00:00:00Rachel Muir:
We're back with Yvonne Riley Cook, and we're going to be talking about some of
00:01:00the history of Kindred Spirits, its role in the LGBT community here in Asheville
per se. And also for the purpose of helping the researchers who are going to
inherit this pile of information about its history. Yvonne's going to talk some
about that history and fill in some of the missing pieces to make better sense
of it so thank you, Yvonne, once again for joining us.
Yvonne R.:
Well, again a lot of this has to do with the domino, how one person brings in
concept or feeling or some piece that's been missing from the community at the
time, and then passing that information along and how it has relativeness to a
00:02:00movement now that is so worldwide, understanding that just like a person that we
would consider a gay man has been documented or a lesbian woman documented in
world history. They basically could never be a gay man by himself or a lesbian
by herself, because they always needed to have a physical partner to have a gay
or lesbian sexual relations. For a transgender person, can fall in love with
their alter ego or themselves, and live personally wonderful within themselves
00:03:00and be able to satisfy their physical needs. And this really falls into those
people who follow a monastic lifestyle.
Yvonne R.:
A lot of the people that I have discovered over the years in monastic lifestyles
are transgender because they don't require to have that outside relationship and
that they are able to physically give themselves that gratification by being in
love with their alter ego or the part of themselves that represents that is
female against male within their relationship and participating in some form of
00:04:00non binary behavior helps them pull back and become that monastic lifestyle. And
I'm not saying everybody that's in the monastic lifestyle is queer, but there's
pretty good high proportion of that. So how do you take that to the transgender
movement and what is happening today in the transgender movement? We're seeing
different people push another domino down, and all of a sudden, there's a whole
new vocabulary thing and this is no more true than as we have gone back through
00:05:00Kindred Spirits, and we have initiated that form of relationship within tribal
Native American existence today, this is the offshoot of that domino falling and
the concept of Two Spirit that we are recording and we're seeing today. Merissa
Sherrill's lover was a Native American Two Spirit person and-
Rachel Muir:
Who's she?
Yvonne R.:
You give me a minute, I'll come up with the name. Who was part of Kindred
Spirits, Merissa Sherrill Lynn was part of Kindred Spirits. If you just go
through the names of those people who worked with the Kindred Spirits community,
00:06:00you'll see that they have now Rena Swifthawk was Merissa's lover. She was a sex
worker. She was a dope addict. She got clean in a sweat lodge. She was a Ute,
Native American Ute, and she stayed clean and sober until her kidneys and liver
finally, because of the prior abuse, caught up with her and she died on the
reservation in out west. But her influence of bringing her Two Spirit or her
kindred spirit to a conference at IFGE that we had in Denver, Colorado, and her
00:07:00presentation of bringing Two Spirit into the Kindred Spirit network, in other
words, bridging what we were doing here in North Carolina to the Western Native
American tribes.
Yvonne R.:
Right now, we have a individual from... that lives here in Nashville, out
working with Native American tribes today as they are journeying out and doing
the networking of bringing back into the native culture, the basic principles of
00:08:00kindred spirits or transgender spirituality of Two Spirit.
Rachel Muir:
When was that conference in Denver, Yvonne, about?
Yvonne R.:
1993. At that conference, we also presented a award, called Trinity Award. The
Trinity Award is a symbol that Merissa Sherrill Lynn came up with, that was the
two hands and a rose that a lot of people embraced again, looking at bridging
00:09:00the binary behavior and bringing that binary or the masculine and the feminine
into existence in one body, recognizing the fact that when you are imbalanced
within yourself, your journey produces the beauty of the rose, but because the
stem is in your hand that holds the thorns of the stem of that rose that are
constantly digging into your body to give you the beauty and the pain of that
journey. And when you are balanced between that masculine and feminine side,
people will see the beauty but they will never see or feel that inner pain that
00:10:00you have gone through to get to that point. The kindred spirit side of it shows
you how to relate that painful journey of finding yourself into a spiritual
journey to find the piece of the relationship with that, that we feel is that,
that holds the soul.
Yvonne R.:
How do you feel that part of your heart that represents a soul and you work with
it, not ignored or look for it and just find it has an essence and energy, and
it's a kindred spirit side of you that will manifest state itself within working
with those energies and then bringing it into a practice of realizing that you
00:11:00don't have to do it all. And shamanism, and if you are healing or a healer in a
shamanic practice, you don't do the work. What you do is you do the journey into
spirit world and you connect to a entity in the spirit world that will volunteer
to you, out of unconditional love, to help a person who needs help. I'll give
00:12:00you an example. I have somebody who had a motorcycle accident, awesome dude, had
a helmet on but still took hit in the head. And had terrible pains and through
that pain and everything like this, they actually went into an altered state of
consciousness. In that state, they came upon their father and their father was
on this bridge, he had passed several years before him.
