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The Witch Purge of 1878 · The Occult Rejects

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Speaker 1: You see, something's going to happen. What? What's going to happen?
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Speaker 1: Something wonderful. What? I understand how you feel. You see,
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Speaker 1: it's all very clear to me now. On May 31st, 1878,
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Speaker 1: a trader named Chris Hubble was at Pueblo, Colorado. the
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Speaker 1: settlement now known as Ganado, Arizona, when he began sending
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Speaker 1: urgent letters toward Fort Defiance. Hubble wrote that there was
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Speaker 1: a big row going on here. Someone had already been killed,
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Speaker 1: armed men were gathering, and he had heard that a
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Speaker 1: larger group might soon arrive from Canyon de Chile. He
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Speaker 1: asked for ammunition, a rifle, and eventually soldiers because he
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Speaker 1: feared the violence could spread to the trading post itself.
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Speaker 1: The man already killed had reportedly been beaten with rocks
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Speaker 1: and struck with arrows, while several other people were said
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Speaker 1: to be marked for death, including a man called Homre
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Speaker 1: in some Anglo-American records and remembered in later accounts as
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Speaker 1: Hastine Bawalsi. Bawalsi was not an anonymous figure living on
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Speaker 1: the margins of Diné society. National Park Service records identify
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Speaker 1: him as a resident of the Canyon del Muerto area
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Speaker 1: and one of the Diné men who signed the Treaty
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Speaker 1: of 1868. the agreement that allowed the Navajo people to
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Speaker 1: return home after the long walk and imprisonment at Basque Redondo.
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Speaker 1: Only ten years after that treaty, a large group of
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Speaker 1: Diné men was preparing to find Bawasi and kill him
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Speaker 1: because they believed he had been harming people through witchcraft.
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Speaker 1: An oral history later collected from the grandson of one
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Speaker 1: of the men involved remembered somewhere between 50 and 100
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Speaker 1: riders coming from Ganado, Greasewood, Klagato, and the surrounding country,
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Speaker 1: carrying guns, bows, and clubs. They accused Bowowsi of burying
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Speaker 1: objects connected with other people, harming livestock and sheep, and
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Speaker 1: causing the deaths of children through supernatural means. The group
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Speaker 1: eventually found him during a healing ceremony, where a clan
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Speaker 1: relative initially tried to protect him, but that protection collapsed
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Speaker 1: after an extended confrontation and public argument over what Bowowsi
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Speaker 1: was believed to have done. The men tore apart enough
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Speaker 1: of the structure where he had taken refugees in to
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Speaker 1: reach him, shoot him while he was still inside, dragged
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Speaker 1: him out wounded, and according to the oral account preserved
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Speaker 1: by historian Martha Blue, threw stones over him until his
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Speaker 1: body disappeared beneath them. Buwalsi was not the only person killed,
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Speaker 1: because historical accounts of what later became known as the
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Speaker 1: Navajo Witch Purge of 1878 commonly placed the death toll
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Speaker 1: at roughly 40 people. No complete list of 40 victims survives, however,
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Speaker 1: so that number has to remain an estimate rather than
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Speaker 1: a documented body count. Medicine people were seized, Suspected witches
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Speaker 1: were restrained in question, military officers were called in, and
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Speaker 1: accusations of supernatural attack became tangled with illness, livestock loss,
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Speaker 1: personal conflict, raiding, political authority, and the enormous changes taking
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Speaker 1: place during the first decade of reservation life. That combination
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Speaker 1: is what makes this story much more complicated than a
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Speaker 1: simple outbreak of superstition, because the people carrying out the
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Speaker 1: purge already lived within a religious world where a harmful
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Speaker 1: witchcraft was understood as a real possibility. The belief itself
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Speaker 1: had not suddenly appeared in 1878, so the question is
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Speaker 1: not simply why Diné people believed that one person might
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Speaker 1: harm another through supernatural means. The harder question, and the
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Speaker 1: one that brings the story much closer to the history
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Speaker 1: of Salem, is why suspicion became accusation at this particular moment,
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Speaker 1: and why accusation suddenly became enough to kill. Welcome to
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Speaker 1: the Occult Rejects. And this is the Witch Purge of 1878.
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Speaker 1: Before following the accusations any further, we need to be
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Speaker 1: careful with the English word witch, because it can drag
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Speaker 1: the entire story into a European framework that does not
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Speaker 1: belong here. When most Americans hear the word in a
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Speaker 1: historical setting, they think about Salem, Puritan ministers, spectral attacks, familiars,
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Speaker 1: satanic pacts, and people accused of joining forces with the devil.
