Colonialism in Wizarding America: J. K. Rowling’s History of Magic in North America through an Indigenous Lens
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In March 2016, J. K. Rowling launched four new short stories entitled The History of Magic in North America . It is safe to say that Rowling did not anticipate the reactions from Indigenous critics that these stories incited. In what was probably a well-intentioned attempt at inclusivity, Rowling’s stories reference “the Native American community” (“Fourteenth Century”) and their place in the world of Harry Potter. In doing so, she stepped on a land mine. Magic in North America ’s treatment of North American Indigenous communities is, at best, misguided, and at worst stereotypical and appropriative. Although Indigenous fans, critics and their allies spent much of the month following the release of these stories tweeting Rowling, as of this article going to press in July 2016, she has yet to respond in detail to the criticism she has faced, and the articles are still available at Pottermore. Although Rowling is certainly not the first white author to misstep in her treatment of Indigenous cultures, she has an unprecedented level of visibility and fame, as well as a passionate fanbase—one which includes many Indigenous children and adults. The wide reach that her work has makes it especially problematic, and Rowling’s lack of response to the criticism she has faced is disheartening, especially in light of the launch of racial micro-aggressions now faced by Indigenous Harry Potter fans who want to speak out regarding the treatment of Indigenous cultures in Magic in North America .
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".