This talk re-members the forgotten lives of over fifty Indigenous transformed (trans) women from the nineteenth century. Staged in the “early contact era," from the land-based fur trade to the rise of residential schools, it tells the untold story of how trans women shaped the history of this region as we know it, whether we have ever had the chance to know them. Presenting from her newly finished PhD dissertation, historian Jamey Jesperson will focus on the micro-history of Sacket, a young Qwat’sinuxw trans priestess who was arrested by the Victoria police in 1895. More than just a story of colonial loss, Sacket’s micro-history illuminates the world of love that once enveloped women like her among coastal nations. This love did not only exist across the nineteenth century, but — in the words of recovered oral histories — it originates from "the very beginning of the world” itself.

Dr. Jamey Jesperson is an award-winning historian and SSHRC Postdoctoral Fellow based at the University of British Columbia. Her growing body of historical research remembers the forgotten lives and worlds of over 150 trans women who lived in the North American West before 1900. After defending her dissertation at UVic in July, she is now working on two books: an academic monograph on the history of “contact” between foreigners and Indigenous trans women in the Pacific Northwest (1814-1895), and an oral history biography for Elder Saylesh Wesley (Stó:lō/Ts’msyen), the first Coast Salish person to transform from male to female in living memory (1972-present).