Seneca Possessed: Indians, Witchcraft, and Power in the Early American Republic by Matthew Dennis (review)

Handsome Lake is due for a renaissance. The visionary prophet and political leader of the Seneca nation inaugurated the most durable of the new Native American traditions of the early American republic (1787–1850); he also posthumously served as the model for Anthony F. C. Wallace’s revitalization theory in The Death and Rebirth of the Seneca in 1969. Yet even though the Seneca and the broader Iroquois Confederacy have been among the most-studied Native American groups, Handsome Lake—and his witch hunts—have had little attention since Wallace. This dearth may derive from the Americanist reluctance to take up ‘“witchcraft” in the historical records after 1692, or perhaps from the imposing shadow Wallace casts over Iroquois historiography. Matthew Dennis’s Seneca Possessed shows no such reluctance, and offers a timely reassessment of Handsome Lake and Seneca witchcraft.

Revitalization theory is not Dennis’s exclusive concern, but it is worth summarizing here. Wallace’s theory of revitalization argued that cultures under duress can combine their own traditions with external cultural forms and present that synthesis as a new religion. This novel religion in turn changes but preserves the original culture; that culture brought back to life—revitalized—in a new form. In the case of Handsome Lake, revitalization meant forging a new religion out of Seneca beliefs and the teachings of the Quaker missionaries residing in Iroquoia (upstate New York and southern Ontario). The resulting faith, eventually written down as the Code of Handsome Lake (Gaiwiio), continues to the present.

Dennis offers a shrewd innovation on this old story: Handsome Lake’s teachings not only added Christian angels and hellfire to Seneca spirituality, it also added Christian patriarchy. With the rise of Handsome Lake’s religion in 1799, Seneca life became more misogynistic and offered fewer rights for women. In this way, Seneca culture followed the same trajectory as white American culture in the early republic. According to the prevailing Americanist historiography, the early stages of capitalism and universal manhood suffrage steadily whittled away at the economic and cultural status of women across the United States. The Seneca version of this process, Dennis argues, was played out in Handsome Lake’s witch trials.

The details of those trials are hazy; Wallace barely discusses them, which makes Dennis’s work the first extended academic history of the topic. At least one witch was killed in 1799, just prior to Handsome Lake’s first prophetic vision. In 1801 and 1809, Handsome Lake himself made accusations of witchcraft; it is unclear whether the accusations led to executions. In 1821, a Seneca named Tommy Jenny took it upon himself to execute a suspected witch, and was then himself imprisoned by New York state for murder. Other accusations and executions may have occurred.

Dennis’s argument relies heavily on the claim of the feminization of Seneca witchcraft. Under Handsome Lake, ‘“the Seneca understanding” of witchcraft ‘“changed—increasingly the ‘witch’ appeared in the shape of a woman” (82). That claim, however, is undermined by Dennis’s corresponding footnote: ‘“I suspect that earlier witchcraft suspicions and accusations among the Iroquois were balanced by gender, and that post-Revolutionary Seneca witch-hunting demonized women in an unprecedented fashion, but the available evidence does not permit any satisfactory quantitative analysis” (249 n. 2).

That is a whopper of a qualification, and it should have more prominence than a footnote. Iroquoia in the early 1800s offers no extensive court records to permit the tidy analysis of gender and witchcraft (as in Carol Karlsen’s work), nor are there confessions from which to interpret the accused witches’ understandings of gender and witchcraft (as in Lyndal Roper’s). Evidence for Seneca witchcraft—before and after 1799—relies on anecdotal evidence, unreliable newspaper reporting, and Iroquois oral tradition. Dennis repeatedly insists that these stories provide evidence of the feminization of...