Magic Can Create a Decolonial Future
“I do not belong to a specific Land, but to my mom, my family, my community, my Ancestors. I do not draw my powers from a specific Land, but from my body, my mind, my spirit and my relationships. However, I am accountable to all the Lands that sustain me and the people I share them with.”
From Hannah Dwyer
I was not raised by the Sea, but some of my Ancestors were. I am Irish, English, and Jewish. One day when I was feeling sad, I went to sit on the beach with a friend on W̱SÁNEĆ and Lekwungen territory. A seal poked its head out of the water not too far from us and we stopped talking to watch it. I told her about how much I love seals, that no matter how many times it happens, the thrill of seeing their shiny little heads pop out of the water, their curious black eyes appraising me, will never get old. When I’m watching a seal watching me, I forget to be sad. I talk to them, ask questions, comment on the weather. Sometimes they come a little closer or just hold my eyes for longer than I expect them to and I feel a little sense of accomplishment because they aren’t afraid of me. I hope that one day we’ll be full-on friends.
My friend told me that her Irish mother always used to tell her about Selkies when they visited the coast and saw seals. She said they were like the Irish version of mermaids. My grandfather was Irish and I love mermaids, so my ears pricked. Selkies are transformers, they can remove their seal skin and live on land as humans. I became ravenously curious about these creatures and consumed as many of their stories as I could possibly find for weeks. Clearly it is wonderful to imagine life under the sea, but my need to find out more about them was part of an inquiry into – grandiose as it sounds – my life’s purpose.
I love the Earth, and I hate that I am inextricably part of a system that violently exploits them. I love the Lands that I have lived on and from in this lifetime and I hate that they have been violently stolen, their rightful stewards subjected to hundreds of years of unspeakable cruelty to facilitate the raping and pillaging of this continent. I love the People of these Lands, who have taken such good care of them for so long and taught me so much about how to think and be outside of the colonial paradigm, and I hate that their oppression benefits me; my existence here harms them. I have sought out every available opportunity to learn from Indigenous people on Turtle Island about how to live well on these Lands and be in good relation with all of their peoples, human and otherwise.
To that end, an instruction that I have received over and over again is that I need to be in touch with my Ancestors. The story of my family did not start when my grandparents arrived in “Canada”, as I had long felt. I was told by my teacher Nika (Haida) that I had to understand who my Ancestors were and what happened to them to understand how I got here and what I need to do. She told me that I must love them and heal for them, even the ones who did bad things. Canadian identity and nationalism are colonialism; knowing the stories of my people, that they transcend state mythology, is decolonization.
So please, let’s hear about those Selkies. In many Selkie stories, a fisherman falls in love with a Selkie and marries her (sometimes she loves him back, sometimes she’s captured). The man loves his Selkie bride so much that he cannot bear to think of her returning to the Sea, so he steals her seal coat and locks it away. They have children together and no matter how much Mum loves them, she is constantly called by the Sea and her Selkie family misses her. Her heart is broken by being pulled in two directions. The Selkie’s coat is somehow returned to her – tragically, usually by her unwitting child, sharing a curious discovery from exploring the house’s hiding spots. Whether she returns to the Sea or remains with her children, she will always long for the other. One day she disappears. From then on, she visits her children in her seal form, sometimes bringing her seal family along or playing with her children in the waves. When you see a seal watching the shore, it may be a Selkie looking for their loved ones.
These stories tell me so much about the lives of my Ancestors. They knew possessive “love” could be very harmful, that some people don’t know how to love another and nurture them in their freedom. Sometimes mothers had to go away, maybe to escape an abusive relationship, and their children were given a story to sustain them through that heartbreak. Some of my Ancestors knew how it felt to live in perpetual melancholy, belonging partially to two places and never fully to one (this is often how I feel, unable to claim belonging on stolen land). Finally, children must suffer the consequences of selfish decisions that their parents made before they were even born.
I have been born into a mess that my predecessors made: Earth used and abused to the brink of disaster; a settler-colonial nation state; a Land stolen for the patriarchs’ love of capital - and her original family wants her back. My generation needs to relinquish the dominion of our forefathers and surrender to the uncertainty of what will happen when the Land, the exploitation of whom gave us this life that we live, is reunited with her First People in the service of her own best interests.
