Can a White Author Responsibly Write a Lakota-Inspired Magical Story About Religious Colonization? If so, how?
Mentallyamoth asks:
CW: war, genocide, colonization
Hello, I am currently writing a book in a fantasy world setting centering a Lakota-inspired main character. In this world, the magic that you develop depends on your religious beliefs. A long time ago, two large groups with two different religious beliefs silmutaniously decided that their religion was the right one and that they had to convince everyone of it. They colonized smaller groups, fought each other and killed all those who wouldn’t give up their beliefs. Now fast forward, my main character is part of one of these colonised groups, living in a city full of the colonizers.
She secretly still believes in her religion, which is Lakota inspired, but knows that openly trying to resist the system will kill her and everyone important to her. So, instead, her goal is to become the first one of the once colonized people to earn respect, power and success for herself and her people. She believes that will be enough to undo the injustice done since she’s been fed with propaganda that the war and genocide “wasn’t so bad”.
She then finds out that there is still people who resist the system, living in secret and preparing for a war. Yet she doesn’t believe that they can do any change and instead originally plans on ratting them out in order to cast a good light on her and her family. Throughout the story, she slowly learns more about what truly happened to her people and decides that she wants to challenge the system she had always been told was the “right one”. In the end, she helps build a society where people respect each other and each others beliefs.
Now, I am a white author and neither me nor my ancestors have experienced religious colonization. However, the topic of religion and the harm it can do, while still being something beautiful and empowering, is very important to me. Still, I don’t want to profit off of other people’s suffering and know that (religious) colonization is a very sensitive topic.
Would it be possible for me to write this story if I do enough research, and if yes, what are some things I have to pay attention to?
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Let me begin this reply with the story of a real life person: Jody Wilson-Raybould. She was Canada’s first Indigenous Minister of Justice and Attorney General. She joined politics specifically to change the colonialist Canadian society, as an idealist.
Jody Wilson-Raybould. Photo by Erich Saide. image description: a dark haired, dark eyed woman with tan skin and a polite toothy smile, wearing a black blazer and red blouse
She was actually starting from a better position to change society than your protagonist—her grandmother persevered to maintain tribal governance, and her father was a hereditary chief. She was taught Indigenous leadership from birth, she grew up navigating the worlds of Indigenous and colonizer, and she wanted to be a lawyer, then prime minister.
It took fourteen years of lawyer positions, tribal counsel positions, and volunteer work for her to gain a seat in politics for the Liberal party. The next year, fifteen years after the start of her career in political positions, she was made the Minister of Justice, the third woman and first Indigenous person to hold the role. She accomplished some things in her tenure. She tried to change Indigenous rights, to make them better, but whether or not she succeeded is highly up for debate. She updated women’s rights and children’s rights. She passed cannabis legalization. She also passed MAiD legalization.
Under her tenure, a white man was acquitted by an all-white jury for murdering a Cree boy on his property in Saskatchewan, and people said she undermined the justice system by openly questioning the jury’s verdict on twitter. She had no power to change a Saskatchewan community with a deeply racist legacy.
Four years after she was made minister of justice, she was demoted to veterans’ affairs—likely because she pushed for reconciliation, and to change the colonial system. She was loud, and bold, and demanding, and she lost power for it. She openly called the inquiry into missing and murdered Indigenous women a farce.
Weeks later, she resigned when there was speculation Justin Trudeau had pressured her to rule one way or another when she was attorney general. She ran as an independent for a bit, but seems to have quit politics since. Burned out, chewed up, writes books about this time in her life and tries other avenues. She’s basically disappeared from Canadian pop culture life, unless you happen to be very interested in this sector of the country’s culture. I don’t know how many Canadians could tell you anything that’s changed for them, unless they directly interacted with her laws—and I don’t know if they even know those changes came from her.
I tell you this story because here is a real life woman in a significantly better position than your protagonist. She had every single thing going for her, to create something. To change something. To create a middle ground society. And the system ground her down to the point she quit and functionally disappeared.
Indigenous communities are extremely divided on her, some saying she did good, others saying she’s a colonial shill who’s working far too much in the system to ever get land back. Either way, the main relevant thing for you to know is she failed.
