It can be easy to overestimate the similarities between British and American cultures.
After all, we both speak the same language (more or less).
We are both western democratic superpowers with imperialist tendencies.
Unfortunately, this is not reflected in Rowlings stories… Unfortuntately, Rowling seems to be ignorant of some big, problematic aspects of American history and present-day culture.
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The appropriation of native cultures.
Rowlings first story, Fourteenth-Seventeenth Century, delves into the history of wizards and witches within Americas indigineous populations.
She specifically uses the Navajo legend of the skin-walker as an entry point.
This is not ancient history, this is not the past.
The ongoing oppression of Native peoples is reinscribed everyday through texts and images like this trailer.
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.
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.
If I had to put this in Tumblr terms: our fave is problematic.
The importance of Scourers.
Things get slightly less awkward moving forward in American magical history.
As Rowling writes, the first order of the MACUSA was to bring corrupt Scourers to justice.
Guys, it was bad.
