Via Hedera - Folkloric American Witchcraft and the Multicultural Experience

The Riverton Witch, Via Hedera, is a Southern-California born folklorist, occult researcher, essayist and sculptor currently based out of the South Seattle region. Raised in an ethnically and religiously diverse family deeply rooted in social justice, she has spent her life tracing the folklore and superstitions of her many ancestors across the world. Vias writing focuses on traditional witchcraft practices, American folklore, animism and green-spirituality. She offers and produces commission altar sculptures as well as private classes on cartomancy and traditional witchcraft. In her down-time, she works as college Event Coordinator, herds unruly rabbits, haunts local pubs and jams to The Eagles.

www.viahedera.com

I acknowledge that I live and work on the traditional territories of the Coastal Salish people; that I live on Duwamish (dxdwab) land and recognize their stewardship of their ancestral home.

This work is for my mother, who taught me that our words have power and to leave no living enemies. For my sweet, loving father, who will be praying for my heathen soul. For Bub and Kendra, who keep me going every day. To my partner Andrew, for choosing to follow me down this crooked path. For my ta Virginia who taught me to receive the spirits, Auntie Dawn for bringing fairy magic into my world, and my mentor Missa for teaching me that art is magic. And for my friends Morgan Daimler, Fawn Hexe, Rusty Sullivan, Nick and Robin Italiano, Shirley Lenhard, Ann Witt and John E. for supporting and inspiring me; for being the best darn folk this side of the pond.

To the Land and the Bones...

And to you, Brigid the Poet, for the fire in the head.

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Mine is a land covered in green. It is shrouded in evergreens and dense canopies and lush undergrowth. Mine is a place where rivers meet and converge, it is a place of diverse beauty in every possible way. I work along the green current, among the invasive ivy. To me, the Land and the Bones that rest within it are sacred, and is reflected in my love for this country, my ancestors and the magic they brought to this brave New World. Underneath these undergrowth forests, buried in the muck of the estuaries, settled in the mounds and hills, there are the bones of the many who came before us, the spirit of who they were still haunting our minds. For a person who appreciates the unseen world such as myself, this is a truly magical place to live, because it is full of history, and full of life.

Washington State isnt where I spent my early childhood - Im a California girl to the bone, but I moved to the Pacific Northwest and bounced between different cultural worlds. Im mixed, you see, a standard American combination of African, Indigenous, European and other thrown in. My household was a black-native household at some times, or an Anglo-black, or Mexican American depending on the year, the month. I grew up in a complicated family, the kind of family that symbolizes American culture at its finest; were a hodgepodge mix of ethnicities and religions and ancestries and it is our shared heritage of adoption, foster-care and displacement that links us.

There may have been some moments that made me ashamed to be mixed because I wasnt, at that moment, the right color or shape for the people around me. Those moments of rejection did not outshine the moments of incredible multicultural exchange and intersectionality in which I was brought up. Growing up in East Los Angeles, most of my time was spent between four cultural groups that shaped my perception of being mixed. For me, America is by definition a multicultural experience and the folkloric