Kaúxuma Núpika

Kaúxuma Núpika ("Gone to the Spirits"),[lower-alpha 1] also known as Qánqon Kámek Klaúla ("Sitting in the Water Grizzly") or Manlike Woman, was a Kutenai[lower-alpha 2] person who lived in the early 19th century.[4][5]

Kaúxuma Núpika
Ktunaxa leader
Personal details
DiedEarly 19th century

First marriage and gender change

Kaúxuma is mentioned in David Thompson's Columbia River journals, around 1811, as a prophet who had changed gender and was then a "man-like woman" with a wife.[4] Kaúxuma was initially married to a Canadian man, to whom Ria Brodell says "she was essentially a slave wife".[5] Thompson describes Kaúxuma as initially a sort of second wife to one of his men named Boisverd in 1803, and reports that she "became so common that I had to send her to her relations; as all the Indian men are married, a courtesan is neglected by the men and hated by the women." Upon leaving this husband and returning to the Kutenai, Kaúxuma said that the man had changed her sex or gender, thereafter adopting men's clothing and weapons and taking a wife.[5]

Travels as a prophet

Kaúxuma traveled throughout the Pacific Northwest, serving as a courier and guide to fur trappers and traders,[5] and as a prophetic figure, predicting the arrival of deadly diseases among the peoples of the area.[4][5] Thompson encountered her next on Rainy Lake, near the Upper Columbia River, in July 1809, where he says "she had set herself up for a prophetess and gradually had gained, by her shrewdness, some influence among the natives as a dreamer, and expounder of dreams. She recollected me before I did her, and gave a haughty look of defiance, as much to say, I am now out of your power." It was 1811 before Thompson ran into her again, when she walked into his camp seeking asylum; Thompson describes her as "apparently a young man, well dressed in leather, carrying a Bow and Quiver of Arrows, with his Wife, a young woman in good clothing". Thompson says Manlike Woman was in trouble with her adopted tribe, the Chinooks, for predicting diseases. Thompson says nothing of his response to the asylum request, but notes that his men found it a tale worth repeating. On August 2, his journal states that "the story of the Woman that carried a Bow and Arrows and had a Wife, was to them a romance to which they paid great attention". John Robert Colombo, author of Mysterious Canada: Strange Sights, Extraordinary Events, and Peculiar Places, extracted the quotes about Manlike Woman from David Thompson's Narrative of His Explorations in Western America: 1784-1812 (1916), edited by J.B. Tyrrell.

In 1823, John Franklin (of the Franklin Expedition to look for a Northwest Passage) wrote that eight years earlier (in 1815) a "manlike woman" had been present at Fort Chipewyan, near Lake Athabasca, with "supernatural abilities", who predicted great change would come to Native peoples in the area.[4] "A Kutenai woman wearing men's clothing" (and fluent in French) is also recorded in 1825 at the Flathead trading post, serving as an interpreter to the fort's factor,[4] who was Franklin's source, a Mr. Stewart of the Hudson's Bay Company.

Thompson never gives the "Woman that carried a Bow and Arrows and had a Wife" a name; it was John Franklin who refers to "the Manlike Woman" in his Narrative of a Second Expedition to the Shores of the Polar Sea (1928), and suggests the designation was one given to her by the native people she influenced. Stewart said Manlike Woman was believed to be supernatural because she excelled in male roles despite her "delicate frame", and Lee Irwin writes that "gender switching was often interpreted as indicating [...] shamanic ability".[4] Franklin's contribution ends with a fuzzy reference to a journey by Manlike Woman to carry a packet between two Hudson Bay Company posts, "through a tract of country which had not, at that time, been passed by the traders, and which was known to be infested by several hostile tribes"; she undertook this journey with her wife, and was attacked and wounded in the process, but achieved her objective.

Kaúxuma acquired the name Qánqon Kámek Klaúla, "Sitting in the Water Grizzly",[4][5] after crouching while crossing a stream (returning from an unsuccessful raid) so others would not "discern his sex".[5] Kaúxuma was killed while attempting to negotiate peace between two tribes.[5][6] In older accounts, Kaúxuma's death "is described as magical, his wounds healing each time he was struck until finally his enemy had to cut out his heart."[5]

Legacy and interpretations

Kaúxuma "is remembered among the Kutenai as a respected shamanic healer"; in 1935, some Kutenai recollected relatives whom Kaúxuma had healed.[4] Francis Saxa recorded Kaúxuma as a prophet and "peace messenger" who helped his father Ignace La Moose, an Iroquois missionary, proselytize Catholicism to the Flatheads.[4]

Will Roscoe argues that Kaúxuma is best inderstood "in contemporary terms as a transgender man.[7]

See also

References
Notes
  1. Older references give spellings like Ko-come-ne Pe-ca and say it meant "Manlike Woman" in Kutenai.[1] Some references give "Bowdash" as another name.[2] Bowdash is apparently a form of the berdache[3] (perhaps specifically of Chinook Jargon "burdash").
  2. Most early[4] and later[5] sources identify Kaúxuma as Kutenai, though a few have suggested that the prophet could alternatively have been Ojibwa.[4]
Citations
  1. Pacific Northwest Quarterly (1930), volume 21, p. 127.
  2. Elizabeth Jameson, Susan Hodge Armitage, Writing the Range: Race, Class, and Culture in the Women's West (1997), p. 51: "The story of Sitting-in-the-Water-Grizzly/Bowdash (Kutenai)"
  3. GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies (1995), p. 203
  4. Lee Irwin, Coming Down From Above (2014), p. 241-242
  5. Ria Brodell, Butch Heroes (2018), p. 24
  6. Barbara Tedlock, The Woman in the Shaman's Body (2009), p. 263
  7. Will Roscoe, Sexual and Gender Diversity in Native America and the Pacific Islands, Identities and Place (2019, ed. by Megan E. Springate, Katherine Crawford-Lackey, ), p. 68.

Further reading
  • Jessica Amanda Salmonson, The Encyclopedia of Amazons (1991, ISBN 1-55778-420-5, Paragon House), pp. 39 and 267.
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