So many of my Ancestors have watched their mothers be entrapped, exploited, and abused. The subjugation of women and femininity [1] has always been a vital component of capitalism and colonialism. Capitalistic wealth accumulation requires the constant input of something for nothing. In its first stages during the Early Modern period in Europe (and in many ways to this day), this input was the unpaid labour of women, both in reproducing the work force and in tending to the domestic needs of male workers. Their enslavement was achieved by terrorism and mass murder under the pretext of witch-hunting. Throughout the centuries, as the lot of European women has slowly improved, the capitalist economy has just been stealing “free” inputs from elsewhere. The rights and freedoms that I enjoy relative to my female ancestors are the direct result of their suffering being outsourced to other people and lands around the globe.
In my search to understand how we got into this mess, and what is my role to play in dismantling this horribly destructive behemoth of racist, sexist, ableist, speciesist global capitalism, I keep returning to the witch hunts. I return to them not only because the trauma that they inflicted continues to reverberate throughout our society, but because I believe that the knowledge and wisdom that was extirpated from the population as a result of that violence crucially needs to be remembered and revived in order to survive the looming climate chaos and create ways of living that do not continue to reproduce colonial violence. In focusing on the violence of the European witch hunts as a historical nexus, or a sort of original wound that will continue leading to secondary injuries until it is healed, it is not my intention to usurp victimhood from bodies that are on the front lines of capitalistic (and therefore colonial and racist) violence right now. I seek to understand the precursors to these forms of violence because understanding what happened to my Ancestors, and how that lives on in me, is part of the decolonial work that I am doing.
On this land, I am part of the colonizing body. An endlessly hungry body that seeks to consume and assimilate every being within reach. The power dynamics within this conglomerate work a lot like a multi-level marketing scheme. People at the bottom of the pyramid in Europe were able to come to Turtle Island and empower themselves by finding new people and lands to subjugate. When enslavement of people stopped being “acceptable” here, the newfound freedom of those people was made possible by the exploitation of people in other lands. The globe now engulfed by these forces, some people believe that DNA is the next frontier of colonization [2], but I digress. The point is, I am now a colonizer but, hundreds of years ago my Ancestors in the British Isles were the colonized. How can I look to those histories and attempt to recover what was lost or hidden, while remaining accountable to the ways that I benefit from colonial violence on this Land, now?
Throughout my spiritual development, I have had so many moments when something spoken to me by an Indigenous thinker has resonated deeply with what I have always known in my heart to be true. The fact that humans are no more or less important than any other beings; the fact that spirit/magic moves everywhere around us and does not live in a faraway place that only men in robes can contact; the fact that with humility, practice, and maybe a little innate giftedness, we can learn to cooperate and collaborate with the spiritual forces that move through other beings; and the fact that the womb is an intensely sacred space where spirit and matter are alchemized into new life and people who carry wombs and bleed deserve respect and reverence for that labour. However, it is not okay for me to simply cobble together the spirituality that I like by appropriating wisdom from various Indigenous traditions. When I started learning about the European witch hunts, I discovered that I did have Ancestors who believed these things, but they weren’t the ones who wrote the stories in the history books, they were slaughtered en masse. My work is to strengthen my relationships with them and to retell the stories of my people that need to be retold.
Although many of my deepest held beliefs are shared between my own indigenous [3] (to the British Isles) Ancestors and the Indigenous peoples of the Lands I live on now, I have learned a great deal from Indigenous people here that is unique to their specific cultures and experiences. I have a difficult time thinking about how I walk with those teachings. For example, Quill Christie-Peters, an Anishinaabe artist whose territory I grew up on, gave me an epiphany when she wrote this of “back to the land” narratives of decolonization: “Our homelands are not that simple and static. Our homelands are not just those physical places we come from. Our homelands are our bodies and our ancestors, story and song embedded in river and rock, story and song embedded in our bones and blood” [4]. Christie-Peters’ words are about her own ancestors and her own homelands, but they lead me to reconsider where I come from in a new light. A week later, while I was still chewing on that thought, my witchy settler friend Monty said “time plus space equals place” while pointing with her hands and making an X in front of her. I am not yet able to articulate why the insights of these two women feel so important to consider in my efforts towards decolonization and healing the relationship between my people and the Earth. Maybe because they create endless possibilities.
