J.K. Rowling’s new collection of short stories, "History of Magic in North America," was not well received by some, including a number of Native Peoples. The history, it seems, was prone to cultural insensitivity, and at times, blatant racism.
Her new installment chronicles and summarizes the history of the wizarding world in the United States, using the real history of the US as a backdrop for Rowling’s fantastical world. While some fans have defended the much-lauded author’s choices, there are several problems with the work that are more than difficult to work past. Here are a few:
The depiction of Native Americans as one monolithic entity. One complaint about Rowling’s new work is the implication that Native Americans are one group of people with the same abilities, desires, and histories. In the first part of her collection (Fourteenth Century-Seventeenth Century), Rowling writes:
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 practiced 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.
This enforces several stereotypes about Native Americans, and lumps a diverse group of people into one way of being. Maybe I’m looking into this too much, but transfiguration is a pretty badass ability to withhold from one group of individuals. It’s defined as, “a complete change of form or appearance into a more beautiful or spiritual state,” and is often associated with Jesus Christ, like God, for a lot of people. Charms, according to the Harry Potter wikia, “Can be some of the most powerful and game-changing spells in existence,” along with requiring “concentration, precise wand movements, and the proper pronunciation of an incantation.” Why can’t Native Americans do these things? There isn’t a real reason given, other than that European wizards have wands and Native American wizards don’t. This sounds like the very familiar and deeply problematic narrative that Europeans took the raw power of the Native peoples and refined it, as in, Europeans came to America and gave Native Americans the means to harness their “wild but strong” powers, giving them direction.
The portrayal of Native American people and traditions as fantasy and relics of the past: Another complaint about Rowling’s new work is related to where it places Native American communities, namely, in the past or out of our reality in its entirety. As a Cherokee scholar, Dr. Adrienne Keene, puts it:
We’re not magical creatures, we’re contemporary peoples who are still here, and still practice our spiritual traditions, traditions that are not akin to a completely imaginary wizarding world … it wasn’t until 1978 that we as Native peoples were even legally allowed to practice our religious beliefs or possess sacred objects like eagle feathers. Up until that point, there was a coordinated effort through assimilation policies, missionary systems, and cultural genocide to stamp out these traditions, and with them, our existence as Indigenous peoples. We’ve fought and worked incredibly hard to maintain these practices and pass them on.
With this pressing reality, it seems regressive to include any of these peoples in a subsection of a fake history leading up to "Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them." Keene later points out that she herself didn’t realize that the original Harry Potter used Celtic/Druid/other local traditions in its makeup. Those very real histories, cultures, and backstories became completely fantastical for her, essentially sponged up by the novel. This, Keene worries, will happen to the Native people’s histories, cultures, and backstories as well, which is incredibly detrimental for groups of people often in the midst of political or personal battles.
Rowling’s position as a white British woman. In her collection, Rowling adopts the voice of an expert. She is, however, clearly not an expert on the Navajo people or their stories. Nonetheless, one of the legends Rowling writes is the Navajo concept of “Skinwalkers.” The legend is taken completely out of context in Rowling’s rendition and placed right alongside the Salem witch trials. As Keene points out in her criticism, these legends are given meaning and power through their cultural context, and have no place in the fantasy world of someone who knows nothing about that context. She states:
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.
On top of this, "Harry Potter" is a magnet for the media. Its stories are constantly being talked about, revised, and fed like lines through the cyber world. People end up wanting to know things that they shouldn’t, perhaps, know anything about. There is an Entertainment Weekly trailer, for instance, that dramatically proclaims “Ilvermorny, Skinwalkers, witch trials, and the magic congress of the United States of America” are real. Placing a sacred Navajo legend between a fantasy school and the highly romanticized Salem witch trials is unnerving. This isn’t to say that Native peoples’ legends and traditions can’t be incorporated through unconventional mediums, but it needs to be done artfully and accurately, with a high amount of sensitivity. As Keene notes:
“I love the idea of Indigenous science fiction, of indigenous futurisms, of indigenous fan fiction, and indigenous characters in things comics and superhero story lines. I know it can be done, and it can be done right and done well. But it has to be done carefully, with boundaries respected (i.e. not throwing around Skinwalkers casually in a trailer), and frankly, I want Native peoples to write it.”
