The Witches of Abiquiu: The Governor, the Priest, the Genízaro Indians, and the Devil (review)

Historians of both witchcraft and Native America in the early modern period need to learn to discern voices. Trial transcripts and colonial records tend to silence or summarize the words of accused witches or indigenous peoples. To compensate, scholars in both fields have learned to “read the silences” in official documents to create history “from below.” Given the parallels in methodology, it is perhaps surprising that few historians have examined the overlap between early modern European courts and Native American witchcraft accusations. Malcolm Ebright and Rick Hendricks have brought to light one such tragic example from colonial New Mexico: The Witches of Abiquiu explores the dynamics of the witchcraft outbreak among the Genízaro Indians between 1756 and 1766. Demons spoke from mouths of possessed Genízaro victims, and befuddled priests sought advice on magic from local curanderos (Native American healers roughly analogous to European cunning folk). Yet the official response from both Spanish administrators and the Inquisition was skeptical, and no executions took place. Situated between Europe and the Americas, Comanchería and Mexico, modern and early modern, the Abiquiu outbreak deserves a full-length study.

To explain the outbreak, the authors make frequent use of the concept of a “middle ground”—Richard White’s theoretical space where neither colonizer nor colonized can establish hegemony. The middle ground therefore allows new cultural and political forms to arise. The very designation “Genízaro” embodied the middle ground; the Genízaro emerged in an eighteenth-century ethnogenesis, as a collection of freed slaves from numerous Plains Indian tribes. Virtually alone among native peoples under Spanish suzerainty, the Genízaro could own land after emancipation, thanks to special dispensations from colonial administrators. Particularly under the rule of Governor Tomás Vélez Cachupín, the Genízaro blended aspects of the cultures of the Apache, Pawnee, Kiowa, Spanish, and others.

In 1756, a Genízaro named El Cojo (“The Cripple”) was accused of having a pact with the Devil; the years of investigation that followed revealed the polyglot supernatural heritage at Abiquiu. El Cojo and the other accused witches allegedly possessed the evil eye (common to European witchcraft cases) and the ability to shoot solid objects into victims’ bodies (common to Navajo beliefs). Ecclesiastic investigations consulted Native American curanderos as well as Catholic witch-hunting manuals, especially the protocols of De La Peña Montenegro’s Itinerario. Official reports incorporated descriptions of Native American hunting magic into the early modern mythology of the witches’ sabbat. Catholic clergy determined that local Native American petroglyphs were in fact satanic symbols; priests hurriedly destroyed the rock drawings and replaced them with crosses. The legal response to Genízaro witch fears followed the tragic arc of many early modern European witch trials: the accused were tortured, and under torture produced lists of names. Over two hundred “witches” were identified in this way. Nevertheless, Inquisitorial authorities in Mexico City, influenced by Enlightenment writings, refused to issue execution orders, citing a lack of evidence that devils had truly possessed the victims. Most of those accused received light sentences.

Ebright and Hendricks deserve great credit for bringing this trial to light—and for the difficult task of translating Inquisitorial and other documents that had long languished in Mexican and American archives. Witchcraft scholars who focus on Native American groups and Enlightenment societies will need to know and understand this outbreak in the years to come. The New Mexico trials should augment studies of late-eighteenth-century witch trials elsewhere in Christian dominions (such as Hungary and Poland); they also fill a gap in the historiography of New Mexico, where the Pueblo Revolt of 1680 tends to overshadow all other colonial developments.

Yet despite unearthing new sources, Abiquiu sometimes tries to force its evidence into preexisting...