Terese Marie Mailhot: Harry Potter author careless with Native 'magic'

Enter J.K. Rowling: a well-meaning white lady whose work, “History of Magic in North America,” debuted with some criticism concerning its depiction of Native Americans. The work was reductive, alluding to Natives as ‘generally welcoming and protective people’ who were ‘gifted in animal and plant magic,’ but weren’t as powerful as Europeans with their wands. She mentions a ‘Chocktaw [sic],’ Native, and yikes. Scooby Doo handled Natives better. At least there was campy music, and a gigantic sandwich to undercut the racism.

It’s as if she thinks she’s doing us a favor with her inclusion. Really, she’s well known for writing a trope of European literature: the orphan, “Harry Potter.” Did we really need another orphaned white kid? Didn’t white people kind of do that to death in “The Secret Garden,” “Oliver Twist,” “Great Expectations,” “A Tale of Two Cities,” “Jane Eyre,” “Villette,” “Tom Sawyer,” and so many others? She’s progressive, but latently, and her work is not reaching. She’s the type of liberal who might backtrack after criticism becomes too overwhelming and say Harry Potter was part Native after all.

Imagine if she wrote about seventeenth century African American magic in North America? Imagine if she included enslaved people in her narrative? Writing fantasy about Native Americans in the seventeenth century is like writing fantasy about Jewish people in Nazi Germany. A writer can do it, but it has to be tactful, well researched, and good. I believe in art. Sometimes fiction can tell the truth about the world. Art can transcend and heal, but she’s not the type of writer who can do it. She’s tactless. She wrote about ‘Sasquatch,’ and ‘Bigfoot’s Last Stand,’ as no doubt an allusion to our brutal history, and no doubt a careless, tagged on reference to an icon within my own culture.