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Speaker 1: Diné ideas about harmful supernatural practice developed independently of that
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Speaker 1: Christian tradition and carried their own categories, methods, and explanations
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Speaker 1: for how one person might deliberately injure another. So one
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Speaker 1: of the most detailed later studies of those beliefs came
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Speaker 1: from the anthropologist Clyde Cluckone, whose Navajo Witchcraft was published
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Speaker 1: by Harvard's Peabody Museum in 1944 after years of work
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Speaker 1: with Diné informants. Cluckone stressed that there was no single
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Speaker 1: practice that could be neatly translated into into the English
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Speaker 1: word witchcraft, and he used English categories such as witchery, sorcery, wizardry,
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Speaker 1: and frenzy witchcraft to separate different kinds of harmful supernatural
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Speaker 1: activity described to him. Those labels were Cluckone's analytical terms
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Speaker 1: rather than proof that every Diné person in 1878 divided
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Speaker 1: this subject in exactly the same way. They are useful
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Speaker 1: because they show immediately why calling every accused person a
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Speaker 1: skinwalker or treating every allegation as the same kind of
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Speaker 1: magic barely distorts the record. Some accusations involve personal material
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Speaker 1: connected with the intended victim, including hair, clothing, tracks, bodily material,
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Speaker 1: or other objects believed to carry a relationship with the
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Speaker 1: person being targeted. Such materials could supposedly be buried or
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Speaker 1: otherwise used while hostile prayers or ritual actions were being
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Speaker 1: directed toward the victim, allowing the attack to appear later
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Speaker 1: as illness, weakness, livestock loss, or some other form of
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Speaker 1: misfortune whose cause was difficult to see directly. Other accusations
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Speaker 1: involved the belief that harmful material could be actually sent
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Speaker 1: into the body, and that idea matters greatly for the
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Speaker 1: events of 1878. Cluckone recorded traditions in which small objects
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Speaker 1: such as stone, bone, shell, hair, or similar material could
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Speaker 1: supposedly be projected into another person and cause pain or sickness.
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Speaker 1: after which a healer might attempt to diagnose the attack
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Speaker 1: and remove the intrusive object. During the purge itself, American
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Speaker 1: officers encountered accusations that certain medicine men were shooting stones
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Speaker 1: into people's bodies, and three suspected practitioners were reportedly found
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Speaker 1: tied up because people believed they had been doing exactly that.
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Speaker 1: Once the belief is understood, the logic of accusation becomes
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Speaker 1: easier to follow. A sudden pain, a stubborn illness, or
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Speaker 1: a death without an obvious explanation could be interpreted not
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Speaker 1: simply as disease or bad luck, but as evidence that
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Speaker 1: another human being has caused the suffering intentionally. If treatment
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Speaker 1: repeatedly failed, relatives might therefore stop asking only what was
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Speaker 1: making the person sick and begin asking who was keeping
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Speaker 1: the person sick, which transforms illness from an uncertain natural
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Speaker 1: event into a possible act of hidden murder. Cluckone also
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Speaker 1: recorded fears involving dangerous plants, poisons, corpse-related materials, and preparations
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Speaker 1: believed capable of causing weakness, unconsciousness, confusion, wasting illness, or
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Speaker 1: abnormal behavior. His work includes references to deterrer and other
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Speaker 1: substances whose effects could blur the line between what a
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Speaker 1: modern observer might call poisoning and what the people involved
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Speaker 1: understood as supernatural attack. We also have to remember that
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Speaker 1: Cluckone was working more than 60 years after the Purge,
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Speaker 1: so his material cannot be treated as eyewitness testimony about
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Speaker 1: what every person around Ganado believed in 1878. His research
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Speaker 1: is more useful for showing the larger religious world in
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Speaker 1: which accusations made sense, particularly because a Denae ceremonial specialist
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Speaker 1: or healer was not automatically considered a witch. Ceremonial knowledge
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Speaker 1: could be used for healing, diagnosis, prayer, protection, and the
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Speaker 1: restoration of balance, while a witchcraft accusation charged someone with
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Speaker 1: turning dangerous knowledge into the opposite direction and deliberately using
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Speaker 1: it to injure other people. That created a frightening possibility
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Speaker 1: within the belief system, because a person respected for knowing
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Speaker 1: how to cure illness might also be suspected of knowing
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Speaker 1: how to cause it. Cluckone recorded later accusations in which
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Speaker 1: ceremonial singers were suspected of making someone sick and then
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Speaker 1: arranging to be paid for curing for the same illness,
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Speaker 1: while other stories claim that harmful material could be secretly
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Speaker 1: introduced into medicine intended for a patient. These accounts do
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Speaker 1: not prove that ceremonial practitioners were actually doing those things,
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Speaker 1: but they help explain why the phrase medicine man can
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Speaker 1: be misleading in 19th century American records. A soldier or
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Speaker 1: Indian agent might write that a medicine man has been
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Speaker 1: accused of witchcraft and conclude that Diné people had irrationally
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Speaker 1: turned on their own healer. The people making the accusation
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Speaker 1: believe something more specific, that a person with legitimate ceremonial
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Speaker 1: knowledge had begun using it to harm rather than heal.
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Speaker 1: There were also believed to be ways of identifying who
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Speaker 1: was responsible for an attack. Cluckone later recorded cases in
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Speaker 1: which diagnostic ceremonies pointed toward a suspected individual. after which
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Speaker 1: families searched for materials they believed confirmed the accusation and
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Speaker 1: confronted the person involved. One account describes a woman becoming sick,
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Speaker 1: a singer being identified as responsible, buried clothing and manure
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Speaker 1: being found, and the accused man eventually being brought to
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Speaker 1: the site and said to have confessed. In another striking statement,
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Speaker 1: one of Cluckone's sources remembered that when accusations became widespread,
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Speaker 1: no medicine man was safe. This is where the comparison
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Speaker 1: with Salem becomes useful as long as differences remain clear.
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Speaker 1: Diné witchcraft belief had nothing to do with the Puritan
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Speaker 1: demonology or satanic covenants. But both systems could turn an
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Speaker 1: invisible form of harm into a search for a human attacker.
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Speaker 1: And once a person was named, older events could be
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Speaker 1: reorganized around that accusation. A failed healing could become sabotage.
