For the many Native people who claim them today, they still are. As a result, the identities they claimed were culturally specific. Indigenous identitiesīefore settler-colonists came to present-day Minnesota, Indigenous people understood variations in gender and sexuality in the contexts of their own languages and lifeways. The LGBTQIA history of the North Star state, then, is also a history of language and tradition, and of the variations in gender and sexuality that have been (in)visible in different eras.
There have always been people in Minnesota, as in the rest of the world, who have lived outside perceived norms of gender and sexuality the words used to name them have just changed over time.
