Quick word about Jack Thorne. I do wish him the best of luck with Star Wars. I could be making a mountain out of a molehill, but that's kinda what I do on here... so... you know. All the best, still pissed about Cursed Child.

OKAY, so although hindsight has given me the ability to anticipate the complications to come, it was a bit premature in the summer of 2016 to question the future success or failure of the play. So, I and my fellow Potterheads settled in, eagerly counting down the days as June entered July.

And for the next month, the fans of everything that is Potter were flicked back and forth like a yo-yo, yet again. First came new writing on Pottermore about the North American wizarding school, ILVERMORNY. Along with it, another stunning video to illustrate the layered history that JKR was weaving masterfully from afar. We devoured every sentence excitedly.

This latest installment followed the 17th-century story of the Irish witch, Isolt Sayre, who traveled to America with the Puritans. Despite some basic geographical inconsistencies about magical creatures from across the nation being somehow native to Massachusetts, or the uncomplicated walking distance between Plymouth Rock and Mount Greylock (the U.S.A. is much larger than it appears on Google, Jo. That was a 180-mile trek you just put this poor girl through...), it seemed like the start of a compelling story. Although, in the historical sense, invading European colonists weren't welcomed with open arms, erecting castles wasn't really an American thing during the Georgian era, and the Irish didn't immigrate in this fashion... but maybe that's beside the point. We were getting to read about the magical history of the North American wizarding school! Er...sorry, I know you're trying to savor this new content, I just had to bring up that JKR was kinda excluding any mention of slavery... or any distinction between the Native American tribes (if they were even mentioned). Okay, sorry again, go enjoy the story!

Within minutes, the Native American community was voicing their concerns, because Rowling took her worldbuilding into the wrong territory for the second time. And it quickly became apparent that the "skinwalker" debacle was but the hors d'oeuvre to a much larger, more controversial buffet of cultural appropriation.

First, let's get the most glaring bit of yikes out of the way. My assumption here is, knowing the backlash she had already received from the Native American community, and realizing that the first Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them movie was now too steeped in North American magical history for her to reset and eliminate any references to Native Americans in an effort to avoid additional claims of insensitivity and appropriation, JKR did a quick fix. But the perceptible underpinnings of her story were already too connected to American history to detach.

Nambe Pueblo scholar Debbie Reese, who discussed this on her blog Native Indians in Children's Literature, stated: "the new story makes it clear that [Rowling] is...in too deep to revise this story".

In the first paragraphs of Isolt's tale, you can see the obvious red pen to which Reese was alluding. On her own in the mountains, Isolt comes upon a magical individual who was most certainly a Native American in the original draft. Now, he's a Pukwudgie. How is this hasty edit so apparent, you might ask? Mostly because he immediately fits the stereotype of the "good Native" - that pigeonholed sidekick bondservant who is willing to guide and assist the colonists, of which the Pukwudgie does with Isolt. As the Tonto to her Lone Ranger, this character refused to provide his name, so Isolt calls him William, after her father, anglicizing this foreign character in a way that was both plot expedient and provided a quick dousing of good old fashioned small-mindedness. Let's dress you up as a proper gentleman straight away, shall we? Enough with that feather headdress nonsense. But, hey, thanks for already knowing how to speak English for some reason!

Wait, didn't JKR regret making house-elf labor a form of slavery in the books and have to backpedal for the rest of the series to right this wrong? But, you know, let's jump headlong back into magical servitude! We gave "the uneducated savage" a name after all. That's basically like giving clothes to a house-elf! Right?

"William" was clearly a magical Native American, specifically echoing the history of Squanto from the Pawtuxet tribe, and JKR must have known that connection would cause some trouble. So rather than give that character a rewrite, she left behind the shadow of all the obvious references to his original concept and just relabelled him a Pukwudgie. Something tells me that his broken English is where we got the term "No-Maj". SMH.

