Adrienne Keene's 'ethnographic refusal' (2016)

When J. K. Rowling recast skin-walkers in her 2016 'History of Magic in North America', Cherokee scholar Adrienne Keene answered by explaining why she would not explain them.

2016 CE · 35.67, -109.06 · status: account

The account

After talking with a Navajo friend and mentor, Keene decided that readers did not need to know the details, describing the belief as deep and tied to ceremony, not just a scary story. She wrote that pop-culture use exposed Native people to a flood of questions about things that outsiders should not be discussing. Her post is now a standard reference on the ethics of using Indigenous beliefs in fiction and media.

Connections in the atlas

• The Secret of Skinwalker Ranch (TV series)
• The Navajo witch purge of 1878
• Yee naaldlooshii (Diné tradition)

Sources

1. Native Appropriations: Magic in North America Part 1
2. Wikipedia: Skin-walker