Article / Archive
Sunny still remembers the day they first met Nex Benedict at the youth shelter where they work in Oklahoma. Winter was ending in 2022, and Benedict, just 15 at the time, was wearing a loose, black sweater. He always wore all black. Benedict had left home after his family refused to accept his identity: The teen was trans and used he/they pronouns. He was also of Choctaw ancestry. Benedict spent around six months at the shelter, where he liked to draw in pen and write silly notes. The shelter still has some of Benedict’s doodles on a fridge in the room where weekly LGBTQIA+ meetings are held. [DMG's fact-checking note: Nex Benedict was sexually abused by her father prior to leaving home.]
Bonding with Benedict over being trans and loving rock music was Sunny, a health specialist for youth who accompanied Benedict to health appointments, often playing Metallica on car rides together. Sunny, a two-spirit person—someone who is Indigenous and embodies masculine and feminine spirits—withheld their last name to protect their identity and respect their workplace’s privacy.
“They were a really cool kid,” Sunny shared through tears.
A year later, Benedict was dead. They were only 16 when three girls bullied and attacked them in a public high school bathroom. Benedict died the following day: February 8, 2024. The state later ruled the cause of death suicide.
“They didn’t get the support they needed from the people who were supposed to be there for them,” Sunny said. “It’s not one person’s fault they’re not here. It’s many people’s.”
Oklahoma is among the most aggressively anti-LGBTQIA+ states, with legislators having introduced 26 anti-LGBTQIA+ bills since November 2024 alone. In 2023, while Benedict was still alive, a ban on gender-affirming health care for minors took effect. Oklahoma is also home to 39 tribal nations; its “American Indian alone” population, per Census language, is the country’s largest. Here, Indigenous peoples and their relatives have suffered generations of displacement, colonization, and exploitation, particularly as a result of oil and gas drilling. Now, they have to contend with extreme and unpredictable weather—from tornadoes to wildfires—the fossil fuel sector has caused via negligent carbon pollution. Queer and Native peoples are disproportionately vulnerable to the growing climate crisis.
Fighting this headwind of challenges are Oklahoma’s queer Indigenous peoples. Their fight grows more difficult as President Donald Trump crusades to spread these harmful policies. Queer and two-spirit people—traditionally caretakers of the land in many Indigenous cultures—are already feeling the effects. Trump’s first day in office saw a flurry of pro-fossil fuel and anti-trans executive actions. He signed yet another order on January 28 to prevent trans minors from accessing gender-affirming health care; New York City’s NYU Langone Health is already preemptively complying.
Oklahoma has been ground zero for these attacks, so the state’s queer, trans, and two-spirit leaders know what’s at stake: the lives of young people like Benedict.
Around the turn of the 20th century, Oklahoma’s tribes were still coping with the loss of their homelands. Between 1830 and 1850, the Indian Removal Act violently forced some 100,000 tribal citizens living east of the Mississippi to the state. After that, several things culminated in rapid succession.
First came the United States government’s formal process in 1887 of removing land from tribal ownership and allotting parcels to individuals, a decision that resulted in the theft of 90 million acres of Indigenous land. Then, in 1897, Oklahoma completed its first profitable oil well. Over the next 10 years, the territory became the world’s largest oil producer, attracting settlers who exploited tribal families with oil on their lands.
Oklahoma officially became a state in 1907, deriving its name from the language of Benedict’s ancestors, the Choctaw. “Oklahoma” means “red people.” Government leaders, however, did little to honor the state’s namesake.
The federal and state governments restricted the rights of Indigenous peoples over their lands, often requiring white “guardians” to manage profitable properties. When Indigenous families discovered oil, they usually became targets of fraud, exploitation, and sometimes abuse. Children and elders weren’t spared.
“Those guardianships exacerbated inequalities and abuses and so forth that were happening as part of allotment and oil production,” explained Mark Boxell, an assistant professor of history at the University of Nebraska at Omaha who has extensively studied these tensions.
In 1924, the University of Oklahoma launched one of the world’s first schools of petroleum engineering, where international students gained the skills to drill and export that harm to Indigenous peoples elsewhere, too.
“There’s this global process where the connections between colonialism and oil production become accelerated through the state’s institutions,” Boxell said.
Oklahoma hasn’t escaped the influence and legacies of fossil fuels: Oil and gas companies are the top donors to Gov. Kevin Stitt, awarding him over $570,000 cumulatively during his 2018 and 2022 campaigns.