Rachel Muir:
This was a vision?
Yvonne R.:
This was his pain vision because he was in such a pain. It caused him to trip
00:13:00over into an altered state of consciousness. And the vision said to this
individual, "Call this shaman and he will take care of the pain." So the
individual called me and told me the story and asked me a bunch of questions. I
told him why and I said, "Just hang on, I'll call you back a little bit." So I
sat with my drum and in a state of bliss or whatever the case might be, and
listened to my drum beat for about 20 minutes. And in the drum beat came a frog.
00:14:00And I asked the frog, I said, "Here's this person." I gave them their name, and
I said, "They're in great pain. Would you help them take care and relieve them
of that pain?" The frog said, "Yes, I will do that." This person, I think, this
was over the telephone so this was about 900 miles away from me. I said, "Okay."
00:15:00I gave thanks and finish the ritual that I do.
Yvonne R.:
And after the ritual, I returned their call and I said, "Do you have a frog
there in your room?", and he says, "Yes, I have a jade frog right here on my
coffee table." And I said, "Go down and hold the frog, and just say thank you
and your pain will go away." He did and it did.
Rachel Muir:
That's pretty cool.
Yvonne R.:
You want to call it magic, you want to call it mind over matter, I don't care.
It's just that this was an example of the healing that happens that you can
document or whatever for yourself. I could not possibly comfortably do that
00:16:00without the training that I received through my time teaching Native American
spirituality along with working with the Kindred Spirits transgender support group.
Rachel Muir:
So Yvonne, you seem to have your feet in two worlds, this kindred spirit and
shamanism [inaudible] community, if you will, and then also the transgender
community because in a prior interview, you said you were part of the founding
of IFGE.
Yvonne R.:
Sure.
Rachel Muir:
So what's the relationship between those two, could you-
Yvonne R.:
Well, it's like I think that the relationship, a lot of times is going down a
river with the knowledge that you do have, your foot in one canoe and another
00:17:00foot in another canoe and different things. But really, the real trick is as you
are flowing down that river is keep them as close as possible.
Rachel Muir:
Good canoemanship.
Yvonne R.:
It can be very painful when it's not, I mean.
Rachel Muir:
So the history?
Yvonne R.:
The history is when we were introduced to the real secret of how do we accept
the fact that yes, we're going to be depressed. Yes, we're going to be
stigmatized. Yes, we're going to be murdered. Yes, we're going to be the subject
00:18:00of hate and discrimination. Yes, we're going to have our self esteem taken away
from us and abused. We're going to have to re fight for our humanism, as a human
being and be able to look at these different elements of ourselves and bring
them into ourselves say, "It's okay.", even if it's the most negative thing that
we could have, in order for us to live with it, we have to give it permission to
reside within ourselves and the teaching of being a transgender person and
00:19:00exploring it to the point to understanding that, yes, we have these issues. Yes,
there are professional psycho therapist, there's professional medical doctors,
there's all kinds of support networks out there, but it's up to a person who is
experiencing these things to seek them out.
Yvonne R.:
Nobody is going to come up to you and say that you are. You're the one that has
to define yourself. Nobody can do it for you. And it's through that self
identifying that the balance, not the healing, the balance will come back into
your life. And when nature and the balance and the beauty comes back into your
00:20:00life, other people will see it. You don't have to provide it to anybody. They
will sense that beauty and they will either inquire of it or they will just
leave you alone because you represent something that's very scary to them, not
everybody is willing to accept themselves. It's much easier to be depressed.
It's much easier to to take a drug. It's much easier to blame somebody else for
your condition. It's much easier to find that there is no acceptance because you
cannot find the box that you belong into. And this community or this word,
transgender, when I wrote the definition, I started with the concept that it was
00:21:00an umbrella term for all those.
Yvonne R.:
And this community or this transgender movement represented everything from the
best behavior to the worst behavior because it is all human behavior. And as we
started support groups, we realize that a support group has a cycle, and it's a
cycle anywhere from three to five years. And a supportive support group over
five years has to recruit or find new people to be in their support group at a
00:22:00rate of one third of the membership at a support group per year. In other words,
if you have 15 members, every three years, you need to replace all 15 members,
five, five, five at a time. You will always have one or two people at the top
that will continue on and get in there and help that support group sustain
itself, but if they don't recruit or look for and do the outreach to find others
like themselves and things like this in that circle or that circular thing, that
support group will fade.