Together, with three young white settlers, the four of them created a new magic school with Isolt. Each of the houses is named after a magic totem animal, also appropriated from Native American mythology, one of them being Pukwudgie. So, why would JKR have "William" be a magical creature, and yet he helped to co-found a new school that was grounded in Native American lore...with no Native Americans?

That's bee-will-derr-ring...

Only it isn't. Because "William" had always been a Native American. And they just used an eraser to avoid negative press.

For the four houses, Pukwudgie derived from stories about a "person of the wilderness" from the Algonquian and Wampanoag tribes. The Thunderbird has symbolic meaning from numerous Native American collectives. Horned Serpents had significant importance in Mississippian culture. And the Wampus is linked to the Cherokee myth of the Ewah.

Is it wrong for a writer like J.K. Rowling to borrow the names and characteristics of its four houses from Native American folklore? On a basic level, I don't know that answer. As the saying goes, "If you're white, it ain't your fight." JKR should have consulted with that community for sure (or apologized when it was brought to her attention, which she did not). But it goes further than just appropriating names. It's this whole outsider, colonialist perspective - that the native occupants who owned and farmed this land were hardly even seen as human (like Pukwudgies?). And certainly not as "enlightened" as the British colonialists. They clearly couldn't have their own school to teach the young and magical how to use their powers! This land, and its people, were untamed and needed fixing!

The structure of Ilvermorny was a poor example of integration, much like the way war chiefs were once paraded around as fascinating decoration.

But in her rushed attempt to avoid unnecessary comparisons with Native Americans, JKR ended up appropriating Native traditions apart from any presentation of Native people, which looks even worse.

What JKR cannot understand is that, as a British person, her perspective on colonialism in North America is extremely different than our perspective. When Native Americans think of "white savior" British colonialism, they don't imagine social structure and roads and the establishment of religion and systems of government. They think of genocide, vicious betrayal, the plundering of resources, economic disparity, the obliteration of peaceful nations, and the conquering of culture.

Talk about authorial intrusion.

Although it was settled by British people, this is not a British nation. It has a bloody and nuanced past that requires sensitivity. Someone like JKR could have done a lot of good to dissuade xenophobic thought processes that still plague this country and be a force for good. Instead, she has inadvertently reinforced stereotypes.

I don't think this was a conscious decision on Rowling's part, as I've stated before. She is a decent person with the best of intentions. Her fault lies more in a lack of research and legwork. Which is kind of a larger problem than someone's personal bias, and should have been a red flag for the upcoming Cursed Child play. But at the moment, this lack of effort was seen in a more scandalous way when those who were more graphically sensitive took a peek at the new updates about Ilvermorny. Because we didn't just borrow from Native American folklore. We also stole someone else's intellectual property.

Whoopsie.

Along with this new history of Ilvermorny came another online sorting, where Potterheads could identify their house at the new wizarding school. The figureheads of the four houses had, as was previously explained, Native American origins and tribal affiliations. Pukwudgies, the Wampus Cat, the Thunderbird, and Horned Serpents.

Rather than borrow from the standard fare of creatures like Hogwarts, with lions, badgers, serpents, and eagles, Ilvermorny took directly from lore. Hogwarts houses had made up names and didn't utilize mythical creatures as their symbols. Ravenclaw could've been a Boggart, Slytherin a Basilisk, etc. But with a castle, and four houses, Ilvermorny was starting to look less American and more like a replica of Hogwarts, only with Native American cultures dumped carelessly over the battlements.

And as if cultural theft wasn't enough, the designs of the four houses on the website were all plagiarized, some from public domain sources, and one in particular, from an artist who never gave their consent.

The feeling we were all experiencing, that the Harry Potter teams were rushing things, was beginning to crystallize. New material on Pottermore and new information about Fantastic Beasts and the fast approaching play, while exciting, was always beset with headaches and controversy. And the Pukwudgie / Plagiarism issue was the most ham-fisted, puzzling, and poorly handled. But most importantly, it was lazy - an author's greatest sin.

Fixing the mistakes after the fact didn't erase that original blunder. It only showed us what we could've had instead.