I received this message from the English woman calling herself NN. She says she no longer practices, and her website is down, and asks that we remove the thread, even tossing in the threat of legal action. Though the threat is one more typically useless bit of bluster, should we move her to Archives? And mark No Longer a Matter of Concern.
Below is her email followed by my response.
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Unfortunately, it's only just been brought to my attention that quite a few years back in Feb 2011, my old & extinct website appeared on your forum - I have a pasted link below for you to see
http://www.newagefraud.org/smf/index.php?topic=3197.0I can see you commented on the old thread which was a short conversation between yourself and nemesis with you rightly recognising that my name was just a 'poetic stance on a spiritual name'. Now being a full time mum to my two beautiful young children...and focusing more on our family's design business, it does distress me to have my past name and something that I once cared very much about associated with this label of new age fraud - even though I do understand you were not insinuating this - my old name remains linked to this forum in an insulting fashion which makes me very upset.
My children's Godparent's are both lawyers and they sensibly suggested I simply contact you as the administrator to request the page be removed. I would appreciate if you could do this as soon as possible.
Thank you for your time and I will await your reply.
Kind regards
Natasha
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Hello,
I'll ignore the silly legal threat. We get those at least once a month, and nothing ever comes of them, except to make us more determined to not back down from such failed attempts at intimidation.
We do not remove information from our site, ever. But we do move threads from Research and so on to Archives and mark them No Longer a Matter of Concern for those who are not doing any harm or those who have changed their ways.
I'm glad to hear you no longer teach the falsehoods you used to. There is no such thing as "Cherokee meditation" and those who told you so were wrong, perhaps con artists. There is an entire industry spreading such falsehoods for profit to outsiders who do not know any better.
"Power animals" are another New Age falsehood. To charge for Native ceremonies, or practice outside of their traditional context, is considered deeply unethical. One should never pay to pray.
Since you no longer spread these falsehoods, I'll ask the others at the forum if we should move the thread to Archives. I urge you to make restitution to those you took from under false pretenses. It is of course entirely possible you did not realize what you were doing was false, inaccurate, and considered unethical by actual American Indians. But now that you know, I urge you to consider making amends.