J.K. Rowling has recently expanded her North American magical universe. While most fans are excited she continues to expand her worldbuilding because of how near and dear Harry Potter is to their hearts, she has committed a deeply hurtful act against Native Americans, and the Navajo in particular.

She has claimed part the Navajo religion, applied it to all Native Americans, then said there was no such thing as actual Skinwalkers in “her” world; the “stories” were simply meant to demonize wizards.

This is incorrect. Skinwalkers are a central part of Navajo belief, one they will now be even more closed off in sharing than they were before. They do not exist for her world. They exist for the Navajo, and only the Navajo.

Yes, Skinwalkers are googleable. You can find information about them, scary stories, sensationalist articles. You might argue that this means they are fair game. That they have been integrated into local culture, popular culture, and have the same weight as vampires when it comes to ‘creatures that go bump in the night.’

This is a false equivalence. Native American religions were banned from being practiced until 1978, and that’s assuming people didn’t ignore the American Indian Religious Freedom Act and continued dissuading practice and/or stonewalling people from their sacred grounds. Cultural appropriation was not recognized as an issue by the UN until 2007, which should give you some idea how little changed in 30 years (especially since the countries with the highest Native populations voted against the prevision: Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and the USA). 

This means Natives had no agency over their own stories, no freedom to perform their rituals without fear of persecution, until the past 40 years, and didn’t have the issue brought to an international stage until the past 9. As a result, they could not have any recourse over those who misused their stories, because those stories were not recognized as theirs. You cannot say it was willingly shared when there was no dynamic that allowed Natives and other groups to be on equal ground.

Vampires are Christian. They were written about by Christians, for Christians, and used to teach Christian lessons. Most of those meanings have indeed been lost and changed, but vampires still remain in predominantly Christian hands today. Christianity is the dominant religion in the Western world (yes, I know they are persecuted in other parts of the world, why I specified Western), and most people who write vampires are writing their own religion. Even if they’re atheist, Christianity is usually what they became atheist from because it is the culturally dominant culture. This means they have whatever agency they want to change it.

Natives have been denied this agency time and time again. We are still being continually denied the ability to tell our own stories. J.K. Rowling is just the latest in a long, painful history where Native voices are rewritten to accommodate white writers’ plots. WWC has said, multiple times, cultures are not your playthings. This is what treating culture as a plaything looks like.

Please, in your own work, be respectful of appropriation and colonization. Understand that even if something is used everywhere, it might not be yours for the taking. That it might’ve been stolen so much nobody even thinks to ask if it’s somebody’s instead of the world’s. Talk to the groups in question and ask if you can use it.

You might get a no.

If you do, change your plot.

Let us have our own voices.

~Mod Lesya