In the 20st and 21st centuries, there has often been more talk about the erasure of exclusion and the incorporation of inclusion. Hence, there is a Black History Month, celebrating the lives of those who suffered the atrocities of slavery, for example. A race that once was excluded has been recognized as an important part of history, and moreover civilization. As black lives do matter, it is important to remember that we are all humans of one earth.
Yet, controversy still arises from time to time. However, a recent controversy has been regarding the INCLUSION of a people rather than the exclusion, as the 88th Academy Awards reminded everyone of for nearly every minute of the countless-hour show. J.K. Rowling has been promoting her first screenplay and spinoff film to the Harry Potter film series: Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them. She has been doing so on her interactive website, Pottermore, whereby people can be put into respective Hogwarts Houses, learn more about their favourite characters and magic, and read new articles written by the author herself.
Her promotion, however, has sparked controversy insofar as she has brought her magic from Europe to North America, where the events of Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them will take place. Going over the history of Magic in America, as part of her four-part series, History of Magic in North America, Rowling talks of the introduction of wands, the Magical Congress of the United States of America (MACUSA), and the Salem Witch Trials. However, the core of the controversy deals with the inclusion of Native Americans, who, by now, have had their story known thanks to the colonists in the founding of the United States.
Today, high schools and universities speak of Indigenous peoples as having their own spiritualties, just as we speak of Canada being a multicultural and multi-faith country, or how different religions have made their way through history over the millennia. While Christians have their resurrecting icon and Muslims have their faceless messenger, Native peoples have their beliefs, which will seem as supernatural to they who see all religions as hokum.
The problem with the inclusion of Native Americans is what seems to be a full circle in history, whereby the colonizing Europeans – J.K. Rowling – put their beliefs and ideologies on the Native peoples.
No one can really put this topic in better words than Katharine Trendacosta, whose analysis of Rowling's History of Magic in North America highlights the seemingly unintentional racism of the text as well as includes a Native American's perspectives on this as well.
In her article, “J.K. Rowling's History of Magic in North America Was a Travesty From Start to Finish,” Trendacosta says:
“Who could have predicted that a white lady from England would have problems with appropriating Native American culture? Oh, wait, that should have been completely obvious to anyone even thinking of doing what J.K. Rowling did. When you’re combining a history of magic with Native Americans, you’re falling into an already prevalent trope of making them “mystical.” And Rowling not only didn’t avoid that trap, she leaned into it:
‘The Native American wizarding community was particularly gifted in animal and plant magic, its potions in particular being of a sophistication beyond much that was known in Europe. The most glaring difference between magic practised by Native Americans and the wizards of Europe was the absence of a wand.
The magic wand originated in Europe. Wands channel magic so as to make its effects both more precise and more powerful, although it is generally held to be a mark of the very greatest witches and wizards that they have also been able to produce wandless magic of a very high quality. As the Native American Animagi and potion-makers demonstrated, wandless magic can attain great complexity, but Charms and Transfiguration are very difficult without one.’
Associating Native Americans with “animal and plant magic”—with, it should be noted, no more detail than that—is leaning so hard on a stereotype it’s hard not to find it offensive. It’s also not great that she says that wands originated in Europe, which reads very much as a Europe being the center of innovation and building in the magic world.
You know, Native Americans and their “Earth magic” while European wizards were the ones smart enough to make wands.
Rowling may say that great things can be done without a wand, but it doesn’t offset the implications—that Native Americans may have raw power, but it’s refinement that only comes from Europe. Implications that she, with her background, was completely blind to.
Later, Rowling also writes that wizards who came to America fleeing the authorities “sought to blend in among the increasing tide of No-Majs, or hide among the Native American wizarding population, who were generally welcoming and protective of their European brethren.” Oh good, the friendly native. There’s another stereotype she should have avoided.
Rowling also included this bit in “Fourteenth Century – Seventeenth Century”:
‘The legend of the Native American ‘skin walker’ – an evil witch or wizard that can transform into an animal at will – has its basis in fact. A legend grew up around the Native American Animagi, that they had sacrificed close family members to gain their powers of transformation. In fact, the majority of Animagi assumed animal forms to escape persecution or to hunt for the tribe. Such derogatory rumours often originated with No-Maj medicine men, who were sometimes faking magical powers themselves, and fearful of exposure.’
I don’t think I can sum up the problems with this portion better than Cherokee scholar Dr. Adrienne Keene, who wrote:
‘What you do need to know is that the belief of these things (beings?) has a deep and powerful place in Navajo understandings of the world. It is connected to many other concepts and many other ceremonial understandings and lifeways. It is not just a scary story, or something to tell kids to get them to behave, it’s much deeper than that. My own community also has shape-shifters, but I’m not delving into that either.
What happens when Rowling pulls this in, is we as Native people are now opened up to a barrage of questions about these beliefs and traditions (take a look at my twitter mentions if you don’t believe me)–but these are not things that need or should be discussed by outsiders. At all. I’m sorry if that seems “unfair,” but that’s how our cultures survive.’
The other piece here is that Rowling is completely re-writing these traditions. Traditions that come from a particular context, place, understanding, and truth. These things are not “misunderstood wizards”. Not by any stretch of the imagination.
It’s appropriative in the worst way. Harry Potter occasionally mentioned monsters from various other cultures as real, which was incidental enough not to be a problem. The History of Magic in North America is all about another group, and the way Rowling writes doesn’t exhibit a deep understanding of her subject. It feels more like she googled “Native American legends” and picked the top result.”
So, taking Trendacosta’s section on History of Magic in North America into account, we cannot really ask whether this was a mistake or not, since it all seems too (im)perfect. The fact of the matter is, she did the thing that was done before that shouldn’t have been done again: hegemonize the culture that has already felt the brunt of hegemony and continues to feel it today. I understand that Rowling tried to include Native Americans into her world, but she, in a sense, said that their spirituality was not “real spirituality” but the effect of magic. That’s like going up to a Christian and saying that “Jesus did not actually resurrect from the dead, but was in a coma the whole time.” The severity of the statement may not match to what occurs in History of Magic in North America, but a sacred idea is being replaced with something not dissimilar to an insult.
The magic of Harry Potter still fills the hearts of the children of today, and the children within the adults who grew up with the stories and films. However, with the additional stories that have not been received well both due to quantity, quality, and content, we see the proverbial “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” lesson come to light.
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