Source: Durango Herald, Huffington Post, Denver Post, Two Spirits website
Fred Martinez, who was murdered in June, 2001 near his remote hometown in southeastern Colorado, is honored and remembered in a documentary that premiered Saturday at the Starz Denver Film Festival.
Some proceeds from the film Two Spirits
have been dedicated to helping his family buy a permanent headstone for his grave.
In a Sunday feature for Durango Herald, reporter Joe Hanel movingly recounts the story told by the film, Two Spirits:
Fred Martinez was anything but simple.
He was, at various moments, a boy, a girl, a Navajo, a Montezuma-Cortez High School student, gay, transgendered, nadleehi.
In June 2001, in a ravine just south of Cortez, he became a murder victim.
Now, he’s the subject of a movie, and, if the filmmakers have their way, he will become a window onto a view of gender that is at once new to American society and older than America itself….
As a teenager, Fred resisted categorizing himself, calling himself gay and transgendered, dressing as both a boy and a girl. He told his mother he wanted to be both.
She told him there was a word for him in Navajo - nadleehi. It’s the third of the four Navajo genders, used for a person with a male body and female character traits.
The producers of the documentary explain their purpose on the website for their film:
Documentary recounts ‘two-spirits’ life of murdered Colo. teen [contd.]
Two Spirits tells a nuanced story of what it means to be poor, transgendered, and Navajo, and examines the lives of Fred Martinez, his friends, family, the police, and those in the larger community who were most affected by his murder.
The documentary explores Fred’s short and compelling life, his terrible death, and his enduring legacy—one that has led to renewed resolve by many people of the several cultures of the Four Corners region not only to accept diversity, but to honor it, and to help ensure that people are free to express the totality of who they are. Two Spirits demonstrates that we have much to gain from making our communities safe for people like Fred Martinez and it poses the question asked by his grieving mother, “Why are people killed for being who they are?”
Lydia Nibley created and directed the documentary. She told the Journal’s Hanel that she hopes her movie will shine a spotlight on Fred and his identity the way his death never did.
Fred Martinez
“There really is a redemptive piece of this, which is why we were interested in making the film,” Nibley said.
Barbara Bridges runs the non-profit group Women + Film, that produces the film festival where Nibley’s film was premiered. Bridges told the Denver Post that she’s especially pleased to be presenting Two Spirits, partly because she watched as the film was created by Nibley and her team from LA-based Say Yes Quickly Productions.
“I was sitting at the kitchen table with Lydia talking about the film before production ever started,” Bridges said. “I felt like I was there at the conception of that film. She worked her magic and made such a beautiful story out of it.”
Nibley has created an inspiring film, Bridges said. “People may be worried it’s too unhappy a story, but it doesn’t work like that.”
The film recounts—and even recreates—the brutal circumstances of Martinez’s death, but it also traces a community’s rediscovery of a mostly forgotten aspect of its cultural heritage.
Gail Binkly, who appears in the film, covered the murder and the town’s reaction to it as managing editor of Cortez Journal in 2001. She calls the film “a low-key, gentle and respectful recounting of Fred’s life and death”:
It interweaves the tragic story of a mother’s loss of her son with a look at a largely unknown time when many Native American cultures held places of honor for people of integrated genders.
Hanel reports:
Most Navajo lost the concept of multiple genders, along with large parts of their culture, when their children were shipped off to government boarding schools starting in the late 1800s, said Richard LaFortune of Minneapolis, an organizer of “Two Spirits” gatherings.
LaFortune's mission is to recover that lost history. He helps organize an annual gathering that coined the English phrase "two spirits" to convey a concept found in most native languages.
Native people had gay marriage long before European settlement of the continent, he said. From his point of view, traditional values make room for a broad range of gender identities.
Not only that, two-spirit people usually were given honored places in the community, serving as counselors and caretakers of orphans.
“You stand at the crossroads of two points of discrimination. It’s a dangerous place to be. You stand at the crossroads of two genders, and it can be a gift,” LaFortune says in the film.
Binkly is now editor of Four Corners Press and was interviewed for the documentary. In an October column at Huffington Post, Binkly recalls the reactions in the small town of Cortez to the slaying:
[S]oon after this body was found, it became apparent this was no common incident. This death was a murder, and it would make Cortez, a city of 8,000 in the far southwestern corner of Colorado, the center of a maelstrom.
The body was that of a 16-year-old Cortez boy, Fred Martinez Jr., who had been bludgeoned to death with a rock. He was Navajo and he was nádleehí, a Navajo word for a man with feminine characteristics -- a quality sometimes referred to as “two-spirited.”
In the historic traditions of many American Indian tribes, being two-spirited was viewed as being special, even gifted. Sadly, as we all know, this view is not universally shared in the broader culture, where gays, lesbians, bisexuals and transgender individuals still encounter discrimination and violence….
In the weeks that followed, Cortez became the center of a debate that raged on street corners, in coffee shops, and in the pages of the newspaper. Letters to the editor streamed in that variously condemned homosexuality, supported gay rights, questioned the very concept of "hate crimes," and lamented the brutal death of a gentle and fun-loving boy.
