Content Notice
This Atlas is a living project and remains in progress. Many nodes are currently undergoing review, expansion, or community-led revision.
The Atlas contains historical records, publications, photographs, organizational materials, and other sources relating to Two-Spirit histories across Turtle Island. Some language reproduced within these records reflects the terminology, assumptions, and biases of the periods in which they were created. Much of the historical documentation concerning Two-Spirit peoples was produced by settlers, researchers, governments, churches, and other colonial institutions. These records should not be understood as authoritative accounts of Two-Spirit life, identity, or community knowledge.
Users are encouraged to engage with these records critically. Where possible, entries are contextualized and placed in relation with Indigenous histories and community knowledge. Correction, reinterpretation, and re-description remain ongoing responsibilities rather than completed acts, and descriptions may change as new relationships, knowledge, and responsibilities emerge.
Origins of the Atlas
The Two-Spirit Atlas emerged through ongoing conversations with Elders, Knowledge Keepers, scholars, librarians, archivists, and community members about Two-Spirit histories, archives, memory, identity, and the responsibilities involved in carrying this knowledge forward.
These conversations redirected the project toward the historical and archival work represented in the Atlas today. Participants emphasized the importance of contextualizing records created through colonial institutions, recovering relationships obscured through archival description, supporting community review and correction, and treating stewardship as an ongoing responsibility rather than something completed when material is made publicly accessible.
Earlier stages of the project also imagined a substantial contemporary layer through which Two-Spirit people might map present-day memories, gathering places, ceremony, activism, and belonging. The conversations undertaken for this project demonstrated that such a layer requires further relationships, consultation, and decisions about governance before it can be responsibly developed. Contemporary community memory therefore remains a direction for future phases of the Atlas rather than a completed component of the present project.
Purpose of the Atlas
The Two-Spirit Atlas is a public digital archival and mapping project that presently focuses on historical materials, organizations, events, people, gathering spaces, and community histories connected to Two-Spirit life across Turtle Island.
The Atlas's steward, Andrew Wiebe, does not claim ownership over the records it reproduces, nor does the Atlas present itself as an authority on Two-Spirit history. Instead, it gathers and connects dispersed historical materials while providing additional context through which colonial descriptions can be questioned, expanded, and placed in relation with Indigenous histories and community knowledge. The Atlas remains a living project: its descriptions are open to correction, reinterpretation, and revision as relationships and knowledge develop.
Community members are invited to participate in the ongoing stewardship of this historical work by identifying errors, adding context, suggesting relevant records or educational resources, and challenging descriptions that require reconsideration. Historical materials and sources that may help expand or correct existing entries are also welcome. If you encounter information that is inaccurate, incomplete, or requires additional context, please contact the Atlas steward, Andrew Wiebe, at andrewj.wiebe@mail.utoronto.ca to suggest corrections, revisions, or additional resources.
Processes for contributing contemporary stories, memories, photographs, and places will be developed through future community consultation rather than assumed by the present infrastructure.
Two-Spirit histories have too often been documented through colonial perspectives. This Atlas creates space for those records to be encountered differently: contextualized, questioned, connected, corrected, and expanded through relationships with the communities and histories they concern. Remembering is not finished when a record is published, and stewardship does not end when it becomes accessible.
Map Legend
Community Memory or Place
Contextual Memory (Historical & Cultural)