororal polygyny. Sisters tended to get along better than unrelated co-wives as they did not compete in the same way. Former Navajo tribal chairman Peter MacDonald explained the Navajo practice directly: a man would marry a woman, work hard for his family, and if he proved to be caring, a good provider, and a good husband, he might be gifted with his wife’s sister as a second wife. (Native American Netroots, 2011)

The levirate — a widow marrying her deceased husband’s brother — and the sororate — a widower marrying his deceased wife’s sister — were also widely practiced. These arrangements served practical social functions: they kept children within established family networks, maintained economic bonds, and ensured the continuation of kinship obligations. (Native American Netroots, 2011)

Female Authority in Marriage

What the European observers consistently failed to understand — or refused to acknowledge — was that indigenous marriage arrangements frequently gave women considerably more authority than European Christian marriage did. In many matrilineal nations, property belonged to women and passed through the female line. Women had recognized rights to initiate divorce. Women had authority in choosing partners and in organizing the household economy. (Fair Observer, 2015)

Among the Wendat and Haudenosaunee (Iroquois Confederacy), clan mothers held significant political authority. The matrilineal structure of these societies meant that sexual and marital choices were embedded in a framework that recognized female power rather than systematically subordinating it. The missionaries who encountered these societies and described the women’s sexual freedom as scandalous were also deeply uncomfortable with women’s political authority — the two were not separable. (Slater & Yarbrough, 2011)

Flexible Dissolution

Divorce — the dissolution of a marriage that was not working — was recognized and practiced across numerous nations without the theological weight that European Christian frameworks attached to it. Marriage was understood as a social and practical bond between people. When that bond no longer served its purpose, its dissolution was a practical matter rather than a spiritual catastrophe. This flexibility was one of the primary targets of missionary campaigns: Christian doctrine required the permanence of marriage, and indigenous practices of flexible dissolution were treated as evidence of moral deficiency.

* * *

Masturbation: The Absence of Shame

The historical and anthropological record on indigenous attitudes toward masturbation is less extensively documented than the record on marriage and gender, which reflects the priorities of the European observers who produced most of the documentation rather than the importance of the subject in indigenous cultures.

What the available record suggests consistently is the absence of the specific shame architecture that European Christian culture attached to solo sexual practice. Indigenous cultures that did not organize sexuality around the concept of sin did not have the theological framework that produced the Victorian anti-masturbation panic or the centuries of religious prohibition that preceded it. Solo sexual pleasure, where it appears in the documentation, is treated as a natural expression of the body’s capacities rather than as a moral failing requiring correction.

The broader framework is consistent with this absence of shame. In cultures where pre-marital sexuality was expected, where women had recognized rights to sexual expression, and where the body was not understood as a site of spiritual danger, the specific pathologization of solo sexual practice that defined European Christian attitudes toward masturbation had no cultural soil to grow in. (Slater & Yarbrough, 2011; Fair Observer, 2015)

The suppression of indigenous sexual culture by missionary activity was comprehensive. What was lost in that suppression included not only the practices themselves but the frameworks of meaning within which those practices existed — the understanding that the body was not a problem, that desire was not a transgression, and that the pleasure of the physical self was not something requiring apology.

* * *

What Colonization Did and What Survived

The advent of European colonization dramatically reshaped traditional indigenous sexual and marriage practices. Christian missionaries actively sought to convert Indigenous peoples, viewing traditional spiritual beliefs and marriage customs — polygamy, flexible divorce, pre-marital sexuality, and Two-Spirit identities — as uncivilized and sinful. Their campaigns frequently involved forced conversion, the criminalization of traditional practices, and intense social pressure to adopt Christian marital doctrines and abandon ancestral ways. (Scientifically.blog, 2024)

Polygamy as a traditional social form evolved over time, serving indigenous peoples as a foundation for status, a symbol of resistance to colonial intrusion, and a means of maintaining kinship bonds when colonial disruption destabilized communities. By the eighteenth century, opposition to indigenous marriage practices had shifted from combating religious deviance to imposing what colonizers called rational social organization — the language had changed but the project was the same. (Key Reporter, 2020)

Two-Spirit traditions survived by going underground. Generations of Indigenous people took essential aspects of their cultural life and spiritual beliefs underground in order to save them. The reclamation of Two-Spirit identity that began in the late twentieth century — the 1990 Winnipeg conference that adopted the term, the growing body of indigenous scholarship on gender and sexuality — represents not the invention of something new but the recovery of something very old that was deliberately suppressed. (Smithers, 2022)

* * *

What This Tells Us

The indigenous peoples of North America did not have a uniform or simple sexuality. Hundreds of distinct nations held hundreds of distinct approaches to desire, gender, partnership, and the body. What they shared was the absence of the specific framework that European Christian colonization introduced and imposed: the framework that organized sexuality around sin, that treated the body as a source of spiritual danger, and that used sexual shame as a tool of social control.

Pre-marital sexuality was normal. Same-sex relationships and gender diversity were recognized and in many cases honored. Marriage was flexible, female authority within it was real, and its dissolution when it failed to serve its purpose was not a theological catastrophe. Solo sexual pleasure was not a moral failing requiring correction.

These are not radical modern propositions. They are descriptions of how hundreds of human communities organized their sexual lives for thousands of years before colonization imposed a different framework on them by force.

The recovery of this history is not nostalgia. It is the honest acknowledgment that the shame architecture most of us inherited is not ancient wisdom. It is a colonial imposition. And it has always had alternatives.

* * *

Sources

Duke University Press. (1995). ‘Living in Offense of Our Lord’: Indigenous Sexual Values and Marital Life in the Colonial Crucible. Hispanic American Historical Review, 75(4).

Fair Observer. (2015, March 30). For Native Americans, Sex Didn’t Come With Guilt. FairObserver.com.

Gay & Lesbian Review. (2022, August 1). Sex and Gender in Native America. GLReview.org.

Human Rights Campaign. (2024). Two Spirit and LGBTQ+ Identities: Today and Centuries Ago. HRC.org.

Key Reporter. (2020, July 20). Polygamy: An Early American History. KeyReporter.org.

Library of Congress. (2024). Native American and Indigenous Peoples — LGBTQIA+ Studies: A Resource Guide. Guides.LOC.gov.

Native American Netroots. (2011). Native American Marriage. NativeAmericanNetroots.net.

Other Sociologist. (2013, September 9). Rethinking Gender and Sexuality: Case Study of the Native American “Two Spirit” People. OtherSociologist.com.

PubMed/NCBI. (2016). Native American Men-Women, Lesbians, Two-Spirits: Contemporary and Historical Perspectives. PMC. PMID: 27254758.

Scientifically.blog. (2024). Native American Marriage: Beyond Monogamy Myths. Scientifically.blog.

Slater, S. & Yarbrough, F.A. (Eds.). (2011). Gender and Sexuality in Indigenous North America, 1400–1850. University of South Carolina Press.

Smithers, G.D. (2022). Reclaiming Two-Spirits: Sexuality, Spiritual Renewal & Sovereignty in Native America. Beacon Press.

Wikipedia. (2026). Marriage in the Pre-Columbian Americas. En.Wikipedia.org.

Wikipedia. (2026). Polygamy in North America. En.Wikipedia.org.

* * *

DarkerRowePress.com

Sexual Health & Awareness

Darker Rowe Press

Stories that keep the lights on.

Home

© 2026 Darker Rowe Press-Independent press. Uncompromising fiction.