From Hanel’s report in Durango Journal:
The last time [Martinez's mother, Pauline] Mitchell saw her son, he was leaving the house to go to the Ute Mountain Roundup rodeo in Cortez. Five days later, neighborhood kids found his body while playing outside. He was 16.
Gail Binkly, who at the time was a Cortez Journal editor, appears in the movie to tell about the crime and the investigation.
Suspicion quickly centered on Shaun Murphy of Farmington, who bragged to friends that he had “bug-smashed a fag.”
After the rodeo, Fred had caught a ride from Murphy to a convenience store. Murphy somehow found Fred later that night and chased him down a dark, dirt road. Fred scaled up a rock wall, but Murphy pulled him down and beat him to death with rocks, finishing the killing with a 25-pound boulder.
At Saturday's screening, sniffles and sighs were audible in the crowd of 500 during the re-enacted murder scene.
At HuffPo, Binkly writes:
[L]aw officers investigating the case seemed loath to label the killing a hate crime -- even after a tipster called and said that an 18-year-old New Mexico man, Shaun Murphy of Farmington, had bragged to friends that he had “bug-smashed a hoto [slang for a “fag”].” Murphy was arrested and initially charged with second-degree murder; a charge of first-degree murder was later added.
As details emerged about the killing, it became clear that Murphy, a violent young man with an extensive criminal record, had indeed been motivated at least partly by hatred for Fred's sexuality.
Following her son’s death,
Pauline Mitchell, Fred’s mother,
was torn between the Navajo cultural injunction to never again speak of the dead and her deep desire to make the circumstances of his murder widely known in the hope that she might help save lives.
Binkly recalls that the murder, and the charge against Murphy were the subject of much discussion in Cortez throughout the following summer, but that the subject had mostly faded from local memory until Nibley began making her film.
There was also a candlelight vigil one night in Cortez that drew more than 100 people, including Judy Shepard, mother of Mathew Shepard, the young gay man tortured and killed in Wyoming in October 1998. Speakers shared memories of Fred, shed tears, and called for forgiveness and healing rather than continued anger. Fred's mother, Pauline Mitchell, gave a moving statement, saying that her son “would want us all to join together and work to the understanding that we can get along. He would want the schools to be a place where those who are different will find peace and joy in being at school instead of name-calling, harassment and hate.”
Murphy eventually pleaded guilty to second-degree murder and was sentenced to 40 years in prison; he wept when the sentence was announced. The hoopla died down, and as the years passed, Fred's murder began slipping into obscurity.
That changed when director Lydia Nibley of California and Say Yes Quickly Productions launched a project to make a documentary film commemorating Fred's short life and examining American Indian views on gender identity.
In a July review of a preliminary cut of the documentary, LA Weekly faults its “editing, sound, and pacing”, and then notes:
But its core tale of the brief life and brutal murder of teenager Fred Martinez, and how his Navajo culture supported his queerness, is so riveting that the viewer forgives the film’s technical weaknesses. Nibley cuts back and forth between assorted talking heads (Martinez’s mother; community people who knew him; fellow Navajos), who detail their culture’s sophisticated, ancient-but-visionary beliefs about gender, giving us a crash course on Navajo history and culture while illuminating the struggles of Martinez, whose detailed murder and mother’s grief are devastating.
Cathy Renna, a founder of GLAAD and the principal partner at Renna Communications in Washington, DC, traveled to Laramie, Wyo. following the beating death of Matthew Shepard in 1998. While she was there, she helped activists in coordinate local, national, and international media and coverage of the tragedy and subsequent murder trials.
Following Martinez’s murder, local activists working with Martinez’s family asked Renna to come to Cortez to do the same thing.
Renna recalled about her arrival in the Four Corners region: “I remember thinking to myself, ‘Why do I always have to go to these beautiful places for such horrible things?’”
In Durango Journal, Hanel recounts her stay:
But Renna had a lot to learn about the Fred Martinez case.
Nearly every one of the 200-plus native languages in North America have words for more than two genders. Some have as many as nine, said LaFortune.
Renna was used to the straightforward labels of her community, which sums up its identity in a neat acronym - GLBT, for gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgendered.
“It brought a level of nuance to the case that I hadn’t dealt with before,” Renna said.
Although the murder was covered extensively in the local news media, national reporters seemed uninterested, Renna said. The Washington Post did a big piece. There was a story in Teen People, and one in The Advocate. But even much of the gay media didn’t pay attention and couldn't figure out how to describe Fred.
“It was a tremendous struggle to get both the media and the LGBT community to pay attention to Fred’s murder,” Renna said.
Nibley hopes audiences throughout the country and the world will now be able to share in the voyage of discovery that Renna jumped into, along with members of the Cortez community.
But she also has a warning: “We want to be inspired by this without appropriating it,” Nibley said. “What we need to make sure doesn't happen is a bunch of white people run around calling themselves two-spirited.”
Source: Film about Cortez youth explores transgenderism | Durango Herald
Hate Crimes, Media and Two Spirits | Huffington Post
The Fred Martinez Project | the film’s website
The roles of Women + Film founder Barbara Bridges | Denver Post