After arguably revitalizing the novel among young children and adults, J.K. Rowling has taken it upon herself to tackle the very unaddressed and totally not done-to-death question of of how to best appropriate and whitewash the histories of indigenous people for white readers.
In this four-part series, “The History of Magic in North America,” Rowling shares with readers her fanciful interpretation of “Native American magic,” replete with medicine men, Skinwalkers, and wand-less incantations (the wand being a European invention, according to Rowling.)
Exciting right? There is one slight problem however—Harry Potter and magic are fiction, Native Americans are not.
Rowling’s fictional whitesplanation of “Native American magic” isn't new. Misinformation about Indigenous cultures, customs, and spiritualities has pervaded Western imaginations and media since Europeans first arrived on Turtle Island. In Don’t Trust White People: Blood Quantum and Identity Appropriation, I discussed cultural appropriation as it relates to non-Indigenous people claiming Indigenous identities. Rowling is engaging in another type of cultural appropriation: reductive stereotyping.
Though hidden beneath a veil of seemingly harmless fiction, it has the irrefutable consequence of reducing our innate cultural complexity to something overly simplistic, thereby more palatable for Western audiences.
Reductive stereotyping of Indigenous cultures has been done before–like a lot. From Wild West-themed Dime Novels to J.M. Barrie’s Peter Pan, Western writers have maintained a tight and time-honoured tradition of portraying Native Americans as one-dimensional stock-characters who are either magical mystics, violent marauders or noble savages. While Rowling’s series is just the tip of this iceberg of literary tradition, her series paves the way for future writers to continue appropriating and misrepresenting our cultures in the same—exploitative—way.
It’s unlikely Rowling’s agenda in writing this series is to perpetuate the trauma of colonization; as an affluent white writer from Britain, a country which has reaped the spoils of the genocide on our peoples, that is precisely the outcome.
Western civilization has thrived on a self-aggrandizing historical narrative; one in which it represents the apex of human evolution, at the exclusion of everyone else. This supremacist narrative works by reducing other peoples to inferior stereotypes. This tactic is frequently unconscious, but outright racist in its motivation. It is at the root of Westerners’ propensity to dismiss the engineering prowess behind the Inca’s construction of Machu Picchu as evidence of extraterrestrial intervention, or Hollywood’s proclivity for re-imagining ancient Egyptians as white.
In this same way, Westerners’ romanticized notions of Indigenous people as magical beings is a reductive stereotype which dismisses the legitimacy of our cultural and spiritual practices to mere witchcraft.
Rowling, though a popular writer, is most definitely not very informed on Indigenous studies. To add offense to injury, she doesn't even care to pretend to try. "In the Native American community, some witches and wizards were accepted and even lauded within their tribes, gaining reputations for healing as medicine men, or outstanding hunters,” she writes.
In the Harry Potter universe there are four different houses of Hogwarts: that suggests more diversity than what Rowling implies by saying “the Native American community.” In this one phrase, Rowling has reduced millions of different Indigenous people with vastly diverse languages, spiritual traditions, and cultures to a single homogenous community. Rowling is demonstrating blatant disregard for the fact that there is no such thing as a single Native American culture.
She seems to ignore the fact that the Americas and its surrounding islands are a tiny bit larger than Rowling’s fictional Hogwarts, or even Britain itself. Additionally, what Rowling and other Westerners generalize as medicine men, are not magicians, but actual medical practitioners who play a key role in maintaining their cultural communities' health. Does Rowling go a “Medicine man” for her annual check-ups?
As Mexica, growing up in Mexico, I learned the Spanish word brujeria to describe our medicinal and spiritual practices–however, this word is truly a misnomer. The word brujeria, meaning witchcraft, dates back to Spanish colonialism in Mexico where our spiritual and medicinal practices were regarded as pagan witchcraft by the Christian colonizers. Our brujos have always been medical practitioners who relied on advanced medical ingenuity for the benefits of their patients and communities. Given the importance of holistic approaches to medicine among our people, spirituality is inextricable from our medicinal practices; not unlike Jesuit medics in the Christian tradition. As such, our medicine and spirituality are core and sacred components of our cultural identity and overall well-being; they are definitely not intended to be appropriated or misrepresented by non-Indigenous writers as magic.
I’m no fan of Rowling’s work myself, however, as a millennial I’m no stranger to the incredible fandom inspired by her masterpiece series, Harry Potter. Rowling has inspired the lives of many people in a positive way by telling a story intended to speak out against genocide. As such, it is shamefully ironic to see her engage in cultural genocide by misrepresenting her Native American fan base so callously.
Rowling may not have intended to cause harm to our Indigenous communities, however, as a popular and well-respected writer, her work has a broad reach which includes many impressionable youth. Words are weapons; Rowling’s foray into cultural appropriation ridicules Indigenous peoples’ identities and creates long term harm to future generations of Indigenous youth who now run the risk of being stigmatized as witches and wizards—I don’t want to even imagine what kind of cosplay and Halloween costumes could come out of this.
Native Americans are real and contemporary peoples who are bringing our legacy of cultural and intellectual achievements into the future. We are not new-age magicians who fraternize with extraterrestrials—well, with the exception of that one cousin, but we don’t talk about him much.