The animal spirit guides are grouped by their habitats as they were on earth. Animal spirit guides can also be represented by symbols or can simply be those animals that you have always felt a connection to throughout your life. Animal spirits serve as your guide and come into your life for a purpose however, they choose you, you do not choose them.

You do not have to be a shaman to access the animal spirit guides in your life. Both the animal totem and power animal are considered spirit guides. In Native American cultures, spirit animals are also commonly called animal totems.

They honor the wisdom and knowledge that each different animal imparts. Shaman practitioners receive a specific animal spirit guide from the spirit world that travels with them to offer insight, guidance and help them with their duties. In Shamanism, the world’s oldest healing tradition, the animal guides are known as power animals. All of these beings help, protect, educate, heal and inspire you along your life path journey. The spirit world is comprised of spirit guides, angels, archangels, ascended masters, departed loved ones and animal spirit guides or totems. For George, Lyzz was simultaneously new and old, a creation and a tradition, a conduit for something he had struggled to express.Animals and humans inhabit the physical world together therefore, they must also exist in the spirit world together. He put on a wig, gave his alter ego a playful name and started competing in shows. It wasn’t until George left Indian Township and went to Dartmouth that Lyzz was born. George Soctomah Neptune posing as his drag alter ego Lyzz Bien Taté Walker / Native Peoples Magazine She, like many in the Passamaquoddy Tribe, was devoutly Catholic, an enduring legacy of intervention by French explorers and missionaries. He says the elders of his tribe told his grandmother that he was Two-Spirit early in his life, and she didn’t immediately approve. He still stood out in Indian Township, where the government-issued houses are identical down to the linoleum. “It means something different to every Two-Spirit.”įor George, weaving baskets with his grandmother and the women of his tribe was a sacred thing, a crucial first step in understanding his identity. “Two-Spirit has many manifestations,” he adds. “But I think the more accurate colonial term would be gender-nonconforming or non-binary. “It’s often narrowly interpreted as transgender,” he says. George explains that Two-Spirit identity doesn’t exactly fit into Western concepts of gender or sexual orientation. “Those two polarities are not supposed to be able to coexist, but that’s why Two-Spirit people exist. “We balance two polarities, two energies in our bodies, two energies in the same spiritual place,” George says. These sacred people are able to freely travel between binaries. It typically refers to people who are born with the spirit of a man and the spirit of a woman in one body. The concept is another ancient tradition among many indigenous tribes in America, as much an identity as it is a philosophy.

“But my grandmother was a fancy basket maker, so at four years old I became one of the first men to make baskets in that tradition.” 'Two Spirit Portrait' of George Soctomah Neptune Thom Willey “Typically, men would make the utility baskets and women would make fancy baskets,” George says. It was George’s grandmother, Molly Neptune Parker, who brought him into the tradition of fancy baskets. But European colonization and economic hardship spawned a new tradition, “fancy baskets,” which were decorative in nature and marketed to white tourists. The tradition dates back to before recorded history, when baskets had a primarily utilitarian function. A basket weaved by George Soctomah Neptune George Neptuneįor the Passamaquoddy tribe in Indian Township, Maine, a reservation of less than 700 people, sweetgrass basketry is a living history, one that tells the story of a people who have had to adapt to survive. Drag is a bit more recent: He started competing in shows as his alter ego, Lyzz Bien, in 2006 as a freshman at Dartmouth.īut long before Lyzz, there was George, his grandmother and baskets. Seven years ago, at the age of 20, he earned the title of master. He’s been practicing basketry since he was four years old. George has no problem talking and weaving at the same time.

One spirit native