Yvonne R.:
Today, we are losing support group that was in Indianapolis, Indiana for 30
years. And it was that that support group in that age bracket that that support
00:23:00group was paying attention to, did not include the young people, did not include
the youth that was in high school, did not include the youth that was in its
20s, did not promote the acceptance of that because it was controlled and became
controlled by old white men wearing dresses instead of trying to look upon it.
Now, that particular support group was part of the Kindred Spirits movement.
Their leadership came through Kindred Spirits. The support group in Greece came
through Kindred Spirits. If you you neglect to get out and to speak at schools
00:24:00and institutions or events and things like this, or your causes or political
beliefs, you're going to shrivel up and fade away into the night. And this is
the reason why when I wrote the definition, I made it so broad that everybody is
capable of being transgender. What has happened to it today, it's segmented and
said, "Well, wait a minute, you've got to pass to be transgender."
Yvonne R.:
You got to be... or if you're not passing or if you're not simulating into a
00:25:00binary behavior, then you are a gender non binary. Well, gender non binary is a
great, great thing for youth because they could play with it, be it, move on.
It's not tied to it. It's isn't going to dominate their life maybe or maybe not,
but they are not wanting to accept the fact that that is transgender behavior,
same thing with Two Spirit. They can adopt it, but again they want their own
definition. So as this community continues to grow, it becomes more apparent
that we need some form of legal recognition for our social behavior. And most of
00:26:00the transgender people in the past 30 years ago, once they became part of the
binary system that represented their masculine side or their feminine side, and
found that acceptance and went hiding in that new closet.
Yvonne R.:
They walked away from the community that needed them the most to be the role
models, the elders and the teachers for that community and the persons who have
not walked away, which I've had very heavy personal influence on, was a person
who didn't particularly care for the International Foundation for Gender
00:27:00Education because they didn't feel that they really wanted to do what we were
doing at that time. They felt that they were looking for an organization that
would support the research that they wanted to do. And they were student at
Harvard University School of Government. And so one afternoon, this particular
person called me up and said I got to talk about these feelings and these
emotions and I'm way out of bounds here.
Yvonne R.:
They didn't know that, but they came and they sat in my office for about an hour
and a half and I said, "Mara, this is what you can do that would fill the hole
and the need that we, as a community has to have, a political legal entity that
00:28:00is ours that we can identify with.", so Mara Keisling says, "I can take up that
challenge." She found support in a person who was... her last name was Johnson,
part of Johnson & Johnson in Chicago, who financially backed her to develop in a
national transgender, whatever it is. I can't remember right now, but Mara went
to Washington D.C., used the gay, lesbian, bisexual task force at the time, now
is the lesbian, bisexual task force, as a base to work from to bring NTC,
whatever her name is, but it was through my influence that she took up the path
00:29:00to understand that the transgender community needed to have the research that
needed to be done and the legal support that was also being looked at from the
task force.
Yvonne R.:
At that time, the task force was so far ahead of that group that they called
Human Rights Commission, and the Human Rights Commission was dominated by a
lesbian who would not believe in the cause of the transgender movement, did not
see the need because of the HIV time of the 70s or the 80s, and poo pooed the
idea where the task force did see the need through their annual conference. My
00:30:00mind is [inaudible]
Rachel Muir:
What year was this? You've got any idea?
Yvonne R.:
Well, I know exactly what year was. It was 1988.
Rachel Muir:
Okay.
Yvonne R.:
Okay. And it was 1989, no 1990 that we had representation at the creative change
gathering in Detroit, Michigan. And the IFGE actually had a booth there along
with our magazine Tapestry, we didn't change the name to Transgender Tapestry
00:31:00until later, which actually helped establish in the pecking order the word
transgendered. This was done through multiple people being very much involved.
Many of them coming through the Kindred Spirits porthole, either at that time or
later, to realize that this community needed to have this triad of involvement
of mind, body and spirit or the idea of legal, social, governmental, spiritual,
healthy, whatever, these different elements and they needed to fit into the
00:32:00world society in such a way that we will move pass the stigmatization.
