Seneca Possessed

Most people who have spent time delving into Seneca Iroquois records have come across intriguing references to witchcraft right into the twentieth century. Therefore, the idea of a book that unpacks witchcraft and Seneca life is a welcome one. Here we find useful information on witchcraft and the Seneca, placed in a broad context and juxtaposed with further information on the Handsome Lake faith, gendered tribal change, and Quaker missions. A real strength is the way the book personalizes Seneca history wherever possible, painting a lively picture of competing spiritualities in early Seneca life. However, this book is baggily composed. It begins and ends with a court case surrounding the Senecas’ execution of a witch and the Indian leader Red Jacket's defense of this exercise of Seneca judicial sovereignty. By direct comparison with the Salem witch trials two centuries earlier, the narrative is structured around the central goal of exploring how the Seneca people and their homeland were “possessed” culturally, spiritually, materially, and legally. Just what “possession” means in this or any other context is never fully explained, nor is the issue of how valid such a nonnative term and idea might be in the various contexts addressed. Instead the author simply states, “In a visceral sense, a colonized people are a people bewitched” (p. 27). As he has in previous works, the author relies on nineteenth-century sources, imbued with their own nineteenth-century agendas, as the platform for his discussion of the Handsome Lake faith. This allows him to present the belief system as fostering patriarchy and as serving to associate witchery with Seneca women. More detailed mining of specific archival repositories for native scholarship on Seneca spirituality might have changed this as would paying attention to secondary native and nonnative scholarship on native spirituality. The book also consistently speaks in encompassing terms about “the Seneca” without defining who they are and how they have changed over time. It does not define witchcraft—a multifarious and heavily theorized phenomenon; instead, the book simply generalizes it as a symptom of cultural crisis. Further, while it is commendable that the author takes pains to register Seneca persistence, ingenuity, and survival, and it is commendable that he sees Seneca history as not yet “postcolonial” (p. 4), these are not the radical or new ideas within Native American studies that he implies

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