Witchcraft in Early North America - Alison Games [21]
The preoccupation by colonizers about witchcraft and resistance to European occupation and rule has the inadvertent consequence of turning indigenous witchcraft practices into actions whose main purpose was to react to external forces, and makes it harder for us to see how witchcraft functioned within indigenous communities to address concerns that were unconnected to European invasions. And of course it continues to be difficult to determine what the “witches” themselves might have thought they were doing. Were they resisting? Or were they simply engaging in customary practices to solve problems? It is hard to tell whether, by ascribing such power to witches, we are adopting their perspective, or that of their accusers, and thus in fact perpetuating their victimization. Readers are urged to draw their own conclusions about these matters in their analysis of the documents in section II.
New Mexico
For all the European conviction that Indians were linked by their very nature to the Devil, only in one part of North America did Indian “witches” appear regularly in colonial courts. This was in Spanish America, and it was an unexpected outcome of colonization, since the lack of Spanish interest in prosecuting witches in Europe hardly predicted the increased numbers of witches in New Spain. Witchcraft was a central feature of life in New Mexico, from the first Spanish forays into the region through the major outbreak in Abiquiu. The last witchcraft case handled by the Inquisition was in 1800. The Inquisition was a long-standing institution devoted to rooting out heresy, and witchcraft cases often fell within its purview. As Spaniards confronted Indians, and devised racial and cultural systems that placed Europeans, Africans, and Indians in relation to each other, they yoked feminine attributes to some of these non-Europeans. And, colonizers believed, just as weak European women attached themselves to Satan, so too did Indians.
Numerous cases found their way to colonial courts, both those operated by the Inquisition and those managed by civil officials. The first witchcraft allegations that caught the notice of Spanish officials in New Mexico were made in 1626 (the same year as the very first case in the English colonies, contained in document 8), when an Indian woman and her mestiza daughter were accused of sorcery and of using their powers on two Indian servants, both of whom sickened and died. Both women were also accused of love magic: the mother took revenge on a lover, who died, and the daughter, who was married, was accused of infidelity with a lover whom she allegedly poisoned and killed. Accusers alleged that the women were able to transport themselves at night, traveling abroad in an egg to spy on their lovers. After accusations in 1626 and 1628, the charges were investigated in 1631. Skeptical of these claims, officials declined to pursue the case.82
In the 1626 case, the accused witches targeted other Indians, but numerous cases from New Mexico reveal the intersecting lives of colonists, Indians, and enslaved Africans. Their entangled lives produced entangled practices, along with ample need for the remedies promised by witchcraft. As early as 1629, a Spanish cowboy named Luis de Rivera, who was denounced to the