Witchcraft in Early North America - Alison Games [15]
In the northeastern woodlands (where the French and English established themselves) at the moment of contact, Indians’ belief systems probably did include ideas about witches and sorcerers. Like Europeans, Indians debated the causes of misfortunes and tried to remedy them with natural cures. But when these cures did not work, they concluded, like Europeans, that witchcraft was present. Early Jesuit accounts—written, of course, by people predisposed to see a world of witches and demons—spoke of sorcerers, people who cast spells and who harmed others in doing so. These witches called on powers to do evil, not good, and were greatly feared by the Senecas (one of the tribes of the powerful Iroquois confederacy) as people distinct from the shamans and other religious practitioners (a distinction that normally eluded Europeans).42 The Iroquois killed witches if they detected them in their midst. A Jesuit, François-Joseph Le Mercier, told of one such execution in 1637 among the Hurons. A woman accused of witchcraft was sentenced to death and was first tortured with fire before the executioner split her skull with a hatchet and her body was burned to ashes.43 Other Indians, including the Algonquian-speaking people whom the English encountered at Roanoke (in modern-day North Carolina) in the 1580s, seem not to have believed that witches—at least witches within a tribe—should be executed for witchcraft, and instead reserved that penalty for outsiders.44
While Europeans tended to think that most witches were women, a gendered association of women with witchcraft appears not to have been the case among the Iroquois and other woodland people. The evidence, as always, is elusive and indirect. One clue comes from the best-known Iroquois witch, a man named Atotarho, who figures in the Iroquois creation myth and almost destroyed Hiawatha before Hiawatha neutralized him and turned him into a good leader.45 A second clue comes from the tendency of the Iroquois to accuse the Jesuits (all men) of doing the kinds of malevolent deeds that they associated with witches: spreading disease, for example (see document 2). Some Potawatomis killed a group of priests in the 1680s for precisely this reason.46 One Jesuit, Isaac Jogues, was killed by the Iroquois in 1646 because they believed him to be a sorcerer (see document 3).47 The connection between Europeans and disease was common, and because the first Europeans many Indians met were missionaries, they readily linked disease with the new faith and its clergy. Shamans and other leaders sometimes used this connection to thwart the efforts of Catholic missionaries (see document 2).48 Possibly the association of priests with witchcraft increased the gendered association among North American Indians of witchcraft with men, but there is simply not enough evidence to know with any certainty.
The connection of disease to witchcraft—since one thing witches did was to spread sickness—meant that evidence of witches’ activities was pervasive in the years during and after European encounters, which brought dreadful epidemic diseases in their wake (see documents 2 and 3). The spread of Eurasian diseases in the Americas accompanied and enabled European military conquest. Historians and epidemiologists talk about “virgin soil populations”—groups unaccustomed to certain diseases and who possess no immunities to them. Indeed, diseases often moved in advance of Europeans, sometimes spread inadvertently by traders. What this meant, for Americans, was sometimes a devastating destruction.