"Really, I just want a version of the occult that isn’t built on plunder, but I suspect that if we could excuse the stolen pieces, there would be nothing left."

Elissa Washuta’s White Magic is not a roadmap—it’s a haunting. A nonlinear, feral, sacred constellation of essays that refuses clean resolution, instead conjuring the disorientation of memory, trauma, and survival under colonialism. It’s a book that breathes in grief and exhales clarity, even if that clarity is sharp enough to cut.

Across these essays, Washuta excavates what it means to search for spiritual belonging in a world where white settlers have plundered, repackaged, and sold back pieces of Indigenous culture like costume jewelry. As a Cowlitz woman living in the Pacific Northwest, she probes the spiritual theft embedded in white witch aesthetics, astrology memes, and self-proclaimed decolonial “healing” spaces that erase the very people they claim to honor. Her prose is elliptical and incantatory—sometimes dizzying in its fragmentation, always deliberate in its power.

Washuta writes through addiction and into sobriety, tracking the historical introduction of whiskey by settlers to Native communities and connecting this legacy to her own struggle with alcohol. She unspools memory: of sexual violence, of misdiagnoses and psychiatric gaslighting, of land loss and desecration. And she makes it clear that these are not separate threads—they are part of the same colonial snare.

Through Catholicism, myths of Lilith, ghost stories, and the eviction of the serpent spirit A’yahos from Duwamish land, Washuta interrogates who gets to be holy, who gets to haunt, and who gets erased.

I first fell in love with Washuta’s voice in My Body Is a Book of Rules, and her writing here is no less luminous or unflinching. That said, I found myself craving a bit more cohesion. The breadth of topics and shifting essay structures sometimes pulled me out of the otherwise spellbinding momentum. For me, a tighter container could have sharpened the already powerful impact of her themes.

Still, as a white reader, I was grateful for how this collection made me sit in discomfort—and more importantly, made me question what parts of me seek safety through performance rather than practice. This book is not meant to be consumed; it’s meant to be metabolized slowly, like bitter medicine or ancestral spellwork.

It’s not easy, and it shouldn’t be. But I’m better for having read it.

📖 Read this if you love: nonlinear memoirs, unflinching writing on trauma and survival, or meditations on Indigenous identity and spiritual reclamation.

🔑 Key Themes: Colonialism and Cultural Theft, Spiritual Disorientation and Belonging, Addiction and Recovery, Indigenous Resistance and Sacred Storytelling.