I am not a Twinkie.
I *am* a cultural, religious and bio-regional orphan. I am a second-generation American, only fleetingly familiar with one grandparent- my grandfather who came as a young man to this country in steerage from Scandinavia, fleeing poverty and famine. A generation later, I was moved at a tender age one-third further of the way across the continent, separated again from that part of the country where this group of people is prominent, where their churches, traditions, food-ways, towns, farms and accents were common and had surrounded me. Away from my closest relatives and only living ancestor. I was raised as an essentially non-practicing, disinterested Lutheran, and un-churched myself at the age of fourteen. I am as close to being a pure-blooded, homogeneously ethnic, secularly suburban White Person as anyone I have ever known. My hair is curly and blond, my eyes are gray, and in the brief time I had to know my single grandfather, he talked to me with a thick accent (in the second language he had learned as an adult), of trolls and tomte and planting potatoes and cutting hay. He made wood carvings of all of those things, as well. I am three times removed from any meaningfully material rootedness in this world. That is what I am.
I own a copy of the Rock Art Tarot, the Santa Fe Tarot, and a set of Medicine Cards. My mom gifted me the Medicine Cards, a deck I was not really taken with, but she came across them in the used bookstore where she worked, and since she has passed, I will never give away or sell her gift. It was not a present made with any thought of cultural misappropriation in mind, she just knew I had started to collect different kinds of decks of cards.
I don't consider the Rock Art or the Santa Fe Tarots, either one, anything like cultural robbery. (Is purchasing a Navajo blanket or owning a Hopi Kachina or Zuni fetish (which I do- two of 'em) cultural robbery?) I chose them because I am most familiar with the land of the southwest United States, and these are decks saturated with the flavor of the places I have lived and landscapes and beings that I love- red slickrock, yellow columbines, juniper-pinon canyons, hummingbirds with flashing garnet gorgets, sheet lightning, coyotes, tarantula hawks, meadowlarks, sphinx moths, aspen and cottonwood trees...
I do not claim, nor ever sought, any special knowledge, sovereignty over, recreational "right" to, or one-ness with any of the sacred places of the southwest (of which there are many), or assumed that merely by living here almost all of my own life, that I am in any way privileged to know or use those sacred spaces- all of that belongs to other people. And *still* my point of view is unavoidably that of the Other, the majority culture, and any ideas I may have of cultural borrowing are going to be tainted and always subjected to suspicion. Such is life.
I also own the Australian Dreamtime Tarot and Oracle, both. I have never assumed deeper understanding behind the conceptions and commercial artistic execution of *any* of these decks (if indeed any exists), but they seem all to have been made by people with respect, tenacity and passion, and I took them at face value for those qualities, and that was what attracted me to them. I suppose, given enough familiarity, they are all equally useful as divination tools, and I would not hesitate to use any of them as such for any reason I can think of. Their systems of use are all very individual and different and require study, and I have not so far had the time to do that. Owning these things, and being willing to use them, I do not know what that makes me in the eyes of others. I will only object to being considered a Twinkie for it.
I have a copy of The Star That Never Walks Around. Again, I do not know Stella Bennett's tribal affiliations, nor did I research those, or her NA credentials before I bought her deck. It just seemed to me then (and still does), simply an authentic deck from an authentic person, with no pretentions, and hardly anything more. She did the drawings (she says) at her kitchen table. I liked that. That's all I know about it. I have always been very cognizant of the pot-hole dangers of Twinkie-dom, but I vehemently deny being PC. I am an *anarchist* ; a slacker, an avoider, sometimes smarmy, usually insincere, often mistaken (I have my flaws)- but I am NOT politically correct.
I don't like any of the other Native American decks I have ever looked at, and though I really know nothing first-hand about them, I basically object to their productions as mere genre-filling concepts, only because that's how they superficially appear to me, and so on account of that, it seems most respectful for me, from where I personally stand, to decline to use them, and leave them and their attendant controversies or usefulness to others.
At their best, they seem all susceptible to criticism and the motivations for their creation not beyond question.
Beyond that, I am not attracted to, or seeking to learn or study or otherwise familiarize myself with the spiritual ways and beliefs of indigenous persons. They are, they can be, in many ways, as narrow and dogmatic as the Western religion I rejected at fourteen. And more than that, their ways are not my ways. I really have no Ways. My ways have all been lost. Left behind in other countries, moved away from to other parts of this country, lost in time, lost in translation. My family was very small to begin with, and now there is only my brother and me, and hanging onto any small cultural traditions (such as they were to begin with) from our childhood seems to be a tenuous, increasingly unchancy thing.
I have no original religion that was learned or ingrained or was ever meaningful enough to me in any way that I would wish to return to (as people suggest is most appropriate for one to do), and Buddhism is very welcoming and open, so that is how I practice life, to the best of my ability. At least one may conscionably and unremarkably *practice* the tenets of Buddhism free of the accusation of cultural or religious misappropriation- Right Speech, Right Thought, Right Mindfulness. I hesitated a long time before I had the temerity to use the word Buddhist to describe myself. Not as many long years as it took me to begin to use the word Witch, but still a good long time. They are mostly words of convenience. My tools are chosen with care and (I hope) with thoughtfulness and are personal to me alone. My artistic (that is to say, philosophic) leanings are Pagan, certainly, celebrated unabashedly and rooted in the only profound thing I do feel- a stubborn bone-deep certainty that I define as and maintain is Racial Memory (though I do not know what that is, or what it means, exactly), an affinity for cold deep lakes and trackless spruce forests, for wood and stone and ice.
What I am *not* is a Twinkie.
Some days, it's a good day to die. And some days, it's a good day to have breakfast.
