![]() ![]() Some of the best essays in White Magic are the most intimate, especially the ones that wrestle with the piercing sorrow of romantic attachment. These essays move deftly between the personal, cultural and historical to create resonances across time. Multiple essays focus on the legacy of sexual violence against Native women, contextualized through Washuta’s own harrowing experiences. ![]() Tapping into her roots, Washuta explores the ecology of the Seattle region through Native mythology, as well as the history of the region’s colonization by white settlers. Washuta, who is a member of the Cowlitz Indian Tribe, wishes for “a version of the occult that isn’t built on plunder,” although she doubts whether such a thing exists. For example, the Native American practice of smudging with white sage has been commodified so thoroughly that sage bundles were recently offered for sale at Sephora. White Magic begins with Washuta's urgent desire to decolonize witchcraft and other spiritual practices. Readers of Washuta’s two previous nonfiction books will recognize some of the same terrain, but this collection creates a new narrative, a reckoning with healing and with growing up. The subjects of these essays are parts of a bigger story-like a spell with the intention to make whole what has been wounded. In Elissa Washuta’s hands, this collection becomes more than the sum of its parts. White Magic is divine, incantatory, a riddle, an illusion. ![]()
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