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Faculty of Graduate Studies

Jamey Jesperson

  • M.A. (Goldsmiths College, University of London, 2021)
  • B.A. (Eugene Lang College, The New School, 2017)
Notice of the Final Oral Examination for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy

Topic

Re-Storying Indigenous Trans Women in the Colonial Pacific Northwest, 1814-1895

Department of History

Date & location

  • Thursday, July 2, 2026
  • 11:00 A.M.
  • Clearihue Building, Room B017

Examining Committee

Supervisory Committee

  • Dr. Rachel Cleves, Department of History, University of Victoria (Supervisor)
  • Dr. Lynne Marks, Department of History, UVic (Member)
  • Dr. Sarah Hunt, School of Environmental Studies, UVic (Outside Member)

External Examiner

  • Dr. Susan Stryker, Department of Gender and Women's Studies, University of Arizona

Chair of Oral Examination

  • Dr. Donn Feir, Department of Economics, UVic

Abstract

In an 1891 ethnological report on “the Indians of British Columbia,” Father of Modern Anthropology Franz Boas made a brief but notable observation: “sometimes men assume women’s dress and occupations […] This custom is found all along the North Pacific coast.”[1] Gathering textual and oral evidence from colonial and Indigenous archives of knowledge, this dissertation clarifies that people who transformed into women — not just in dress, but all ways of life — were indeed once scattered across the coast, and all over the Pacific Northwest. From first contact to the turn of the turn of the twentieth century, these women played recurring roles in the records of countless influential foreigners, some of whom claimed — and Indigenous oral histories confirm — that the “transformation of sex” occurred in “nearly all the tribes.”[2] Despite this rich archive, Indigenous trans women have never once been centered as primary subjects of Western history. On the rare occasion historians have noted them before, their spiritual, social, and material lives as women have been warped beyond recognition by anachronistic analyses that either misgender them as men, or degender them as a mystical “third gender.” The ongoing obfuscation of Indigenous trans women’s history, however, has led to another egregious oversight: they survived the first century of contact. From earliest Spanish arrival to the rise of Modern Anthropology, Indigenous trans women were witnessed “everywhere” across the Pacific Northwest. Through diverse and creative means, they outlasted the early colonial period, albeit in the face of mounting colonial aggression that, by the twentieth century, would transform their lives and worlds forever.

Diving deep into the archive, this dissertation re-members the forgotten stories of over fifty Indigenous women whose womanhood was forged through transformation between 1814 and 1895. Although many of their records are too fractured to be studied in isolation, when gathered together, they reveal the contours of an Indigenous way of life, including a colonial project to destroy it, that has heretofore eluded the historiography. To offer precision, I zoom in on three influential micro-histories of contact: an assault at Fort Vancouver, an arrest in Victoria, and then a fracturing in the Fraser Valley. Spanning the fur trade to the rise of residential schools, these micro-histories reveal the heterogeneity of Indigenous transformed life across the Pacific Northwest’s coast, and amidst colonial transition. Together, they prove that trans women have shaped the history of this region and land as we know it, whether we have yet to truly know them.

Working from archival fragments, this dissertation is woven together by the modern life stories of Elder Saylesh Wesley, the first Coast Salish person to transform from male to female in living memory. Despite growing up in an era when this history had been forcibly “put to sleep,” Saylesh, a gifted healer, seer, and weaver, answered an ancestral call to transform at the turn of twenty-first century.[3] Through great fortitude and divine intervention, Saylesh is “waking to dream” up new, or perhaps very ancient ways of life. Indeed, transformed womanhood did not just survive the first century of contact, but — to re-story Boas — it is reawakening “all along the North Pacific coast” today. We have been called to witness.

1 Franz Boas, “Second General Report on the Indians of British Columbia,” in Report of the Sixtieth Meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science (London: John Murray, Albemarle Street, 1891), 571.
2 Andrew Bowles Holder, “The Bote,” The New York Medical Journal 50 (1889): 623.
3 Jo-Ann Archibald / Q’um Q’um Xiiem, “Hands Back, Hands Forward,” Indigenous Pedagogies 49 (2023).

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