Two-spirit educator and psychologist Dr. Eugene Hightower was born in Los Angeles in 1951. He grew up in LA as part of a big family and was particularly close to his maternal grandmother. Both his parents were Black, White and American Indian.  His dad grew up on the Creek Indian Reservation in Oklahoma. His paternal grandmother was descended from the Cherokee tribe and paternal Grandfather was descended from  the Choctaw tribe. Both had distant ties to the Muscogee Creek and lived there because of greater acceptance of Black Indians by Creek Indians.  They participated in Creek ceremonies such as the stomp dance. His mother had ancestral ties to the Dakota tribe in North Dakota through her White father and she was 25 % Indian (according to DNA tests) but never chose to become involved in the Indian community. She was  later proud of Gene’ books on Native American culture.

In high school, Gene was popular, an A student, lettered in sports and active in student government, things he parlayed into a Harvard undergraduate acceptance. Gene remembers going to an intriguing “love in” for gay people in LA  during senior year. He went off to Harvard excited at the possibility of finding a greater gay community there. .At Harvard, he studied Psychology and Social Relations, as well in Native American Studies and African American  Studies. He started a gay student group at the still-all-male school, acutely aware of how uncomfortable he was making his straight roommates by knocking doors and collecting phone numbers of prospective members. He was galvanized by this early organizing, saying that “even though I had not had boyfriends or sex yet.” I was a political homosexual.”  This was not long after the Stone Wall riots.  Gene was able to get the group formally recognized by the college dean. While the group found mostly acceptance on campus, they still had trouble in the greater Cambridge community. The group’s announcements and ads were sabotaged by the printers of the student paper, the Crimson, until the paper’s editors advocated for them. US Postal workers threw their mail in the trash. One professor in a class on diversity referred to them as ‘faggots” However, he had many gay accepting straight friends and faculty also.

He got his first job as a mental health therapist at what was then known as the Homophile Community Health Center in Boston. After Harvard, Gene went to UC Berkeley for the Community Mental Health program there. While there, he led the Gay Student Union, an analogue to the group he’d started at Harvard. He later held positions at the Pacific Center for Sexual Minorities in Berkeley and San Francisco’s LGBTQ clinic Operation Concern.

Gene felt pressured to downplay either the Black or the Native American sides of himself depending on the context, until he joined Bay Area Black Native Americans..  He helped organize their Black Indian Powwow. It was around this time when he met Beaver, his Choctaw medicine man teacher and mentor. Beaver who also was a cofounder of Three Rivers Indian Lodges Recovery Center for American Indians, Beaver taught Gene about ceremonies  It was on a vision quest that it was revealed to Gene that he was Two Spirit and Black Indian. When Gene started BAAITS (Bay Area American Indian Two-Spirit), Beaver, an ex- marine, was an straight ally. Gene later received the name “Silent Thunder” in a ceremony conducted by Lakota two spirit medicine man Florentine Blue Thunder.

Gene has taught Native American studies at UC Berkeley and at Stanford. He coauthored a book with Beaver titled Counseling Native American Indians, and is the editor of the textbook Native American Psychosocial Identity. He has also taught Psychology courses at numerous universities, including UC Santa Barbara and UC Berkeley. He still practices psychology as a therapist. in the SF Bay Area.

Bio Author: Charlotte Lang-Bush