While I know that it is deeply colonial to take what I like from Indigenous knowledges and find a way to rationalize it as my own, there is another truth which must be held in tension with that: the truth that people share their teachings because they want them to be known. I have learned about a Haudenosaunee prophecy [5], an Anishinaabe prophecy [6], and a Haida prophecy [7] that all predate contact with Europeans and predict that people will come from across the Sea bringing death and destruction. The details of each prophecy differ, of course, but suffice it to say that they have proven extremely accurate thus far. Each of the three prophecies that I am aware of contain some sort of explanation of the fact that the world will one day be on the edge of disaster, and the teachings of the people to whom the prophecy was given will be needed to bring it back, not just for the Haudenosaunee, the Anishinaabe, or the Haida, but for everyone. Because I have been made privy to these prophesies, I feel that I am now implicated. When people from any of these groups share their cultural teachings with the wider world, I see it as my responsibility to heed that knowledge. I believe that fulfilling the prophecies in a good way can happen when these groups of people are respected as leaders in showing us how to live on their homelands. I also believe that they can be interpreted as working when the teachings of these groups remind others of truths that are known deep within themselves and their Ancestral memories, and inspire us to re-member the land-based knowledges of our Ancestors and lay to rest the colonial ideologies that have caused so much harm to the world.
The indigenous/land-based knowledge keepers of my lineage were “witches” [8], so-called pagans, and druids. Their epistemologies were mapped onto the skies, the cycles of the seasons, and the landscapes where they lived. Ireland and Britain, where most of my Ancestors are from, underwent multiple waves of colonization in the last 2000 years. These land-based epistemologies were constantly targeted in the efforts to absorb communities into the body politic of Christian colonialism by severing their relationships to Land, their bodies, and each other. The witch hunts were perhaps the most effective desecration of such relationships to occur. Countless peasant women and gender-nonconforming men were slandered, publicly tortured, and murdered because of their ability to undermine the hegemonic power structures with their embodied, relational, and Earth-based wisdom. The impacts of this trauma cannot be overestimated. Some villages were left without a single living woman [9]. The women/herbalists/creatives/seers/sex-and-gender nonconforming people who did survive knew that they could be put to death if anything about them made a person in power the slightest bit nervous or angry.
“Witches” were dangerous to dominating powers in part because they understood the body. They knew how to sustain and heal themselves and others independently from the exploitative systems of the church and state. They understood fertility and empowered themselves and others to exercise reproductive sovereignty. They nurtured corporeal, as well as intellectual and spiritual, relationships with the more than human world, and had many allies. They knew which forest beings to enlist to help a woman who could not take any more abuse from her husband, the plants and mushrooms that would make him unable to beat her - either for a little while, or ever again. In her book Caliban and the Witch, Silvia Federici concludes “that witch-hunting in Europe was an attack on women’s resistance to the spread of capitalist relations and the power that women had gained by virtue of their sexuality, their control over reproduction, and their ability to heal” [10]. To this day, people have not yet fully reclaimed the bodily autonomy that was stolen.
Many, many women were murdered in an effort to secure the control of women’s reproductive powers for the ruling class. After the enclosures of the commons, working class people no longer had free access to land with which to support themselves as they did in feudal systems. It became much more difficult for working class people to sustain themselves with the wages of working men alone, and so whether because food scarcity increased infant mortality or because poor people began practicing birth control more often to prevent having mouths they could not feed, birth rates declined. This was not acceptable to the ruling class, who relied on masses of cheap labourers to fuel the constant acceleration of wealth accumulation that they so desired. For this reason, churches and states colluded to demonize and criminalize birth control, abortion, and non-procreative sex [11]. Stigma, misinformation, and ignorance still pervade in common knowledge of fertility, reproduction, and sexuality.
