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sorcerers, to bring all the people under their [own] dominion and authority; and the sorcerers, with the same opposition, persuaded all that they made the rain fall and the earth yield good crops, and other things at which the warriors sneered. Wherefore there were between them continuous civil wars, so great that they killed each other [off] and laid waste whole pueblos, wherein the Demon had his usual crop. Their religion, though it was not formal idolatry, was nearly so, since they made offerings for whatsoever action. As, at the time when they were going out to fight their enemies, they offered up flour and other things to the scalps of those they had slain of the hostile nation. If they were going to hunt, they offered up flour to heads of deer, jackrabbits, cottontail rabbits, and other dead animals. If to fish, they made offerings to the river. The women who wished that the men should desire them, went out into the country fat and well, and set up a stone or some small pole on some hill, and there offered flour to it; and for eight days, or as many as they could [endure], did not eat, except something to disturb their stomachs and provoke vomiting; and they flogged themselves cruelly. And when they could endure no more, and from fat had made themselves lean and of the mien of the Demon, they returned [to the pueblo] very confident that the first man that they might see them would desire them, and would give them mantas [cotton]—which is their chief end. But this adoration of these poles and stones is in nowise reverential; for it makes no odds to them [the Indians] that [people] trample upon them nor spit upon them, but as a ceremonial they put them thus. . . . And in this manner the Demon kept them deceived with a thousand superstitions. . . .

Notes

1. On the Arroyo de Chililí, located about twenty-five miles southeast of Albuquerque.

2. Luisa de Carrión (1602–1665) was a nun in Spain who experienced miraculous flights to New Mexico during which visits she assisted the priests in their conversion efforts.

Source: Emma Augustus Burbank Ayer, trans., The Memorial of Fray Alonso de Benavides 1630 (Chicago: R. R. Donnelley and Sons Company, 1916), 20–21, 28–29, 30–32.

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2. Making Sense of the Sickness in

Huron Country, 1636–1637: Who’s a Witch?

This document is culled from a long account by a Jesuit, François-Joseph Le Mercier (1604–1690), published in the massive Jesuit Relations (1610–1791). Written by Jesuits in Canada whose ambition was to convert Indians to Christianity, these letters give us a rare and remarkable entry into the collision of cultures that transpired when the French first arrived in Canada. Le Mercier reached Canada in 1635, and worked and lived among the Hurons for almost two decades. With Europeans, of course, came terrible sickness, in this particular case, probably measles or influenza. Both Indians and French had clear ideas about what caused disease, even such unfamiliar ones as those the Hurons suffered, and also what steps to take to cure illness. As the excerpts below make clear, witchcraft and sorcery were critical elements of these discussions. What (or who) caused illness? Just who was a witch? How did Jesuit actions increase Indian convictions that they were witches? Did the Jesuits become witches when they crossed the Atlantic?

On the 1st day of October [1636], I felt some touches of illness; the fever seized me towards evening, and I had to give up, as well as the others. But I became free from it too cheaply; I had only three attacks, but the second one was so violent that I condemned myself to be bled; my blood was obstinate, however. God reserved for me a more natural remedy, which appeared at the end of the third attack, and rendered me able to say the holy Mass from the next day on. However, I was almost unable for six or seven days to render any service to our Fathers. The Savages wondered at the order we observed in caring for our sick, and the diet that we made them observe. It was a curious thing to them, for they had never yet seen French people ill. I have