Remember back in June when it was announced that the new Harry Potter prequel-of-sorts had an American Wizarding school? Remember how I was concerned? If you don’t, here’s a link to that post. Basics of my argument were: 
 
 The problem, Jo (can I call you Jo? I hope so), is that we as Indigenous peoples are constantly situated as fantasy creatures. Think about Peter Pan, where Neverland has mermaids, pirates…and Indians. Or on Halloween, children dress up as monsters, zombies, princesses, disney characters…and Indians. Beyond the positioning as “not real,” there is also a pervasive and problematic narrative wherein Native peoples are always “mystical” and “magical” and “spiritual”–able to talk to animals, conjure spirits, perform magic, heal with “medicine” and destroy with “curses.” Think about Grandmother Willow in Pocahontas, or Tonto talking to his bird and horse in The Lone Ranger, or the wolfpack in Twilight…or any other number of examples. But 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 (as badass as that wizarding world is). In a fact I quote often on this blog, 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. So I get worried thinking about the message it sends to have “indigenous magic” suddenly be associated with the Harry Potter brand and world. Because the other piece I deal with on this blog is the constant commodification of our spiritual practices too. There is an entire industry of plastic shamans selling ceremonies, or places like Urban Outfitters selling “smudge kits” and fake eagle feathers. As someone who owns a genuine time-turner, I know that marketing around Harry Potter is a billion dollar enterprise, and so I get nervous thinking about the marketing piece. American fans are going to be super stoked at the existence of a wizarding school on this side of the pond, and I’m sure will want to snatch up anything related to it–which I really hope doesn’t include Native-inspired anything. 
 
 I acknowledged in the post that it was pure speculation based off a few tweets, and then the name of the American wizarding school was announced as Ilvermorny, and I relaxed a little bit, because (from what I understand) it’s totally made up and not a direct reference to anything Indigenous. But then, today. Oh today. Entertainment Weekly posted a trailer for a new series of short stories written by JK Rowling, in conjunction with the release of Fantastical Beasts and Where to Find Them in November. It’s called “Magic in North America.” Immediate reaction when I saw the clip? Actual audible cussing in my office. Ready? 
 
 The narration of the video is as follows: 
 
 “The wizarding world you thought you knew is much larger than you imagined. History has many secrets. The official story is never the full story. Look beyond the surface, and you will find another world parallel to our own. A secret world, where magic is real. Ilvermorny, skinwalkers, witch trials, and the magic congress of the United States of America. These aren’t myths. for the history of America is more amazing than you ever could imagine. Everything you know is about to change. Magic in North America. A series of original stories by writer JK rowling. Read them exclusively at Pottermore.com.” 
 
 It actually makes me kind of want to cry. Harry Potter was such a formative series for me, and holds such a deep place in my heart–and to see and hear this feels like such a slap in the face to me and other Native Potter nerds. It’s exactly what I worried would happen in my original letter to Jo. 
 
 Accompanying the narration are images of a Native man in a breech cloth who transforms into an Eagle: 
 
 And screaming girls being burned alive. 
 
 I don’t really know what to say beyond my original letter, but I’ll reiterate it again. Native spirituality and religions are not fantasy on the same level as wizards. These beliefs are alive, practiced, and protected. The fact that the trailer even mentions the Navajo concept of skinwalkers sends red flags all over the place, and that it’s mentioned next to the Salem witch trials? Disaster. Even the visual imagery of the only humans shown in the trailer being a Native man and burning girls places the two too close for comfort. 
 
 We fight so hard every single day as Native peoples to be seen as contemporary, real, full, and complete human beings and to push away from the stereotypes that restrict us in stock categories of mystical-connected-to-nature-shamans or violent-savage-warriors. Colonization erases our humanity, tells us that we are less than, that our beliefs and religions are “uncivilized”, that our existence is incongruent with modernity. 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. How in the world could a young person watch this and not make a logical leap that Native peoples belong in the same fictional world as Harry Potter? 
 
 We are also fighting everyday for the protection of our sacred sites from being destroyed by mining, fracking, and other forms of “development.” These sites are sacred. Meaning they have deep roots in our spiritual beliefs, hold sacred power, and connect us to our ancestors. If Indigenous spirituality becomes conflated with fantasy “magic”–how can we expect lawmakers and the public to be allies in the protection of these spaces? 
 
