Every child matters. Today is Orange Shirt Day, the day of remembrance for Indigenous victims of the residential schools (which ran from the 1870s to 1996). Many children in them died of tuberculosis, hunger, abuse, and neglect. Sexual and physical abuse was rife.
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BIPOC Science Fiction & Fantasy
A complete list of Science Fiction and Fantasy by BIPOC (Black, Indigenous and People of Colour) would be very long indeed, so I am going to highlight a few of my favourites and add links to more lists.
BIPOC Pagan Reading List
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).
Solidarity with Black Lives Matter
There have now been hundreds of Black people killed by police in the USA. The militarization of the police has continued and expanded since the Ferguson protests over the killing of Michael Brown.
I have mainly been posting about the protests on my Instagram and Twitter accounts.
The Tower and the Virus
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.
What we have in common
I dreamed that I was in an Anglican or Episcopalian Church in North America and had been invited by the vicar to introduce a hymn. She handed me the order of service which already had a hymn picked out, and it had been annotated to change “him” to “her”, so I introduced it and encouraged people to sing “her” where appropriate if they wanted to. One of the congregation said they didn’t really know the tune for that hymn. So then I suggested we sang Morning has broken and changed “him” to “her” in the second verse, and “God’s” to “Her” in the third verse. Then I woke up.
Pagan statement of solidarity with Wet’suwet’en and Tyendinaga
We the undersigned believe that the colonial occupation and exploitation of Wet’suwet’en lands, and all other unceded lands, is illegal.
Books I’ve read in August
Books I’ve read in August.
On building in wood
Building dwellings out of wood is a great thing to do. We currently live in a house whose core is an old log cabin, and it is pretty darn snug in the winter. My previous house was built out of stone, with walls a foot thick, and it could be quite cold and damp. So why do cultures that build their dwellings out of wood get dismissed and belittled for it?
Review: Guelph Art Gallery
There are currently three amazing exhibitions on at the Art Gallery of Guelph (until 16 December): epistemologies of the moon, 1745, and Critical Mass. It is hard to say which of these exhibitions I was the most excited about, as they all address things I care about.
