America Bewitched: The Story of Witchcraft After Salem by Davies Owen

Author:Davies, Owen [Davies, Owen]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
Published: 2013-01-25T00:00:00+00:00

Alaska: of barbers and gunboats

From the moment the United States purchased Alaska from the Russian Empire in 1867 through to the present day, governors of Alaska have had issues with witchcraft. On taking over the vast region the army moved in to impose ‘order’ on indigenous populations that were liberally described as heathens, pagans, and idolaters. The natives had their own judicial and social mechanisms for maintaining law and order, but as with other Native-American peoples these were often at odds with European conceptions of justice and morality. In fact the real law-and-order problem concerned the thousands of unruly gold prospectors that headed north, while the soldiers who were meant to be keeping the peace were frequent breakers of it. Still, witchcraft clearly posed a serious problem from the 1870s onwards. Missionaries assumed that it had always been thus, but maybe it was the social and cultural stresses generated by the arrival en masse of the Europeans that exacerbated native fears of a witch epidemic. It has been suggested that this is what happened to the Kaska Indians of British Columbia and the Yukon during the early twentieth century. The Kaska way of life was disrupted by miners making their way to the Klondike goldfields, and concern regarding witches increased with greater contact with the Tlingit peoples to the west amongst whom witchcraft had already assumed epidemic proportions.22

The old naval flagship the USS Jamestown was one of the hubs of American Alaskan administration in the early years. It had been launched in 1844 and first served off the West African coast to suppress the slave trade. In 1867–8 it served as a guard and store ship at Sitka, the capital of the new American territory.23 The land here in the panhandle of Alaska, along the Pacific coast, was populated by the Tlingit people. They had already had decades of semi-colonial rule under the Russian-American Company, which had a commercial monopoly in the territory trading principally in furs. The Russian Orthodox Church had also set up a mission, created parishes, and founded schools. An 1850 Church report was confident that the power of the native medicine doctors was weakening due to such missionary activity. The Russian physicians, who the Tlingit initially suspected of being workers of witchcraft, also reported some success at convincing them that their knowledge was better than that of their medicine men, and that witches were not responsible for diseases.24

Under the captaincy of Lester Beardslee the Jamestown returned again between 1879 and 1881 to protect American interests and preserve the peace after the withdrawal of the army from Alaska. Ten days after arriving in Sitka, Beardslee, who took a keen interest in native customary law, was informed of an elderly native woman who had fled from her people fearing she would be killed as a witch. She was brought to the customs house along with those who had made the threats. The latter were informed in no uncertain terms that they would be hanged if they carried out their intentions.

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