• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 610 0

supernatural powers through rituals (see documents 1 and 2). Prophets, for their part, spurned this approach, looking not to ritual but to individual behavior as ways to redeem their communities.210 The Shawnee prophet, for example, condemned medicine bundles, sacred items much like the enslaved conjurer’s gris-gris, which gave Indian shamans their power to heal and could confer special strength on warriors. François-Joseph Le Mercier described one in document 2: it contained “some hairs, a tobacco seed, a green leaf, and a little cedar twig.”211 The Indian conjurer pictured in figure 11 wears just such a bag. Tenskwatawa redefined such objects as malevolent. The prophets’ view of medicine men as at best foolish and at worst evil and satanic was a long-standing opinion of Christian missionaries, but it had traditionally been rejected by Indians. The prophets also foretold doom and disaster for those who failed to follow their teaching. One Delaware prophet’s visions in 1806 predicted a whirlwind that would destroy the people if they did not follow prescribed ceremonies. Handsome Lake promised great sickness for those who neglected his message.212

Handsome Lake and Tenskwatawa made witch-hunting a central component of their efforts to revitalize indigenous communities, as it had been in similar movements in the 1750s–1770s.213 The witch hunts of the early nineteenth century revealed both the efforts of these beleaguered tribes to reconstitute themselves in a turbulent period and also the extent to which the groups had become acculturated during centuries of contact with Europeans and Euro-Americans. The Senecas offer an especially clear view of acculturation in their altered definition of witches, who were almost exclusively female during the period of the nineteenth-century witch hunts.

Handsome Lake’s code did not invent witchcraft, which had been a part of Seneca beliefs since before European contact. Just two days before his first vision, an accused witch was murdered, stabbed to death while working in a field in full view of the community, because she had allegedly killed a child.214 But the idea of who a witch was, or what she or he did, had changed from the centuries before and during European contact. After the American Revolution, Seneca witches became women. The prophet’s attack on women echoed the gender norms of white Americans, and especially of the Quaker missionaries who had reached Indian country in 1798 and sought to inculcate these values. Quakers hoped to turn Seneca women into submissive women, confined to the household, which would be organized along the patriarchal order central to white American practice, not in the matrilineal lodges inhabited by the Senecas. They rewarded, for example, crops produced by men (Seneca women customarily raised crops), offering men cash for their rye or wheat. These new values had considerable influence on Handsome Lake. When Handsome Lake woke up from his trance, the first sins he addressed were precisely those that the Quakers had been speaking against: divorce; drinking; and the abuse of women, children, and the elderly.215 The prophet also rejected polygamy for monogamy. Mary Jemison, who had been captured by the Senecas as a child in 1755 and spent her life among them, reported the strains these transformations caused in her own household, where her son John lived with two wives. A second son, Thomas, opposed the practice, “although polygamy was tolerated” within the tribe, and criticized his polygamist brother, even calling him a witch. Thomas also accused Jemison herself of being a witch, for having a witch for a son.216

It is impossible to determine exactly how many people were executed in the Seneca witch hunts. The historian Matthew Dennis suggests that some of the oral histories of the period, including the recollection by Mary Jemison that thousands died in the hunts, are exaggerated. But certainly there were times of intense activity, including a campaign in 1801 following the death of Handsome Lake’s niece.217

While the Seneca witch hunts targeted women,