Native Signification and Communication

In his study of Joseph-François Lafitau's Moeurs des sauvages américains comparées aux moeurs des premiers temps, or Customs of the American Indians Compared with the Customs of Primitive Times, Andreas Motsch quotes (172-74) this anecdote about a female Huron shaman who was asked for information about seven warriors who had been a long time absent from the village. She employed the method of pyromancy:

She began first by preparing a space of ground which she cleaned thoroughly and covered with flour or well sifted ashes (I do not exactly remember which). She set around on this powder, as on a map, some bundles of sticks representing various villages of different tribes, observing accurately their relative positions and the direction of the wind. She then went into dreadful convulsions during which we perceived clearly seven sparks of fire come from the sticks representing our village, trace a path over this ash or flour and go from one village to another. After disappearing for a rather long time in one of these villages these sparks reappeared, traced a new path back until they finally stopped rather near the village or bundle of sticks from which the first seven had originally set out. Then the Indian woman . . . related everything unusual that had happened to the warriors, the path that they had taken, the villages through which they had passed, the number of prisoners that they had taken. She told where they were at that moment and gave the assurance that they would arrive three days after at the village, a statement verified by the arrival of the warriors who confirmed her statements in every point.

(Lafitau, Customs of the American Indians, 1: 244-45)

Lafitau followed this story with the words of an Abenaqui female shaman, a convert to Christianity, explaining to her mission priest why she continued to practice pyromancy:

I have never understood what harm there is in it and I still have great difficulty in seeing any. Listen, God has given men different gifts. To the Frenchmen, he has given the Scriptures by which you learn the things that take place far from you as if they were in front of you; to us he has given the art of knowing, by fire, things remote in time or place. Suppose then that this fire is our book, our Scriptures, thou willst not see that there is any difference or more harm in the one than in the other.

(Ibid. 245-46)

I found this passage and Motsch's discussion of it fascinating. The first story is an unusually detailed account of a divination method quite similar to the Ojibwa Kosaubunzitchegun as described by John Tanner (110). Lafitau, relying on an unnamed French informant, affirmed the power of the technique. He did not, like many other missionaries, dismiss it as a hoax or as black magic contrived by the medicine men whom the French called jongleurs or "jugglers." Still more interesting, however, is how the Abenaqui woman calls such pyromancy a form of writing. For as Michael Taussig argues in Mimesis and Alterity, this pyromancy and other such practices, which resemble the popular notion of the voodoo doll, are at their core forms of mimesis. Like writing, these are signs representing objects in the world. And these divinitory symbols were sometimes not simply read but "written"; the symbols were manipulated in an attempt to control the objects or persons that they represented, through a power that modern or Western observers believed to be false or superstitious. Taussig's great insight was to perceive how in Western modernity, "mimesis is of a piece with primitivism" (219) and to see that this...