November 17, 2025 | Michail Takach

Michael Waupoose: accepting sacred responsibilities in a divided world

Michael shares his story of navigating Native oppression, reclaiming his cultural and sexual identities, and championing positive change for the tribal and Two-Spirit communities.

Michael Waupoose

“Being Two Spirit means there is a responsibility to your family and community, to be a teacher, mentor, and elder."

The second-grade classroom in Oshkosh, Wisconsin, was meant to be a place of learning, but for a young Michael Waupoose, it was often a stage for a cruel form of performance.

It was Thanksgiving season, and his teacher, in an attempt at cultural inclusion, had the other children craft paper "Indian headbands." Then, she would call on Michael, the only Native American child, to stand before the class and "do Indian dances."

“I don’t remember seeing a single person of color in my grade school, junior high, or first year of high school,” Michael recalls now, speaking from his life in Madison, where for the last 31 years he has built a life of sobriety, professional success, and profound self-discovery.

That moment in the second grade—a mix of forced performance, curiosity, and deep-seated othering—was a symbol of the tension that defined the early years of his life. It was a tension born of systemic oppression, discriminatory federal policies, a tension between being a proud Menominee while being encouraged to "blend in," and later, a tension between his identity as a gay man and the life he was forced to live.

Today, Michael, who is a retired clinical social worker and was previously the director for an outpatient addiction and psychiatry clinic for UW Health, carries a more complex and integrated identity: a Menominee man, a respected elder, and a proud Two-Spirit (2S) person. His story is a powerful testament to the resilience required to reclaim what colonization, assimilation, and institutional prejudice sought to erase from Native communities.

The ghosts of termination

Michael was born in 1957 to a single mother on the Menominee Indian reservation in Keshena, Wisconsin. His very existence as a Native child, kept by his mother during an era known as the Sixties Scoop—where predominantly government-run social agencies, often supported by churches, removed Indigenous children from their families for adoption into white homes—is a strong testament to his mother’s tenacity.

“It’s really fascinating that I was born to a single mom and kept—at a time when many native children were taken from their homes and adopted out,” he reflects. He knew peers who were not so fortunate. One dear friend and a professional colleague were both taken at young ages, placed with white families, and raised completely disconnected from their tribes, languages, and heritage. This forced adoption was a continuation of the federal policy goals enacted through the “Indian boarding schools,” a deliberate and destructive attempt to sever Native cultural ties.

But for Michael's family, the pressure to sever ties came in an additional form: termination. In 1954, through the Menominee Termination Act, the federal government terminated the Menominee tribe’s status as a federally recognized Tribe, dismantling the reservation, encouraging families to move off, and transforming the land into a county. Michael was born after the tribal roles were closed.

“My mom could not enroll me in the tribe,” he explains. “The Tribe was not restored to federal recognition until 1973.

During those two decades, the land changed hands, creating the deep-seated, racial tensions that still bubble up today between reservation residents and the predominantly white surrounding county.

His parents, both survivors of the boarding school system, encouraged their children to fit in. For them, raising Michael and his sisters and brothers in the almost exclusively white communities of Oshkosh and Sheboygan was an unintentional effort to “spare us from their childhood experiences” and also afforded financial opportunities to the family that where scarce on the reservation at that time.

This environment of forced conformity created a double layer of cultural invisibility for Michael. While his family provided a traditional upbringing he didn’t fully understand at the time, his public life was marked by the constant need to “pass.” The casual racism—from the school dance to the blatant disrespect in Shawano stores, where white customers were served before his mother and him—was a constant, low-grade abrasion.

Don’t ask, don’t tell

After graduating from Sheboygan High School in 1976, Michael entered a period of personal struggle, complicated by addiction.

“I was struggling for real,” he admits. In 1981 he was unemployed, floundering, and easily influenced. It was a chance commercial on TV that led him to the Air Force recruiter. He initially intended to join the reserves, but the recruiter talked him into full-time enlistment. The final, strange clincher was the promise of a free hotel room overnight near the recruiting center in Milwaukee.

