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1. Mo Martin and nothing but! (mordecaipinhas@sunbeam.city)'s status on Friday, 29-Mar-2019 15:51:02 EDT Mo Martin and nothing but!

   So spirit animals came up, which means it's always a good time to remember that people who aren't indigenous to the Americas don't HAVE spirit animals, that there is more or less no tradition of worshipping and spiritually identifying with the spirits of animals in the European imagination, and that it is grossly cruel and inappropriate, considering the European invasion of and ongoing genocide of the American peoples, for European descended people to make claim to Indigenous spirituality

   1. Mo Martin and nothing but! (mordecaipinhas@sunbeam.city)'s status on Friday, 29-Mar-2019 15:51:15 EDT Mo Martin and nothing but!

      in reply to

      I feel one of the "problems" we keep running into, with discussions of spirit animals, is that white people really DON'T have anything like spirit animals in their cultures. We can talk about patronus', or daemons, or in some dark corners of the web, fursonas, but all of these lack the spiritual gravitas and register of discussing specifically spirit animals. Familiars are an interesting parallel, but it's worth noting that we only know about them through condemnations of witchcraft, we don't know if anyone practiced a spirituality centered around identifying with animals in the west except through the mouths of accusations of a bestial nature to magic and magic users. In most European writing I've come across about these things, the metaphor is almost wholly negative. It is about how the person who shares traits with animals is LESS than human.