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Native Signification and Communication Lafitau et l'emergence du discours ethnographique. ANDREAS MOTSCH. Sillery, Quebec: Les Editions du Septentrion; Paris: Presses de l'Universite de Paris-Sorbonne, 2001. 295 pp.
The Demon of the Continent: Indians and the Shaping of American Literature. JOSHUA DAVID BELLIN. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000. 280 pp.
Writing Indians: Literacy, Christianity, and Native Community in Early America. HILARY B. WYSS. Amherst, Mass.: University of Massachusetts Press, 2000. xi, 207 pp.
In his study of Joseph-Francois Lafitau's Moeurs des sauvages americains comparees aux moeurs des premiers temps, or Customs of the American Indians Compared with the Customs of Primitive Times, Andreas Motsch quotes (172-74) this anecdote about a female Huron shaman who was asked for information about seven warriors who had been a long time absent from the village. She employed the method of pyromancy:
She began first by preparing a space of ground which she cleaned thoroughly and covered with flour or well sifted ashes (I do not exactly remember which). She set around on this powder, as on a map, some bundles of sticks representing various villages of different tribes, observing accurately their relative positions and the direction of the wind. She then went into dreadful convulsions during which we perceived clearly seven sparks of fire come from the sticks representing our village, trace a path over this ash or flour and go from one village to another. After disappearing for a rather long time in one of these villages these sparks reappeared, traced a new path back until they finally stopped rather near the village or bundle of sticks from which the first seven had originally set out. Then the Indian woman . . . related everything unusual that had happened to the warriors, the path that they had taken, the villages through which they had passed, the number of prisoners that they had taken. She told where they were at that moment and gave the assurance that they would arrive three days after at the village, a statement verified by the arrival of the warriors who confirmed her statements in every point. (Lafitau, Customs of the American Indians, 1: 244-45)
Lafitau followed this story with the words of an Abenaqui female shaman, a convert to Christianity, explaining to her...