Osh-Tisch

Osh-Tisch (Crow: "Finds Them and Kills Them")[1][2] was a Crow badé. A badé (also spelled baté) is a male-bodied person in a Crow community who lives in the social role of woman in that culture (the modern, pan-Indian term for this third gender role is Two-Spirit).

In the late 1890s, an American agent named Briskow, tasked with forcing the Plains Indians to assimilate into the dominant culture, jailed Osh-Tisch and the other badés, and forced them to get masculine haircuts, wear masculine clothing, and perform manual labor such as planting trees. The Crow, who considered their badés valuable members of their community, particularly known for their needlework and cooking,[3] were outraged, saying this abuse went against their nature.[4] Chief Pretty Eagle used what power he had to compel the agent to resign and leave tribal lands.[2] Crow historian Joe Medicine Crow, delivering this oral history in 1982 said, "It was a tragedy, trying to change them."[5]

Osh-Tisch was one of the last known badés of the Crow Nation, and the institution of the badé is said to have gone into decline.[6]

Sources

  1. ↑ Also spelled Ohchiish; from óhchikaapi "find".
  2. 1 2 Will Roscoe (2000). Changing Ones: Third and Fourth Genders in Native North America. Palgrave Macmillan. pp. 25, 35. ISBN 0-312-22479-6.
  3. ↑ Transgender Warriors by Leslie Feinberg, Beacon Press, Massachusetts, 1996, p.26.
  4. ↑ The Crow Indians (1983, ISBN 0803279094)
  5. ↑ Transgender Warriors by Leslie Feinberg, Beacon Press, Massachusetts, 1996, pp. 22–23.
  6. ↑ Sabine Lang (1998). Men as women, women as men: changing gender in Native American cultures. University of Texas Press. p. 117. ISBN 0-292-74701-2.
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