On the north side of Rapid City surrounded by around 30 community members, Monique “Muffie” Mousseau and Felipa De Leon opened the city’s first Indigenous-led LGBTQIA+ center, Uniting Resilience, on Thursday, Feb. 29.
For 19 years, the Oglala Lakota lesbian couple has fought for the right to be together. The two have experienced discrimination, homophobia and barriers to expressing themselves. Now, they’re hoping to stop other Two-Spirit couples from facing these challenges.
When same-sex marriage was legalized nationwide in 2015, the couple was still unable to be married on their reservation. Instead, the couple was married in the Black Hills. “That (homophobia) isn’t traditional. That’s a colonized way of thinking,” Mousseau said.
The term "Two-Spirit" refers to a person who identifies as possessing both a masculine and feminine spirit and is used by some Indigenous people to describe their sexual, gender and/or spiritual identity. Two-Spirit is an umbrella term for what in western culture may be referred to as the LGBTQIA community.
https://ictnews.org/news/a-place-for-acceptance?fbclid=IwZXh0bgNhZW0CMTEAAR10fdn_ZdybmzxNbWWtY7kdoiXTMHNG2U6KOjkcZ914E2K53cVMFbqEbSM_aem_PM63aynX3GZlspoalTd9XQ