“Staying in a hotel room in the big city was a big deal,” said Michael. “That really impressed me, enough to get me down there to meet with them. I sometimes wonder how many people were as impressed as I was.”

Still, Michael’s military commitment was made with deep ambivalence.

"I kept thinking, ‘anytime it becomes too much, I will come out, and they’ll let me go home.’"

But suddenly, eight years had passed, and he was still there. He had loved the structure, education, and vocational experience, but he had lived that entire time in the closet to the Air Force, constantly under the shadow of a dishonorable discharge.

Michael excelled, earning numerous awards and recognition, reinforcing his hunch that queer people and People of Color in the military often over-performed. His success led to a recruitment attempt by the Air Force Office of Special Investigation. The job was intriguing, but the extensive background check it required —including interviews with people in Sheboygan and Oshkosh — was wrought with anxiety.

“I knew I would not pass. My identity would come out,” he explains. “The risk outweighed the possibility of joining. It was another one of those ‘I wanted to do this, but being outed as gay was too much of a risk moments, so I chose not to do that.”

The fear was corrosive. When he reached the point of deciding whether to re-enlist for a second term that would eventually lead to a decision to stay until retirement, he chose to leave. He was exhausted by the constant burden and had found his career as a substance abuse counselor rewarding and fulfilling.

“I didn’t want to live with that lingering fear always hanging over me,” he states.

In 1984, a drunk driving ticket had led him to treatment and, ultimately, sobriety. It was in that recovery setting that he began to acknowledge the direct, dualistic relationship between his oppressed identities—being Native in a white world, being gay in a straight world, and being sober —and the internal pressure he had been carrying. He had to keep these identities "hidden, unspoken."

Sobriety allowed him to begin the hard work of reconciliation.

A Two-Spirit awakening

After leaving the military in 1989, Michael took a role with the North Carolina Department of Corrections, supervising an AODA program in a medium-custody men's prison. This move, strange as it seemed, offered a pivotal experience.

“Going from the macho-ish environment of the Air Force to an all-male prison…wow! I was there for a few years, and it was a big takeaway: an understanding of my identity as a man, absent of being a gay man. Really coming into my own as a man,” he says.

But he missed his family. He missed his home. He returned to Wisconsin, took a job as an AODA counselor with the Menominee Tribe, eventually earning a Master’s Degree in Social Work. It was here that his Menominee identity, which had been unexplored, finally began to blossom.

“Raised off the reservation, raised in all-white communities and all-white schools with all-white educational model, I wasn’t sure how to navigate that,” he reflects. But working for the tribe was "a whole new world," and he started to understand what it meant to be Menominee.

It was during tribal conferences that he first heard people talking about Two-Spirit (2S) identity, and the history and representation of such individuals in tribal communities pre-Contact.

“I knew I was gay from a very early age. Eventually I started to understand this has a historical element of identity.”

For Michael, embracing 2S is far more complicated and profound than simply being "gay." He still uses "gay" when speaking with white people, finding that 2S often leads to uncomfortable curiosity and a sense of being treated as an "interesting object" or a "unique thing." But when he is with Native people, he is 2S, an identity that is, in his own words, “way way more complicated than who I have sex with.”

He defines the Two-Spirit identity as one rooted a in sacred responsibility to family and community—to be a teacher, mentor, and elder.

This is manifest in his relationship with his nieces and nephews and his community, which became a vital part of his life after his return. He embraced caregiving responsibilities, offering correction and uplifting support. When his youngest nephew realized he could read, the first person he wanted to call was Uncle Mike. When he was diagnosed as a Type 1 Diabetic, he called Michael and his husband to ask them to learn how to help care for him so he could continue to come stay with them for visits.

