Вы находитесь на странице: 1из 5

American Indians, Witchcraft, and Witch-Hunting

Author(s): Matthew Dennis


Source: OAH Magazine of History, Vol. 17, No. 4, Witchcraft (Jul., 2003), pp. 21-23, 27
Published by: Organization of American Historians
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/25163617 .
Accessed: 03/05/2014 21:35
Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at .
http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp

.
JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of
content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms
of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.

Organization of American Historians is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to
OAH Magazine of History.

http://www.jstor.org

This content downloaded from 201.235.237.120 on Sat, 3 May 2014 21:35:06 PM


All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

Dennis

Matthew

American

Indians,
and

To

Witchcraft,

Witch-hunting

paraphrase historian David D. Hall, "the people[s] of


New England lived in an enchanted
seventeenth-century
universe. Theirs was a world of wonders" (1). As much
as English settlers, Native New Englanders (and Native Ameri
cans generally)
inhabited worlds of wonder, milieus peopled

ofthe missionary Thomas Mayhew Jr. regarding theWampanoags


in 1652:
of Martha's Vineyard
the Lord first brought me to these poor Indians on the
When
Vinyard, theywere mighty zealous and earnest in theWorship
of False gods and Devils; . . .The Devil also with his Angels

with

extraordinary beings and marked by


Witchcraft,
supernatural
phenomena.
among other remarkable beliefs and prac
tices, was an integral part of their worldview,
as common

pean

as among

many

itself,

phasized
American

the advent of American


European

coloniza

commentators

have

the cultural differences


Natives and European

by their

Yet,

at

least

in retrospect,

between

the

similari

ties among these contending


peoples are
recent
A
few
scholars
have even
striking.
that
such
similarities?
argued persuasively
not differences, certainly not any "racial"

tile

[shaman

Pawwaws

counted

and not particularly

hos

observer.

The religious contest between Puritans


and Indians?or
between Europeans and
Native Americans generally in the colonial
not principally a battle of mo
period?was
against

dernity

or reason

primitivism,

vs.

rev

(let alone "superstition"). It was a


of power (even magic), and in the
it pit a stronger god
minds of Europeans
a
one.
weaker
against
Against Christ, Indian
elation
contest

abundant

Indian supernaturalism, particularly claims


of direct, personal revelation, made Natives
suspect in the eyes of colonists and helped

their Pawwaws

sacrifice,_The

knowledgeable

distinction?set
colonists
and
European
Native Americans at odds as they competed
for the same thing: American
land and re
sources. Yet a shared belief in witchcraft?
no more than a similar ambition to live
lives in the North American
land
two
the
scape?hardly
brought
peoples to
one
in
At
least
important respect,
gether.

with

their Imps their Preservers, had them trea


sured up in their friends (2).
about this
Perhaps most disconcerting
is that Mayhew,
who spoke
description
the Wampanoag
language, was himself a

em

colonists,
often equating Indian difference with inferi
ority.

meetings

or chief religious practitioner], (who usually


had a hand in their hurt) to pacifie theDevil

Euro

newcomers.

Since
tion

among

Natives

had his Kingdom among them;... by him


they were often hurt in their Bodies, dis
tracted in theirMinds, wherefore they had

? ?.
^
Jesuits

* " , -.

^^n
provided

some

of our earliest

_
accounts

gods?and

devils?were

of American Indianreligion. (FromOurCountryiA


This providential
....
Household
History For All Readers
Image
courtesy of the Picture Collection, The Branch pean colonization
tone for European
Libraries, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox,
and Tikten Foundations.)
of Indian religion

persuade English settlers that Indians liber


ally practiced the dark arts. Hostile colonists
characterized the Natives' homeland as "wilderness," a "devil's
den." They saw the Indians' natural religion as diabolical, under
stood Native shamans as witches, and demeaned Native practi
tioners as slaves of Satan. Consider, for example, the descriptions

simply

overmatched.

view of triumphant Euro


would continue to set the
American understanding
in subsequent eras.

While colonial representations of Indian


colonization a mythic
gave the narrative of American
an
contest
it
of life and death, good vs. evil?
epic
quality?made
Native people believed
themselves to be the primary victims of
witchcraft

witchcraft.

Devastating

epidemics

decimated

OAH Magazine

This content downloaded from 201.235.237.120 on Sat, 3 May 2014 21:35:06 PM


All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

of History

Native

popula

July 2003 21

tions, white encroachment


land, and periodic warfare
Native worlds upside down.
providentially by Indians as
that

the

was

catastrophe

depleted game and took away their


brought violent death and turned
Such crises could be interpreted as
they were by European Christians?
in part,

induced,

witchery?and

by

Indians sought solutions both in religious tradition and innova


to face physical and cultural
tion. Although
Indians continued
in the two centuries following the colonial period,
dislocation
they have survived, and among some "traditionalists," belief in
endures

witchcraft

it does

(as

today

a world

means of understanding
bad things happen.

some

among

as a

Christians),

for them, evil exists and

inwhich,

Such contemporary beliefs vary considerably among the diverse


American
summarized.

own

of our

communities

Indian

the nature

Reconstructing

time

are not

and

of witchcraft

beliefs

among

lived hundreds of years ago is even more difficult.


it is possible to get a sense of Native witchcraft and
Nonetheless,
from the imperfect historical and ethnographic
witch-hunting
records historians and anthropologists have amassed. The Five,
of the Iroquois, who resided in central and
later Six, Nations
western New York during the colonial period, offer an exemplary
case. Here we must distinguish between the "witchcraft" attributed
those who

to

Indians

or biased

ignorant

by

white

observers?misrepresenta

tions of misunderstood Native rites and beliefs, which had nothing


to do with any diabolical force?and
the witchcraft that Indians
believed actually troubled their existence, an indigenous craft
regarded by them as nefarious and dangerous.
to the Jesuit missionary and ethnographer, Father
According
Joseph-Francois Lafitau, who lived among the Iroquois early in

uniformly

the

are

than

to harm

as

. . .

the

was

Iroquois,

lent

the

mobilized

they

injure

witches

or force

or power,
even

others,
near

inspired

no

"the

authors

own

kin.
among

female

Iroquoians,

and those suspected of such maleficence were hated and avoided.


Lafitau decried native shamans as jongleurs ("jugglers"

Although

or charlatans),

tinguished

commentators

Puritan

unlike

considerable

antipathy

he

the

among

dis

nonetheless

from those of witches,

shaman practices

who

inspired

Iroquois.

afflictions threatened the mental and physical health


Witches'
oi individuals and entire communities.
Iroquois men and women
the injuries, illnesses, and misfor
struggled to discern whether
tunes that periodically beset them resulted from natural processes
or sinister

When

magic.

natural

remedies

failed

to produce

Iroquois

the

and
men

and

of outward

avoidance
women

repressed

expressions
their

means

22

to express
to

assault

themselves.

Witchcraft

antagonists

OAH Magazine of History

within

offered
Iroquois

such

for opportu

a covert,
communities,

in

hatred

acts

of aggressive

repression

among

the

Iroquois,

Bressani

Gioseppe

wrote

about

were

who

the Hurons,

without

fellow-countrymen,

accuser

other

any

or

than

judge

dying man, who said that he had been bewitched by such a one,
who was killing him..."
(4). A witch discovered among one's own
or

lineage

after

clan,

be more

could

all,
or

afar?he

from

operating

she

could

become

we

Wherever

expect.

might

seventeenth-

and

tended

antagonisms
Iroquois

eighteenth-century

one

than

dangerous
a cancer

within.

Fear of witches, diabolical sorcery, and witch-hunting


gendered among the Iroquois, but in ways more complicated
to

was
than

surface

in

witchcraft

culture,

might be implicated. Frustrated men, for example, might seek aid in


hunting, fishing, or trading activities, to counteract bad luck in such
enterprises, and some could be so driven to distraction that they
crossed over to the dark side, seeking the services of witches. Some
may have become witches themselves; others procured magical
charms?considered

living,

non-human

persons

of great

power?

required careful handling. Those who failed to propitiate


them, by feeding, talking, singing, or listening to them, could
endanger themselves and their families, as dishonored charms could

which

on"

and

"eat"

their

holders.

Similarly,

women

(or men)

to
in contrast
and colonial
witch-hunting,
European
no
the Iroquois were
and executed
among
accused,
suspected,
more
that
for example,
It is suggestive,
than men.
apt to be women
the Iroquois was Atotarho,
witch
the most
venerable
among
perhaps
In general,

those

the powerful male shaman and sorcerer of the Iroquois political


creation myth. A hideous figure, twisted in mind and body, with
writhing snakes for hair, Atotarho had nearly destroyed the cultural
hero Hiawatha with his nefarious magic before the great Iroquois
Peacemaker pacified him and transformed him into a benevolent
Iroquois

wicked

communities

repeatedly

accused

Jesuit missionaries

often attributing to them the


of committing acts of malevolence,
contagion that swept through Iroquoia in the seventeenth century.
The Jesuit Isaac Jogues, for example, who proselytized among the
Mohawks

conflict,
but

aggression,

feelings could still simmer below the surface, waiting


nities

of

even

jealousy,

culturally similar to the Iroquoians, "the confidence of the Sav


of spells and witchcraft went so far, that
ages in the multiplicity
upon mere suspicion they often killed and burned even their

leader.

results,

and when rituals to uncover hidden wishes ofthe soul through the
examination of dreams failed to have their therapeutic effect, it
became clear that witchcraft lurked nearby. In a society based on
consensus

rivalry,

sometimes resorted to witchcraft as well as legitimate magic in the


interest of love, which might have enticed them to cross the line
separating the benign from the malignant.

benevo

Both

of resentment,

but it also bred endemic suspicion.


Such was the danger of witchcraft
that the Iroquois, like
English Puritans, would "not suffer a witch to live." They sanc
tioned the execution of witches, as quickly as the act could be
from the rules of kin
carried out, and they exempted witch-killing
In 1653, the Jesuit missionary
based revenge and atonement.

"turn

personified,
than

rather

fear

their

aim

other

utgon, or otkon, for

that witches

universal

the

the spirits or
are

ones"

evil

for

spells
of

because

have

spells

"evil

cast

who

spirits

(3). Agotkon,

power

orenda,
to

purposes

and male

evil

cast

These

harm."

of their curses and witchcraft"


as

or

agotkon

who

[T]hose

and work

women

and

that they have with

think

people

geniuses.

tutelary

...

regarded

traffic which

men

"the

century,

eighteenth

[sorcerers]

and

cumspection

Francesco

easily

sense

one's

indulge

secret ways. Behind affectations of serenity or stoicism could lay


intense feelings and emotions; disgruntled persons could silently
cultivate enmity for years and might be driven, ultimately, to seek
the help of witches to punish their enemies or to indulge in the
black arts themselves. Fear of witches certainly encouraged cir

in 1646,

came

to be

considered

a sorcerer

and

a witch.

men and
Jogues's alleged witchcraft cost him his life. Iroquois
a male as
was
it
women practiced and suffered witchcraft equally;
well

as female

art.

to

July 2003

This content downloaded from 201.235.237.120 on Sat, 3 May 2014 21:35:06 PM


All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

If conscientious religious practice ensured Native people health


and prosperity, witchcraft's malignant object was to challenge and
frustrate the divine order and to afflict suffering on its victims. As
accusation

the

against

a Jesuit

missionary

above

suggests,

Indians

often associated sickness with witchcraft. Who or what caused


the
loved ones to sicken and die, and what force precipitated
entire
of
disease
that
destroyed
epidemic
unprecedented misery
villages and nations? For many,
the logical answer was witch
craft. And witchcraft was impli

practices and a departure from ancient ways toward amore Chris


tian, misogynous
understanding of witchcraft. Oddly, as white
Americans
distanced themselves from the unsavory past repre
sented by the Salem "witch" trials of 1692, one Iroquois leader, the
Seneca orator Red Jacket, appropriated and invoked Salem in order
to legitimate Native beliefs and protect Iroquois sovereignty. Dur
ing an inconclusive murder trial of a Seneca man accused of
executing a witch, Red Jacket
exclaimed:
What! Do you denounce us
as fools and bigots, because
we still believe that which
you yourselves believed two

in the disasters Native


in the late
experienced

cated

people
colonial and early national peri
ods as well, when the American
and its aftermath
Revolution
new
rounds of death,
brought
and
dislocation to the
disruption,
numerous
other In
and
Iroquois
dian people. As Natives
to

