Jessalyn Smith

Where the Wild Things Are: The Demonization of Native Americans by the Puritans

Jessalyn Smith

Humans need to feel in control of themselves and the world around them. Though a fear of the unknown and unpredictable may have been necessary to the survival of early humans, eventually the same survival tactic that defined interactions between humans and their environment began to make its way into social interactions. Many species are inherently violent but the instinct to compete for mates and resources cannot account for all of the human death at human hands. Humans are the most violent of species. According to research lead by Dr José María Gómez, the average amount of deaths cause by the same species is about 0.3% in the animal kingdom. But in human history, the same-species murder rate has reached 10% in the Mesolithic and Medieval ages, over 15% during a period from 3,000 to 1,500 years ago, and then more than 25% around the time Columbus arrived in the New World. These enormous increases in deaths seem to be clustered around events involving the interaction of different peoples, providing good reason to believe that these high rates in human-on human killing has some basis in social and political interactions, not just in territorial struggles (Johnston). With social and political interactions between societies often comes discrepancies concerning culture; it seems that where humans lack understanding, fear forms alongside violence. For humans, borders between territories is much more than just a claim to resources: colonial violence cannot be explained only as a conflict over land.

When the Puritans landed in America in 1620, they were met by the native people of what would eventually become New England. Despite some effort in the beginning, relations between the colonists and the Native Americans were tense. The reason for the uneasy relationship between the two groups of people was the fear that the Puritans had of the natives. This fear came from the Puritans’ inability to control or identify with them. The alien quality of many of the Native American practices were demonized. Beginning with simple differences in culture, Native Americans were seen as distinctly different from the colonists. Because the Native people had a civilization that differed from that of the European settlers, the colonists determined that the Native Americans lacked civilization, they were savages who roamed in the wilderness. In an account of an encounter with a group of Native Americans in Guiana, Sir Walter Raleigh wrote, “[The Native Americans] had their eyes in their

Figure 1. Depictions of Blemmyes, engraving in a 1603 German edition of Sir Walter Raleigh’s “Discovery of Guiana,” 1595. From the John Carter Brown Library at Brown University.

shoulders and their mouths in the middle of their breasts.” This outlandish depiction of these people made it easy for them to be viewed more like beasts than as people (Gaudio).

This separation of Native Americans from their humanity became morally convenient when it would eventually be determined that they needed to be controlled in ways that one does not control another human.

The Puritans felt it was their duty to bring God to the Native Americans. They believed that America was a land overrun by Satan and that God had placed them there to reclaim that land for Him. In “The Wonders of the Invisible World” Cotton Mather writes, The New Englanders are a people of God settled in those, which were once the devil’s territories; and it may easily be supposed that the devil was exceedingly disturbed, when he perceived such a people here accomplishing the promise of old made unto our blessed Jesus, that He should have the utmost parts of the earth for His possession.

Like the demons who occupied this new land, the Native Americans were there to challenge the Puritans; however, the natives were ultimately to be converted by them. By spreading their religion and settling the wilderness, the Puritans believed that they were taking that land back from the devil. Diseases that the Europeans introduced and that natives had no immunity to were wiping out large populations of Native Americans. The Puritans took this as God

clearing a spot for them. In a letter John Winthrop wrote to Nathaniel Rich describing life in the New World, he said. “For the natives, they are near all dead of the smallpox, so the Lord hath cleared our title to what we possess” (U.S., pp.237).

The Puritans made a strenuous effort to subdue large parts of savage human nature. The control sought after in the Christian community is not only restricted to that of things outside the self. For the Puritans, the wilderness was the dwelling place of Satan and was a place of darkness and temptation. There are a multitude of references to Satan in association with the forest in Christian literature and literature written about Puritan society, but this fear of nature also extends to a fear of the fallen nature of man (Takaki). Christians look to God to tame the urges that they feared they otherwise wouldn’t be able to restrain. The Puritans had a particular focus on the destruction of individual identity in the interest of focusing on the identity and well-being of the community: one’s sinful nature had to be destroyed in order to be redeemed in Christian society. This fallen self consisted not only of moral self, but of the physical self. Anything that was in the basic nature of the human such as gluttony, drunkenness, sexuality, etc. was thought to draw the soul away from God and into the arms of Satan. The Puritans were very strict with themselves because they believed God to be even stricter. They needed the wrath of God to keep the wilderness and the evil inside them in check. Jonathan Edwards, in one of his well-known sermons, “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God”, describes how the only thing keeping humans from slipping into hell is the mere will of God. He reiterates that “The wrath of God burns against [wicked men], their damnation does not slumber, the pit is prepared, the fire is made ready, the furnace is now hot, ready to receive them” (Edwards, pp. 4).

