Indigenous Knowledge and the Environment in Africa and North America by Gordon David M.;Krech III Shepard; & Shepard Krech III

Author:Gordon, David M.;Krech III, Shepard; & Shepard Krech III
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Ohio University Press
Published: 2012-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

Conclusions

The culture war over medicine continued after the 1824 epidemic. At times Christian evangelists even expressed dismay that they were losing to the “conjurors.” In 1827, the Reverend Isaac Proctor lamented that even those who had become church members still practiced native medicine. “Their conjuring is as purely heathen as almost any thing to be met with on the River Ganges,” he informed his mission board. “When conjuring they pray to almost every creature such as white dogs, butterflies, turtles, etc. etc.”54 Daniel Butrick, though, did not let such backsliding pass. In 1828 the minister suspended two church members who had engaged in “conjuring” and reported that “my preaching respecting idleness, Sabbath breaking, but especially conjuring and my determined & public opposition to them has excited some feeling against me.” He admitted that church attendance dropped off but glossed over Cherokee opposition by claiming that “perfect order and regularity” existed “in our meetings because none attend but such as wish to receive instruction.”55

Similarly, Charles Hicks’s converted brother, William, informed a Moravian “that he had been endeavoring to relieve certain Heathen conjurors from their superstitious ways, but that as yet his exertions had been vain.”56 By the end of the 1820s, the Moravians and the ABCFM missionaries were joined by the Baptists and Methodists, but altogether they counted only 1,399 members among the nearly 15,000 Cherokees.57 Such diminutive numbers indicate that a large majority of Cherokees remained wedded to what the missionaries considered ancient beliefs and customs.

Scholars should not accept the missionaries’ claims of these medical beliefs and rituals as ancient. As the smallpox dance illustrates, the Cherokees adapted their indigenous knowledge to deal with the threats that colonialism and its germs presented. In 1824 Cherokees had further opportunity for creativity in the way they dealt with smallpox. Vaccine was available to them, and it was not out of the realm of possibility that offered to them under different circumstances, they would have accepted it. Because of the cultural war that the missionaries provoked, no middle ground existed in which natives could incorporate Euro-American medicine into their medicine. Indigenous knowledge and practices about smallpox remained one tool in the arsenal of Cherokee religious leaders in their counterattack against the growing influence of Christianity.

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