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Speaker 1: An old agreement could become motive. A death could become
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Speaker 1: supernatural murder and a reputation for unusual knowledge could become
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Speaker 1: threatening rather than respected. By 1878, none of these ideas
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Speaker 1: were new, which means the purge was not caused by
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Speaker 1: the sudden invention of witchcraft belief. What changed was the
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Speaker 1: scale and intensity of the response. As suspicions that might
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Speaker 1: once have remained within healing, family conflict, private fear, or
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Speaker 1: isolated violence began spreading across communities while accused people were
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Speaker 1: restrained interrogated, hunted, and killed. To understand why that escalation happened,
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Speaker 1: we have to look at the world the Diné were
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Speaker 1: rebuilding after the Long Walk and Basque Redondo. The people
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Speaker 1: involved in the purge were not living in a stable
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Speaker 1: society that suddenly developed an unexplained fear of witches. Only
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Speaker 1: a little more than a decade earlier, the United States
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Speaker 1: military had attacked the foundations of Diné life, forced thousands
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Speaker 1: of people from their homeland, and imprisoned them hundreds of
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Speaker 1: miles away. During the early 1860s, Brigadier General James Henry Calton,
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Speaker 1: commander of the Department of New Mexico, pursued a policy
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Speaker 1: intended to force Diné' s surrender by destroying the resources that
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Speaker 1: allowed communities to remain independent. Christopher Kit Carson carried out
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Speaker 1: the campaign beginning in 1863. And under Calton's orders, his
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Speaker 1: forces destroyed crops, burned homes, killed livestock, and attacked food
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Speaker 1: supplies in a scorched earth strategy that made continued resistance
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Speaker 1: increasingly difficult. By the winter of 1863 and into 1864,
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Speaker 1: hunger and the destruction of essential resources pushed growing numbers
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Speaker 1: of families towards surrender. What followed became known as the
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Speaker 1: Long Walk, although the name describes a series of forced
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Speaker 1: removals rather than one single march. Thousands of men, women, children,
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Speaker 1: and elderly people were driven roughly 300 to more than
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Speaker 1: 400 miles, depending on route and movement. under conditions remembered
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Speaker 1: for cold, hunger, exhaustion, inadequate clothing, and death along the way.
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Speaker 1: One National Park Service study records a removal during which
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Speaker 1: close to 200 people reportedly died from cold and exposure,
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Speaker 1: while Diné oral histories preserve additional memories of people unable
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Speaker 1: to keep pace being killed or left behind. The destination
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Speaker 1: was Bosque Redondo, near Fort Sumner in eastern New Mexico,
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Speaker 1: remembered in Diné history as welding. The United States intended
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Speaker 1: the reservation to concentrate and control the Diné and Mescalero
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Speaker 1: Apache while pushing them toward a settled agricultural system. But
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Speaker 1: the project became a disaster as crops repeatedly failed, food
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Speaker 1: remained inadequate, disease spread, and the available water created serious problems.
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Speaker 1: Approximately 10,000 Diné were forced there, and the four years
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Speaker 1: in confinement brought enormous loss of life and disruption to families,
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Speaker 1: livestock holdings, movement, and older economic relationships. In 1868, Diné
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Speaker 1: leaders negotiated with the United States and signed the Treaty
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Speaker 1: of Basque Redondo on June 1st, ending the exile and
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Speaker 1: allowing the people to return to part of their ancestral homeland.
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Speaker 1: The Navajo Nation emphasizes how unusual and important that return was,
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Speaker 1: because unlike many indigenous peoples removed during the 19th century,
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Speaker 1: the Diné negotiated a return to part of their ancestral
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Speaker 1: homeland rather than permanent relocation elsewhere. The return was an
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Speaker 1: extraordinary act of survival, but it did not restore the
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Speaker 1: world that had existed before the military campaign, because families
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Speaker 1: came back with relatives dead, herds depleted, property destroyed, and
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Speaker 1: an entirely new reservation relationship with the federal government taking
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Speaker 1: shape around them. American agents now played a larger role
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Speaker 1: in Diné affairs. Promised supplies and livestock became politically important.
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Speaker 1: Reservation boundaries altered movement. and communities had to rebuild their
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Speaker 1: economy while dealing with the continued disputes involving raiding, theft, family, authority,
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Speaker 1: and relations with surrounding peoples. Those changes did not cause
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Speaker 1: belief in witchcraft, but they changed the conditions in which
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Speaker 1: all the beliefs were operating, because illness, livestock loss, failed healing,
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Speaker 1: and conflict were now unfolding inside a society still recovering
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Speaker 1: from forced removal and adapting to an expanding system of
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Speaker 1: American control. Only 10 years separated the 1868 treaty from
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Speaker 1: the killings around Granado, meaning that many adults involved in accusing, defending, hunting,
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Speaker 1: or killing suspected witches had personally lived through the military campaign, Weldy,
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Speaker 1: or the difficult return home. By the time reports of
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Speaker 1: witch killings began reaching American officials in 1878, the Diné
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Speaker 1: had survived an attempt to break their independence from outside,
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Speaker 1: but rebuilding social and economic life was far more from finished.
