Lyla June's "Mamwlad," released as a music video timed to Beltane in 2018, takes on one of the most grievous chapters of European history: the persecution of people accused of witchcraft, and what those deaths may still be doing to the living. The note that accompanies the video frames the song as a memorial to grandmothers and grandfathers who were burned, drowned, raped, and tortured, and it makes a claim that reaches well past a single piece of music. Europeans, the note argues, have never fully faced, forgiven, or healed from this wound, and the healing could break cycles of untended intergenerational trauma that touch far more people than Europe alone. This piece draws on the release note and credits published with the video, and it tries to explain the ideas that note sets in motion.
The note begins with the artist's identity. Lyla June describes herself as a biracial woman, Native American and European, and says she wrote the song to honor the people her European ancestors harmed in the name of "witchcraft." The song's name is pronounced Mah-Mu-Lahd. The note begins to explain the word as "Mothe," and the copy available for this article cuts off there, so the full meaning should be checked against the complete note on the video's page rather than reconstructed here.
What matters most is the stance. The song is not presented as a lament for distant victims. It is presented as a family matter: the artist's own grandmothers and grandfathers, on the European side of her lineage, are named among those who suffered. That personal claim is what gives the project its weight, and it is why the video reads less like a history lesson and more like a reckoning.
The central move in the note is a reframing of who the accused were. The artist writes, "I know that these people were not evil, but rather were the carriers of Indigenous European knowledge that was demonized by colonizing forces, just as my Native American ancestors were demonized and persecuted."
That sentence does a lot of work. It places the witch persecutions in the same family as the colonization of the Americas: a process of demonizing a people's knowledge and then punishing the people who held it. The parallel is not that the two histories were identical. It is that the same logic, the labeling of inherited wisdom as dangerous, appears on both sides of the ocean. Seen this way, the European witch trials are not an event that happened to someone else's ancestors. They are an act of colonization carried out against Europe's own Indigenous roots.
From there the note makes its most consequential claim: "This is a wound that we as Europeans have yet to heal face, forgive, and heal from." The three verbs are deliberate. Facing the wound means acknowledging it as real. Forgiving it means releasing the anger that keeps it active. Healing means doing the slower work afterward. The note suggests that European descendants have skipped the first two steps, and that the skipping has consequences.
The video's description cites an estimated 6 to 9 million women persecuted as "witches" in Europe. The figure is offered as an estimate, and it is worth reading that way. The note's purpose is not to settle a historical count but to insist on the scale of loss, and to make clear that the victims were overwhelmingly women. The description ties the number to the choice of Beltane as a release date, pairing a spring festival with an act of forgiveness on behalf of those women.
The note also points readers toward a documentary on the subject, linking to the National Film Board of Canada's film "The Burning Times." For anyone who wants to see the historical record the song is drawing on, that link is the most direct next step the material offers.
This is the part of the note that may surprise listeners most. It asks not only women and Europeans to heal, but men as well, and it does so through the figure of the men who could not intervene. The note states:
"Our elders have taught us that any assault on the women of a society is also an assault on the men who love them. Imagine having your wife, or daughter burned alive and being restrained from helping her. This is what so many of our grandfathers went through and it drove them purely mad."
(Lyla June, video description, Mamwlad)
The argument here is that the harm was not contained to the people who died. The men who loved them were also injured, made helpless in front of violence they could not stop. The note goes further, calling for prayer "for the soul of the masculine that was tricked into thinking it was insufficient, tricked into thinking it 'failed to protect.'" In this reading, a particular story about masculinity, that a good man protects by force and fails when he cannot, was itself a product of the same violence. The men were not failing. They were being set up to believe they had failed.
That is a sophisticated point, and it's the reason the song resonates beyond its immediate subject. Patterns of self-blame are often the most durable effects of historical trauma, because they keep the wound alive from the inside. The note calls these "psychological tactics to make us hate ourselves across the board," and argues that they have done damage for "too many generations."
Forgiveness in the note is not a request to excuse the perpetrators. It is paired with a different kind of work, which the artist describes this way: "This is healed through self-love and the forgiveness of this unimaginable cruelty of others."
The sequence matters. Self-love comes first, and it is aimed at undoing the internalized shame the note describes. Forgiveness then addresses the cruelty of others, releasing the hold that the old violence still has on the living. The note's last movement is spiritual and declarative: "It is time to throw off these chains and throw off these lies and affirm our sacredness and worth as men and women in the eyes of Creator."
In other words, the note treats healing as a reclaiming of worth. The lies to be thrown off are the ones that told people their ancestors were evil and their men were inadequate. The chains are the inherited shame that makes those lies feel true. Forgiveness is the act that breaks them.
The description opens with the line "This Beltane, we are forgiving the persecution of an estimated 6-9 million women," which makes the release date part of the message. The video was published on May 3, 2018, and the note ties it to Beltane, a spring festival. Choosing a seasonal turning point to mark a act of forgiveness is a way of making the work feel like a ritual rather than a single release, and it signals that the song is meant to be used, not only listened to.
The credits name Jay Jacoby, Craig Whyte, and Michael Clark on cinematography, with Clark also credited as editor. Priscilla Peña is listed as wardrobe supervisor, and Lyla June is credited as composer. The credits are brief, but they show a small, collaborative team building the visual side of a song whose subject is intimate and historical at once.
The most useful next step is the full release note on the video's page, which carries the complete explanation of the song's name and the rest of the artist's argument. From there, the National Film Board of Canada film "The Burning Times," linked in the description, offers the historical context the song assumes. Read the note alongside that film and the song's central proposition becomes clear: that the witch trials were not a closed chapter, and that facing them honestly, forgiving them, and healing the self-blame they left behind is work the living still have to do.
