Inside Native American Two Spirit Society

Photography by Luke Gilford

In late July, Travis Goldtooth, who also goes by Buffalo Barbie, took a 900-mile road trip from her home in small, conservative Farmington, N.M., to Blacktail Ranch, a lonely homestead perched high in a valley in Wolf Creek in a part of Montana even locals refer to as the middle of nowhere. The drive from the south meanders along the eastern edge of the Continental Divide through a complex landscape that follows Montana's golden prairies racing into the Rocky Mountains. Roadside biker bars and one-horse towns rise and fall from view in the same undulation as the mountains. Seen from the distance through the thin light in the north country, some of these mountains look hellish and jagged, others fat, grassy, and long, like giant, sleeping, yellow dogs flecked with pine trees.

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