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Speaker 1: Within that unsettled world, accusations of supernatural harm were beginning
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Speaker 1: to turn violence inward. By the spring of 1878, accusations
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Speaker 1: of harmful witchcraft around the Granada region were no longer
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Speaker 1: remaining inside private disputes or healing ceremonies, because groups had
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Speaker 1: begun organizing themselves to confront suspected witches directly. Martha Blue's
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Speaker 1: reconstruction draws on traitor correspondence, government and military records, and
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Speaker 1: later Diné oral histories. so the exact sequence is not
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Speaker 1: perfectly clear. But by May 31st, Charles Hubble was already
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Speaker 1: reporting a killing, warning that more violence might follow and
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Speaker 1: asking for weapons and military assistance. Later local histories commonly
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Speaker 1: say that as many as 40 people around Granada were
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Speaker 1: accused and killed, including at least one victim reportedly killed
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Speaker 1: at the doorway of a trading post. That number appears
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Speaker 1: often enough to be useful as an estimate of the
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Speaker 1: scale remembered, but no surviving list gives us 40 confirmed
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Speaker 1: names and the documentary record is far thinner than the
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Speaker 1: records preserved from Salem. There was no central court producing warrants, examinations,
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Speaker 1: or transcripts. Suspicion moved through the families and communities, sometimes
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Speaker 1: gathering enough support that armed men confronted the accused directly.
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Speaker 1: The killing of Hastin Bawasi gives us the clearest surviving example,
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Speaker 1: because oral history remembered accusations involving sickness, livestock harm, buried objects,
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Speaker 1: and the deaths of children. The large group that eventually
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Speaker 1: found him believed they were stopping somebody who had already
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Speaker 1: caused serious supernatural damage. His political and social history makes
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Speaker 1: the case especially important because he was not simply an
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Speaker 1: isolated outsider who could be sacrificed easily. He belonged to
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Speaker 1: the generation that had survived Basque Redondo and participated in
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Speaker 1: the rebuilding that followed the return. His death also shows
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Speaker 1: how witchcraft accusation could overpower ordinary protections. because a clan
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Speaker 1: relation initially tried to defend him, but after the accusation
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Speaker 1: was argued publicly, that protection failed and the crowd killed
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Speaker 1: him anyway. Once enough people accepted the idea that someone
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Speaker 1: was secretly responsible for sickness or death, reputation, clan obligation,
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Speaker 1: and previous standing might no longer be enough to save
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Speaker 1: the accused. Ceremonial practitioners were especially vulnerable because their knowledge
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Speaker 1: placed them close to sickness, diagnosis, and supernatural explanations. The
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Speaker 1: person called to explain an illness could eventually become the
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Speaker 1: person blamed for causing it, particularly if a treatment failed
17:41
Speaker 1: or another practitioner identified them as responsible. The 1878 accounts
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Speaker 1: involving medicine men accused of shooting stones into people's body
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Speaker 1: show exactly how a respected form of specialized knowledge could
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Speaker 1: become dangerous once people believed that knowledge had been turned
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Speaker 1: toward harm. The Purge also became tangled with ordinary conflicts
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Speaker 1: involving livestock theft, and raiding. What a surprise. Several later
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Speaker 1: accounts describe those targeted as witches and thieves, while historians
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Speaker 1: have connected Manuelito and Ganado Mucho with efforts to suppress
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Speaker 1: people considered responsible for renewed depredations. That does not prove
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Speaker 1: that witchcraft charges were fake or merely political, because the
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Speaker 1: same person could sincerely be feared as a supernatural attacker
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Speaker 1: and also be regarded as a thief, raider, rival, or
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Speaker 1: threat to community stability. The important point is that supernatural
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Speaker 1: and ordinary danger were no longer easy to separate. By
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Speaker 1: the time traders, agents, and soldiers began paying serious attention,
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Speaker 1: the people carrying out the purge had moved beyond the
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Speaker 1: abstract question of whether harmful witchcraft existed and were answering
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Speaker 1: the much more dangerous question of who among them was responsible.
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Speaker 1: Once names were attached to sickness, livestock deaths, failed healing, theft,
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Speaker 1: or other forms of misfortune, the accused could be hunted, restrained, questioned,
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Speaker 1: and killed by people who believed they were preventing further deaths.
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Speaker 1: Because no complete victim list survives, we cannot build a
19:10
Speaker 1: demographic profile of the accused with anything like the precision
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Speaker 1: available for Salem. But the evidence does show that the
19:16
Speaker 1: targets were not simply powerless outsiders. Some appear to have
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Speaker 1: been ceremonial specialists, some are connected with older suspicions, some
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Speaker 1: are described alongside accusations of theft or raiding, and at
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Speaker 1: least one major victim Hastin Bawasi had enough reputation and
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Speaker 1: clan standing that his killing required those protections to be overcome.
