Shawna Thompson was born on June 4, 1966 in Cortez, Colorado to Roselyn Thompson (née Harrison) and John Lowe Thompson. Both of her parents were Navajo. Shawna and her mother were from the Coyote Pass clan and her father was from the Red House clan. Her parents had been raised in boarding schools designed to assimilate Indian children to white culture, which left them with attenuated connections to their own communities.
Shawna’s first three years of life were spent in or near Dove Creek, Colorado, outside the Navajo community, where her father was training to be a missionary in the Pentecostal Church of God. When Shawna was three years old, her father moved their family to Kayenta, Arizona, where he would serve as pastor of a church on the Navajo reservation.
Despite his career, John Thompson realized by the end of his life that Christianity was a white man’s religion, and he included aspects of traditional Navajo religion in his religious practice. But his charisma and religiosity in public were shadowed by violence at home, and Shawna’s mother, Roselyn, eventually left the father due to the violence. Roselyn was a committed Christian her entire life. She spent many years with her husband running their Pentecostal church. After they separated, she served in many roles including legal assistant, police records clerk, and information specialist for Maricopa County Superior Court.
Shawna survived an abusive childhood home, frequent neglect, and sexual abuse by family members. However, she did not let those experiences define her.
Throughout her life, Shawna loved women more than men and did not adhere to conventional gender norms, both of which caused conflict with her Pentecostal family and misunderstandings in her wider milieu. When a Navajo man referred to her as two-spirit, she discovered the Navajo term for who she was.
After graduating from Monument Valley High School in 1984, she followed her brother Jonah to American Indian Bible College in Phoenix, Arizona. She got involved in college activities, but was expelled in January 1985 for having too close a relationship with a woman. She attended Arizona State University, graduated from technical school, and got a job at Shamrock Foods, working with 150 men in a warehouse at night and beginning to learn the rules of non-Navajo life.
At college, Shawna got involved in drinking, drugs, and an abusive relationship. After her drinking buddies from work intervened, she joined an Alcoholics Anonymous (AA) group. There she found community, and began to find God again. She read about Native American ways of life and traditions and took as her conception of God a female deity from Navajo culture.
Shawna had learned from Navajo tradition that if you stay off the reservation, you become mentally ill. Exactly that happened. She became homeless for periods of time and spent years on mental-health disability. She visited various churches. Someone took her to Phoenix Quaker Meeting, and, as she sat among people gathered in silence, she experienced for the first time being in the company of people who did not tell her who she was supposed to be. She never went back there, but sitting in that silence ingrained something in her. She had learned from her father in childhood to listen to the wind for answers. She began to do so again.
When she began taking psychotropic medication in 1997, her life improved. However, her peers at AA disapproved, viewing medication as potentially addictive. Yet again, she lost a community, though the conception of God she had learned in AA stayed with her. Although medication helped her fit in with Belagana (non-Navajo) culture, in later years, she grew to believe that her experience had been overpathologize.
She got a job as a student worker in the library of Mesa Community College, then finished her bachelor’s degree in psychology from Arizona State University in Tempe, Arizona on May 10, 2002.
After finishing her bachelor’s degree, she entered a new relationship. She and her partner, Jan, were together for five and a half years, raising a daughter, Ashley, together. They moved to Tucson in 2006 and attended Metropolitan Community Church, a LGBT-centered Christian denomination. While the church reconnected Shawna with Christian belief, she found it to be a Sunday exercise that did not provide the connection she was seeking - in Quaker words, an empty form.
In 2008, Shawna was diagnosed with a highly heritable form of breast cancer. With Jan’s encouragement she underwent the lifesaving treatment of surgery, chemotherapy, and radiation, which ultimately cured her of both cancer and aspects of gender dysphoria. However, Shawna perceived that the chemo “drained God out of [her] system” and chemically altered her such that she could no longer feel the presence of the Higher Power, and she prayed to God for relief. In 2010, Jan left her and returned to the Mormon Church of her youth, which prohibited lesbian relationships.
At the Cancer Center, in a support group for survivors, Shawna met Pima Monthly Meeting member Bob Winchester. He invited her to attend Quaker storytelling, where she first heard Friends talking about following God’s leading, and she experienced that sense of connection again. She first attended worship at Pima Monthly Meeting as his guest in 2010, and continued to attend after he died in 2011.
She resumed the studies that had been interrupted by cancer and finished her Master of Arts in Information Technology and Library Science, which she received from the University of Arizona on May 11, 2012. She thereafter worked as a library information associate at the University of Arizona (UA) and served on the UA Diversity, Social Justice, and Equity Council. During her time at UA, she experienced the politics and practicalities of being Navajo, two-spirit, and a cancer survivor in a University community that prioritized none of those identities.
She was accepted into membership at Pima Meeting on July 14, 2013. She viewed Quaker meeting as a place where she could be accepted absolutely in all aspects of her identity. She served on the Nominating Committee, the Ministry and Oversight Committee, as recording clerk, and as clerk. Her Spirit-centered leadership helped the community through a time of sometimes difficult change. Her commitment to the truth helped the Meeting move forward with integrity, and her sense of humor helped change Friends’ perspectives and shake up resistance so that Meeting could move forward in the Spirit’s Light.
Like her father, Shawna practiced extreme generosity with her time and money and never worried about holding onto resources, knowing through faith that when the time came, God would provide what was needed. She was known as a caring, friendly, and nonjudgmental listener, and maintained close connections in numerous communities. Her approach to life was shot through with subtle wit; she wrote what she called “bar poetry,” characterized by wry observations and good humor. At events she was known to hand out and share her poems with those lucky enough to meet and interact with her.
In 2018, she went out to the desert south of Tucson to discern God’s will for her life, and quickly got the answer: that she was not to continue in Quaker service or a library career, but to spend time with her mother. Her mother came to Tucson to live with her, and their relationship became much closer and more supportive toward the end of Shawna’s life.
Shawna was diagnosed with late-stage pancreatic cancer in early 2019. Drawing on her experience with chemotherapy and radiation, she declined to receive the aggressive treatment that she knew would not cure her. Instead, she spent the final three-and-a-half months of her life in the beloved community living out peace, joy, and acceptance. In mid-April 2019, with the help of Pima Meeting, she, her mother, and four of her friends traveled to Monument Valley on the Navajo Nation. While there, she experienced a foretaste of resurrection: she forgot the previous two and a half months of her illness. She was able to draw more deeply from within herself, and the experience resulted in a renewed vitality that lasted through her return to Tucson.
Shawna passed away peacefully on May 20, 2019 from pancreatic cancer. She was survived by her mother, Roselyn Thompson (née Harrison), her older sister, Lorna Chávez, and her two older brothers, Jonathan and Jonah Thompson. She was interred at the Shiprock cemetery between her father John Thompson and her grandmother Lucy Harrison, on Saturday, May 25, 2019. Her family and reservation community held a memorial service for her at the Harvest Time Church in Kayenta, AZ on June 8, 2019. Pima Friends Meeting held her in the Light at a memorial meeting for worship on September 28, 2019, which was filled with friends from across the wide range of Shawna’s beloved community.
Approved at Meeting for Worship with a Concern for Business, 14th day, Eleventh Month, 2021