And I’m into the Instagram-witch lifestyle: black dresses, lavender baths, affirmations about being worthy of things. I look the part: like a Hollywood witch, dark-haired and pale-skinned (because of my European ancestry).
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 needed to believe things happened for a reason. 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. She interlaces stories from her forebears with cultural artifacts from her own life-Twin Peaks, the Oregon Trail II video game, a Claymation Satan, a YouTube video of Stevie Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham-to explore questions of cultural inheritance and the particular danger, as a Native woman, of relaxing into romantic love under colonial rule.īracingly honest and powerfully affecting, White Magic establishes Elissa Washuta as one of our best living essayists.
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. 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. 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.
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