She Was My Brother by Julie Jensen

WORLD PREMIERE!

Julie Jensen, the playwright that brought us the critically acclaimed play "Dust Eaters" (2007/08 Season), is back with "the most unlikely love story ever told." What happens when two Victorian anthropologists--Tullis, a mature woman and Wilson, a young man--encounter Lamana, a "two-spirited" religious leader of the Zuni pueblo? This moving and intense play, loosley based on historical fact, explores the borderline between love, fluid gender identities and cultural assumptions.Directed by Barclay Goldsmith & featuring Kalani Queypo ("New World," "Bones," "The Royal Tennenbaums," and Culture Clash) and local actors Martie van der Voort and Brian Levario.

THE ZUNI WORLD AND ME by Julie Jensen
As a child I liked to imagine being the first white person to see the Grand Canyon. I am walking along in the forest of lodge pole pines. Suddenly and without any warning, the earth opens up and there it is before me, a mile deep and ten miles wide. Nothing in my experience prepares me for what I see. Would I think I’d lost my mind? Would the vision alter the way I experience everything afterward?
Now as an adult I try to imagine being the first American to study the Zuni people. The Zuni language is, for example, completely unrelated to any other on earth, meaning that these people developed with few influences from other cultures. They may just be completely original. Nothing in my experience prepares me for what I encounter. Would I think I’d lost my mind? Would my experiences there alter the way I experience everything afterward?
The first two white Europeans to study the Zuni people spent years with them, wrote thousands of pages about them. And yet both scientists left out a very important part of the Zuni culture, the presence of third gender people. We don’t know why they chose not to pass this information forward, perhaps because the pressures from their own culture were so strong they could not. Perhaps for personal reasons, they would not.
Frank Cushing, the original ethnologist to study the Zuni, spent five years among them, even becoming a member of a highly prestigious secret society, the Priesthood of the Bow. He knew the language and wrote extensively about the people, describing their behavior and religious practices, their stories and legends, their crafts and arts. The third gender person whom he most certainly knew, We-Wah, is never described or even mentioned in all his volumes of material, except in a census where Cushing called We-Wah an “hermaphrodite.”
As for Matilda Coxe Stevenson, she wrote about the third gender person with scant detail. She was, for example, with the famous Zuni man-woman when he died, yet she relegates that event to a footnote.
My contention is that Cushing and Stevenson excised the material about this person when they reentered white society, an act of self-censorship unrivaled in modern science.
Not only did our white progenitors fail to pass on the story of We-Wah, they also failed to discuss the seven other third-gender people in Zuni during their time there. They made no mention of or comparison with the thousands more who were a valued part of other tribes in the Americas. This material, left out of their record, is for me one of the most important aspects of Zuni culture, certainly a part of the Zuni world that our world yearns to understand.
Would such information have changed the way we think? Would it have meant that the last century of life in America was less dominated by prejudice and hate? I like to think so.