This short book is at once a brief history and anthropology of the Zuni people, a biography of We'wha, who fulfilled the lhamana (third gender) role, a meditation on the nature of gender as a cultural construct (specifically how the lhamana identity fulfills a social need that Western/European culture fails to address), a critique of Western gender, an overview of Zuni rites as they relate to the construction of a gender identity, a (heartbreaking) account of the dismantling of the lhamana and similar "two-spirit" identities by government mandate (as well as the Victorian cultural forces that created those mandates), and a small beacon of hope in the (then in its early stages) reburgeoning of the two-spirit identity within intertribal cultures.
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