Missing Witches

It's Beltane! It's May Day!! It’s the halfway point between Spring Equinox and Summer Solstice! It's a day of solidarity! It's the official kick off date for the annual Missing Witches Reparations fundraiser!! Every year we at Missing Witches, and our coven, and extended Witch community spend the month of May joyfully raising money for Indigenous support orgs (especially the Native Women's Shelter of Montreal!) and gathering together with magical friends to spotlight Indigenous voices through conversations about Indigenous Futures. Today we're joined by Amanda Amour Lynx, Granddaughter Crow, Christopher Marmolejo and Patty Krawec to talk about our imaginative fantasies as tools of hope, the worm, our stories as umbilical cords, the gardener as futurist, and community as remedy to the weight of survival mode. What revolution are you funding? Patty encourages listeners to join the fundraiser by donating to PAYYOURRENT.CA - collecting funds from people living on stolen land and disbursing them to Indigenous people. Amanda suggests donating to the Sierra Club - Protect the Lakes From a Devastating Oil Spill and Support Anishinabe Nations. As always, GDC recommends discovering and getting involved in your local community. Christopher suggests donating to the Coalition to Stop Violence Against Native Women. Here's a quick rundown of how our fundraiser works: Make a donation of $10 or more to your local Native Women’s Shelter or Indigenous Led Support Org or DONATE to the Native Women’s Shelter of Montreal. Take a screen shot of your receipt and email it to [email protected] with the subject line: REPARATION Be entered to win one of more than twenty-five fabulous prizes (more than $6000 in prizes available to be won - full 2026 list HERE) donated by luminaries of the Witch community. Automatically receive coupon codes for discounts from some of our favourite Witchy Businesses! https://www.missingwitches.com/beltane-2026-midwives-to-new-worlds-mwrf-2026-part-1

The scariest thing about seeing a cockroach, they are after all, quite tiny and unthreatening, is that if you see one, it means there are likely thousands more hiding in the darkness. This is true of Witches too. Because our numbers are growing, and that’s scary. Because we know that for survival and evolution, adaptation beats control. In the end, our kinship with roaches is an invitation to notice a shared choreography of exclusion and return. Both Witches and roaches have been named as infestations, treated as signs of disorder, and targeted with rituals of removal that reveal more about the fears of the persecutor than the nature of the accused. The Witch, like the roach, is imagined as multiplying, hiding, slipping through the sanctioned boundaries of the home and the body. Yet what persists beneath these projections is a quieter truth: we mark forms of knowledge and survival that refuse central control. We embody our knowledge, our magic beyond our mere brains and into every cell of our being, The Witch carries herbal, communal, and embodied ways of knowing; the cockroach carries an evolutionary grimoire of endurance, adaptability, and life in the margins. We unsettle the fantasy of purity. We expose how systems define themselves by what they cast out. To view roaches as Witch kin, as OUR kin is to recognize that what is called unclean or dangerous often names a resilience and resistance that cannot be easily governed or exterminated. Remember Witches, survival, especially under pressure, rarely looks like virtue. It looks like persistence in the dark, a continued presence where one is not supposed to be, and a refusal to disappear. https://www.missingwitches.com/ep-294-we-are-cockroach-kin-slipping-through-the-cracks-of-control

I have such a strong visceral reaction to even the sight of this animal on a screen that in my childhood my sister decided I must have died of Bubonic Plague in a past life. I’m not afraid of much - heights, spiders, public speaking, none of these things bother me in the slightest, but a single glimpse of that skinny tail and I freeze in abject terror. And much like how we humans have been socialized to think, my fear manifests as hatred and disgust. I see it everywhere - on my timeline, in the streets - how fear turns to anger, how fear turns to revulsion. So today, I turn to the vast tales and skinny tails of Rats, to discover how we are the same, what makes us kin, what I can learn from them and why I should be grateful they exist. I am human, and the best I can do is to examine my fears, locate them in space, time and in my body, question their validity before scared turns to angry, before scared turns to disgusted, before fear turns to destruction. I’m gonna work through this, Rat Kin, with you, not against you. Though even in the writing of these introductory paragraphs, I can feel my stomach starting to turn, my skin starting to crawl, I promise not to turn away. I’ll go with you into the dark recesses of your life and hopefully leave my phobia there, underground. Consider this a training ground, Witches, to take what we learn and use it all as an antidote to hate, as I skulk and scuttle through the sewers of my own mind, to find amid the filth and muck, a warm place in my heart to love a Rat. Today, I am Rat kin. https://www.missingwitches.com/ep-293-we-are-rat-kin-worthy-of-every-poem

Risa reflects on gardens, seedlings, memory, illness, friendship, and the fragile courage of beginning again. Braiding together stories of Montréal community gardens, queer friendship, cancer, parenting, lost commons, and childhood wonder, she asks: how do we stay hopeful when failure is inevitable and the work of living never ends? Through music, memoir, and magic, this is a love letter to all our small bright attempts—to the vulnerable green selves in each of us that keep reaching for light anyway. A song for the wild-hearted, the weary, the grieving, and the still-growing. https://www.missingwitches.com/we-are-seedling-kin-infinite-and-inevitable/

In this kinship season episode, Risa traces a line from struggling houseplants in a Montreal apartment to global systems built on the use of bodies—human and more-than-human. Through the biology of spider plants, the story of Henrietta Lacks, and a life rebuilt after rupture, this is a meditation on survival, resistance, and the quiet ways we keep each other alive.