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

This book shows the Senecas as an "adaptive, innovative people" coping with the turbulent early decades of United States history, and specifically of New York State (209). Matthew Dennis asserts that the Senecas' story has "too often . . . been told as a saga of declension and disappearance," and he counters this view with his own well-researched and compelling alternative interpretation (11). He helps readers understand Senecas' achievement of "self-possession" within a chaotic world that threatened Senecas with complete loss of control (225). Central to his interpretation is a careful analysis of the role that gender played in the transformations among the Senecas. Changing formulations of witchcraft accusations reflect larger issues in this study, including how the Senecas moved from division to greater unity by the 1820s, as they opposed challenges to their sovereignty.

Self-possession involved Senecas adjusting to the growing market economy while employing strategies aimed at retaining homelands. Senecas adapted to the commercializing society around them, finding ways to utilize wider markets to help themselves survive as a people. They promoted economic connections with Pittsburgh through the Alleghany River trade. Recognizing the growing demands in western New York for construction materials and able builders, Senecas produced and sold boards from their sawmill, made shingles, and gained a reputation for their house carpentry skills (164-65). Dennis portrays the Senecas as more in step with the times economically than were Quakers, who, he writes, pushed an "anachronistic" approach in their mission to the Senecas (178). Fearing corruptions from burgeoning markets, Friends favored isolated Seneca nuclear households surviving on domestic and agricultural production. Dennis portrays the Senecas as taking the more sensible approach. They recognized that the Quakers' preference for allotting Seneca lands would only weaken their ability to stop encroachments from speculators. "It was prudent," Dennis writes, "to calculate that land was better protected if held collectively" (144).

Yet the Quakers did not aggressively demand change from the Senecas, according to Dennis. Compared to other missionaries, "none seemed as patient— or even reticent—in sharing their particular creeds and rituals, or their criticism of Indian religious practice, as the Quakers" (121). In fact, Friends' presence among the Senecas, the author suggests, served as a type of "firebreak" against other missionaries (119), some of whom may not have worked as well with the Senecas to create spaces for "selective adaptation" (58). An example of this selectivity was Seneca women's response to the Quakers' program of encouraging spinning. Seneca women participated but did not allow spinning to usurp their longstanding roles as agriculturalists (169).

A major achievement of this book is how well it places the Senecas' story in the larger context of the times, while examining the Senecas on their own terms. This era saw the rise of the Seneca reformer and visionary Handsome Lake. Dennis stresses continuities between Handsome Lake's teachings and older Seneca beliefs, while also noting how Handsome Lake's "hybrid teachings and developing code reflected the prolonged intercultural conversation between Seneca religious traditions and various representatives of Christianity" (70). The book situates the discussion of Senecas' witchcraft accusations, which arose in deeply troubled times, within a larger discussion of the millennialism and revivalism spreading through New York State. Religious movements of this era spurred gendered reformulations. "Whether consciously or without calculation," Dennis writes, Handsome Lake "imbibed aspects of white patriarchy and reworked it to fit his purposes" (88). He argues that Handsome Lake's witchcraft accusations were aimed at women to an extent that had not been customary among Senecas of earlier eras; yet, in the long run, Seneca women took a major part in shaping Handsome Lake's teachings into "a faith that accorded women status and conserved women's religious roles" (110).

Interrogating the theme of "possession" in several ways, Dennis offers readers a fascinating and significant study that expands and deepens understandings of the history...