Reheated (117)

Ms Schenandoah, it turns out, is a Faith-keeper of the Wolf Clan, and skilled in ways of healing “negative energy,” with tuning forks and smudging – that’s burning tobacco and sage, obviously.

A Campus & Community news bulletin – in which the word “Indigenous” is used many, many times – tells us that Ms Schenandoah will be helping students “bring forth their own potential” via “a wide range of healing modalities,” including the aforementioned tuning forks.

Those touched by Ms Schenandoah’s uncanny powers will learn that the forest is “a relative, not a resource,” and that birds “sing in the morning because they’re happy.” Quality stuff.

Armed with such arcane skills, Ms Schenandoah – whose job description is curiously vague – will provide “a safe space where Indigenous students can cope with stress and trauma.”

Yes, the trauma of attending one of the more expensive and statusful colleges in America, with its annual fees of $70,000, its 920 acres of rolling lawns, its 20 tennis courts, and a capacious ice-skating pavilion.

You see, a captioning oversight – or if you prefer, an accidental acknowledgment of reality – is part of a “system of oppression” and therefore a basis for a grand project of social correction. One that must address the seemingly bottomless sorrows of “Black, Indigenous and racialised people and 2SLGBTQIA+ people,” and thereby prevent a fearless politician from feeling “hurt and isolated.”

“I am assumed male nearly always by strangers,” says Ms Kuttner, which, frankly, seems a tad implausible. We’re also told that perceiving her as a man, not a woman, requires “effort,” an effort that is expected by Ms Kuttner – which would appear closer to the truth, if not entirely consonant with the previous claim.

“I don’t like when politics is focussed on identity,” says Ms Kuttner. While informing the nation, via YouTube videos, about her own list of identities, her pansexual appetites, her PTSD, her variable pronouns, and the need to “look at pretty much every piece of policy from a gender-diverse lens.”

Apparently, “all physicists and other scientists” should divert time and effort from their actual work, the important stuff, the thing that pays the bills, in order to become familiar with indigenous “bodies of knowledge.” Presumably, on grounds that one simply can’t do physics or astronomy without a detailed knowledge of magical talking beavers and rival chiefs stealing the Moon.

This “indigenous knowledge,” the particulars of which are elusive and treated rather coyly, will, we’re told, be “elevated” – presumably, above its station – while “Eurocentric western science” – or, you know, science – will be “de-centred and scrutinised” for any residual wickedness. Any oppressive taint. And hey, what better use could there be of other people’s time and money?

The Pagan Federation, however, issued a statement insisting that the womanliness of cross-dressing men is obvious, unassailable and “not up for debate”: “Trans women are women, trans men are men, and all non-binary genders are valid.” Validity for everyone. Just tilt your head and squint.

Apparently, we’re to be told what reality is by people who think they’re witches.

As these are terribly modern, immensely caring witches, Ms Howard was banned from the organisation’s Facebook page and from the website of the British Druid Order on grounds of being “unequivocally transphobic.”

Thereby denying Ms Howard access to the arcane knowledge of “seers and healers,” along with the opportunity to purchase oracle cards, audio recordings of spells and invocations, and “hymns to the divine feminine.” Oh, and guides to coping with stress by wrapping a thick blanket around your head.