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Speaker 1: Cluckone's later research suggests that singers and relatively wealthy people
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Speaker 1: could be especially vulnerable to witchcraft suspicion. While family reputation
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Speaker 1: could matter if someone was related to a person already
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Speaker 1: considered dangerous, His 20th century material cannot be treated as
19:52
Speaker 1: a statistical profile of the 1878 victims, but it shows
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Speaker 1: how accusations could emerge within existing relationships rather than being
20:01
Speaker 1: directed only at strangers. The suspected witch was often someone
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Speaker 1: who knew the victim, had access to the household, possessed
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Speaker 1: specialized knowledge, had performed an unsuccessful healing, had argued with somebody,
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Speaker 1: or belonged to a family around which all the suspicions
20:17
Speaker 1: already existed. Wealth may have also created tension, particularly in
20:21
Speaker 1: a society rebuilding livestock holdings after Basque Redondo. Although the
20:25
Speaker 1: purge should not be reduced to resentment against prosperous Diné people, sheep, horses,
20:31
Speaker 1: and cattle were central to family survival and recovery, so
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Speaker 1: theft and unusual loss could become economically devastating. and a
20:38
Speaker 1: person suspected of raiding or stealing livestock might become even
20:42
Speaker 1: more threatening if illness or supernatural harm was also attributed
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Speaker 1: to them. The available evidence also points more heavily toward
20:49
Speaker 1: male-accused practitioners than the familiar European image of women being
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Speaker 1: hunted as witches, although the record remains too incomplete for
20:57
Speaker 1: absolute claims. The difference is another reminder that the word
21:01
Speaker 1: witch describes different social figures in different cultures. And importing
21:05
Speaker 1: the demographic pattern of European witch trials into the Diné
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Speaker 1: Purge would be as misleading as importing Puritan ideas about Satan.
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Speaker 1: What mattered most was that accusation could defeat the social
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Speaker 1: protections that normally made community life possible. A respected person
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Speaker 1: could lose the protection of reputation. A clan relation could
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Speaker 1: fail to shield someone from an angry group. And a
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Speaker 1: healer's specialized knowledge could be reinterpreted as proof that he
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Speaker 1: possessed the means to cause the very illness he claimed
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Speaker 1: to treat. Once that happened, the central problem became how
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Speaker 1: anyone could establish guilt for a crime believed to occur invisibly.
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Speaker 1: There was no centralized DNA witch court in 1878, so
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Speaker 1: it survives of fragments describing diagnosis, reputation, accusation, interrogation, confession,
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Speaker 1: and direct punishment rather than a uniform legal process. A
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Speaker 1: suspect might be named through ceremonial diagnosis, blamed because harmful
21:59
Speaker 1: material had supposedly been discovered, accused of projecting objects into
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Speaker 1: a victim's body, were targeted because an existing reputation made
22:07
Speaker 1: a new illness or death seem like confirmation of earlier fears.
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Speaker 1: One of the clearest examples involved the accusation that medicine
22:14
Speaker 1: men were shooting stones into people. In idea, American officials
22:18
Speaker 1: dismissed as superstition until they encountered men who had already
22:21
Speaker 1: been tied up because others believed they were responsible. Another
22:26
Speaker 1: account describes Ganado Mucho telling officials that medicine men had
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Speaker 1: caused deaths by placing grass, hair, horse dung, and sheep
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Speaker 1: dung in a relative's grave. The accused men were said
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Speaker 1: to have confessed, and two were reportedly killed by Ganado Mucho,
22:41
Speaker 1: giving us one of the strongest surviving indications that confessions
22:45
Speaker 1: could move directly from accusation toward execution. Those confessions cannot
22:50
Speaker 1: automatically be treated as calm admission of guilt, because a
22:54
Speaker 1: suspect who had already been restrained, surrounded by armed men,
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Speaker 1: or confronted by grieving relatives was operating under extraordinary pressure.
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Speaker 1: A confession might have been sincere, coerced, strategic, altered in translation,
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Speaker 1: or remembered differently afterward, but within the belief system it
23:11
Speaker 1: could carry enormous power because admitting responsibility was sometimes thought
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Speaker 1: to weaken or reverse the supernatural attack. Cluck Hone's later
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Speaker 1: informants described accused people being summoned or brought before groups, questioned, restrained,
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Speaker 1: and in some accounts denied food or water while being
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Speaker 1: pressured to confess. He also recorded descriptions of hot coals
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Speaker 1: being applied to the feet in older cases, while noting
23:35
Speaker 1: that sensational outsider stories about witches being torn apart by
23:39
Speaker 1: horses were rejected by Denae informants. That distinction matters because
23:43
Speaker 1: the history is violent enough without importing grotesque legends that
23:46
Speaker 1: the people he interviewed themselves denied. The logic of confession
23:50
Speaker 1: could trap the accused from both directions, because admission might
23:54
Speaker 1: justify punishment and strengthen the belief that witches were operating
23:58
Speaker 1: within the community. Continued denial offered little protection if it
24:01
Speaker 1: could be interpreted as evidence that the suspect was refusing
24:05
Speaker 1: to stop an attack against someone who might still be sick.
24:08
Speaker 1: In that situation, every hour of refusal could look less
24:12
Speaker 1: like a claim of innocence and more like a deliberate
24:15
Speaker 1: act of harm. Clark Cohen was told that accused witches
24:18
Speaker 1: who continued refusing to confess could eventually be killed, while
24:22
Speaker 1: others might escape or leave the community permanently. Methods of
24:26
Speaker 1: killing were not standardized. Later accounts mention clubs, axes, shootings,
24:31
Speaker 1: and direct retaliation by relatives, while the 1878 record gives
24:35
Speaker 1: us the Bawasi shooting and stoning as well as the
24:38
Speaker 1: killings associated with Ganado Mucho. In some cases, there appears
24:42
Speaker 1: to have been a period of questioning or attempted confession
24:45
Speaker 1: before death, while other killings could happen through direct action
24:48
Speaker 1: by people who believed a relative had already been supernaturally murdered.
