Witches Among Native American Navajo and Pueblo Peoples
A scholarly article on witchcraft in Southwestern Native American tribes. Please comment and add your own posts.
Additional information about Navajo witches and mythology at: http://americanindianoriginals.com/
For Native Americans no crime loomed more heinous nor brought swifter retribution than that of witchcraft. Often, mere suspicion resulted in condemnation and execution. Had a victim many relatives or friends, further bloodshed might follow if they sought revenge.
Witchcraft and the manipulation of supernatural powers for evil purposes was practically universal among American Indians. Many of the rites and customs of black magic indulged in by inhabitants of the New World bore striking resemblance to practices found in Europe, Africa, the South Seas, and elsewhere, for in whatever tribe or environment the craft appeared, there could be found the common belief that blame for human suffering often rested upon deliberate misuse of otherworldly powers by persons versed in the black arts.
Many Indian modes of bewitching paralleled those reported in Europe and New England. Native witches sought locks of hair, nail parings, saliva, urine, or fragments of perspiration-stained clothing from their prey so that these might be employed in occult treatments to produce disease or misfortune.
Among tribes of the Northwest Coast, witches made images of enemies, then tortured those parts of the body in which they desired to instill pain. The Chippewa of the Great Lakes followed similar practice, except their images were not dolls or effigies, but figures drawn in the sand or the ashes of a campfire.
Among the ancient Aztecs of Mexico, doll-like representations of amatl paper were fashioned to serve the needs of witches.
The Tarahumara of the Sierra Madre of Chihuahua dispensed with images and relied upon a rasping stick and song to cause injury or death, to adversely control the weather, or to provoke other misfortune.
A technique for bewitching encountered among most Indian groups involved the injection of some foreign object into a victim, such as an arrowhead, spearpoint, or piece of bone. Witches accomplished this, not through direct physical means, but by symbolic propulsion or by exerting mental energy. The Haida believed witches introduced mice inside a person's body and that if these could be expelled health returned.
The Cheyenne of the Great Plains used the "intrusion theory" to explain serious illness, and their medicine men, employing supernatural rites, were called upon to locate and extract the disturbing element.5 Most tribes attributed to an evil medicine man the power to draw out a person's soul and fill the vacuum with the spirit of an animal or snake.
For the Pueblo Indians of the Southwest, the nature and extent of witchcraft belief is fairly well known since these people have been studied meticulously by anthropologists for almost eighty years. Moreover, as we have seen, Spanish-colonial records beginning in the seventeenth century contain many references to witches and their activities.
These documents, including trial records, reports of the missionaries, and statements by civil officials, clearly reveal the long and intense involvement of the Pueblos with witchcraft and allied matters of an occult character.
Evidently the Pueblo Indians' concern with magical systems extends well back into prehistoric times, but of this, precise details are lacking since information supplied by archeology is generally restricted to aspects of material culture.
Nevertheless, rock art (incised or painted pictures left on cliff faces or cave walls), fetishes, and other ceremonial objects that have been discovered and studied by scholars strongly suggest that witchcraft was a tangible and threatening reality to the earliest inhabitants of the Rio Grande Valley.
Furthermore, Pueblo mythology and folk history are rich in descriptive detail concerning the misdeeds of witches, adding more weight to the suggestion that such belief is grounded in ancient tradition.
A tale of witch treachery current among the people of Jemez Pueblo is always related as having taken place "in the beginning." Then, the Jemez dwelled in several villages along a stream at the foot of the Nacimiento Mountains and were prey to a band of witches (referred to as sawish in the Towa language of Jemez) who plotted to destroy them. Once when these evil persons met late in the night at a secret rendezvous their conversation was overheard by a young Pueblo boy.
Hastening to his father, who was a native priest possessed of supernatural powers, the boy reported that the witches intended to burn the Jemez villages by wrapping pine gum in cedar bark, igniting these bundles, and casting them upon roof tops while the people slept.
At once the father prepared sacred prayer sticks, and taking these, together with some clay canteens, he proceeded to a place not far from the village called Black Rocks. Here he set up the sticks in the canteens to serve as a defensive line against the inroads of witchcraft.
Looking up from his work he saw one of the neighboring pueblos ablaze and the fire sweeping out of control directly toward him. But when the flames reached Black Rocks the prayer sticks went into action, spewing out streams of water and quenching the fire.
The other pueblos, lacking this protection, were all destroyed, and only those Indians who escaped to the river were saved. For that reason, according to popular Jemez belief, only one of their pueblos exists today, and it continues to be bedeviled by witches in its midst who seek to complete the ruin of their predecessors.
A figure common in Pueblo folk tales is Coyote, the arch trickster, who receives blame for introducing witchcraft among the Indians. According to a Tewa story, Coyote married Yellow Corn Girl and taught her how to change herself into an animal by leaping through a ring. Following this transformation she and Coyote slew her mother and brother by witchcraft, and from that point on witches have plied their iniquitous trade along the Rio Grande.
Several elements of this tale—metamorphosis into an animal, passing through a ring, and the Coyote figure, are features that recur again and again in southwestern witchcraft lore, both Indian and Spanish.
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