Hyper-sensitive Harry Potter fans are having another go at author J.K. Rowling this week following the release of the second installment in her series on the evolution of magic on the North American continent.
The activists are irked that Rowling had the audacity to use figures from Native American mythology in a short story about the founding of a school of wizardry in 17th-century Massachusetts by a “colonialist” interloper on the continent.
Rowling’s innocent fable about an orphan from Ireland starting the first school for non-Muggles in the New World was met with howls of derision from those who accused her of deviously appropriating Native American culture to sell her books.
“Now we see white folk create a magic institution that consumes native knowledge while erasing the natives,” William J. Richardson, self-described as a Ph.D candidate at Northwestern University studying settler colonialism, tweeted.
“Even in fantasy, white supremacy rules,” he continued in a multi-tweet tirade against the Potter author.
In the story, Rowling names the four houses of the Ilvermorny School of Witchcraft and Wizardry Horned Serpent, Wampus, Thunderbird and Pukwudgie—all figures from Native American mythology. The narrative describes the founding of the school on Mount Greylock in Massachusetts by a young refugee named Isolt Sayre from County Kerry in Ireland.
The stories are part of a series of tales out about the origins of wizardry around the world being dribbled out between now and the release of a new film, “Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them” this fall.
Twitter user Nakawe Writer Mari turned on the all-caps to take Rowling to task for her “disrespectful” appropriation of the mythical creatures.
Budding writer R. Vincent was even more incensed.
This is not the first time Rowling has come under fire. She was accused of appropriating the “living tradition of a marginalized people” when she wrote about the Navajo legend of the skinwalker in a similar story released in March.
On her blog Native Appropriations, Dr Adrienne Keene took Rowling to task at the time for focusing her fiction on Europeans in the Americas instead of Natives and calling “brutal colonizers” “benign ‘explorers.”
“The problem … is that we as Indigenous peoples are constantly situated as fantasy creatures,” Keene wrote. “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.”
Rowling has not responded to her critics, and has instead spent recent days trashing UK Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn.