Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-8ctnn Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-27T08:53:00.917Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Witchcraft and the Colonization of Algonquian and Iroquois Cultures

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  18 June 2018

Amanda Porterfield
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

On Martha's Vineyard in the late seventeenth Century, a Native American called George suffered from being “Tormented” and “impotent” and sought out a renowned “Powaw,” or shaman, for help. According to Matthew Mayhew, who published the story in 1697, the shaman diagnosed George's troubles as effects of witchcraft and proceeded to “dance around a great fire” with George and other sick Natives “lying by.” Other Natives broke up the dance, claiming that the Powaw himself had “bewitched” the sick, and “threatened to burn him unless he cured the sick man.” Fortunately for the shaman, when he “felt the heat of the fire, the sick immediately recovered.”

Type
Research Article
Information
Religion and American Culture , Volume 2 , Issue 1 , Winter 1992 , pp. 103 - 124
Copyright
Copyright © Center for the Study of Religion and American Culture 1992

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Notes

1. Mayhew, Matthew, A Brief Narrative ofthe Success which the gospel hath had, among the Indians of Martha's-Vineyard (Boston, 1694), 13–14.Google Scholar

2. The Interpretation of witchcraft as an adaptive response to disease recognizes the tremendous impact that death and suffering from epidemics had on the religious lives of Native peoples. The disease and population specialist Henry F. Dobyns asserts that the Virtual absence of disease in North America before European contact made the continent, in at least one respect, a “Garden of Eden.” Dobyns, Henry F., The Number Beamte Thinned: Native American Population Dynamics in Eastern North America (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1983).Google Scholar

3. Nancy Oestreich Lurie, “Winnebago,” in Handbook of North Ameri can Indians, ed. William C. Sturtevant, vol. 15, Northeast, ed. Bruce G. Trigger (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution, 1978), 696 (hereafter cited as Hand book: Northeast); Leacock, Eleanor B., “The Montagnais ‘Hunting Territory’ and the Für Trade,” in Memoirs of the American Anthropological Association 78 (Menasha, Wis., 1954);Google Scholar Brasser, T J. C., “Early Indian-European Contacts,” Handbook: Northeast, 84;Google Scholar also see Brasser, “Seventeenth-century Coastal Algonquians,” Verhandlungen des Internationalen Amerikan Istenkongresses 38 (1971): 261-65.

4. Brasser, T. J. C., “The Coastal Algonkians: People of the First Fron tiers,” in North American Indians in Historical Perspective, ed. Leacock, Eleanor B. and Lurie, Nancy Oestreich (New York: Random House, 1971), 64–91.Google Scholar

5. For examples of a predominantly archetypal approach to Native American religion, see Lawrence E. Sullivan, ed., Native American Religions, North America: Religion, History and Culture, Selections from The Encyclopedia of Religion, Mircea Eliade, editor-in-chief (New York: Maanülan Publishing Company, 1989). For further discussion of the archetypal tendency to circumvent important questions about the relationship between religion and society, see Porterfield, Amanda, “Shamanism: A Psychosocial Definition,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 55 (Winter 1987): 721-39.CrossRefGoogle Scholar The quotation from Loretta Fowler can be found in Fowler, Loretta, Shared Symbols, Contested Meanings: Gros Ventre Culture and History, 1778-1984 (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1987), 10–11.Google Scholar Fowler relies heavüy on Geertz, Clifford, The Interpretation of Cultures (New York: Basic Books, 1973),Google Scholar and Geertz, The Social History ofan Indonesian Town (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1965). For another definition of ethnohistory that places less weight on the theoretical contributions of symbolic anthropology, see Axtell, James, “Ethnohistory: An Historian's Viewpoint,” Ethnohistory 26 (Winter 1979): 1–13.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

6. Kluckhohn, Clyde, Navaho Witchcraft (1944; repr., Boston: Beacon Press, 1967), 76–113;Google Scholar quotation 112. Also see Evans-Pritchard, E. E., Witchcraft, Ora cles, and Magic among the Azande (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1937);Google Scholar Malinowski, Bronislaw, Magic, Science, and Religion, and Other Essays (1948; repr., Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1954);Google Scholar and Douglas, Mary, Witchcraft Confessions and Accusations (London: Tavistock Publications, 1970).Google Scholar

