Witchcraft in Early North America - Alison Games [54]
In this respect, the Shawnee prophet’s message was overtly political and worked effectively with the efforts of his brother, Tecumseh, to create a pan-Indian movement to oppose the United States. Tecumseh (1768–1813) led a large Indian confederacy and, like his brother, condemned those Indian leaders who sought accommodation with the United States. He fought against the United States from 1810 until his death in 1813. And many Indians were receptive to this message: among the Delawares, for example, many young men were already enraged at the chiefs for land cessions, and it was young warriors who led the chief Tedapachsit to the execution fire.221 Ultimately, Tenskwatawa’s witch hunts proved divisive and aroused considerable opposition from Indians who questioned his leadership. It was this opposition that ended the witch hunts. In the case of Handsome Lake, anti-witch zeal lasted longer, but ultimately the energy focused against witches lost its prominence in the Code of Handsome Lake.
There is a second point of comparison between the Indian witch hunts and those that came before. In North America in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, witchcraft and possession often manifested themselves in those areas experiencing the most ardent religious reformation: New England, Querétaro, or Abiquiu. And this correlation seems to have been at work among the Senecas at the time of Handsome Lake and among the Delawares, Shawnees, and Wyandots during the time of Tenskwatawa. Both prophets, like reforming clerics in other places and times, sought to revitalize their societies through rigorous changes in behavior, enforcing conformity and imparting a new rigid code of behavior. And in this setting, just as had been the case elsewhere, those who opposed the reforms, or who were unable or unwilling to alter their conduct and beliefs to exist peacefully with their reform-minded neighbors, languished at the margins, demonized as witches who undermined the reforming mission.
The connection in the early nineteenth century between revitalization and witch hunts also points to a third link to the earlier period, this one to seventeenth-century New Spain. There, Indians in the northern parts of the viceroyalty pursued their own revitalization efforts and sought to expel the Spanish. Both the Tepehuan and Pueblo revolts can be understood in this context, as movements inspired by messianic leaders who hoped to marshal indigenous gods to force the Spanish to withdraw (see documents 4 and 5). And witchcraft, too, figured in these movements. But in this earlier era, it was the European Christians who brought accusations of witchcraft, and they turned these accusations on Indians. In the nineteenth century, Indian prophets saw witchcraft all around, too, but they found it in their midst, not just among their enemies.
Finally, we can see in the Seneca and Shawnee witch hunts the same complex dynamics that Norton argues shaped the events at Salem and that seem to have played a role at Abiquiu and in Querétaro: the challenges of people with opposing interests living in forced proximity, the pressures each endured on land, lives, and livelihoods, and the fear and anger that provoked each to violent action. New Englanders, Europeans, and Indians alike lived in a world full of peril and greed and uncertain futures in the late seventeenth century; so, too, did the remnant nations of Indian Country in the new United States. In a world where people linked witches to all these dangers, was it any surprise that witchcraft defined how people articulated their anger and their fears?
Skepticism
The Indian witch hunts among the Delawares came to an end because people did not act on accusations. This skepticism was pervasive, and it accompanied belief in witchcraft, not only in the same period, but within the same individuals. When people fell ill, they consulted physicians. When people lodged accusations against their neighbors, they reached deep into the past, sometimes referring to events