 This isn’t a joke, this isn’t something that can be laughed off and just enjoyed at face value. As I often say, when you’re invisible, every representation matters. And the weight and impact of the Harry Potter brand can’t be ignored. 
 
 ETA: I want to address what I already see as the flipside of this argument: Would I rather see Indigenous peoples erased? Is there a way they can be represented in this that is not harmful? 
 
 I want Native peoples to be able to represent ourselves. I love the idea of Indigenous science fiction, of indigenous futurisms, of indigenous fanfiction, and indigenous characters in things comics and superhero storylines. 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 (ie not throwing around Skinwalkers casually in a trailer), and frankly, I want Native peoples to write it. We’ve been misrepresented by outsiders every which-way, and it’s time for us to reclaim our stories and images, and push them into the future, ourselves. 
 
 If there are any Native people that worked with Rowling on this, feel free to reach out. I’d truly be happy to be proven wrong. 
 
 UPDATE: I read the first installment. You can read my thoughts here: “Magic in North America Part 1: Ugh.” 
 
 Read the earlier post: Dear JK Rowling, I’m concerned about the American Wizarding School (June 2015) 
 
 The twitter convo is using the #MagicinNorthAmerica hashtag if you’d like to join 
 
 PS: Lots of comments and emails this time around reminding me that the other books have many highly problematic aspects as well. I know. To quote Anita Sarkeesian from Feminist Frequency, “remember that it is both possible (and even necessary) to simultaneously enjoy media while also being critical of it’s more problematic or pernicious aspects.” I can have love for Harry Potter and simultaneously be critical of the colonial values the original series puts forth in its portrayals of other ethnic groups, as well as this recent development. Don’t worry. ||||| J.K. Rowling’s new Pottermore story about the American Wizarding World had a lot of Harry Potter fans excited, but it upset plenty, too. Ben A. Pruchnie / Getty Images ID: 8159079 
 
 In the first installment of the four-part series, Rowling introduces readers to the earliest wizards and witches in North America: Native Americans skilled in animal and plant magic, who don’t need wands to conjure spells. Rowling also describes skin walkers (which, according to some Native beliefs, are people who can transform into animals at will) as Native American Animagi — fictional beings of her own creation. She also includes medicine men in her narrative. 
 
 Not long after the author published the first portion of her writing on the history of magic in North America, some fans took to Twitter in outrage, accusing Rowling of colonialism and appropriation of Native American culture. You can't just claim and take a living tradition of a marginalized people. That's straight up colonialism/appropriation @jk_rowling. — Dr. Adrienne Keene (@NativeApprops) ID: 8159446 
 
 An existing culture of real people. Now, there are a lot of invented cultures in the story and that's fine, that's fantasy, but fucking about with an existing culture? — Matt Wallace (@MattFnWallace) ID: 8159478 
 
 I'm broken hearted. Jk Rowling, my beliefs are not fantasy. If ever there was a need for diversity in YA lit it is bullish!t like this. — Brian Young (@hungrynavajo) ID: 8160274 
 
 
 
 
 
 You must outta your mind if you think we should sit idly while a renown white author uses us as props in her fictional work. — Native Beauty (@nativebeauties) ID: 8159629 
 
 Some pointed out the harmful impact of Rowling’s story on an already misrepresented group of people. Imagine how many Native Americans are going to be gaslit about their own culture under the guise "well in canon it's actually like this..." — Fangirl Jeanne (@fangirlJeanne) ID: 8159511 
 
 because @jk_rowling has based her "native wizards" off the same racist stereotypes & miseducation that JM Barrie used in Peter Pan. — Johnnie Jae (@johnniejae) ID: 8160307 
 
 
 
 
 
 So far, Rowling has not responded to the backlash. And Rowling joins the long, not-so-proud tradition of white women ignoring criticism from Native scholars. — Sarah Hamburg (@sarahrhamburg) ID: 8159627 
 
 BuzzFeed News has reached out to a representative for Rowling for a comment. ||||| Close 
 
 Read Piece Two 
 
 As No-Maj Europeans began to emigrate to the New World, more witches and wizards of European origin also came to settle in America. Like their No-Maj counterparts, they had a variety of reasons for leaving their countries of origin. Some were driven by a sense of adventure, but most were running away: sometimes from persecution by No-Majs, sometimes from a fellow witch or wizard, but also from the wizarding authorities. The latter sought to blend in among the increasing tide of No-Majs, or hide among the Native American wizarding population, who were generally welcoming and protective of their European brethren. 
 