reconstitute

you would

and

unfortunate

emerged

of white

The

new,

encroachment.
nineteenth-century

ad

and

government,

forth

sentence

the

demnation

her

upon

this

drawn

down

arm

the

have

geance. What
ers done

con

of

against
and

woman,

identification

sures

for

you will find that hundreds


have been executed for the
very crime which has called

ing witches. Witch-hunting


sometimes played a critical role
in these postcolonial Native re

solidarity based on fear


but designed to resist the pres

own

your

Tenskwatawa?distinguished
themselves as adept in identify

Native

brother

hering to the faith of his


fathers and of yours! Go to
Salem! Look at the records of

among their leaders who offered


charters for the future which
blended tradition and innova
tion. Many such prophets?the
Seneca Handsome Lake, for ex
the Shawnee
and
ample,

and pros
vivals;
ecution
witches
of alleged
those
deemed
respon
destroyed
sible for the chaos (collaborat
ing leaders who sold land, for
example), and continued purges
of whom dis
of witches?many
sented or frustrated the proph
to forge a
ets' reforms?helped

black

Your

ago?

the formalities of law; and


now punish our

struggled

themselves

visionaries

survive,

centuries

coats thundered this doctrine


from the pulpit, your judges
it from the
pronounced
bench, and sanctioned itwith

more

of

ven

our broth

than

the

rul

ers of your people have done?


And what crime has thisman
committed,
a summary
his
hovers
illustration, a demon
the French Jesuit Joseph-Francois
was
to Satan
and addicted
subject

In this seventeenth-century
longhouse,
that Native

expressing

above

an

Lafitau's

to the dark arts.


religion
or Protestant,
whether
Catholic
colonists,
European
clergy or laity,
a view.
des
shared
such
Lafitau, Moeurs
sauvages
(Joseph-Frangois
aux moeurs
des premier
am6riquains
companies
temps, 4 vols.
[Paris,
II: 58.
of the Lilly Library,
Indiana University.)
1724],
Image courtesy

worlds of Native Americans?


even those designed by Indian prophets to remain "traditional"?
were hybrid creations. While many of those worlds continued to be
haunted by witchcraft, the nature of that witchcraft (like Native
religion generally) evolved and accommodated or adjusted to the
intrusions of outsiders. For the Iroquois (and perhaps other Indi
witches
ans), witchcraft seems to have been feminized?increasingly
tended be women, following the prophet Handsome Lake's subor
dination of women to men in the new social order he prescribed.
which flourished in the first decades of the nine
Witch-hunting,
teenth century and became sporadic thereafter, paradoxically rep
resented both continuity with traditional Iroquois beliefs and

executing,

in

way,

the

of

com

the

and

country,

laws

mand ofthe Great Spirit (5)?


The defendant was ultimately

Iroqouis
sense

Other

by

freed,
deed,

though he
and

the

Iroquois

culture,

land,

his

resource

to defend

fully continued
lives,

admitted

and

their
sover

eignty, with varied success. The


people, generally did not attempt to
as they sought to survive as Indians.

Iroquois, like other Native


imitate Puritan forefathers
But in their troubled modern

history, some Native Americans


remained convinced that their distress, both internal and exter
nal, emanated from witchery.
Endnotes
1. David

D. Hall, Worlds
in Early New
Beliefs
Press,

1989),

of Wonder,
England,

Days

Popular Religious
of Judgement:
MA: Harvard
University

(Cambridge,

71.

See Dennis / Page 27


OAH Magazine

This content downloaded from 201.235.237.120 on Sat, 3 May 2014 21:35:06 PM


All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

of History

July 2003 23

"STAND
FAST,MEN

sons to Salem witch-hunting.


the association

with

By the late 1950s, the combination

anticommunist

mass

investigations,

THEV'RE
ARMED
WITHMARSH
MAIUMS"

of

communi

the dramatic allegory presented by The Crucible


provided propulsive force to the association of Salem with persecu
tion. As the next century approached, presidential impeachment,
child sex abuse, terrorism investigations, the death penalty debates,
gay rights, and amyriad of local and national debates demonstrated
on newspaper pages across the country that using Salem to brand
and

cation,

one's

as "witch-hunters"

opponents

was

not

only

but

commonplace

nearly inescapable.
Whether Sarah Good's curse haunted minister Nicholas Noyes's
remaining days on earth isnot known. But Salem witchcraft's long
life as a cultural metaphor suggests that since that long ago day in
imagination.
June of 1692, Salem has haunted the American
Endnotes
on the Origin and
Anderson,
Imagined Communities:
Reflections
(New York: Verso Books,
1991).
Spread of Nationalism
2. For a similar conclusion
of "witch burning" within
the
about the persistence
see also Bernard Rosenthal,
Salem Story: Reading theWitch
Salem metaphor,
1. Benedict

Trials of 1692

(New York: Cambridge

University

Press,

1993),

209.