In addition to terrorizing the population into compliance by publicly torturing and killing people accused of witchcraft in the most violent and horrific ways possible, witchy knowledges were driven underground by stigmatizing and even criminalizing female friendships and networking [12], and by disrupting womxn’s access to their plant, fungal, and animal allies in the world beyond their domestic cells. Such knowledge includes the fact that female fertility can be mapped with the cycles of the moon, and that certain plants in our vicinity can be used to ensure the arrival of a monthly bleed. Witchy knowledge also includes the tools and practices that people can use to connect with Spirit directly and learn that many of the demands being made of them by the church are not in fact God’s wishes. Female midwives elicited so much suspicion that their roles were usurped by male doctors. Human birth began to be treated as pathological, and medical interventions were introduced to sterilize and expedite the process, many of which were dangerous and extremely dehumanizing, and continued for far too long (some hospitals still practice “medical procedures” that research has proven to be dangerous and unnecessary, such as routine episiotomies, dry shaving pubic hair, and drenching the birth with disinfectant) [13].
When we look at what happened during the European witch hunts, we can identify what needed to be destroyed in order for patriarchal, racist, and exploitative power structures to take hold and spread across the globe. Common knowledge about fertility and reproduction, common knowledge about the medicines growing from the Earth all around us, collaboration and community care, sexual autonomy, the ability to create and nurture life without dependence on untrustworthy systems, acknowledgement of immanence and animistic worldviews. Witches are the mortal enemy of capitalism. Those of us with witchcraft in our lineages have our work laid out for us. We have to re-member the knowledge and practices that those powerful men were so afraid of, and in so doing, emancipate ourselves and our communities from this big ugly world-eating monster.
To me, a Witch is a person who does not subscribe to oppressive gender roles, a potion is food or herbal medicine, magic is spirit or mystery, and spell craft is any practice by which the divine properties of plants and other material beings, the cycles of the Earth and heavens, and the Witch work together with intent. When I think about if and how it is possible to embody the indigenous wisdom of my Ancestors on territories where I am a colonial invader, I get pretty lost pretty quickly. There are a lot of reparations that need to be made and trust-building work that needs to be done before I could possibly be welcome to make a home here in which I truly belong. I do not think that I can ever be spiritually enmeshed in these landscapes the way that the Indigenous peoples of these lands are. But I can start here, in my own body, and work out from there. I can educate myself and others about how to identify the 4-5 days a month when it is possible to get pregnant, and what to do to make sure our periods come when we may have had a risky encounter. I can nurture my ongoing connections with those plants and animals in these lands with whom I do have ancient relationships, and I regularly engage with them to create joy, medicine, and sustenance (AKA magic): raspberry (fruit and leaf), strawberries, nettles, valerian, silly-cibin mushrooms, the deer that sleep a few meters from my bedroom window every night, and maybe those seals that I see on the beach (I’m not quite sure if Selkies ever came all the way here, but Irish people did so why not?). And I can forge new relationships in these Lands that are grounded in respect and reciprocity.
The most powerful rituals that I perform are the ones my mother taught me. My mom throws great parties. She cooks huge quantities of delicious food, puts some booze out, washes the floors, and when the house fills up with people magic happens. Stress, chaos, and grief get transformed into hilarious stories, abundant love, and collaboration. That one afternoon or evening of togetherness is a transcendent space that melds with all of the other moments these people have shared as if no time has passed in between. As far as I can remember, I have always been conscious that not many things matter more than such parties. If I only have $60 in my account, my mom will never shame me for spending all of it to cook my friends a meal. She is magic. Sometimes she dreams about a friend she hasn’t talked to in years, and she will call them up the next morning to find that their dad died yesterday, or they’re getting a divorce, or their kid got hurt. She also has this strange thing that happens, which she passed on to me, where streetlights often go out or turn on as she walks underneath them. It doesn’t sound that strange but I’m telling you, it’s spooky – in a great way.