Though Stitt has been supportive of clean energy—Oklahoma is a major wind state—he still hasn’t finalized a climate adaptation plan for his constituents. And they need one: Between 1980 and 2024, Oklahoma experienced 115 extreme weather events that cost over $1 billion each, including drought, floods, storms, and wildfires. Luckily, the South Central Climate Adaptation Science Center at the U.S. Geological Survey’s National Climate Adaptation Science Center has been collaborating with tribes to develop adaptation strategies across the region.
“There’s a lot of hope,” said Paulette Blanchard, a citizen of the Absentee Shawnee Tribe in Oklahoma and co-principal investigator of the Rising Voices, Changing Coasts research project, which weaves Indigenous ecological knowledge and Western science. The center closed last week as a result of Trump’s policies. “If the political will could keep from erasing us again—and just allow us to be—we could get the work done whether they like it or not.”
In May, more than 110 tornadoes broke out across several states, including Oklahoma, causing some $3.5 billion in losses. Two-spirit climate justice activist Cheyenna Morgan’s sister was among those affected. Their sister, who was nine months pregnant, took shelter with her boyfriend and daughter. They survived; their one-story house was ripped apart.
“I drove over power lines and through trees to get to her,” said Morgan, who is an enrolled citizen of the United Keetoowah Band in Oklahoma and an Oglala Lakota descendant. “Seeing the aftermath of the tornado was devastating.”
Indigenous people in Oklahoma are uniquely vulnerable to such threats. The homelessness rate for Native Americans is nearly double that of Oklahomans at large. Gender-expansive people are also more likely to experience homelessness nationally. Since 2015, homelessness among trans people has increased by 217% across the U.S., compared to 14% for cisgender people.
“If [queer people] try to be their true selves, they risk bullying and abuse,” Sunny said. “They risk being homeless.”
That’s what brought Benedict to the shelter where he met Sunny. Benedict eventually returned home to a family trying to understand his identity. But the bullying at school didn’t stop. Now, Oklahoma Superintendent Ryan Walters instructs schools to teach the 10 Commandments and ban books featuring queer characters.
“The culture in Oklahoma for queer kids is difficult,” Morgan said.
Sage Runsabove, who is a two-spirit Shawnee, Ponca, Otoe, and Sioux, serves as a founding mentor with the local LGBTQIA+ youth organization Cousins. Most of the young people served by Cousins are homeschooled to avoid bullying and gun violence. “These kids are terrified right now,” she said.
Runsabove hasn’t heard them mention fears around climate change, but she knows they’re living in unprecedented times. She wants to show them that queer and trans Indigenous people exist—in Oklahoma, and beyond. Last year, some of the youth attended the All Nations Two-Spirit Society’s international gathering in Oklahoma, where they met queer elders, stomp danced, and participated in sweat lodges.
“Trying to be a part of that sometimes is impossible or frowned upon,” Runsabove shared, adding that tribal ceremonies are often gendered. “We’ve just got to create those spaces for our people so they can be able to participate.”
Cultivating that type of community can save lives, said Alex DeRoin, a two-spirit Osage, Otoe, Pawnee, and Blackfeet Native who is a sitting council member at Tulsa Two Spirit, another nonprofit dedicated to cultivating those spaces regularly for Indigequeer people. A 2023 report from LGBTQIA+ rights organization The Trevor Project found that over half of Indigenous LGBTQIA+ youth reported seriously considering suicide over the past year. Nearly a quarter reported an attempt. Some, unfortunately, succeed. Research has also connected higher temperatures with heightened suicide rates.
“In the environment we are in right now in Oklahoma, even just having community is already a form of resistance,” DeRoin said.
The state’s attacks may be driving Indigenous queer people out of the state. “The trans and two-spirit community here is really in a state of crisis,” said Jordan Harmon, a two-spirit Muscogee Creek and policy analyst and legislative advocate for the Indigenous Environmental Network. “People are fleeing the state if they can, whether it’s for their safety or to seek health care.”
No one can know where Benedict would have ended up if he had the support and love of his peers and family. Maybe he would’ve moved. Maybe he would’ve stayed in Oklahoma and found his forever people. What we do know is this: Benedict should still be alive. He should have turned 17 last month. Instead, he’s gone. The community mourns, and so does the land.
“Now, we have to be caretakers of each other,” Harmon said, “because no one else is taking care of us.”
