Indigenous

Indigenous resources

/ Yvonne Aburrow / Leave a comment

In the wake of the awful discoveries of unmarked graves in residential schools, more and more Canadians want to learn the truth about the destruction of the cultures and languages of Indigenous Peoples in Canada, and the theft of their lands.

I have created a new resources page with links to websites where you can learn more about Indigenous culture and issues, and identified the key resources to get started on your learning journey.

If you only have time to interact with a few things on this list, check out the ones with a star next to them.🌟

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For the ones who did not come home

/ Yvonne Aburrow / 1 Comment

Thread a bead for me,
Not a rosary:
A bright bubble of blood
From that river in flood
Between the worlds.

Carve a flute for me,
To breathe a memory,
Thread a song from the air,
Where the land is bare
On that distant shore.

Hold a hand for me,
Dream a dream for me,
Of summer days I cannot see,
Woven beneath the oldest tree,
Beyond the door.

Light a fire for me,
Down by that inland sea
Where the stars drink the night
And a bright scarf of light
Dances in the sky.


By Yvonne Aburrow

©️Yvonne Aburrow, 2021. Repost only with clear written credit to me. Please include this copyleft notice and all the information below as well.

The imagery in this poem is Pagan imagery (the World Tree, the river between the worlds in The Ballad of Thomas the Rhymer, the land of the dead being over the ocean). The poem is dedicated to the children who did not come home from residential schools. I woke up this morning with the fragment of a dream in my head with beads being threaded on a string as some sort of remembrance ritual. The poem is an attempt to capture the dream.

Happy Pride

/ Yvonne Aburrow / 4 Comments

Happy Pride everyone.

❤️ Here are three of my favourite LGBTQ+ movies: Pride, about Lesbians and Gays Support the Miners. Torch Song Trilogy, which I saw in my first few weeks at university because the Gay Society did a screening (yes folks, in the 1980s the Lesbian and Gay societies at uni were two separate things). And The Birdcage (which I prefer over the French film it was based on) in which gayness eventually wins over the stiff straights.

More reflections on queerness and intersectionality after the cut. 🏳️‍🌈🏳️‍⚧️

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BIPOC Pagan Reading List

/ Yvonne Aburrow / 1 Comment

A reading list of BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, and People of Colour) authors covering Paganism, the occult, astrology, Tarot, and Indigenous spirituality.

Note that the deities of African diaspora religions can only be contacted through those religions and not via other religions. And that Indigenous life ways and spiritual practices are specific to their cultures and should not be culturally appropriated.

I’ve put out a call on Twitter and Instagram for more books to add to this list, and I will post updates (as I do with the Queer Pagan Reading List).

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The Tower and the Virus

/ Yvonne Aburrow / 7 Comments

My first guest column at The Wild Hunt.

I have been anxious for months, years even. I have watched with growing horror the rise of right-wing populism, the melting of the icecaps, the burning of Australia, the beginnings of wars over water and resources, the seemingly inexorable destruction wrought by climate change. The protests of Fridays for Future and Greta Thunberg and Extinction Rebellion gave me some cause for optimism, but it is also obvious that governments have not been doing enough to turn the economy around to stop the production of carbon emissions. So when everyone suddenly swung into action to deal with the coronavirus crisis, it gave me some hope that perhaps now the needful actions to deal with climate change (many of which, it turns out, are quite similar to the actions needed to flatten the curve of coronavirus transmission) would seem doable. It also feels like now everyone else is as anxious as me.

Continue reading at The Wild Hunt.

If you enjoyed this post, you might like my new book, Dark Mirror: the Inner Work of Witchcraft.

Dark Mirror: the Inner Work of Witchcraft