num_pages: 432
description: Bracingly honest and powerfully affecting White Magic establishes Elissa Washuta as one of our best living essayists.Throughout her life Elissa Washuta has been surrounded by cheap facsimiles of Native spiritual tools and occult trends starter witch kits of sage rose quartz and tarot cards packaged together in paper and plastic. Following a decade of abuse addiction PTSD and heavy-duty drug treatment for a misdiagnosis of bipolar disorder she felt drawn to the real spirits and powers her dispossessed and discarded ancestors knew while she undertook necessary work to find love and meaning.In this collection of intertwined essays she writes about land heartbreak and colonization about life without the escape hatch of intoxication and about how she became a powerful witch. She interlaces stories from her forebears with cultural artifacts from her own lifeTwin Peaks the Oregon Trail II video game a Claymation Satan a YouTube video of Stevie Nicks and Lindsey Buckinghamto explore questions of cultural inheritance and the particular danger as a Native woman of relaxing into romantic love under colonial rule.
language: English
title: White Magic
publisher: Tin House Books