To distinguish to believers what was holy and what was Satanic, Puritans set up boundaries, figurative boundaries of faith made up by strict rules as well as literal geographic boundaries defined by the settled land and the wilderness. What lived inside the boundaries of civilization and community was under the control of God and could be trusted; whatever existed outside of the boundaries, in nature, was evil and was an object of fear. The Native Americans lived outside these boundaries; they physically lived outside of the religious community and they didn’t subscribe to the same beliefs or customs. They were described as savage, wild, and ignorant. Associated with the dwelling place of Satan, they were thought to be worshippers of the devil, whether this was of their choice or a product of mere ignorance (Agnew). The Puritans believed that human nature was evil; humans were good only to the extent that God willed their redemption within the community of Christ. While not in the presence of God and His teachings as relayed by the ministers and magistrates of the Puritan church, humans were subject to the enticements of the devil (Berg). They were thought to have succumbed to the temptations of nature and of Satan; they worshipped Satan and did his bidding. Proximity to the Native Americans and to the woods was proximity to Satan. This proximity was dangerous because it could allow the devil to corrupt the righteous souls of the Puritans and the wilderness offered the dangerous temptations of “nature”. Mary Rowlandson’s captivity narratives, or The Sovereignty and Goodness of God, provides a useful insight into this mentality: The first week of my being among them, I hardly eat anything; the second week, I found my stomach grow very faint for want of something; and yet it was very hard to get down their filthy trash; but the third week, though I could think how formerly my stomach would turn against this or that, and I could starve and die before I could eat such things, yet they were sweet and savory to my taste.

At first, Rowlandson is disgusted by the food that they eat, it is food only fit for savages. But as she becomes hungrier, she is forced to eat. She feels guilty and sad that she enjoys it because she fears she is becoming more like the savages holding her captive. The possibility of finding similarities between herself and the savages who had taken her was terrifying because while it opened up the possibility that they could be less savage and more like the Puritans than she thought, it could also indicate that the devil was indeed rubbing off on her, or even worse, it could mean that she held the same savagery within her all along.

Christianity, as with other religions, provides a set of rules to be followed and a community to be lived within. A community with defined borders, physical and epistemological, that make it easy to locate anything or anyone that does not comply with them. People need these borders to feel as if those around them are in control. Those who aren’t within these borders are feared. But these rules are also set in place to control themselves. Christians do not seek to have individual control but to be controlled by an entity they view as having much more power and wisdom than themselves. This, to a certain extent releases them from the responsibility of their own actions, while they can claim it is all a part of God’s plan. Because they doubt their own power to tame nature, they put their faith in someone who does; through the distinctions between the place of God’s redemptive power and the place of fallen nature.

Masochism is taking pleasure in relinquishing control and being punished. Stuart L. Charmé describes several cases in which certain traits or patterns exhibited in people who are psychologically masochistic are also exhibited in religious practices. Charmé writes, “Theories of masochism can be divided into six general categories which trace masochism to 1) a distortion of love, 2) a need for punishment, 3) a payment for future rewards, 4) a strategy of the weak or powerless, 5) a flight from selfhood, or 6) an effort to be an object for others” (Charmé, pp. 2). Each of these categories can be seen in the practices of the Puritans. For instance, the masochist identifies a partner as an ideal self and relinquish-

es all sense of one’s own self. Thus, the Puritans focused on destroying the self to better serve God and become closer to his divinity. There are examples from the bible of taking God’s wrath and punishment as signs of his love. In Romans 5:3-5: “We rejoice in our suffering, knowing that suffering produces endurance and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not disappoint us, because God’s love has been poured into our hearts.” Or Hebrews 12:5-6: “My son, do not regard lightly the discipline of the Lord, nor lose courage when you are punished by him. For the Lord disciplines him whom he loves, and chastises every son whom he receives.” The members of the Christian church adore a God that punishes them. The Puritans felt the need to punish themselves for their nature and their individuality.

The Puritans often sought to suppress and destroy the individual. They did not want to get caught up in temporal concerns such as grief, which questioned God’s plan. They also found comfort in the belief that when things went wrong in the community or when the Native Americans threatened them that it was just God punishing them or it was a part of God’s plan. The Puritan’s masochistic tendencies could have had a large role in the demonic characteristics that they placed on the Native Americans. Because they felt that there was something inside them that was worth punishment, they pushed those sinful traits and urges onto others outside of themselves because it was easier to feel in control of them.