7. MacFarlane, Alan, Witchcraft in Tudor and Stuart England: A Regional and Comparative Study (New York: Harper and Row, 1971).Google Scholar Other histories of witchcraft in England and Europe include Trevor-Roper, H. R., The European Witch-Craze of the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries and Other Essays (New York: Harper and Row, 1956);Google Scholar Thomas, Keith, Religion and the Decline of Magic (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1971);Google Scholar and Cohn, Norman, Europe's Inner Demons (London: Sussex University Press, 1975).Google Scholar

8. See “Introduction,” The Salem Witchcraft Papers: Verbatim Transcripts of the Legal Documents of the Salem Witchcraft Outbreak of 1692, 3 vols., ed. Paul Boyer and Stephen Nissenbaum (New York: Da Capo Press, 1977), 1:3-30; Boyer, Paul and Nissenbaum, Stephen, eds., Salem-Village Witchcraft: A Documentary Record of Local Conflict in Colonial New England (Belmont: Wadsworth Publishing Company, 1972);Google Scholar and Karlsen, Carol F., The Devil in the Shape ofa Woman: Witchcraft in Colonial New England (New York: Norton, 1987).Google Scholar

9. Hackett, David G., “Sociology of Religion and American Religious History: Retrospect and Prospect,” Journal for the Scientiftc Study of Religion 27 (December 1988): 461-74;CrossRefGoogle Scholar also see Bender, Thomas, Community and Social Change in America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978).Google Scholar

10. Eliot, John, “Letter of 1649,” in Glorious Progress of the Gospel amongst the Indians in New England, ed. Winslow, Edward (London, 1649), 121;Google Scholar Matthew Mayhew, A Brief Narrative, 15.

11. Thwaites, Reuben G., ed., Jesuit Relations and Allied Documents: Travels and Explorations of the Jesuit Missionaries in New France, 1610-1791, 73 vols. (Cleveland: Burrows Brothers, 1896-1901), 13:159; 12:87,13:147,15:45, 57; 10:43-9;Google Scholar also see Trigger, Bruce, The Children of Aataentsic: A History of the Huron People to 1660, 2 vols. (Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press, 1976), 407.Google Scholar

12. Thwaites, ed., Jesuit Relations, 19:153, 159, 23:195, 30:19-21, 47:57, 49:107,50:115; Trigger, Children of Aataentsic, 708,833,599-60.

13. Thwaites, ed., Jesuit Relations, 33:217-21, 145^7; Trigger, Children of Aataentsic, 738.

14. Mayhew, Brief Narrative, 17-18; Zeisberger, David, History of the North American Indians, ed. Hulbert, Archer Butler and Schwarze, William Nathaniel (Columbus: Ohio State Archeological and Historical Society, 1910), 125-27.Google Scholar

15. Howard, James H., Shawnee! The Ceremonialism of a Native American Tribe and Its Cultural Background (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1981), 146-7;Google Scholar Smith, De Cost, “Witchcraft and demonism of the modern Iroquois,” Journal of American Folk-Lore 1 (April-June 1888): 184-94,CrossRefGoogle Scholar quotation from 187; Wallace, Anthony F. C., The Death and Rebirth of the Seneca (1969; repr., New York: Random House, 1972), 37,78-92.Google Scholar

16. Zeisberger, History, ed. Hulbert and Schwarze, 127; Trowbridge, C. C., Shazunese Traditions, ed. Kinietz, Vernon and Voegelin, E. W., Occasional contributions from the Museum of Anthropology, University of Michigan, no. 9 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1939), 36,45;Google Scholar Howard, Shawnee!, 145-47,176.

