chapter 1 The Americans 1 They lived crowded lives. Few in number by modern demographic standards, even before European diseases tore through their villages like the wrath of God, their world was multitudinous, densely populated by active, sentient, and sensitive spir­its, spirits with consciences, memories, and purposes, that surrounded them, instructed them, impinged on their lives at every turn. No less real for being invisible, these vital spirits inhered in the heavens, the earth, the seas, and everything within. They drove the stars in the sky and gave life and sensibility to every bird, animal, and person that existed, and they were active within the earth''s ­materials--­rocks, hills, lakes, and rivers--and in the wind, the cold, the heat, and the seasons. These purposeful, powerful spiritual forces that crowded the Indians'' world required respect; care had to be taken not to offend them. One must act pru­dently, obey ancient precepts, learn complex prescriptions, and take advice from the gracious and sage. There were right ways and wrong ways. There were ­life-­giving empowerments and tangles of prohibitions.

When the rules were broken, people suffered. The earth''s generosity, on which survival depended, could be jealously withheld. Profligacy, waste, irreverence could offend. Though a community''s life depended on the success of the hunt, one might not slaughter animals recklessly. They too were protected by patron spirits, by "elder brothers," by soul spirits of their kind capable of retribution for insults and wanton killings; they too had rights to life and, properly, only limited reasons for dying. Hunting therefore had its rituals: was in itself a form of ritual--­a religious, at times a mystic, rite essential not only for survival but also for the maintenance of order and balance in the world. So the Micmacs in Nova Scotia, out of respect for their prey, strove to prevent any drop of beaver blood from falling on the ground, and when that animal''s flesh was boiled into soup, they were careful never to allow the broth to drip into the fire. They refused to eat the embryos of moose for fear of their mothers'' retribution.

Bones had to be disposed of with care. To treat these remains crudely, to throw them to the dogs or toss them about randomly, would offend the animals'' kin and their presiding spirits, who would thereafter prevent their easy capture. So too the creative spirits, who watched jealously over the success of procreation, might resent the punishment of children and remove them from human hands; children were treated indulgently. Since the myriad, immanent spirits were everywhere alert, everywhere sensitive and reactive, the whole of life was a spiritual enterprise, and the rules of behavior had to be finely drawn. Propitiating the anima of beavers, who were greatly respected, was especially demanding, and there were significant distinctions: those that were trapped had to be treated differ­ently from those that were otherwise killed. There were special rules for dealing with birds and animals caught in nets; the sex of captured animals mattered in their treatment. Respectful of the animals'' spirits, Penobscot hunters would not eat the first deer or moose they killed each season, the Chipaways in the north offered up to ritual the first fish caught in a new net, and Eastern Abenaki boys had to give away their first kill, however small. And everywhere great attention had to be given to the ways that bears, patrician animals, were killed and consumed.

Before or after bears were slain (it made no difference which, since in either case their spirits were alive), they had to be addressed with ceremonial honor and with apologies for the necessity of killing them; their carcasses had to be disposed of reverentially. In this ­magico-­animist world taboos abounded. To obey them would minimize offenses and so help maintain stability; to violate them would lead to disaster. The possible effects of women''s "uncleanliness" and their procreative processes had to be strenuously controlled. When menstruating, Micmac women were not allowed to eat the flesh of beavers, whose spirits would be insulted, nor drink out of common kettles. Huron women, when pregnant, were excluded from the area of the hunt since they would frustrate the capture of any animals they happened to glance at. And childless women were banished when bear meat was being brought in and consumed. The universe in all its elements, animate and inanimate, was suffused with spiritual ­potency--­manitou, the Algonquian peoples called ­it--­that empowered each entity to function in its dis­tinctive way and that embraced all of ­life''s diversity in an ultimately unified and comprehensive state of being.