Gretchen A. Adams is an assistant professor in the department of


history at Texas Tech University and is the author ofthe forthcoming
book The Specter of Salem in American Culture. She is also the
Associate Editor ofthe Salem Witch Trials Documentary Archive and
Transcription Project <http://jefferson.villageMrginia.edu/salem/

Herbert

Block's

America

whose

Post,

Prints

of Congress,

and

Photographs

Division.)

1841),

"Seneca

Possessed:

Colonialism,
Witchcraft,
In Spellbound: Women

author
counters

Ethnohis
in

in
of Handsome
Lake."
and Witchcraft
DE: SR Books,
1998.
ed. 121-43. Wilmington,
in Seven
Cultivating a Landscape of Peace: Iroquois-European Encounters
Press, 1993.
Ithaca, NY: Cornell University
teenth-Century America.

the Time

Great

Lakes Region,
1991.

Matthew Dennis
of Power."

and Gender

NE: University

of Nebraska

of Idaho Press, 1970.


University
S. "Cultural Bias in the New England Puritans' Perception
of
Simmons, William
and Mary Quarterly,
Indians." William
3d ser. 38 (January 1981): 56-72.
in the
Richard.
The Middle Ground:
and Republics
White,
Indians, Empires,
Press,

tory42 (1995): 445-75.


Matthew.

Prophet. Lincoln,

MA: Harvard University


Clyde. Navaho Witchcraft.
Cambridge,
Press, 1944.
at Six Nations."
In Systems of North
"Iroquois Witchcraft
Shimony, Annemarie.
American Witchcraft
ID:
and Sorcery, ed. Deward E. Walker
Jr. Moscow,

320-21.

Selected
Bibliography
a Witch?
"Who or What's
David.
Blanchard,
Iroquois Persons
American
6 (1982):
Indian Quarterly
218-37.
Cave, Alfred A. "The Failure of the Shawnee
Prophet's Witch-Hunt."

The Shawnee

1983.

Kluckhohn,

1724]), I, 241.

Putnam,

R. David.

Press,

73 vols, trans, and ed. Reuben Gold


4. The Jesuit Relations and Allied Documents,
vol. 39, 27.
Thwaites
(Cleveland: Burrows Brothers,
1896-1901),
or Sa-Go-Ye-Wat-Ha;
5. William
L. Stone, The Life and Times of Red-]acket,
and
(New York: Wiley
Being the Sequel to the History of the Six Nations

America,

Dowd,

Library

Edmunds,

to the
3. Joseph-Francois
Indians Compared
Lafitau, Customs
of the American
N. Fenton
Customs of Primitive Times, no. 49, 2 vols. ed. and trans. William
and Elizabeth Moore
1974-1977
(Toronto: Champlain
[first publ.,
Society,

-.

11 August

marshmallows,"

/ From page 23

of the Progress of the Gospel


2. "Tears of Repentance:
Or, a Further Narrative
Massachusetts
Historical
amongst the Indians in New-England,"
Society,
3d ser., 4 (1834): 201-202.
Collections,

Dennis,

with

armed

men?They're

1954, reproduction from original drawing published in theWashington

home.html>.

Dennis

fast,

("Stand

to an attack against
the Girl Scouts
of
responds
as "un-American."
"one world"
branded
ideals were

cartoon

Gregory Evans. A Spirited Resistance: The North American Indian Struggle for
1745-1815.
Press, 1992.
Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University
Unity,

1650-1815.

UK: Cambridge

Cambridge,

University

isProfessor ofHistory at theUniversity of Oregon and

of Cultivating

a Landscape

in Seventeenth-Century

of

Peace:

America

Iroquois-European
(Cornell

University

En
Press,

and Blue Letter Days: an American Calendar


1993), Red, White,
(Cornell University Press, 2002), and coeditor with William Pencak
and Simon P. Newman
of Riot and Revelry in Early America
State
Press, 2002). He is currendy atwork on
University
(Pennsylvania
Seneca

Possessed:

Witchcraft,

Gender,

and Colonialism

on

the Fron

tier of the Early American Republic.

OAH Magazine

This content downloaded from 201.235.237.120 on Sat, 3 May 2014 21:35:06 PM


All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

of History

July 2003 27

Вам также может понравиться