17. C. F. and Voegelin, E. W., “The Shawnee Female Deity in Historical Perspective,” American Anthropologist 46 (1944): 370-75;CrossRefGoogle Scholar Trowbridge, Shawnese Tra ditions, 45; Porterfield, Amanda, “Tecumseh, Tenskwatawa, and the Complex Relationship between Religious and Political Power,” in Religion and the Life of the Nation: American Recoveries, ed. Sherrill, Rowland A. (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1990), 219–234.Google Scholar

18. Mayhew, Thomas, “Letter from Capawack November 18,1647,” in Glo rious Progress, ed. Winslow, 115-16;Google Scholar Eliot, John, “Good Newes of the Day-Breaking,” in Jessey, Henry, Of the conversion offive thousand and nine hundred East-Indians zvith a Post Script ofthe Gospels good successe also amongst the West-Indians ofNew England (London, 1650), 18;Google Scholar Eliot, John, “Letter of 1649,” in Glorious Progress, ed. Winslow, 121.Google Scholar

19. Eliot, John, A Late and Further Manifestation of the Progress of the Gospel Amongst the Indians of New-England (London, 1655), 13;Google Scholar Eliot, Glorious Progress, ed. Winslow, 123.

20. Eliot, John, Indian Dialogues for the Instruction in that great Service of Christ, in calling home their Country-men to the knowledge of God, And of Themselves, and of Jesus Christ (Cambridge, 1671), 3,1,20.Google Scholar

21. Ibid., 3.

22. John Eliot, “The Examination of the Indians at Roxbury April 4 1654,” in A Late and Further Manifestation of the Progress of the Gospel, 13. After the Salem witchcraft trials of 1692, the identification of witchcraft and pre-Christian Native rituals became even more dearly established in New England. Several of the young women who appeared to be persecuted by witches in 1692, induding Mercy Short in Boston, were young women whose family members had been killed during King Philip's War and whose images of the Devil and hell had been profoundly shaped by memories and stories of Indian warfare and torture. Mary Toothaker confessed that she had agreed to serve the Devil in return for his protecting her from Indians. John Alden was identified as a witch by an accuser who cried out, “there Stands Aldin, a bold fellow with his Hat on before the Judges, he sells Powder and Shot to the Indians and French, and lies with the Indian Squaes, and has Indian Papooses” (Boyer and Nissenbaum, eds., Salem Witchcraß Papers, 3:768; 1:52) Two years after the Salem trials, Matthew Mayhew regretted that “some have stigmatized Indians.” However, he himself applied some of the language used in the Salem trials to describe Indian practices, defining “witchcraft” among Indians as “Familiarity with Infernal Spirits.” Furthermore, in his characterization of Native shamanism, Matthew Mayhew displayed the concern for specific details of how witches worked that had characterized investigations in Salem. With an attention to detail uncharacteristic of earlier reports, he recounted that “Their Practice was, either by desiring the Spirit to their appearing to per form, what mischief they intended; or to form a piece of Leather like an Arrowhead, tying an hair thereto: or using some Bone, as of Fish (that it might beknown witchcraft, to the bewitched) over which they performed certain Ceremonies.” Mayhew, Matthew, A Brief Narrative, 27,12,13.Google Scholar

23. This is not to say that seventeenth-century Europeans or EuroAmericans created the conception of subjective guilt, for indeed those Christians traced their understanding of guilt back to Augustine and Paul. What makes the colonial conceptions of guilt and sin premodern is their important role in the emergence of social structures emphasizing individual self-control that began to replace social structures based on more external forms of punishment.

24. Matthew Mayhew, A Brief Narrative, 13-14.

25. van den Bogaert, Harman Meyndertsz, “Narrative of a Journey into the Mohawk and Oneida Countries, 1645-1635,” in Narratives ofNew Näherland, 1609-1664, ed. Jameson, J. Franklin (New York: Charles Scribner and Sons, 1909), 152-53.Google Scholar

26. Thwaites, ed., Jesuit Relations, 12:7,13:157,12:7.

27. Trigger, Children of Aataentsic, 66-68.

28. Ibid., 424-25,494; Thwaites, ed., Jesuit Relations, 8:95.

29. Anthony F. C. Wallace, “Origins of the Longhouse Religion,” in Handbook: Northeast, 442-48; Wallace, Death and Rebirth ofthe Seneca, 254-62.

30. Drake, Benjamin, Life of Tecumseh, and of his brother the Prophet; with a Historical Sketch ofthe Shawanoe Indians (Cindnnati and Philadelphia: Queen City and Quaker City Publishing Houses, 1856), 88;Google Scholar Schultz, Noel W., Jr., The Study of the Shawnee Myth in an Ethnographie and Ethnohistorical Perspective (Ph.D. diss., Indiana University, 1975), 68–75.Google Scholar