Children, Calvin Martin writes, were taught "that nothing was profane." There were few gradations in value or levels of superiority among animate things; nor were any species truly alien or any objects completely insensate. Animals no less than men belonged to "nations," lived in communal dwellings, conferred together sociably, danced and played together, fought in familiarly human ways, and acted in everything they did according to rules and precepts no less judicious and spiritually ­self-­protective than those that shaped the behavior of men. The dignity of trees had to be acknowledged when they were felled, sometimes by sprinkling tobacco, which had peculiar powers, on the ground around them. The west ­wind--­the ­seasons--­thunder--­too had purposes. In such a world, reciprocity was the key to stability, to happiness, in the end to survival. Injuries had to be requited, insults repaid, losses recovered. Raids were launched, wars were fought, over the failure of reciprocal trade, and to capture prisoners who might replace deaths or abductions incurred in previous conflicts ("mourning wars") and to restore lost dignity and pride.

Body ­parts--­severed heads or ­hands--­of warriors who had fought improperly might be offered to victims'' families to maintain the stability of tribal relations. Village life and political alliances were based on reciprocity: the fear of supernat­ural retribution was in itself a form of social control. Productive land had to be left fallow to recover the nourishment of which it had been robbed; rich fishing grounds had to be vacated to prevent irreversible depletion; girls given in marriage had somehow to be replaced, by compensation to a woman''s family "for the loss of her valuable labor and ­child-­bearing potential." But reciprocity, the maintenance of equilibrium, the restoration of ­balance--­among people, between people and their environment, and among the elemental forces of ­life--­was a complex process, full of mysteries that people struggled to comprehend. When the world went ­wrong--­when there were droughts, epidemics, unaccountable wars, frustrated ­hunts--­familiar remedies could be resorted to: ­well-­known rituals, sanctioned patterns of ­self-­abasement and ­self-­denial, symbolic gestures, cunning exhortations. But often the sources of disturbance, of the insults to the system, were hidden; only direct communication with the ultimate powers could help, and that was the work of experts: doctors of esoteric lore and divination, shamans, magi, sorcerers. The shamans, authoritative cosmologists and custodians of the myths of creation, could make personal contact with the immanent powers, penetrate the mysteries of lost balances, identify forgotten violations of taboo or offenses that demanded apologies, and recommend the proper forms of recovery. They could even diagnose the ultimate causes of physical illnesses that defied herbal cures, and find remedies in magical chants, amulets, rattles, and sucking procedures that rid the body of the disbalancing, destructive spirit.

For they, above all others, knew that physical nature was only part of the great universe whose ultimate forces were spiritual. So in these emergencies, the shamans, the powwows, the sorcerers and soothsayers transcended ­physicality--­in trances, by hallucinogenic drugs, by hypnotic, ­mind-­blinding incantations, perhaps in epileptic ­seizures--­in order to penetrate the deeper recesses of being and connect with spiritual sources. They emerged from these encounters with mandates that could be strange, at times frightening, entailing everything from symbolic gestures and prayerful dances to warfare, torture, and cannibalism. But ordinary people too had an avenue of direct access to the control­ling anima, though it was an erratic, at times perplexing route requiring imaginative ­interpretation--­through dreams. Centuries would pass before European civilization would match the Indians'' understanding of the importance of dreams. They were not seen as random, superficial ephemera that expired with the light of day, but as cold reality, profoundly meaningful experiences that had to be understood. The Hurons and Senecas, a Jesuit reported in i649, believed that, quite beyond one''s conscious wishes, our souls have other desires, which are, as it were, inborn and concealed. These, they say, come from the depths of the soul, not through any knowledge, but by means of a certain blind transporting of the soul to certain objects; these transports might, in the language of philosophy, be called desideria innata, to distinguish them from the former, which are called desideria elicita.

Now they believe that our soul makes these natural desires known by means of dreams, which are its language. Accordingly, when these desires are accomplished, it is satisfied; but . . . if it be not granted what it desires, it becomes angry . . . [and] often it .

 . . revolts against the body, causing vari.