American Schools (was:Hats - lateste

[catlady_de_los_angeles]

Original Yahoo! HPFG Header:
No: HPFGUIDX C5890
From: catlady_de_los_angeles
Subject: Re: American Schools (was:Hats - lateste
Reply To: [Yahoo! #5865] Re: Hats - latest evidence
Date: 8/5/00 4:56 pm  (ET)

> There must be other schools of magic in America dating from long before
the '50's. (snip) Native Americans (very few Muggles among them)may have
trained in the apprenticeship model but may now have founded schools.

You may well be right about the Native Americans -- in my theory, they
keep themselves to themselves and so even a knowledgeable American wizard
wouldn't know about the Native American wizarding schools.

But in my theory: all the African traditions of wizarding are in
Africa. The African wizard folk used their magic to avoid being captured
by slavers, and -- with the disrespect for Muggles that we have seen so
much of in British wizard folk -- felt no need to travel to the New World
to help out their Muggle co-racialists. Thus, Afro-Diasporic wizard folk
descend from people who were Muggle-born mages in the New World.

And the European and Asian traditions of wizarding stayed in Europe
and Asia, because wizard folk didn't emigrate to the New World, because
they didn't want to do the same thing as a bunch of Muggles, plus they
had their magic powers to protect them against religious discrimination,
famine, tyrannical aristos, and the other causes that led so many Muggles
to emigrate.

For example: I think my mother was born in 1922 (anyway, she was 69 when
she died, and I could work it backwards to her birth year if I wanted to
take the time). She was born in New York City. Suppose her parents had
been a witch and a wizard. They wouldn't have known they were magic,
wouldn't have had any training in use of magic, wouldn't have wands,
wouldn't teach their child to use magic. She would have grown up as a
Muggle, never knowing that she was magic, and figuring out for herself
how to do a couple of things that she thought were normal abilities that
*everyone* is able to do if they just try hard enough. I've thought that
they'd be the Charm Charm, which makes all the people to whom you talk
like you, and the Spell Spell, which makes her know the correct spelling
of every word even if you've never encountered it before.

I don't think JKR has the same theory that I do -- she mentioned a
wizarding school in Brazil.