"that most precarious of historical endeavors"

"Though Cherokee gender identities and social roles came with a degree of malleability, there exists no documentary evidence to support insinuations that Cherokees like [Nancy] Ward assumed a [late-twentieth-century] two-spirit identity.  Such people may have been asegi, or 'extraordinary,' but historians reject the connection that some gender theories and LGBT scholars make when they posit that extraordinary Cherokees like Ward were two spirits.
     "Historians have good reasons for rejecting such assertions.  The disciplinary boundaries of historical analysis demand that the historian present a body of evidence in which patterns can be discerned and conclusions made (tentative and contested as they usually are).  Given this, historians generally agree that Ward’s diplomacy was in keeping with her role as a Beloved Woman and was not evidence of her two-spirit identity.  Though there exists no debate among historians over whether Cherokees like Ward were two spirits, however, scholarly debate does go on in other humanities and social science disciplines.  For example, gender theorists and LBGT scholars, not bound by the same evidentiary burdens as historians, remain open to speculation that prominent Cherokees like Ward were two spirits.
     "For historians, though, the written sources used to reconstruct Cherokee life during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries are virtually silent on the existence of two-spirit people.  Indeed, specific references to berdaches or two spirits are absent from the settler colonial archive of the eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Woodland South.  To historians, then, the assertion that Ward was a two spirit remains unsupported by [documentary] evidence and is generally dismissed as speculation."

     Gregory D. Smithers, "'Two spirits':  gender, ritual, and spirituality in the Native south," Early American studies 12, no. 3 (Fall 2014) =Beyond the binaries:  critical approaches to sex and gender in early America:  635-636 (626-651), italics mine.  What Smithers says here about the documentary evidence for Cherokee two-spiritism he would (I think) say also about early "two-spiritism" in general, all of the relevant differences considered.
     But this is, for him, only so much throat-clearing (and my selection only, therefore, so much special pleading), given that Smithers proceeds to appeal to (ancient and) contemporary Native American epistemologies other than those of professional Western historiography, to contemporary instantiations of oral tradition, to "critical" techniques of up- and sidestreaming (637), to "interdisciplinarity," to the importance of "a critical imagination (what we might also call a critical historical consciousness)," and so forth.  (As another way of stressing that I've taken these comments out of context, I've illustrated this post with the cover of his latest book (Boston:  Beacon Press, 2022), which, by the way, I can't claim to have read.)
     Though he doesn't seem to be as "critical" here about the extent to which the very oral traditions in question may have come to reflect the preoccupations of an ambient Western culture as he is about the extent to which the documentary evidence does, he is quite honest about how very little of the latter there is (however compromised) to work with, and the degree to which traditional historians have been either skeptical or at least cautious in the face of the lack of Western-style evidence.
     (The heading comes from p. 637, and refers to the technique of upstreaming.)