 From the first, however, it was clear that the New World was to be a harsher environment for witches and wizards than the Old World. There were three main reasons for this. 
 
 Firstly, like their No-Maj counterparts, they had come to a country with few amenities, except those they made themselves. Back home, they had only to visit the local Apothecary to find the necessities for potions: here, they had to forage among unfamiliar magical plants. There were no established wandmakers, and Ilvermorny School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, which would one day rank among the greatest magical establishments in the world, was at that time no more than a rough shack containing two teachers and two students. 
 
 Secondly, the actions of their fellow No-Majs made the non-magical population of most wizards’ homelands look lovable. Not only had conflict developed between the immigrants and the Native American population, which struck a blow at the unity of the magical community, their religious beliefs made them deeply intolerant of any trace of magic. The Puritans were happy to accuse each other of occult activity on the slenderest evidence, and New World witches and wizards were right to be extremely wary of them. 
 
 The last, and probably the most dangerous problem encountered by wizards newly arrived in North America were the Scourers. As the wizarding community in America was small, scattered and secretive, it had as yet no law enforcement mechanism of its own. This left a vacuum that was filled by an unscrupulous band of wizarding mercenaries of many foreign nationalities, who formed a much-feared and brutal taskforce committed to hunting down not only known criminals, but anyone who might be worth some gold. As time went on, the Scourers became increasingly corrupt. Far away from the jurisdiction of their native magical governments, many indulged a love of authority and cruelty unjustified by their mission. Such Scourers enjoyed bloodshed and torture, and even went so far as trafficking their fellow wizards. The numbers of Scourers multiplied across America in the late seventeenth century and there is evidence that they were not above passing off innocent No-Majs as wizards, to collect rewards from gullible non-magic members of the community. 
 
 The famous Salem Witch Trials of 1692-93 were a tragedy for the wizarding community. Wizarding historians agree that among the so-called Puritan judges were at least two known Scourers, who were paying off feuds that had developed while in America. A number of the dead were indeed witches, though utterly innocent of the crimes for which they had been arrested. Others were merely No-Majs who had the misfortune to be caught up in the general hysteria and bloodlust. 
 
 Salem was significant within the magical community for reasons far beyond the tragic loss of life. Its immediate effect was to cause many witches and wizards to flee America, and many more to decide against locating there. This led to interesting variations in the magical population of North America, compared to the populations of Europe, Asia and Africa. Up until the early decades of the twentieth century, there were fewer witches and wizards in the general American population than on the other four continents. Pure-blood families, who were well-informed through wizarding newspapers about the activities of both Puritans and Scourers, rarely left for America. This meant a far higher percentage of No-Maj-born witches and wizards in the New World than elsewhere. While these witches and wizards often went on to marry and found their own all-magical families, the pure-blood ideology that has dogged much of Europe’s magical history has gained far less traction in America. 
 
 Perhaps the most significant effect of Salem was the creation of the Magical Congress of the United States of America in 1693, pre-dating the No-Maj version by around a century. Known to all American witches and wizards by the abbreviation MACUSA (commonly pronounced as: Mah – cooz – ah), it was the first time that the North American wizarding community came together to create laws for themselves, effectively establishing a magical-world-within-a-No-Maj-world such as existed in most other countries. MACUSA’s first task was to put on trial the Scourers who had betrayed their own kind. Those convicted of murder, of wizard-trafficking, torture and all other manners of cruelty were executed for their crimes. 
 
 Several of the most notorious Scourers eluded justice. With international warrants out for their arrest, they vanished permanently into the No-Maj community. Some of them married No-Majs and founded families where magical children appear to have been winnowed out in favour of non-magical offspring, to maintain the Scourer’s cover. The vengeful Scourers, cast out from their people, passed on to their descendants an absolute conviction that magic was real, and the belief that witches and wizards ought to be exterminated wherever they were found. 
 
 American magical historian Theophilus Abbot has identified several such families, each with a deep belief in magic and a great hatred of it. It may be partly due to the anti-magic beliefs and activities of the descendants of Scourer families that North American No-Majs often seem harder to fool and hoodwink on the subject of magic than many other populations. This has had far-reaching repercussions on the way the American wizarding community is governed. ||||| The first part of Rowling’s new online series History of Magic in North America sheds light on Native American magic – and expands the Harry Potter universe across the pond 
 
 Harry Potter author JK Rowling has published her first expansion of the magical universe she created in the bestselling fantasy book series she began 20 years ago: History of Magic in North America, a series of short stories telling the magical history of America. 
 