24:53
Speaker 1: The absence of a central court separates the purge sharply
24:56
Speaker 1: from Salem. because Massachusetts converted witchcraft accusations into formal criminal prosecutions,
25:03
Speaker 1: while the Denae Purge operated through families, local groups, leaders,
25:07
Speaker 1: ceremonial judgment, armed parties, and direct violence. That decentralized structure
25:12
Speaker 1: may have also made the crisis harder to stop, because
25:15
Speaker 1: there was no single judge or courtroom whose authority could
25:18
Speaker 1: simply be withdrawn once the panic became dangerous. Punishment could
25:22
Speaker 1: also reinforce the panic itself. because if a sick person
25:25
Speaker 1: recovered after an accused witch confessed or died, that recovery
25:29
Speaker 1: might be remembered as confirmation that the accusation had been correct,
25:33
Speaker 1: while a new illness could suggest that another hidden practitioner
25:37
Speaker 1: remained undiscovered. Under those conditions, eliminating one accused witch did
25:42
Speaker 1: not necessarily end the danger, because it could strengthen the
25:46
Speaker 1: belief that a larger network had still not been uncovered.
25:49
Speaker 1: Claucon also recorded later reports that the family or clan
25:52
Speaker 1: of an accused or executed witch might make payments to
25:56
Speaker 1: the relatives of someone believed to have been harmed, showing
25:59
Speaker 1: that witchcraft accusation could create material and social obligations rather
26:04
Speaker 1: than remaining a private religious fear. By the time American
26:08
Speaker 1: officials intervened, they were therefore confronting not one isolated killing,
26:12
Speaker 1: but a larger system in which suspected witches could be identified, restrained, interrogated,
26:17
Speaker 1: forced to confess, driven away, or killed by people who
26:21
Speaker 1: believed they were protecting their communities. The two names most
26:24
Speaker 1: often attached to later explanations of the Purge were Ganado
26:28
Speaker 1: Mucho and Manuelito, both major Diné leaders whose careers stretched
26:32
Speaker 1: across conflict with the United States, Bosque Redondo, the Treaty
26:36
Speaker 1: of 1868, and the difficult years of rebuilding that followed.
26:39
Speaker 1: Their involvement matters because both men were navigating a new
26:43
Speaker 1: reservation system in which renewed raiding could bring American retaliation,
26:48
Speaker 1: while at the same time communities were dealing with accusations
26:51
Speaker 1: that harmful practitioners were were secretly causing sickness and death.
26:55
Speaker 1: Granado Mucho had been a successful livestock owner and leader
26:59
Speaker 1: long before the Long Walk, survived the collapse produced by
27:02
Speaker 1: military campaign, and became one of the most important political
27:05
Speaker 1: figures of the Western Reservation after the return. Manuelito, who
27:09
Speaker 1: had resisted American forces before eventually surrendering, likewise survived Basque Redondo,
27:14
Speaker 1: signed the 1868 Treaty, became one of the most influential
27:18
Speaker 1: leaders after Barba and Cito's death, and later became a
27:21
Speaker 1: major advocate for rebuilding Diné life without returning to a
27:24
Speaker 1: war that he believed could end disastrously. Later histories sometimes
27:29
Speaker 1: describe the Purge as though these two leaders simply ordered
27:32
Speaker 1: the deaths of 40 witches, but the sources are less tidy.
27:36
Speaker 1: Some accounts connect the victims directly with harmful witchcraft, others
27:40
Speaker 1: call them witches and thieves, and still others place the
27:43
Speaker 1: killings or related actions inside efforts to suppress raiding and
27:47
Speaker 1: livestock theft. Edward Spicer, for example, associated Manuelito and Ganado
27:52
Speaker 1: Mucho with action against roughly 40 people connected with renewed depredations,
27:57
Speaker 1: while Cluckone later offered a more explicitly political interpretation in
28:02
Speaker 1: which Manuelito may have used witchcraft accusation against men advocating
28:06
Speaker 1: renewed conflict with the United States. Cluckone's version creates a
28:11
Speaker 1: serious dating problem, however, because he places an execution of
28:15
Speaker 1: more than 40 witches in 1884. while Martha Blue and
28:19
Speaker 1: several other accounts center the major Ganado Purge in 1878.
28:23
Speaker 1: Rather than silently forcing those references into one event, the
28:27
Speaker 1: safer conclusion is that later writers may have partly collapsed
28:30
Speaker 1: several episodes of witchcraft accusation, anti-rating action, and social conflict
28:36
Speaker 1: from the early reservation years into one remembered purge. Blue's
28:40
Speaker 1: reconstruction remains the stronger guide for the documented 1878 crisis,
28:45
Speaker 1: while Cluckone tells us how the later Denae informants and
28:48
Speaker 1: historians understood the political meaning of that period. Granado Mucho's
28:53
Speaker 1: involvement also appears to have been personal rather than purely political,
28:58
Speaker 1: because he reportedly believed medicine men had caused deaths among
29:01
Speaker 1: his relatives through harmful materials placed in a grave. If
29:06
Speaker 1: he sincerely believed members of his family had been killed
29:09
Speaker 1: through supernatural means, then his actions cannot be reduced to
29:13
Speaker 1: an attempt to please American officials or eliminate raiders. From
29:17
Speaker 1: his perspective, Supernatural murder, theft, political instability, and the danger
29:22
Speaker 1: of renewed conflict may have been parts of the same
29:25
Speaker 1: crisis rather than separate categories. Manuelito's role is equally difficult
29:30
Speaker 1: to reduce to one motive, because his commitment to avoiding
29:33
Speaker 1: another catastrophic war with the United States makes later claims
29:37
Speaker 1: that he opposed raiders and militants historically plausible. The evidence
29:41
Speaker 1: does not allow us to say confidently, however, that he
29:44
Speaker 1: invented witchcraft charges as a calculated excuse to murder political opponents.