“2S means there is a responsibility to your family and community, to be a teacher, mentor, and elder,” Michael states. This understanding provides a depth to his life that extends beyond his relationship with his husband of 30 years.

Shifting sands for the Seventh Generation

Despite the cultural significance of the 2S role, the Menominee reservation is not a utopia. Michael acknowledges the profound, painful legacy of colonization and Christianity, which deeply embedded homophobia. Slurs happen, and it remains a painful reminder of bigotry.

However, the tide is undeniably shifting. He recalls attending a Pride March on the reservation this past year.

“Walking with my trans nephew, my gender fluid niece, my husband and other LGBTQ community members… just seeing that, on the reservation, was a significant moment in my life. The sight of community members honking their car horns in support was amazing.”

This shift is accelerating. The Menominee Tribe will host its first-ever 2S Pow Wow in June, and other tribes, like Oneida, are beginning to incorporate 2S dances into their annual ceremonies. This is an indication that younger people are more open, accepting, and inclusive, and the decades-long movement to reclaim Native cultures, histories, and languages has expanded to embrace Two-Spirit identities.

Michael now champions the idea of institutionalizing this change.

“Wouldn’t it be amazing if every tribe across Wisconsin had not just a 2S dance within their annual pow wow, but an annual 2S pow wow?”

His vision includes tribal governments funding these events and establishing 2S advisory groups to counsel leadership on community issues.

He understands the monumental effort required. Tribal governments are already pulled in countless directions—language revitalization, treaty rights defense, fighting major corporations like Enbridge Oil Pipeline, and ongoing land rights disputes (such as the recent State Supreme Court case defending the Menominee right to place purchased land into trust). Yet, he believes the courage and wherewithal for this movement must come from within the 2S community and allies, with advice and encouragement from elders.

“What do we want to see for the seventh generation? What tribal values do we need to restore and reinforce?” asks Michael.

Michael also addresses the ongoing challenges of appropriation, which he has dealt with his entire life—from white people claiming Native heritage for financial or professional benefit to the colonial invention of blood quantum, which limits tribal enrollment and access to treaty resources.

The blood quantum requirement creates an ironic, cruel dynamic: children who are raised on the reservation, steeped in culture but slightly below the required blood percentage, are excluded, while others who are completely separated from the identity may claim descent based on a tiny fraction of blood. The rule is “really quite a disruptor,” reducing resources for Menominee families and blurring the true identity rooted in community and upbringing.

Hanging in there, after all these years

Michael Waupoose’s life has been a slow, powerful integration of all his separate, formerly contradictory identities: the behavioral health clinic director, the Menominee man, the sober addict, the husband, the elder, and the Two-Spirit person. None is stronger than the others; they are strongest together.

Reflecting on his hard-fought path, he offers advice to his younger self: “Hang in there.”

He credits his survival to the simple, profound truth he learned as a clinician.

“A kid needs at least one person in their life that unconditionally loves and supports them.”

For him, that person was his grandmother, whose quiet, non-verbal presence was everything. When a family member attempted to shame Michael for coming out, a beloved aunt told him: “nothing they said was true, because your grandparents loved you to the moon, no matter what.”

That unconditional love stuck with him. It is the lesson he now imparts to his nieces and nephews.

“My commitment to you is to be here when things are going well and not going well. Nothing will change the fact that I love you.”

He never could have imagined his life today—the success, the stability, the 30-year relationship with his husband, the respect, and the ability to serve his community. As a final, powerful act of integration, Michael is now redoing his ceremonial regalia for the upcoming 2S Pow Wow in June, ensuring it will visibly reflect the fullness of his identity.

The forced separation is over. After a lifetime of being asked to blend in, to hide, and to perform, Michael Waupoose stands fully revealed, defined not by what he lacks, but what he offers, and by the sacred responsibilities he embraces.

“One day I will be an ancestor and I want my descendants to know that I used my voice so that they could have a future.” - Autumn Peltier.