Radiance Olympia

The Cowlitz Indian Tribe's 27th Annual Powwow is next Saturday, September 26 starting at 10 a.m. with this year's theme “A Day to Celebrate Culture in Dance.” Grand entry is from noon to 7 p.m. with more than 20 dance categories! Celebrate culture with us and join us at the Cowlitz County Event Center.

For any questions, please email [email protected].

Some of us call ourselves witches and then reach for the past as if it were a witness. We say cultural context. We say the old ways. We want the weight of those words. We do not want their limits.

Context is not a feeling. It is who taught the work, who was allowed to do it, what the name meant in that generation, and whether the people in question used “witch” at all. If you cannot hold those facts, you are not in conversation with the past. You are using it to sound established.

Listen to how wide we push the name. Witch as identity. Witch as a method kept by use. Witch as ceremonial form with ranks. Witch as the person a town blamed when something broke. That is not one craft. That is four different human situations. Mixing them does not make you traditional. It keeps the claim from having to mean one thing, so it never has to answer for itself.

The mix has a direction. Formal, lettered, paid practice gets talked up as complete. Local method gets talked down as incomplete. High and low are not neutral maps. They are a status split. Someone with time and an educated voice becomes the one who explains. Someone who kept the work without a platform becomes the example. One keeps prestige. One keeps the margin.

That is the hypocrisy. We say we remember people who had no official seat. Then we rebuild official seats and sit in them. We say we care about class and culture. Then we lift a method out of its generation, attach it to our name, and judge the people who actually carried it. We want witch when it raises our standing among peers. We want distance from witch when it still means poor, unofficial, or at fault.

Direct question. When you say you tap the past, whose past. When you say witchcraft, which job is the word doing. When you teach, who gets to remain the source.

If you need the old world to agree with the way you already practice, you are not honoring context. You are recruiting it. The honest version is smaller. Practice what you practice. Claim what you were given. Leave what is not yours unbranded. The past does not owe you a title.

Severed Branches Press is at Radiance. Animists publishing from the South Salish Sea: ecology, ceremony, land defense, and what a place is actually owed.

Two issues of their solstice journal, Defending the World Tree, are here.

The first, A Journal of Animist Awakening, asked its writers where their church is. Returning, Arnold Schroder, ClayAir, Amanda Lyn, Johnny DeLacy, Kelly, Dare/Darius Carrasquillo, and Ocean answer from land, from grief, and from the older lineages of devotion that empire and church both tried to unmake.

The second is, Trees of Ceremony. Twenty makers this time, among them Chiyokten, Ocean, Kelly, Mizia, Heron, Returning, ClayAir, and Arnold Schroder. Particular trees. The rites still held with them. The spirits in the bark. The cut that comes for them, and the people who will not give those trees up. Kelly’s photographs. Mizia’s clay face on the cover.

Black Hills Cabal is Ocean’s book of poems. Dream-work and wild country. Cascadian underground, passed hand to hand for years.

Fight Like an Animal is Arnold Schroder’s. Revolutionary biology in defense of life: science, ecology, and animism from more than thirty years on the front lines of land defense. Why we act. Why we freeze. What it would take to protect living systems together.

Numbered copies.
Radiance - Kindred Moon Apothecary
106 5th Ave SE. - Olympia, WA, 11am-6pm, 7 days a week

severedbranchespress.com
Severed Branches Press