A lot of the stuff about multicultural wizarding America could still be absolutely true - but MACUSA doesn't talk about it in the officially published history. I wrote a very short story from the perspective of one of the (hypothetical) culturo-magic groups the New York wizards don't like to think about.

This assumption doesn't cover everything, but it fills in a lot of it - particularly when you view the History as being written by MACUSA. Why don't they talk about their predecessors' American patriotism? Because they're desperately trying to instill the current generation with the mindset that MACUSA Is All.

A couple specific points:

-There was a lot of thought way back that the entirety of North America would eventually join the US. MACUSA probably took that to conclusions and claims authority over the entire continent.

-House names! I agree that an American school probably shouldn't look like Hogwarts, but disagree about 'uninspired'. It's far more interesting than the three house systems I've personally experienced:

-My secondary school had houses named after the three founders of the schools it was made up of. Not terribly imaginative, given that two of them were named in the name of the school.
-My primary school had Diamond, Ruby, Emerald, and Sapphire. Thrilling, no? (Diamond was best.)
-My son's school has Oxford, Cambridge, Bath, and... I dunno, probably Milton Keynes or somewhere equally banal. No, they have no connection to any of those universities.

The Hogwarts idea of houses that a) people care about, and b) have actual distinguishing features is either a very weird one, or a very Upper Class Public School one.

hS

Warning, one-sided discourse ahead!

There's a long history between the United States and the Native American nations, most of it very ugly - we've gone from actively genocidal to passively genocidal (via forced assimilation) to "merely" pushing them into corners and neglecting them to death.

A big part of this ugly history is religious - as Morally Upright White Christians, it was our job to Civilize the Savages and Enlighten the World. This didn't go well, but it went - the Indian boarding schools (or Residential Schools, if you're looking for Canadian information) intended to, among other things, forcibly Christianize a generation or two of native youth. They didn't succeed, but they did irreparable damage to the cultural fabric of Native America, and as it really only stopped a generation or two ago, we still don't know its full effects.

And now we come to the details of this case, and Thunderbird. (I'm weak on this chunk of the story, VM, please help?) Thunderbird is a specific - and rather significant - entity in native spirituality. I'm not going to try to compare them to western mythologies/religions, because that's a Bad Idea, but Thunderbird is very important, especially in the pacific northwest traditions. And, because Thunderbird is included in the category of Things To Be Suppressed Because They Are Not Christianity, a lot of native people, including native youth, were forcibly indoctrinated because of their belief in Thunderbird (along with other entities and reasons).

So, the message being sent by using Thunderbird as a house name reads like this: You know that thing that is an important and powerful symbol of strength to your people? The one that we-as-white-people tried to destroy, and used as reason to try to destroy your culture? Yeah, it's ours now. We're going to take the pretty pictures and strip them of their meaning and run them through a marketing machine on a scale you can't even imagine and spread our milquetoast, inaccurate vision of your most sacred stories further than you'll ever be able to reach - and, oh yeah, we'll treat it with no more reverence than a high-school mascot.

It's like the worst bible fanfiction ever, but with extra terrible twists - instead of a single writer posting terrible badfic on ff.net, this is an immense publishing conglomerate, with a name on the title page bigger than the media presence of the entire religion she's borrowing from. This isn't a religion that's a household name like Jesus Christ, either- this is a belief that has been suppressed and repressed and attempted-genocided, right up until it became the exotic fetish of the New Age decade. And that's cultural appropriation in a nutshell: we-as-white-people are going to take a culturally significant entity from people we have oppressed, and use it to make money and spread our culture instead.

And that's the angry anti-appropriative view.

And I completely agree, AHoMiNA is definitely MACUSA propaganda.

I could kinda see how it could be cultural appropriation, but that would be making way too many assumptions to assume it is right now, with the little information we have.