29:49
Speaker 1: Even Cluckone cautioned against giving Manuelito a more deliberate strategy
29:53
Speaker 1: than the evidence could prove, and the larger record shows
29:56
Speaker 1: that sincere belief in harmful witchcraft was operating alongside politics
30:01
Speaker 1: rather than being replaced by it. The best way to
30:04
Speaker 1: understand both leaders is therefore to keep the layers together.
30:08
Speaker 1: Granado Mucho and Manuelito were not neutral observers who stood
30:12
Speaker 1: outside the purge, but neither can be reduced to cartoon
30:15
Speaker 1: villains who cynically manufactured a supernatural panic. They were operating
30:20
Speaker 1: in a period when witchcraft accusations, raiding, livestock theft, leadership abuse,
30:25
Speaker 1: family grievance, and the struggle to survive under expanding American
30:29
Speaker 1: authority had become tightly tangled together. By the time American
30:34
Speaker 1: officials began responding seriously, traders were reporting deaths, accused medicine
30:39
Speaker 1: men were being restrained, and armed groups were moving through
30:41
Speaker 1: the region, which forced the Navajo agency and military posts
30:45
Speaker 1: to deal with the crisis they only partly understood. The
30:49
Speaker 1: basic problem was that American officers did not generally believe
30:53
Speaker 1: witchcraft was killing anyone. while many Diné accusers believed that
30:56
Speaker 1: failing to act against a witch meant allowing a murderer
30:59
Speaker 1: to continue operating. Fort Wingate became important because it was
31:04
Speaker 1: one of the major military posts connected with Navajo affairs
31:07
Speaker 1: and its commander in 1878 was Lieutenant Colonel Peter T.
31:11
Speaker 1: Swain of the 15th Infantry. The military was already involved
31:16
Speaker 1: in questions of raiding, policing, and relations with surrounding settlements.
31:20
Speaker 1: While an Indian agent organized a company of Navajo scouts
31:23
Speaker 1: in 1878, to help control raids outside the reservation. That
31:28
Speaker 1: organization lasted about a year before being reduced to a
31:31
Speaker 1: smaller Navajo police force working under the agent. The purge
31:35
Speaker 1: therefore erupted at the same moment federal officers and Diné
31:39
Speaker 1: leaders were experimenting with new forms of policing and authority.
31:43
Speaker 1: One of the most revealing encounters involved Lieutenant Mitchell, who
31:46
Speaker 1: found three medicine men tied up after being accused of
31:49
Speaker 1: magically shooting stones into people's body. Rather than simply mocking
31:54
Speaker 1: the accusation, Mitchell reportedly told the men that the Americans
31:58
Speaker 1: were taking the complaint seriously enough to demand that the
32:01
Speaker 1: supposed practice stop, then obtained a promise from them. His
32:05
Speaker 1: response sounds strange if read literally, but it appears to
32:08
Speaker 1: have been a practical attempt to create a reason for
32:11
Speaker 1: releasing the accused without directly humiliating the people who believed
32:15
Speaker 1: they had been attacked. That episode shows why intervention was
32:19
Speaker 1: so difficult. because Mitchell did not have to believe in
32:22
Speaker 1: supernatural projectiles to understand that people might be killed over
32:26
Speaker 1: the accusation. And simply telling grieving relatives that witchcraft did
32:30
Speaker 1: not exist would not necessarily save the men they had captured.
32:34
Speaker 1: The immediate challenge was not winning an argument about metaphysics,
32:37
Speaker 1: but stopping the next execution. American officials often describe the
32:42
Speaker 1: Purge as a mixture of superstition, politics, and disorder. which
32:47
Speaker 1: captured part of the crisis while missing much of the
32:49
Speaker 1: eternal religious meaning. An officer could look at a tied
32:54
Speaker 1: medicine man and see a victim of superstition, while the
32:57
Speaker 1: family holding him believed they were standing beside someone responsible
33:00
Speaker 1: for invisible murder. Those positions were not simply two descriptions
33:04
Speaker 1: of the same event. They rested on different assumptions about
33:08
Speaker 1: what had happened, what counted as evidence, and what danger
33:11
Speaker 1: the community faced. Trading posts helped bring the crisis into
33:15
Speaker 1: the American communication network John Lorenzo Hubble had established a
33:19
Speaker 1: trading operation in the Pueblo, Colorado wash area by 1876
33:24
Speaker 1: and had experience as an interpreter and troubleshooter around Fort Defiance,
33:28
Speaker 1: which meant traders could become intermediaries between scattered Diné communities,
33:32
Speaker 1: the agency, and the military. Once violence threatened the trading
33:36
Speaker 1: post network, what might otherwise have remained an internal conflict
33:40
Speaker 1: quickly drew outside attention. There was nevertheless no dramatic moment
33:45
Speaker 1: when federal troops arrived arrested everyone responsible, and declared the
33:49
Speaker 1: purge over. Intervention appears to involve warnings, military presence, negotiations,
33:55
Speaker 1: efforts to free accused people, and pressure on Diné leaders
33:59
Speaker 1: to stop further killings rather than a conventional murder investigation
34:03
Speaker 1: followed by mass prosecution. Because no single Diné tribunal controlled
34:08
Speaker 1: every accusation, there was also no one courtroom the Americans
34:11
Speaker 1: could close in order to end the crisis. The intervention
34:15
Speaker 1: seems to have helped contain the immediate violence without eliminating
34:19
Speaker 1: the beliefs behind it. Soldiers could threaten consequences for another killing.
