Witchcraft in Early North America - Alison Games [20]
The Spanish saw the Devil in the Pueblo Revolt. Spanish officials paid close attention to testimony given after the revolt by Indians who claimed that the revolt’s leader, Popé, had communicated with the Devil (see document 5). Witchcraft emerged as a crucial explanation for the revolt, not only in explaining its timing and personnel, but also in helping the Spanish make sense of the targets of Pueblo attack. One of the men whipped in the 1675 witch hunt was Popé. It was Popé who emerged to lead the revolt in 1680, and it was Popé who articulated a vision of a new society, one in which all Spanish influences were expunged and the old gods restored. The millenarian visions that were conveyed so fully in the Tepehuan and Pueblo uprisings, the expectation that the Spanish could be dislodged and old gods restored, were classic expressions of revolts that took place within the first two generations of conquest. In these first decades of occupation and invasion, indigenous people still adhered to precontact religious beliefs and worldviews, and these beliefs empowered shamans and soldiers alike to combat the upheavals caused by epidemic disease, forced labor, and disrupted ritual life.77 To Europeans, these uprisings and their religious goals looked like witchcraft.
One unusual feature of the historical scholarship on witchcraft in the Americas is the extent to which historians often agree with the interpretation of European colonizers that witchcraft was indeed a form of resistance. In this interpretation, Indians, mestizos, Africans, and others practiced witchcraft (as defined by both themselves and Europeans) and used these practices actively to strike at and to thwart Europeans and those who occupied their territory, claimed their labor, displaced them from their homes, assaulted them sexually, and transformed their world.78 Irene Silverblatt, for example, argues that Andean women who confessed to witchcraft likely believed themselves to be witches and that their pact with the Devil “was a symbol of their alienation from a society which offered them little more than despair. It was their attempt to gain power in a society in which they were powerless.”79 In their study of the Abiquiu outbreak (1756–1763), Malcolm Ebright and Rick Hendricks similarly argue that witchcraft was indeed being practiced in this major New Mexico episode, and that the Indians there “used witchcraft against the Franciscans as a form of resistance to Christianization.”80
Historians studying witchcraft in Europe or British America tend not to write frequently about witches as people expressing or seeking social or cultural power. Not least because so many European witches were women, people for the most part without equal legal status in their societies, witches tend to evoke historians’ sympathy for the terrible plight in which they found themselves. Mary Lee, an elderly woman traveling alone who was murdered as a witch by frightened sailors on their journey to Maryland, is a perfect case in point (see document 9). Other accused witches were entangled in legal systems in which it was sometimes very difficult to prove innocence, especially given the willingness of courts to apply different standards to witch trials and to allow apparitions to be evidence of guilt (see document 24). Many of these accused witches may well have been guilty of witchcraft as