Louise Erdrich's early poem "The Strange People" portrays a dynamic understanding of gender echoed in many of her later fictive works. Narrated by a speaker who is half antelope, half woman, the poem details the relationship between a masculine hunter and his feminine prey. The poem suggests that gender is experienced as a wound, a site of conflict and discord, a transformation, a negotiation between men and women, masculine and feminine--an exchange that redefines and transcends both. Erdrich's blurring of animal and human subjectivities echoes Judith Butlers assertion that issues of identity fundamentally question who or what is defined as human and to what extent. In questioning not only who or what counts as human but also, by extension, the connectivity existing between a variety of subject positions, Erdrich places an examination of issues of identity--namely those of gender, race, and sexuality--at the forefront of her project as a writer. Like the antelope-woman of "The Strange People," throughout her series of interconnected novels Erdrich frequently includes characters that combine, perform, and transcend masculine and feminine gender identities. In "Blurs, Blends, Berdaches: Gender Mixing in the Novels of Louise Erdrich," Julie Barak analyzes this idea of gender exchange. Barak argues that many of Erdrich's characters blur masculine and feminine gender roles and are of a mixed-gender status. In attempting to establish a framework for understanding the gender mixing of Erdrich's characters, Barak suggests that such practices be read in light of the Native American figure of the "berdache"--a role that existed historically in many Native American cultures and that represented a third category of gender identity, existing outside traditional Western understandings of male and female, men and women. In this essay, the author argues that Erdrich moves beyond what Barak describes as gender mixing in relation to such traditional figures as the "berdache" to synthesize traditional notions of "men" and "women" into new understandings of gender that transcend binary categorization. Instead of reading her characters through a framework such as that of the "berdache" or two-spirit, the author proposes reading many of Erdrich's characters as transgendered. While the term "transgendered" is often used to describe a wide variety of gender identities and expressions, the author uses the term to represent gendered identities that exist beyond binary categories of male and female, masculine and feminine, heterosexual and homosexual. (Contains 12 notes.)