Part of my research texts for my Isobel the Bear-Eater Project have been the writings of Waldemar Bogoras, who spent some time hanging out with the Chukchi in the Russian Far East. His work was part of the Jesup North Pacific Expedition, and was published through the the American Museum of Natural History. Other authors in the same twelve volume series included Franz Boas and John Swanton. Bogoras recorded folk stories and daily practices, trying to get the whole culture down on paper. An impossible task, if you ask me, but I appreciate what he recorded.

Two of the stories Bogoras included particularly interested me. Both are listed as “Told by Qo’tirgin, a Maritime Chukchee man, in the village of Mi’sqAn, November, 1900.”*

Story #14, “A Tale of the Raven Ku’urkil”, is unremarkable until the end. Raven’s son-in-law has slaughtered a reindeer and Raven is supposedly helping him bring back the carcass. Instead, he eats all the meat and shits on the bones. (Typical Raven behavior, really, and typical in that the Chukchi stories are not shy about scatological detail.) When he gets called out by his wife, he falls over “dead”.

In a moment [from mere confusion] he was dead from mere shame; or, rather, he simulated death. His wife carried him to the funeral place. She put him into an old jawbone house. Then she went home. As soon as they went home, he also went away. He came to some Reindeer people. He cut off his penis (and made it) into a needle-case; his testicles (he made) into thimbles, and the hair of his pubes into needles. He found a husband among the Reindeer people. He hung his needle-case with its appurtenances (up on his sitting-place); and when the other (women) came near, he would cry out, “(Beware!) You will break my needles!” lest they should look on them. The needle-case was simply his penis.

But a Fox tells Raven’s wife, Miti, what’s up and she dresses up as a man in order to pass through the Reindeer village and let it be known that she’s on her way to court Raven’s widow.

When evening came, Ku’urkil felt restless, he grew jealous, then he grew mad and wanted to come out. They could not keep him back.
He went out, and went away. He came to his wife, and called out, “O Miti!” She paid no attention. “O Miti!”
“Ho!”
“I have revived.”
“Oh!”
“With whom are you sleeping?”
“A suitor came to me.” (Just so she spoke as) she had been taught by the Fox.
“Oh, I have come back, I have revived!”
Then the woman said, “It seems that I have seen you recently. You came out with one sleeve dangling.” He died again from shame. This time he did it in earnest. Verily, he died, was dead from shame, simply rolled down. That is all.

Curious, But let me share the other story, #20, “The Man who visited the Polar Bears”. Our unnamed protagonist marries a Polar-bear woman, who bears him children, then is taken home by her brothers. Her husband follows her across the sea, where he gets on pretty well with his in-laws. After killing some neighboring monsters he takes his wife home again. Later his brothers-in-law, the Polar Bears, try to come visit him, but are killed (by humans), so our protagonist goes on a revenge war-expedition and kills them all. That’s the polar bear part, but the story continues. “After this slaying he ascended to heaven. He lived with the Morning-Dawn.” After a while, his family sends a sacrificial dog to remind him to come home.

Then he got back, rubbed some stone, anointed himself. Then he slaughtered the barren doe, offered it as a sacrifice. He entered the house, slept (through) the night, and then turned into a woman. He looked for his penis. “Gracious! indeed I am a man!” It had turned into a vulva.
He had (a suit of) armor in a pile of his goods. He said, “Well, then, I have (a suit of) armor.” He took it out. But it turned into female attire, into a woman’s overcoat. A man from the (Upper) Beings came to woo him. He said to him, “What do you want?” The one (who had) turned into a woman asked him this.
He spoke thus: “I came as a suitor (for your hand).”
“I am not a woman, I am a man.”
The suitor said to him, “Indeed, you are a woman. For that very reason I have come to you.”
He said, “Now here! See my spear!” He looked at it. It turned into a needle-case. He copulated with (this one). (The visitor) took his wife home [and brought her there].

Then there is some additional reindeer sacrifice, and the visitor turns out to be a stone pillar. The new wife is upset, and is visited by the Zenith.

“Why are you crying?”
“Some mischevious beings have acted thus towards me.”
“There, I will take you to my house!”
He took her there — a big house. She slept there. The penis (of this person) began to grow. She said, “It seems, however, that I am a woman.” Thus she said (to herself) in her innermoust (thoughts).
Just then the Zenith said, “This happened to you because you married among the Polar Bears. Go home!”
The spear that had become a needle case again became a spear.

So male characters are magically turned into women, and back again. I might dismiss these stories, as only two out of a large collection, especially as they came from the same source, if it weren’t for Bogoras dedicating an entire section of a later volume to ‘Sexual Perversion and Transformed Shamans.’ (Remember, his field work was in the 1890s. Kinsey hadn’t happened yet, nor did he likely have any experience with the diversity of gender expression I see daily in Seattle’s Capitol Hill neighborhood.)

 

 

The branch of shamanism, however, of which I am about to speak, is of a more special character, and refers to that shamanistic transformation of men and women in which they undergo a change of sex in part, or even completely. This is called “soft man being”; “soft man” meaning a man transformed into a being of a softer sex. A man who has changed his sex is also called “similar to a woman”, and a woman in a similar condition, “similar to a man”. Transformation of the first kind is much the more fequestion; indeed I had no opportunity of seeing personally an instance of the second kind, and my information is gathered only from hearsay.
Transformation takes place by the command of the ke’let, usually at that critical age of early youth when shamanistic inspiration first manifests itself.

Bogoras goes on to discuss various cases which he encountered or heard of, both male to female and female to male, and the degrees of transformation. I’ll probably share more of that on another day, take a moment to think about this completely different cultural take on trans identity. Despite his label of “perversion”, I think the stories that Bogoras shares show a culture which doesn’t view it as such. No, it’s not common, and people do think it’s a bit peculiar, but the cultural explanation is totally different from the Western/Christian take on things. There is no assumption that dressing or identifying as a gender other than the one your body started as is wrong and against nature, in fact it’s just the opposite. There is no God telling you not to, rather there are spirits telling you that you must.

And let’s go back to the story about Raven. Raven is the Creator character in the mythology of the north Pacific. And he deliberately changes his gender. The story shows him doing it out of shame, but try to imagine a Biblical story where this happens. Shouldn’t Jesus have spent some time living as a woman to get a full sense of being oppressed? He was always hanging out with the downtrodden, I hear. However, a quick internet search lets me know that Deuteronomy 22:5 specifically forbids cross-dressing, so lady Jesus or transgender saints seem unlikely. But how different might life be for transfolk today if Jesus had done the same as Raven?

 

*I have made no effort to try to reproduce the correct diacritical marks at this time, sorry!