I am a diasporic Witch. I do not belong to a specific Land, but to my mom, my family, my community, my Ancestors. I do not draw my powers from a specific Land, but from my body, my mind, my spirit and my relationships. However, I am accountable to all the Lands that sustain me and the people I share them with. When I approach new relationships in Lands that my Ancestors did not know, I approach them through a Magical epistemology. That means that I assume other beings have consciousness, agency, and intelligence that are equal to mine even if I can’t understand them. It means I seek collaboration in order to create new and better realities for myself and those around me. It means that I take no for an answer and expect to be reigned in when I’m out of line. It means that I am accountable to the Land and beings that sustain me and I come when I am called: to occupy the B.C. legislature, to divest from big banks, to share my educational privilege with the settlers in my life who have been mislead about the stories of these Lands and their peoples. Magic gives me the tools and practices that I need to nurture, replenish, and challenge myself so that I can continuously labour against colonization, both in my own genealogy, body, and mind and in the stolen Lands that I live on.
Notes
The gender binary and gendered essentialism are myths which have done a great deal of harm. That said, I do believe in complementary masculine and feminine energies that exist (ideally in fluctuating balance) in all people. I am privileged to identify socially and spiritually with the body that I was born in. I believe that I came to Earth this lifetime in this female-sexed body and predominantly feminine-identified spirit to do the healing and life-affirming work that only a body and spirit like mine can do. I believe that gender-nonconforming people are here to do equally if not more important and timely work that is equally if not more unique to their embodied spirits, and listening to them and following their leadership is not only the compassionate thing to do, but also what is best for all of us. In this essay, I will discuss historic harms which have been perpetrated inside a paradigm with a dogmatic conception of sex and gender, against people with wombs and vaginas, and against those who perpetrators thought resembled such people in any way (including Land). I have not discovered the perfect language to deal with these slippery and nuanced topics, please be compassionately critical in your reading.
Shiva, Vandana. Biopiracy: The Plunder of Nature and Knowledge. Boston, MA: South End Press, 1997. Print.
When I write “indigenous” I am using it as an adjective to describe ways of knowing and being that are land-based and highly relational. I distinguish it from “Indigenous”, which is a contemporary identity with political and legal ramifications that I am in no way claiming access to.
Benaway, Gwen, and Quill Christie-Peters. “Decolonial Love Letters to Our Bodies.” Tea&Bannock, 28 Apr. 2018, teaandbannock.com/2018/04/28/decolonial-love-letters-to-our-bodies-gwen-benaway-and-quill-christie- peters/.
Basmajian, S. (Producer), & Rogue, S. (Director). (2009). Six Miles Deep [Motion picture]. Canada: National Film Board of Canada.
Kimmerer, Robin Wall. Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants. Minneapolis, MN: Milkweed Editions, 2013.
vernon Sgaalanglaay Gaamdamaay. Personal communication, November 2017.
I say “witches” because I honestly don’t know if this or a similar identity existed before it was identified as a threat to patriarchal Christian colonization. I suspect it is a derogatory exonym placed on people with certain powers (AKA knowledge and abilities) and used to victimize them. In modern times, people with those powers (herbalism, clairvoyance, the ability to create alternatives outside of the enforced norm, etc.) are only too happy to fully embody the specter of “witch” and say “yes, we are everything you feared and more”, much like the f-word for gay men or the n-word.
Morales, Aurora Levins. “Night Flying: Power, Memory, and Magic.” Medicine Stories: Essay for Radicals, Duke University Press, 2019.
Federici, Silvia. Caliban and the Witch. New York: Autonomedia, 2004, pp. 170.
To this day, hierarchies of wealth and power determine who has access to reproductive sovereignty and who gets punished for having abortions. In the U.S., having an abundance of poor and undereducated bodies is good for some people’s bottom line.
Federici, Silvia. “On the Meaning of ‘Gossip’”. Witches, Witch-Hunting, and Women. PM Press, 2018.
Jolly, Natalie, “Birth and the Bush: Untangling the Debate Around Women’s Pubic Hair”; (2017). SIAS Faculty Publications. 674.
Hannah Dwyer
Hannah is a settler of English, Irish, and Jewish descent currently living on unceded Lekwungen territory (Victoria, BC). She was raised on Anishinaabe and Haudenosaunee territories in the Great Lakes region. She loves farming, hiking, cooking, knitting and building resilient skills. She is extremely passionate about cultivating food sovereignty and reproductive sovereignty. Her reading and writing revolve around sexual/reproductive health and justice, decolonization, healing inherited and collective trauma, and environmental violence. You can reach out to her on Instagram, and she loves knitting people socks for art trades.