Two stories have surfaced from my research on dance and colonial history that tell of magical performances that might sink ships. One chronicles Indigenous shamanistic ship-sinking performances in Alaska at the end of the nineteenth century. The other claims that witchcraft practices of sabbath dancing and storm-brewing occurred among Basque Labourdian seafaring communities at the beginning of the seventeenth. In these stories, dance belongs to a set of activities that might be categorized as “natural magic”, and as such, should tell us something about nature and (of course) about magic. But they speak to me in whispers instead about the practice of researching colonial history that, even in an embrace of anti-colonial critique, keeps producing a certain kind of colonial-intellectual desiring.
1.
On the invitation of Adolf Bastian, the Norwegian seafarer Johan Adrian Jacobsen was travelling through Alaska on behalf of the Royal Ethnological Museum of Berlin between 1881-1883. Tasked with gathering collections of Indigenous North American materials, Jacobsen found Alaska already teeming with Russian and American collectors. In his journal, he complained of high prices and increasingly turned to abandoned towns and graves as sites for extraction. Jacobsen variously “collected” bodies, ceremonial regalia, artworks, and everyday objects by means of excavations, grave robbing, coercion, deception, and purchase.
In his travel journal, Jacobsen more than once described shamanic efforts to sink the ships that moved the colonial economy through the region. Disparagingly, he describes the dance of a shaman seeking to sink the very steamer by which he was travelling the Yukon river:
The next fishing village remained in our memories because of the amazing Indian we saw running around like mad and jumping with threatening poses. He danced furiously like a crazy person, swung his cap around and threw it on the ground as long as he was in sight. The Indian pilot and steersman we had with us told us that the Indian was trying to bewitch the steamer to make it sink into the ground. Our vessel did not respond and steamed majestically past the high Hotlotulei [Hotlina] mountain range, whose tallest peak showed the first signs of the coming Artic winter. (1977 [1882]: 100)
Jacobsen here spends more energy on characterizing the dance as crazed than on describing its performance. Nonetheless, he records the existence of a very interesting dance performed with the demise of the audience floating by as its goal.
Further south, in Prince William Sound, Jacobsen gathered information about shamans from a sea captain named Anderson. In an entry on their ceremonial and performance work among Eyak Indigenous people, Jacobsen recorded Anderson’s descriptions in his travel journal:
The shamans are highly respected by the people. Captain Anderson told me that once when he was waiting for a schooner, a shaman offered to tell him whether it would come soon. So a group of people gathered and he performed his usual tricks. While he was being swung on the cords over the fire, the cords broke and he fell into the glowing embers. Quick as lightning he jumped out of the fire, and this fast flight on the part of a man who was supposed to be nonflammable made some of the audience laugh. The shaman directed his anger against the unlucky ship and cried out that it would have an accident. By chance the ship ran aground in the same year, near Saint Paul on Kodiak Island. This made the prestige of the shaman rise so that even today he is still considered one of the most important practitioners in the region. (1977 [1882] 209-210)
Either Captain Anderson or Jacobsen (or both) seem here to belittle and misunderstand the complex mix of comedy, chance, and serious magical prediction going on in the performance. What is recorded, nonetheless, is the fact that, among the Eyak – who had experienced enslavement and mass starvation at the hands of the Russian-American Company followed by dispossession and discrimination after the US purchase of Alaska in 1867 – ship-sinking shamans held positions of great renown.
2.
In an early seventeenth century treatise explaining the causes of witchcraft in the French Basque region of Labourd, the Jesuit judge Pierre de Lancre wrote of the influence of the rumbling, roiling sea upon the bodies of people who lived in relation with it:
In Labourd almost all the people throw themselves into this inconstant work of the sea; they scorn regular labor and the cultivation of the soil. And although nature has given the earth as nursemaid to all mankind, they prefer (fickle and volatile that they are) the cares of the thunderous seas. (2006 [1612]: 52)
De Lancre wrote about the sea-swept nature of Labourdian embodiment his Tableau de l’inconstance des mauvais anges et demons, published in 1612 – a book arguing that a relationship between the local people and natural environment had transformed a culture into, at best, bad Christians, and at worst, witches. De Lancre’s witch hunt is one among quite a number to occur in the region. It has been argued that de Lancre was sent to Labourd, in part, to assist the French government in obtaining greater control over its seafaring economy from the minority Basque community who had been fishing in Labrador, on the eastern coast of Canada, for generations, and whose lucrative contacts with Indigenous whalers may have extended back more than century. Labourdian Basque relations with Innu people are depicted on the below mid-16th century map by Pierre Desceliers (fig. 1), which shows a Basque whaling crew with harpoon. An Indigenous person with bow and arrow is represented on board. Evidence remains of the entanglement between Labourdian Basque and Labradorian Innu cultures, who shared technologies, and continue to share linguistic ties. Labourdian fishermen, for example, learned a harpoon technology from Inuit whalers which greatly improved their success in catching whales.
De Lancre’s witch hunt was undertaken in the summer months of 1609, when many Labourdian fathers, brothers, and sons were conveniently gone fishing. Lancre persecuted and imprisoned women, children, and a number of priests. Describing the lives women led as untethered in the absence of male authority, de Lancre critiqued Labourdian Basque life for the heightened role that women enjoyed in religious activities, supporting the care of churches and ceremonial activities.