Sunny still remembers the day they first met Nex Benedict at the youth shelter where they work in Oklahoma. Winter was ending in 2022, and Benedict, just 15 at the time, was wearing a loose, black sweater. He always wore all black. Benedict had left home after his family refused to accept his identity: The teen was trans and used he/they pronouns. He was also of Choctaw ancestry. Benedict spent around six months at the shelter, where he liked to draw in pen and write silly notes. The shelter still has some of Benedict’s doodles on a fridge in the room where weekly LGBTQIA+ meetings are held. [DMG's fact-checking note: Nex Benedict was sexually abused by her father prior to leaving home.]
Bonding with Benedict over being trans and loving rock music was Sunny, a health specialist for youth who accompanied Benedict to health appointments, often playing Metallica on car rides together. Sunny, a two-spirit person—someone who is Indigenous and embodies masculine and feminine spirits—withheld their last name to protect their identity and respect their workplace’s privacy.
“They were a really cool kid,” Sunny shared through tears.
A year later, Benedict was dead. They were only 16 when three girls bullied and attacked them in a public high school bathroom. Benedict died the following day: February 8, 2024. The state later ruled the cause of death suicide.
“They didn’t get the support they needed from the people who were supposed to be there for them,” Sunny said. “It’s not one person’s fault they’re not here. It’s many people’s.”
Oklahoma is among the most aggressively anti-LGBTQIA+ states, with legislators having introduced 26 anti-LGBTQIA+ bills since November 2024 alone. In 2023, while Benedict was still alive, a ban on gender-affirming health care for minors took effect. Oklahoma is also home to 39 tribal nations; its “American Indian alone” population, per Census language, is the country’s largest. Here, Indigenous peoples and their relatives have suffered generations of displacement, colonization, and exploitation, particularly as a result of oil and gas drilling. Now, they have to contend with extreme and unpredictable weather—from tornadoes to wildfires—the fossil fuel sector has caused via negligent carbon pollution. Queer and Native peoples are disproportionately vulnerable to the growing climate crisis.
Fighting this headwind of challenges are Oklahoma’s queer Indigenous peoples. Their fight grows more difficult as President Donald Trump crusades to spread these harmful policies. Queer and two-spirit people—traditionally caretakers of the land in many Indigenous cultures—are already feeling the effects. Trump’s first day in office saw a flurry of pro-fossil fuel and anti-trans executive actions. He signed yet another order on January 28 to prevent trans minors from accessing gender-affirming health care; New York City’s NYU Langone Health is already preemptively complying.
Oklahoma has been ground zero for these attacks, so the state’s queer, trans, and two-spirit leaders know what’s at stake: the lives of young people like Benedict.
A Persecuted Past and Present
Around the turn of the 20th century, Oklahoma’s tribes were still coping with the loss of their homelands. Between 1830 and 1850, the Indian Removal Act violently forced some 100,000 tribal citizens living east of the Mississippi to the state. After that, several things culminated in rapid succession.
First came the United States government’s formal process in 1887 of removing land from tribal ownership and allotting parcels to individuals, a decision that resulted in the theft of 90 million acres of Indigenous land. Then, in 1897, Oklahoma completed its first profitable oil well. Over the next 10 years, the territory became the world’s largest oil producer, attracting settlers who exploited tribal families with oil on their lands.
Oklahoma officially became a state in 1907, deriving its name from the language of Benedict’s ancestors, the Choctaw. “Oklahoma” means “red people.” Government leaders, however, did little to honor the state’s namesake.
The federal and state governments restricted the rights of Indigenous peoples over their lands, often requiring white “guardians” to manage profitable properties. When Indigenous families discovered oil, they usually became targets of fraud, exploitation, and sometimes abuse. Children and elders weren’t spared.
“Those guardianships exacerbated inequalities and abuses and so forth that were happening as part of allotment and oil production,” explained Mark Boxell, an assistant professor of history at the University of Nebraska at Omaha who has extensively studied these tensions.
In 1924, the University of Oklahoma launched one of the world’s first schools of petroleum engineering, where international students gained the skills to drill and export that harm to Indigenous peoples elsewhere, too.
“There’s this global process where the connections between colonialism and oil production become accelerated through the state’s institutions,” Boxell said.
Oklahoma hasn’t escaped the influence and legacies of fossil fuels: Oil and gas companies are the top donors to Gov. Kevin Stitt, awarding him over $570,000 cumulatively during his 2018 and 2022 campaigns.
