Picture credit: Pottermore

A week before my grandpa passed away, he gave me a call. It was a beautiful and bright fall day, the weather nice enough to sit outside. I had never heard his voice sound so tired, so distant. But there was an unrelenting cheer behind it, and I did what I could to feed it. I told him how my life was going, that I would be praying for him, told him what I was working on. The project I was working on – which is still fermenting in the back of my mind, over a year later, was in no small way inspired by him. And to understand that, you should understand who he was.

My grandpa, Raoul McKay, was Metis. That’s a heritage he’s passed down to me, a unique cultural blend of Anglo and French settlers coming alongside First Nations people, especially Ojibwe and Cree. Throughout much of Canadian history, they were – no surprise here – oppressed, repressed, and taken from their homes to live in residential schools. These schools, operated by the Catholic Church and the Canadian Government, largely existed to force assimilation, to “kill the Indian, save the man.” Over the years, these residential schools made horrifying progress in the march to exterminate First Nations culture, language, and identity. My grandpa lived in constant opposition to that goal.

He was a teacher, an activist, and academic devoted to the preservation of Metis culture and fair treatment of First Nations, Metis, and Inuit people by the Canadian government. My whole life, he loomed as this incredible activist force – a personality that has permanently stamped the search for justice in my bones. It’s a heritage I want to earn and follow, and that brings me to the project I was pitching at him.

“There’s this author – George RR Martin,” I told him. I felt safe in assuming that Game of Thrones hadn’t landed on his desk, and I was absolutely sure he didn’t have an HBOgo subscription. “And what he’s done is take the history of the War of the Roses and put it through a fantasy lens.” I hadn’t really ever talked with my grandpa about my love for fantasy literature. That came from the other side of the family. “I want to do that, but with Native stories.” A few weeks prior, I had found a history recorded by James Mooney about the Cherokee people, and ever since I’ve been working at adapting it into fiction. I told him as much, and he seemed to love the idea. The idea was, and is, about preserving and sharing stories that have endured being repressed or ignored for generations.

This memory came roaring back in force the other day when JK Rowling published a story about Native Americans and the Wizarding World. It was only a couple of paragraphs, and it touched primarily on how Native Americans are known for wandless magic, a rich animagi history, and generally being pretty in tune with nature. She also talked about the southwestern Skinwalker, and that’s where the trouble began.

CNN and BBC were plastered with headlines like “Rowling Under Fire,” and “New JK Rowling story earns ire of Native Americans.” Blogs like Cultural Appropriations and a number of twitter activists were leading conversations about how Rowling was stealing stories, disrespecting Native American heritage, and ticking off every box in the “how not to write about Native Americans” checklist that’s been developed over the past fifty or so years. She reinforced the myth of Native people being perceived as artifacts and “noble savages,” and she had taken something that had a very special role in southwestern religions and turned it on its head, breaking taboos and traditions without any apparent input from the people who still held these beliefs.

Two camps quickly emerged, and they should sound somewhat familiar. On one side were those arguing the points above – sometimes with anger and passion, and some taking a more tempered tone. On the other hand, you had those offended at the offense, accusing the accusers of being racists themselves, of being “tumblrina-SJWs,” and of being generally over-sensitive. “After all,” went the reasoning, “People write about Vikings all the time, and I don’t see Denmark getting all pissy.” Which of course, entirely misses the point. And of course, in the middle of all this you had a hodgepodge of ambivalent Native Americans and confused bystanders being confronted with these issues for the first time.

I’ve found that I land somewhere in the middle – JK Rowling’s first post was a bit tone deaf, and could have definitely been improved by some element of consultation with Native Americans. On the other hand, I think the stories and histories of Native Americans are too important and too rich to be ignored, and make for a beautiful pallet to paint from, and I got really excited when I heard that Rowling was going to be acknowledging Native Americans in her new raft of North American stories.

So here’s the question – how can authors, native and non-native share the stories of Native America without practicing a kind of cultural colonialism and creating depictions that end up doing more harm than good? How can authors show respect without causing offense? And how can we pay homage to some of the core values of many indigenous people without falling into the trap of the Noble Savage? While I don’t think there’s a single answer, I’m going to try and follow three principles:

1. Remember the People

If JK Rowling had sat down with a Navajo or Hopi when she started thinking about Skinwalkers, my guess is she would have had a much more successful story, and evaded a lot of the criticism she did. She also would have gained access to something far more powerful than simple approval – inspiration and collaboration. The sum total of indigenous beliefs aren’t kept on Wikipedia, they’re stewarded by elders and cultural centers that devote themselves to keeping a way of life thriving. It’s my hope that talking to the people I’ve been inspired by will help me create more holistic characters and cultures.

2. Remember the Cultures

Native Americans don’t form a single, contiguous culture. There are dozens of culture groups, thousands of languages, and an uncountable diversity of thought, belief, and history contained in a history that goes back thousands of years. I want to pay homage to that, and resist creating a simple stand-in culture for all of pre-Columbian America.

3. Remember the Human

Above all, I don’t want to just put a bunch of cultural elements on a plate. That’s poor storytelling, and it’s a quick way to get to a bad stereotype. Instead, I’m hoping to create really rich and human characters (even if I don’t have “humans” in my stories at all – this is fantasy!). That’s always going to be my core test – can people, no matter what culture they come from, identify and relate to these people? If not, my guess is that no one will be able to – and that won’t serve on enrich my readers, no matter what culture they come from.

At the end of the day, no map is the land itself, and no depiction will ever perfectly encapsulate a culture. So in the meantime, I’ll do my best to reach out to the people I’m writing about and create characters not caricatures. But I don’t think that’s the end of the conversation. In fact, I’m hoping its just the beginning.