According to the Bible, when Lucifer was cast out of heaven, God said to him:

“How you have fallen from heaven, morning star, son of the dawn! You have been cast down to the earth, you who once laid low the nations! You said in your heart, “I will ascend to the heavens; I will raise my throne above the stars of God;

I will sit enthroned on the mount of assembly, on the utmost heights of Mount Zaphon. [b]

I will ascend above the tops of the clouds; I will make myself like the Most High.” But you are brought down to the realm of the dead, to the depths of the pit.

Those who see you will gaze at you, And consider you, saying: ‘Is this the man who made the earth tremble, Who shook kingdoms, Who made the world as a wilderness And destroyed its cities, Who did not open the house of his prisoners?”

(Isaiah 14:12-17)

In these verses, Lucifer is accused of being the destroyer of civilization and the creator of chaos and of the wilderness. There is a connection made between nature and evil as well as a relationship between the loss of control and evil. Lucifer is something that God had created, but God could not control him so he was cast out and confined to “the realm of the dead”. You can see here a symbolic and geographic representation of where goodness lies and where evil lies. Lucifer has to be physically removed from heaven; he is place in hell, a domain of punishment and suffering.

The boundaries of faith can easily be transformed into actual, geographical boundaries. There is often one place that is deemed Godly and good; everything outside of it is evil. In the cases of Lucifer, Adam and Eve, and Cain and Abel, what is originally inside the good space turns out to be evil, it is cast out into the space that is other than that Godly space, the evil space. The Puritans viewed civilization similarly. For the Puritans, community was sacred; what was not a part of that community, what did not lie under the control of God and of the church, was something or someone of Satan and belonged outside of the community.

An infamous example of “purging” the wickedness found inside a community is the Salem witch trials. Beginning in 1692, the trials were conducted in an effort to smother heresy in the colony. Those accused were thought to have been working with the devil or to have been influenced by him. Some believe there are more political explanations because often the targets were members of the community that criticized the government. The paranoia became contagious. Eventually, people began to come forward as witches themselves. The fear had spread from the general community to the individual: Satan had infiltrated them; they could no longer trust themselves to have control over their thoughts; the devil was destroying them from the inside out. The community was driven mad and resorted to violence at the prospect of the absence or the penetration of God’s protection (Blumberg). Like Mary Rowlandson, they were terrified at the prospect that there was wickedness inside them. The Puritan’s focus on what was and was not in the community, usually allowed them to feel like they were under control of what was and was not inside themselves. Their community was meant to be an area of purity in a land overrun by Satan and his followers.

Religion has historically been and remains a crucial part of society. It is used as a device to organize and moralize the population. Christianity and religion in general are a way for humans to feel in control of their existence. Religion is necessary but it also sets up an inevitable division between people and within believers, creating an outlet for prejudice. There are still groups of people today who find themselves in the same position the Native Americans found themselves in 400 years ago. Homosexuals have faced much discrimination and mistreatment by those who use the bible as justification. Leviticus 20:13 asserts that “If a man has

sexual relations with a man as one does with a woman, both of them have done what is detestable. They are to be put to death; their blood will be on their own heads.” Thus has been used by many a person calling for the execution of homosexuals in America and racism is still a prominent issue in the world. But one does not have to be religious to be homophobic, or racist, or to have a fear of what is different from them.

Nature, in this paper, has come to be synonymous with uncontrollable. Nature is what is outside of the human because humans have made themselves a civilization, and nature is also inside the human. Human nature is not in our control, but control is engrained into human nature. Religion is used as a way for people to take control while simultaneously surrendering it. Humans fear what is outside of themselves, and what is outside of what is familiar to them. As it turns out, there are things not so familiar that lie within us as well, and it is these things which can be the most frightening. In order to conquer this fear, the Puritans subscribed closely to a rigorous version of the Christian faith. They relied on God and his power to control their nature for them. They concentrated much of their energy on suppressing what comes naturally. Those who did not concentrate the same attention on suppressing these instincts were subjects of Satan. The Puritans felt it was their duty to take back or destroy what had been taken by Satan. This included the wilderness and the “brutes” that roamed wildly within.

The Puritans sought to control themselves and the Native Americans. Religion and religious leaders control followers of religion. Systematic racism controls people of color and what they can accomplish. Patriarchal society controls women how they are perceived, and how they perceive themselves. Everything in society is created around the control of nature, imagined within and outside of the precariously civilized self. The violence, patronization, dehumanization, and destruction of individualism that comes hand in hand with control did not begin with the Puritans nor did it end with them.

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