Though Stitt has been supportive of clean energy—Oklahoma is a major wind state—he still hasn’t finalized a climate adaptation plan for his constituents. And they need one: Between 1980 and 2024, Oklahoma experienced 115 extreme weather events that cost over $1 billion each, including drought, floods, storms, and wildfires. Luckily, the South Central Climate Adaptation Science Center at the U.S. Geological Survey’s National Climate Adaptation Science Center has been collaborating with tribes to develop adaptation strategies across the region.
“There’s a lot of hope,” said Paulette Blanchard, a citizen of the Absentee Shawnee Tribe in Oklahoma and co-principal investigator of the Rising Voices, Changing Coasts research project, which weaves Indigenous ecological knowledge and Western science. The center closed last week as a result of Trump’s policies. “If the political will could keep from erasing us again—and just allow us to be—we could get the work done whether they like it or not.”
Fostering Resistance in Community
In May, more than 110 tornadoes broke out across several states, including Oklahoma, causing some $3.5 billion in losses. Two-spirit climate justice activist Cheyenna Morgan’s sister was among those affected. Their sister, who was nine months pregnant, took shelter with her boyfriend and daughter. They survived; their one-story house was ripped apart.
“I drove over power lines and through trees to get to her,” said Morgan, who is an enrolled citizen of the United Keetoowah Band in Oklahoma and an Oglala Lakota descendant. “Seeing the aftermath of the tornado was devastating.”
Indigenous people in Oklahoma are uniquely vulnerable to such threats. The homelessness rate for Native Americans is nearly double that of Oklahomans at large. Gender-expansive people are also more likely to experience homelessness nationally. Since 2015, homelessness among trans people has increased by 217% across the U.S., compared to 14% for cisgender people.
“If [queer people] try to be their true selves, they risk bullying and abuse,” Sunny said. “They risk being homeless.”
That’s what brought Benedict to the shelter where he met Sunny. Benedict eventually returned home to a family trying to understand his identity. But the bullying at school didn’t stop. Now, Oklahoma Superintendent Ryan Walters instructs schools to teach the 10 Commandments and ban books featuring queer characters.
“The culture in Oklahoma for queer kids is difficult,” Morgan said.
Sage Runsabove, who is a two-spirit Shawnee, Ponca, Otoe, and Sioux, serves as a founding mentor with the local LGBTQIA+ youth organization Cousins. Most of the young people served by Cousins are homeschooled to avoid bullying and gun violence. “These kids are terrified right now,” she said.
Runsabove hasn’t heard them mention fears around climate change, but she knows they’re living in unprecedented times. She wants to show them that queer and trans Indigenous people exist—in Oklahoma, and beyond. Last year, some of the youth attended the All Nations Two-Spirit Society’s international gathering in Oklahoma, where they met queer elders, stomp danced, and participated in sweat lodges.
“Trying to be a part of that sometimes is impossible or frowned upon,” Runsabove shared, adding that tribal ceremonies are often gendered. “We’ve just got to create those spaces for our people so they can be able to participate.”
Cultivating that type of community can save lives, said Alex DeRoin, a two-spirit Osage, Otoe, Pawnee, and Blackfeet Native who is a sitting council member at Tulsa Two Spirit, another nonprofit dedicated to cultivating those spaces regularly for Indigequeer people. A 2023 report from LGBTQIA+ rights organization The Trevor Project found that over half of Indigenous LGBTQIA+ youth reported seriously considering suicide over the past year. Nearly a quarter reported an attempt. Some, unfortunately, succeed. Research has also connected higher temperatures with heightened suicide rates.
“In the environment we are in right now in Oklahoma, even just having community is already a form of resistance,” DeRoin said.
The state’s attacks may be driving Indigenous queer people out of the state. “The trans and two-spirit community here is really in a state of crisis,” said Jordan Harmon, a two-spirit Muscogee Creek and policy analyst and legislative advocate for the Indigenous Environmental Network. “People are fleeing the state if they can, whether it’s for their safety or to seek health care.”
No one can know where Benedict would have ended up if he had the support and love of his peers and family. Maybe he would’ve moved. Maybe he would’ve stayed in Oklahoma and found his forever people. What we do know is this: Benedict should still be alive. He should have turned 17 last month. Instead, he’s gone. The community mourns, and so does the land.
“Now, we have to be caretakers of each other,” Harmon said, “because no one else is taking care of us.”
