Elissa Washuta - White Magic

THROUGHOUT HER LIFE, ELISSA WASHUTA has been surrounded by cheap facsimiles of Native spiritual tools and occult trends, starter witch kits of sage, rose quartz, and tarot cards packaged together in paper and plastic. Following a decade of abuse, addiction, PTSD , and heavy-duty drug treatment for a misdiagnosis of bipolar disorder, she felt drawn to the real spirits and powers her dispossessed and discarded ancestors knew, while she undertook necessary work to find love and meaning.

In this collection of intertwined essays, she writes about land, heartbreak, and colonization, about life without the escape hatch of intoxication, and about how she became a powerful witch. She interlaces stories from her forebears with cultural artifacts from her own lifeTwin Peaks, the Oregon Trail II video game, a Claymation Satan, a YouTube video of Stevie Nicks and Lindsey Buckinghamto explore questions of cultural inheritance and the particular danger, as a Native woman, of relaxing into romantic love under colonial rule.

Bracingly honest and powerfully affecting, White Magic establishes Elissa Washuta as one of our best living essayists.

This book

is dedicated

to WES

HEADLINE: Man with land acknowledgment in his Tinder bio declared too woke to die

[Image of half-smiling white man with vest, ACAB button, white button-down shirt, and coffee mug, in a caf]

TEXT OVERLAY: before I ghost you, Id like to acknowledge that this date is taking place on stolen land

@decolonial.meme.queens,

via Instagram

Ill stop writing abt my bodys danger

when one of those goes away

Tommy Pico, Junk

SOME GIRL AT SCHOOL ONCE had a mood ring. We girls were quiet about it the way we were quiet about the rolled waistbands of our uniform skirts, which we concealed with the loose overhangs of tucked-in polos. Both were kinds of witchcraft the nuns forbade: spells done with sacred tools, the conjuring power of our hips.

I bought a mood ring at the mall. On my finger, it turned from black to green and sometimes to orange when my hands filled with hot desire. A witch brings change to the seen world using unseen forces; a witch gestures through the veil between worlds. Wearing the ring, I saw my thoughts on my hand. This is how I learned I wanted witchcraft: by paying for something cheap.

Now thirty-three, I have crystals scavenged from places unknown and unimaginable after the rocks are tumbled, polished, and turned into tiny vessels to hold wishes and dread. The stones, I know, belonged to somebodys homeland. I worried about my crystals long before I read Emily Atkins piece for the New Republic, which asks the reader, Do You Know Where Your Healing Crystals Come From? In the article, business owner Julie Abouzelof says crystal sourcing is unclear in part because of the deep, psychological construct of the mining industry, where everything is a little bit hidden.

I know about hidden things: gathering locations, fishing spots. What happens in some ceremonies. Once, I went with my aunties to pick huckleberries on the mountain where aunties have picked since the beginning of time, but we got nearly nothing, because we were late in the season and the white people were early.

If you let whiteness in, it takes you for everything youve got.

Not long ago, the witches got upset on the internet. Sephora was going to sell a starter witch kittarot cards, sage, rose quartz, perfumeand the witches thought it was wrong for the makeup store to peddle spiritual tools alongside pore refiners. As a Native woman and an occult enthusiast, I had an opinion. I had an opinion about a Macklemore video interview in which a non-Native astrologer teaches him to burn white sage, a traditional medicine for California Native peoples; in the wild, its threatened by non-Native overharvesting. I had an opinion when I saw an Instagram promoted post featuring a pentagram dream catcher beside the text of a Good Luck Spell and tagged #witch, #wicca, and anything close.

I kept those opinions to myself. Better to leave the critiques to people who dont buy candles from stores where non-Native people sell sage bundles, I thought. The first time I browsed a magic store, I saw shelves of sage and cedar shrink-wrapped against abalone shells, and even though I recoiled, I still exchanged my money for a divination deck. Ive been looking the other way ever since.

As a child, I read picture books about girl witches. As a preteen, hoping to find a way to make magic in isolation, I took to the still-adolescent World Wide Web, where glimmering Angelfire websites warned me I had better not try anything without a coven. In my heavily Catholic forest-and-farmland slice of New Jersey, I never did find one. The authors of those prescriptions were Wiccans, and there was no way into their closed world, even through hyperlinks.

Nearly four years ago, in early 2015, chronically drunk and desperate for relief in the Seattle suburbs, I decided the white Wiccans of the web were wrong: I could go it alone and access the power. I needed to believe things happened for a reason. I had witch friends. Even my therapist seemed witch-adjacent. Witchcraft is sold as self-help, and occultist aesthetics inspire Starbucks drinks; hardly anyone talks about covens or rules. A witch needs only the right look, the right stuff, the right feelings. I look the part: like a Hollywood witch, dark-haired and pale-skinned (because of my European ancestry). And Im into the Instagram-witch lifestyle: black dresses, lavender baths, affirmations about being worthy of things. But I dont like calling myself a witch. I dont want to be seen as following a fad, and I dont want the white witches I resemble to take my presence in their spaces as permission for theft. Really, I just want a version of the occult that isnt built on plunder, but I suspect that if we could excise the stolen pieces, there would be nothing left.

Ive executed successful bindings against men I feared. Ive cast spells I probably shouldnt have with hair and spit. I play fast and loose, sifting through websites for formulas but rarely willing to follow the steps. Even when the spells work, I feel like an amateur and an interloper. But the white women who dominate the online esoteric marketplace cannot hoard this power. When I was thirteen and first desperate for magic, I hadnt yet read Leslie Marmon Silkos Storyteller: The world was already complete / even without white people. / There was everything / including witchery.

I am Cowlitz. My people are indigenous to what is currently southwestern Washington. I was born in New Jersey, lived in Washington (in Coast Salish territory, to the north of my ancestral homeland) from 2007 to 2017, and now live in Ohio. In Washington, I was introduced to Native spiritual practices I will not describe here. Know only that my physical husk was wilting around my incapacitated spirit. I had been reading tarot and trying out spells for a few months, but the occult was not enough. Native friends taught me to maintain relationships with place spirits and ancestors. In April 2015, at age thirty, I stopped drinking the alcohol that made my insides bleed. Something was lodged in there, clawing. Today, I feel it holding my lungs in its fists, and I cant sob hard enough to cry it out.