There is in de Lancre’s treatise a testimony from a sixteen-year-old girl named Jeannette d’Abadie, who was from Ciboure. A favorite witness of de Lancre’s, d’Abadie described the grotesque feasting and dancing at sabbaths. De Lancre wrote that she, “testified that […] she had been transported to the sabbath for the first time by a woman named Gratiane” (2006 [1612]: 118), and from there to Newfoundland on the eastern coast of present day Canada – to Labrador – where Basque fishermen were engaged alongside Indigenous communities in fishing and whaling. De Lancre relays d’Abadie’s testimony:
She stated that she was frequently carried through the air to Newfoundland by the above-mentioned Gratiane, who used to bring her to the sabbath. […] She was conveyed from the Ciboure sabbath to another place with many other female witches, and that they returned right away. She said that the Devil carried them all together. She said that in the New World she saw female witches from practically all the parishes of the Labourd, and that they went to stir up thunderstorms and windstorms so that ships would perish. And, in fact, in Maricot a boat was lost that belonged to Miguel Chorena of Ciboure, who, being a witch himself, assisted in the sinking of it. Found to be true (since the ship was lost around this time), this clearly shows that witches did travel to the sabbath and that they did so to stir up storms.
Jeannette d’Abadie’s testimony stands along with one of Jeannette de Belloc, who likewise described flying witches leaving the sabbath dances, “for Newfoundland, where they went because there they saw their fathers, husbands, children, and other relatives, and because this was their customary route” (2006 [1612]: 152). De Lancre further reports on a testimony by a twenty-eight-year-old woman named Marie de la Ralde, who claimed that she had traveled from a sabbath “to Newfoundland, perched on top of a ship’s mast” and from there, joined other witches who, “poisoned everything that these poor sailors had taken from the sea” (2006 [1612]: 118).
Their testimonies speak to how women related with, imagined, and dreamed about the faraway lands where their relations travelled. This is not to say that women imagined the “New World” as a diabolical place, but instead, perhaps, that, succumbing to the pressure to imagine themselves and others in acts of witchcraft, women may have drawn on previous fantasies: of travelling to the remote place where members of their communities were working, of acts reunion, celebration, dances, and sexual relations with faraway loved ones, or of the nightmare disaster of ships sinking with family and friends aboard.
In her book on the Voices of the Accused in the Basque Witch-Craze (2019), Emma Wilby wrote that, “it is no surprise to find that several witch suspects confessed to having flown to the New World to attend sabbaths or sabotage fishing trips”, because, she argued, Basque people would have gained “vivid and memorable impressions of Amerindian life” from “fathers, husbands, brothers and other family members who […] had travelled to the New World”. De Lancre’s cross-examinations may have pressured women to reframe their experiences of religion, ceremonial life, quotidian spiritual practices, dreams, and nightmares into demonological stereotypes, but something of their experiences and cultural landscape remains in their testimonies – both of the near, and the far.
3.
Drawing from the Melanesian term mana, Durkheim theorized in Elementary Forms of Religious Life (1912) that practices of natural magic – storm-brewing, and the sinking of ships, for example – universally derived from “primitive” belief in an energetic, non-mimetic power operating beyond metaphoric relations and similitudes that, “can attach to words spoken and gestures made, as well as to material substances” (1995 [1912]: 202). In Durkheim’s thought, mana is the ultimate exchange value. Perfectly translatable between cultural and religious contexts, it rendered all symbolic activity operational yet literally insignificant. Itself identifiable with none of the sites or actions through which its energy could be magically transmitted; mana in Durkheim’s thought is immanence; “the power to produce the rain or the wind, the harvest or the light of day” around which symbolic activity could only organize at random (ibid.).
In Totem and Taboo (1913), Freud takes the concept of mana in another direction – positing it as the unapproachability and consequent magical power that the taboo holds as a initiator of symbolic action. Arguing that an energetic build-up mounts around taboos as they are desired and suppressed, Freud proposed that a release would become necessary, and would take the shape of an energetic discharge through symbolic substitution. Almost anything will do, as long as it “stands in” for that which is tabooed, the way that a scapegoat might “stand in” as a sacrificial victim.
The performance work of ship-sinkers, placed within the framework of Durkheim and Freud’s early twentieth-century thoughts, are then perhaps to be understood as sites where profound colonial desires were given ceremonial shape and discharged. Among Indigenous Alaskans, to claim such magical power over the sinking of colonial ships through performance might have channelled desires to take control over the incursion of settlers and merchants. Among Labourdian women accused of witchcraft, it might have somehow quenched the desire to control the vehicles that transported their friends and family far away.
That, at least, is what emerges from reading performance in colonial and persecutorial documents through the concepts of mana in Durkheim’s 1912 theory of “primitive” religion and Freud’s 1913 theory of taboo. A theory of performance as a pyschological release valve in pressurized contexts of state violence emerges from the ways that European theories of “primitive” magical enactment have been transferred through psychoanalytic theory to yield up Eurocentric visions of art as symbolic healing of colonial trauma in turn.