 The first part that launched today, titled Fourteenth Century – Seventeenth Century, reads like an extract from an academic tome and tells the story of how wizards communicated with North America before it was colonised by non-magical humans, or ‘No-Maj’, a term revealed by Rowling recently as an American slang equivalent to the British term ‘Muggle’ used in the Harry Potter books. 
 
 Magical travel meant that even far-flung wizarding communities were in contact with each other from the Middle Ages JK Rowling 
 
 Rowling writes that “the Native American magical community and those of Europe and Africa had known about each other long before the immigration of European No-Majs in the seventeenth century” and that the proportion of magic folk in the population is consistent all over the world. Rowling then focuses on Native American magic, writing that wizards in Native American tribes were “accepted and even lauded” by their people, for their skills in healing and hunting. 
 
 The author weaves in some of her existing lore into the new story, using her term from the Harry Potter books, ‘Animagi’ – wizards and witches who can turn into animals at will – to explain the use of magic amongst Native American tribes. Rowling refers to ‘skin walkers’, an actual myth of the Navajo people, where individuals gain the ability to transform into animals at night, usually after killing a family member. Rowling writes that these individuals were usually Animagi who did not use sacrifices to gain their powers, but “assumed animal forms to escape persecution or to hunt for the tribe. Such derogatory rumours often originated with No-Maj medicine men, who were sometimes faking magical powers themselves, and fearful of exposure.” 
 
 What, no muggles? JK Rowling fans aghast at new term for non-wizards Read more 
 
 Rowling also explains that Native American wizards are better at making potions than European wizards, but do not use wands like their counterparts across the world. 
 
 “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,” Rowling writes, “As the Native American Animagi and potion-makers demonstrated, wandless magic can attain great complexity, but Charms and Transfiguration are very difficult without one.” 
 
 The series of stories coming this week are connected to the upcoming cinematic expansion of the Harry Potter universe: Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them, a trilogy of films set in 1920s New York, 70 years before the Harry Potter books begin. The films will tell the story of Newt Scamander, a expert in magical animals – or ‘magizoologist’ – and author of a textbook Potter himself finds on his recommended reading list in his first year at Hogwarts. The first film, which stars Oscar winner Eddie Redmayne as Scamander and was written by Rowling herself, will be released worldwide in November 2016. 
 
 Despite a spate of announcements putting Rowling back in the Harry Potter universe – the author recently announced she was helping with the stage play Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, an “eighth Harry Potter story” that will continue Potter’s story when he is middle-aged, and the film Fantastic Beasts, which she wrote the screenplay for – History of Magic in North America is the first expansion of the canon and her first depiction of the magical community in North America. 
 
 History of Magic in North America by JK Rowling – review Read more 
 
 Today’s 400-word story is the first of four new stories building the history magical America published on Pottermore each day this week. Rowling has previously dabbled in building on the existing Harry Potter universe with short stories, starting the website Pottermore as a home to tidbits of information about what happened to the characters before and after the series was set, including Quidditch – a magical sport – match reports penned by Harry’s wife Ginny Weasley. In 2014, Pottermore crashed when fans flooded to the site to read a new story about Harry and his friends, written in the style of a tabloid news article.
– Native American Harry Potter fans are feeling hurt, betrayed, and angry over JK Rowling's newest entry to her magical universe. History of Magic in North America: Fourteenth Century-Seventeenth Century was published online this week and focuses on Native American wizards, the Guardian reports. According to Mashable, the short story describes how Native American wizards are experts in magic relating to plants and animals. They're also great with potions and can often turn into animals at will. Rowling discusses the Navajo belief in skin-walkers, people who take on the forms of animals, but replaces it with her own concept of "Animagi," saying skin-walkers were "derogatory rumors" started by non-magical people. The story has led to accusations of colonialism and cultural appropriation from Native American readers and others, BuzzFeed reports. "I'm broken hearted," one fan tweets. "JK Rowling, my beliefs are not fantasy." "Thanks to [Rowling], hordes of non-native adults and kids are going to completely misunderstand and assume they are experts on Native Americans," tweets another. Adrienne Keene writes on Native Appropriations that the story is exacerbating the problem of Native Americans often being seen in a fantasy or magical context. "But 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 (as badass as that wizarding world is)," she says.