Lhamana

[3] The most famous lhamana was We'wha (1849–1896), who in 1886 was part of the Zuni delegation to Washington D.C., where they met with President Grover Cleveland.

Accounts from the 1800s note that the lhamana, while dressed in "female attire", were often hired for work that required "strength and endurance",[4] such as hunting big game and chopping firewood.

[1] In addition to doing heavy work, some lhamana people have excelled at traditional arts and crafts such as pottery and weaving.

Writing about her friend We'wha, anthropologist Matilda Coxe Stevenson described We'wha as: She performs masculine religious and judicial functions at the same time that she performs feminine duties, tending to laundry and the garden.

[7]Though generally seen by European colonialists and modern adherents of queer studies as gay, LGBT or transgender, the Zuni lhamana, like other Indigenous social, cultural and ceremonial roles, exist in an Indigenous matrix.