Notices by Mo Martin and nothing but! (mordecaipinhas@sunbeam.city)

So I don't think we (we being broadly, white people) DO have a concept that can translate "spirit animal." But that's okay! I put "problem" in quotes because I don't think it's inherently bad if one culture can't use or translate the concepts of another culture, and in fact, I think it's bad if a culture that has done so much damage to another culture attempts the forcible assimilation (and lets face it, commodification) of the attacked cultures ideas. So in short, if you're white or otherwise not indigenous to the Americas, and you really like an animal, just say "I really like this animal." or even, "I see a metaphor for my life and struggles in what this animal does." but do NOT say "they are my spirit animal"

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.

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

I still think rather than cultural appropriation, which raises issues of what cultural "property" is and how it can be "stolen" or "appropriated", we should talk about "erasure" and "fetishization/objectification" which seem to me to be the real issues 99.9% of the time

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Most everyone calls me Mo. I write here about #mentalhealth, #Judaism, #bookhistory, how badly I want to publish #zines, my #travel, dabbling in #Occultism, #solarpunk, #HopePunk, #Writing, #Tabletopgaming also known as #RPGs, #bookcollecting, #reading, oh hell, just about everything.

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