Cherie Dimaline is a member of the Georgian Bay Métis Council of the Métis Nation of Ontario. She’s also an award-winning author, and she published her first book for adults, VenCo, last year. (It’s now available in paperback.) I had the opportunity to talk about this novel with her, and one of the topics we discussed was cultural appropriation in contemporary witchcraft. In the universe of this novel, magic is very much attached to place—to the land, and also to community. Magic that works in one locale might not work elsewhere, and witches might not be able to work magic that is outside their own tradition. This is maybe my favorite thing about VenCo—in part because this dynamic is something I haven’t encountered elsewhere in fiction, and in part because thinking about cultural appropriation has changed my own practice a lot over the last several years.
I have more to say on this topic—see below—but before I leave VenCo behind I want to add that it’s an absorbing and entertaining novel, and I suspect that a whole lot of witches will enjoy it as much as I did.
Witchcraft is a syncretistic religion, which is to say that it draws on a variety of traditions. We might also say that Christianity is a syncretistic religion in that it has, over its history, absorbed and redefined existing traditions that can be aligned with church doctrine. One difference between witchcraft and Christianity is that the latter tends to redefine what it adopts in a way that erases any hint of pre-Christian or secular origin, while witches often applaud themselves for pluralism.
As it happens, I also belong to a Unitarian Universalist congregation. This is another syncretistic religion in which we applaud ourselves for our pluralism. I support my fellow seekers in embracing truth and meaning wherever they find it. What I struggle with is the idea that every religious tradition, every wisdom tradition, every artistic tradition, every literary tradition is a Whole Foods hot bar from which we can freely sample. Or, to put it in a less bitchy way: Searching traditions that aren’t our own to find words and images and rituals that seem to support what we already believe is, at best, maybe not a great way to search for truth and meaning and is, at worst, a form of colonization.
Americans have a tendency not only to appropriate cultures, but also to “simplify and reduce them down to the point where it’s not identifiable anymore by the people in that group,” said [Rosalyn] LaPier, who is an enrolled member of the Blackfeet Tribe of Montana and Métis. (source)
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