Yvonne R.:
Now, that stigmatization started 3,000 years ago and we have to look at our
transgender history as saying, "Again, 3,000 years ago, your personal or
transgender experience, what did that represent in your tribe?" And again, it's
the healer, the magician, the physician, the thing that person that's outside of
the binary or the artist or whatever that particular group was. And because of
00:33:00that, they were demonized in order to promote what today is that we call
religion and it is the reason why... and agreeing and that a religion that we
based our society on a pyramid of masculine dominant power dominance and we are
in that mode today and they would not particularly, here to the transgender
person and the transgender person now is being so demonized. And they are
government is setting up today to try to erase a behavior that's thousands and
00:34:00thousands of years old, but they're going to wipe it out. They're going to say
that, "Tomorrow, you are a non person."
Yvonne R.:
Now how that affects me personally, is that I, honorably discharged from the
United States Air Force. I use the facilities at the VA. Tomorrow, my privileges
that I put my life in line to protect and defend the Constitution of this United
States is no longer valid because I am a transgender person and I am no longer
worthy of being a human being in this country under this administration. Am I
00:35:00angry? A little bit. Do I fight within myself not to use the magic that I have
to take vengeance on these things? No. I feel opposite. I feel that this anger
needs now to be focused and motivated to create change. It needs to know and
acknowledge the love that we have as transgender people or gay people or
whatever and we have allies, and bringing that into the fold to where, again we
were working in the 90s to eliminate all these wonderful stigmas that we thought
we had. We were bringing back in the early turn of the century, an item of self
00:36:00esteem because we were being recognized. We were just too damn successful at it.
Yvonne R.:
Now, again we are representing a world threat to the religious community. If you
look at what Islam is doing through their belief system, and throwing gay men
off rooftops, stoning transgender people in Africa, beheading people in
Malaysia, and in the east or in the Islamic belief systems, and here in the
00:37:00United States, this conservative movement is destroying good spiritual people
because they're being forced to make a decision to accept or not accept
equality. Equality cannot exist as long as these religious beliefs and anger is
out there to destroy it because they are threatened by free will. They are
threatened through the use of rights. They realize the transgender person has
more to do with body imaging, presentation and things like this to try to
00:38:00conform to binary behavior, that's what they want. We're trying to do it, but
yet they will kill us for trying to adhere to what they feel that they want us
to behave like in society.
Yvonne R.:
So in the meantime, they are dehumanizing us and trying to erase the work that
we're doing within our community that represents now that we have people like
Mara Keisling, who is doing research and being able to say this is the number in
the United States. We know that we have an estimated close to 14,000 serving
actively in our military. We know that we have pretty close to 200,000 Americans
00:39:00who are veterans of the military experience, who are being targeted and being
denied medical service because they are transgender. We have a battle that's in
front of us and the solution to the battle is to take all this publicity about
the transgender person and starting to come out and to teach. We're not the
victim. We're just a piece of the political action that makes other people
comfortable by bringing up the most uncomfortable thing that they can think
about and the person that's sitting next to them could be a person or
transgender experience and they will never know it. So I don't going to go on a soapbox.
00:40:00
Rachel Muir:
Well, we have about three minutes of battery left. Is there anything you'd like
to sum up on Kindred Spirits?
Yvonne R.:
The Kindred Spirits movement is still alive and well. There's still being talked
about. The lessons learned there and the people that went and participated at
the time the 20 years of Kindred Spirits has existed, is writing about it. Like
I said, the Two Spirit movement is coming along. The gay movement is seeing how
valid the Kindred Spirits concept is. I'm really proud, so so proud of what
00:41:00Holly's vision was by popping a tab in Virginia, many many years ago and little
LSD opening up awareness of the possibilities of bringing to a marginalized
society, a spiritual element that could be accepted. It isn't Kindred Spirit is
the only way in Canada. It's being taught in Native American, people's way. They
will find their way into this flow of energy that came out of this area called
00:42:00Asheville, North Carolina. And remember, Asheville was the base for many
spiritual beliefs and the founding fathers that came to Asheville, were out of
Brittany, France. They were Celtic, and an element that actually came in, in the
late 1700s into Asheville or into the mountains area were Celtic Quakers.
Yvonne R.:
And the Quaker belief system today and at the time, was to sit quietly within
00:43:00nature and to be able to find one's peace within themselves, and it's the same
principle for the transgender movement today.
Rachel Muir:
Yvonne, we're just about out of time. Thank you so much for sharing all that
you've shared today. If you'd like, I would like to have a return session and go
into some more of your personal history. But in the meantime, thank you for this
wonderful archive and thank you for your words today.
Yvonne R.:
We have to support our universities as learning institutions, and research
institutions and to do that, they need to have your input as a human being as to
what your journey is and how it represents into the larger scheme of our human
existence. Without that, we are bound just to repeat, repeat, repeat. Thank you.
00:44:00
Rachel Muir:
Thank you, Yvonne.
