[-empyre-] III.

[lucian o'connor]

III.

My academic training inspired fierce doubts over whether or not I
could ethically participate in the Anishinaabe rituals taught to me by
my Native kin. I have researched histories of racist imagery in
science, art, and culture since I was an undergraduate in the late
90s. I know better than to appropriate elements of culture that do not
belong to me... especially with no accountability to the people who
created them... especially when such acts articulate a power
relationship.

Descriptions of Anishinaabe rituals are saturated with the metonyms of
witchcraft in the archives I have pored over, particularly newspaper
stories written after the Haitian revolution shamed Napolean and ended
France’s expansion into the Americas -- during the 19C, when U.S.
settlers moved into the Great Lakes region because of the Louisiana
Purchase and began framing both French and Native cultures there as
“ancient” (even if they were referring to things they knew were only
60 years old; even when there were communities of French and Native
people still living nearby).

The most common term I have encountered in old settler newspapers to
describe the Midewiwin Society and its spiritual practices has been
“superstition.”

“Superstition” was repeatedly deployed to belittle a complex system of
spiritual beliefs, and relations with the local ecology that had
abundant resources corporations wanted to extract.

Sacred sites became recoded as places invested with irrational
feelings about the supernatural, and the concerns of Native peoples
about the changing landscape disparaged by a discourse partially
rooted in anti-Pagan and anti-Muslim bigotry.