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Yesterday I wrote near the trailer for JK Rowling'due south new multi-part background pieces on Pottermore, entitled "Magic in North America." You should read the post here if you need context. Even before that, back in June, I wrote most my concerns with the bringing of the "magic universe" to u.s.. You tin read that here.

So this morning at 9am, part 1 of this mess was released. It's really short, I don't know what I was expecting, only definitely get over and read information technology in full.

There are a number of things that stand out and deeply concern me, but the response to my critiques on my twitter timeline is even worse. I'll talk near that after I walk y'all through the text. Because, like with everything I critique, information technology's not just the mascot/image/text/moving picture/fashion itself, it's the response, how it's used, and the impact. This has the perfect storm of all of those categories. I actually could write a dissertation most this, simply I have a one thousand thousand papers to form and work to do, so a quick rundown:

Office 1 of MinNA, The 14th to 17th century, starts with this:

Though European explorers called it 'the New Earth' when they first reached the continent, wizards had known about America long before Muggles (Annotation: while every nationality has its own term for 'Muggle,' the American community uses the slang term No-Maj, brusque for 'No Magic'). Diverse modes of magical travel – brooms and Apparition amid them – not to mention visions and premonitions, meant that even far-flung wizarding communities were in contact with each other from the Middle Ages onwards.

And so first off, we're centering Europeans, calling brutal colonizers benign "explorers" (yeah, it's written for children, but I don't think anyone would fence the HP canon is absent of intense violence. I'm justfascinatedto encounter how Rowling will address the brutality and complication of colonization in the next stage). Also, "America" didn't exist during this timeframe.

The Native American magical community and those of Europe and Africa had known about each other long before the clearing of European No-Majs in the seventeenth century. They were already aware of the many similarities between their communities. Certain families were conspicuously 'magical', and magic besides appeared unexpectedly in families where hitherto there had been no known witch or wizard. The overall ratio of wizards to non-wizards seemed consistent across populations, equally did the attitudes of No-Majs, wherever they were built-in. 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. Still, others were stigmatised for their beliefs, ofttimes on the basis that they were possessed past malevolent spirits.

"The Native American community." Oh human that loaded "the." One of the largest fights in the earth of representations is to recognize Native peoplesand communitiesand culturesare diverse, complex, and vastly dissimilar from one another. There is no such thing as one "Native American" annihilation. Even in a fictional wizarding world.

The legend of the Native American 'skin walker' – an evil witch or wizard that tin 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 shut family members to gain their powers of transformation. In fact, the majority of Animagi causeless animal forms to escape persecution or to hunt for the tribe. Such derogatory rumours ofttimes originated with No-Maj medicine men, who were sometimes faking magical powers themselves, and fearful of exposure.

So, this is where I'one thousand going to perform what Audra Simpson calls an "ethnographic refusal," "a calculus ethnography of what yous need to know and what I pass up to write in." In her piece of work with her own customs, she asks herself the questions: "what am I revealing here and why? Where will this go us? Who benefits from this and why?"

I had a long telephone call with one of my friends/mentors today, who is Navajo, request her nearly the concepts Rowling is drawing upon here, and discussing how to all-time talk well-nigh this in a culturally advisable way that can help yous (the reader, and perchance Rowling) sympathise the depths to the harm this causes, while not crossing boundaries and taboos of civilisation. What did I determine? That you don't need to know. It's not for you to know. I am performing a refusal.

What yous do need to know is that the belief of these things (beings?) has a deep and powerful identify in Navajo understandings of the world. Information technology is continued to many other concepts and many other ceremonial understandings and lifeways. It is non but 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, just I'1000 not delving into that either.

What happens when Rowling pulls this in, is we every bit Native people are at present opened upwards to a avalanche of questions near these beliefs and traditions (take a wait at my twitter mentions if you lot don't believe me)–but these are non things that demand or should be discussed by outsiders. At all. I'one thousand sorry if that seems "unfair," simply that's how our cultures survive.

The other piece hither 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". Non past whatever stretch of the imagination.

Hither is how Rowling responded to questions online most the term:

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and hither was my response:

I accept more to say, but I'll end with this. These are things you don't mess with. And then good luck with that.

The Native American wizarding customs was particularly gifted in animal and plant magic, its potions in particular beingness of a composure beyond much that was known in Europe. The nigh glaring departure betwixt magic practised by Native Americans and the wizards of Europe was the absenteeism of a wand.

The magic wand originated in Europe. Wands channel magic and then equally to make its furnishings both more precise and more powerful, although information technology 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 loftier quality. As the Native American Animagi and potion-makers demonstrated, wandless magic tin can attain great complexity, but Charms and Transfiguration are very difficult without i.

This whole wandless magic matter is bugging me. And so Rowling has said multiple times that information technology takes a lot more than skill to perform magic without a wand (Dumbledore does it at several points in the books), but points out that wands are what basicallyrefinesmagic. Wands are a European invention, and so basically she'due south demonstrating Eurocentric superiority here–the introduction of European "technology" helps bring the Native wizards to a new level. AKA colonial narrative 101.

The response online today has been awful. My twitter mentions have been exploding non-stop all twenty-four hours, with the typical accusations of my oversensitivity and asking if I sympathize that Harry Potter is fictional, and more than directed hate telling me my doctorate is being misused and I'm an idiot. In improver are the crew who "would love to know the real history" of these concepts (again, not for you lot to know), or are so grateful that JK Rowling is introducing them to these ideas for the offset time. This is not the fashion to learn well-nigh or exist introduced to contemporary and living Native cultures. Not at all.

Also worthy of notation is that Rowling is known for responding directly to fan questions on twitter, and overall being accessible to her fan base. Despite thousands of tweets directed at her most these concerns, she has non addressed it at all. The silence is noted, and it's deafening.

So this is the offset solar day of the writings, I truly shudder thinking near the glossy way that first contact and subsequent genocide is going to be addressed.

Until tomorrow?

Read my original post here: "Dear JK Rowling, I'g concerned near the American Wizarding Schoolhouse"

and the ane from yesterday: "Magic in North America": The Harry Potter franchise veers too shut to home

and the writing I'm responding to: Pottermore "Fourteenth- Seventeenth Century"