The most fantastical part of the story you’re proposing is the fact there is implied success. That there is implied speed. But people like your protagonist exist in the real world. They are lauded and they are slandered. They move the needle slightly, sometimes in good directions, sometimes in bad. But one of the most universal constants in all of them is they fail at producing drastic cultural change. There is too much work to undo colonialism by a single person.
Now, if you read this and think “okay, so I’ll scale back the idealism”, I would invite you to keep reading. Because you’re going to need to fundamentally change multiple parts of this in order to write a respectful story.
1- half of a reclamation character arc
I think this is where the plot falls down the most. Because you jump from “learning everything is a lie” to “and now things are rebuilding and I’m free”, which is how a lot of people think it goes—especially if they haven’t experienced religious colonialism and deconstruction work.
You basically have the first half of a character arc here, and it’s a perfectly fine first half… until it goes into an altruistic dream instead of really sitting with repercussions.
What I feel like is missing is simple: what is she grieving?
The grief of growing up in a colonial system is staggering. Not just your life, but your parents’ lives, your community’s lives, the pieces of broken chain and disconnect you can see.
One of my steadfast beliefs is that people need a culture that connects them to something. They have traditions, they have food, they make things, they steward things. They feel ownership over taking care of their families, their property, their community, their everything.
To me, the root of colonialism is it strips you of that and replaces it with itself, leaving your world a hollowed out shell either fighting to get something, or numbing to stop the pain. It’s traumatic. It is nothing short of traumatic, and that trauma lives in your bloodline as pain. Abuse, addiction, and a disconnect from emotions because you don’t have anything to teach you how to process the world around you, anymore, with these external systems.
This has created breaks in chains that had survived for ages before, and the amount of chain you retain depends on where you landed after it was cut. Someone who lives on a reservation on ancestral land, who returned to the reservation after residential schools, and who has done reconstruction work and knows the language and rituals and crafts and food stewardship and survival strategies has a lot of chain. Someone like me, whose great grandfather left everything to try and become white, hardly has anything. I need to manually go and learn everything from scratch. A bunch of people are in the middle, for varying reasons with varying bits and pieces of what used to be.
The arc right now is the arc I see mirrored in dozens and dozens of asks: I have learned about injustice, and I will gain power to “fix” it. I will be Good. I will Inspire. Things Will Be Better.
Where is the healing? Where is the grief? Where is the time spent unpacking everything and learning to not be bowled over every time you’re reminded of something that was awful because people decided you were sub-human, all because of an idea and a god that told them it was okay to kill everything you loved?
When looking at this character and plot, there’s no real… understanding, on a narrative level, that this colonial system replaced something. It’s treating her secretly practicing magic as enough, when it’s not. She lost so much more than just magic, and she’s only managed to retain the smallest part of her ancestral way of life.
She’s also kinda recreating colonialism by trying to make a new, better thing to replace the present with, instead of reaching back to the broken chain and seeing what parts of it can be pulled into the future. She’s not doing anything to make space for other colonized groups to do the same, as well. It just… ends. With an unrealistic ideal, and a neat little bow that it’s simply realization of lies and injustice that’s enough to get your life back. It’s not.
We can’t go back to the “old ways”, no—the chain is cut, the land has been depleted by extractive processes, the people are traumatized. We do need a new system. But in the end, it’s just as colonial to go full replacement all over again. We need a set of systems informed by the past, before the chains were cut, that lets those colonized become whole again in a way that fits each and every one of them.
What parts of the chain does she hold, beyond magic? What does she want to grab that belonged to her that was stolen generations ago? How will she make space for that? What is fundamentally incompatible with the way the system is now, and what trade-offs will she make to get what she wants? Will what she wants change as she discovers there was an old way, or will she give up connecting fully to her history in the name of trying to move the needle?
I will caution you, however, this sort of story is getting extremely, extremely close to an identity story, and reclamation narratives are fraught in the best of times. I would not make your MC bipoc in this scenario at all, but instead an accomplice to help get the story out and move the needle. I’m simply explaining this in detail for you to understand why this narrative does not land.
2- you’re using a closed practice
Having a magic system implies that it will be used within the story, and will be a plot point. Either way, I’d assume her magic would be described, somehow, and your end goal would be to have it shown in its full Indigenous glory.
This is not going to be possible.
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