34:24
Speaker 1: Agents could insist that disputes be brought to authorities and
34:27
Speaker 1: traitors could call for help. But none of those actions
34:30
Speaker 1: could prove to a family that a person they feared
34:32
Speaker 1: had not caused the death through supernatural means. What ended
34:36
Speaker 1: was not the belief in harmful witches, but the moment
34:38
Speaker 1: when enough accusations were being answered with killing to create
34:42
Speaker 1: a recognizable purge. The end of the witch purge looks
34:45
Speaker 1: very different from the ending of Salem because there was
34:48
Speaker 1: no single moment when an authority declared the accusations invalid,
34:52
Speaker 1: released a group of prisoners, and formally closed the proceedings.
34:56
Speaker 1: The violence appears instead to have faded through military pressure,
34:59
Speaker 1: changing local conditions, the growing influence of traitors and agents,
35:03
Speaker 1: and new reservation systems for policing disputes. While belief in
35:07
Speaker 1: harmful witchcraft remained alive. The surviving documentary record does not
35:12
Speaker 1: show a large criminal prosecution of the people responsible for
35:16
Speaker 1: the 1878 killings, even though American officials clearly knew accused
35:20
Speaker 1: witches had been killed. Blue's reconstruction points towards suppression and
35:25
Speaker 1: containment rather than a major murder trial, which makes sense
35:28
Speaker 1: within a political system still dependent on cooperation with influential
35:32
Speaker 1: Diné leaders such as Manuelito and Gennaro Mucho. Prosecuting large
35:37
Speaker 1: group of followers or major leaders, could have created a
35:40
Speaker 1: new crisis at the same moment federal authorities were trying
35:43
Speaker 1: to reduce raiding and stabilize relations on the reservation. American
35:48
Speaker 1: courts elsewhere also struggled when indigenous defendants killed people they
35:51
Speaker 1: sincerely believed were witches. Owen Davies documents later cases in
35:56
Speaker 1: which officials and juries had difficulty deciding how to treat
35:59
Speaker 1: defendants who argued that they were protecting themselves or their
36:03
Speaker 1: families from supernatural attack, including a later Navajo case that
36:07
Speaker 1: ended with a hung jury. Those cases do not tell
36:11
Speaker 1: us exactly what happened in 1878, but they show why
36:14
Speaker 1: a 19th century legal system built around ordinary physical evidence
36:19
Speaker 1: had trouble confronting a killing whose motive rested on a
36:22
Speaker 1: completely different understanding of causation. Now there is direct evidence
36:26
Speaker 1: that the government attempted to suppress the purge, including an
36:29
Speaker 1: archaeological report mentioning an object obtained by an officer from
36:33
Speaker 1: Fort Wingate in 1878 during government efforts to suppress a
36:38
Speaker 1: Navajo witch purge. The important point is that the suppression
36:42
Speaker 1: did not require the Diné to stop believing in witches.
36:45
Speaker 1: It required people to understand that killing an accused person
36:49
Speaker 1: can now bring soldiers, agents, or other outside consequences into
36:53
Speaker 1: the dispute. Historian Peter Iveson likewise places the purge inside
36:57
Speaker 1: the unstable early reservation years and notes that the panic
37:01
Speaker 1: faded as Diné society regained greater stability, which does not
37:05
Speaker 1: reduce the killings to economies. but supports the importance of
37:08
Speaker 1: the changing conditions around them. As the reservation economy stabilized,
37:13
Speaker 1: livestock herds were rebuilt, trading relationships expanded, and new forms
37:17
Speaker 1: of political authority developed. Some of the conditions that had
37:21
Speaker 1: intensified the crisis also changed. That does not mean economic
37:25
Speaker 1: recovery somehow cured witchcraft belief, because Cluckone found decades later
37:29
Speaker 1: that accusations and fear of harmful practitioners remained powerful, and
37:34
Speaker 1: occasional killings still occurred. What changed after 1878 was this
37:38
Speaker 1: scale of organized violence, not the underlying worldview. That distinction
37:44
Speaker 1: prevents us from giving the purge a false ending in
37:46
Speaker 1: which everyone suddenly realized the accused had been innocent. Families
37:51
Speaker 1: may have remembered the same death in completely different ways,
37:54
Speaker 1: with relatives of an accused person preserving a story of injustice,
37:58
Speaker 1: while relatives of someone believed to have been bewitched remembered
38:01
Speaker 1: the execution as an act that restored safety, without a
38:04
Speaker 1: central court issuing one official verdict. Conflicting memories could survive
38:08
Speaker 1: beside one another for generations. That is exactly why Martha's
38:12
Speaker 1: Blue work matters so much, because the Purge survives through
38:15
Speaker 1: two very different archives. One consists of records written by
38:18
Speaker 1: outsiders trying to control a crisis they did not fully understand,
38:22
Speaker 1: while the other consists of Diné oral histories preserving motives, relationships,
38:27
Speaker 1: and accusations the written record often missed. When Martha Blue
38:31
Speaker 1: published The Witch Purge of 1878, oral and documentary history
38:35
Speaker 1: in the early Navajo reservation years in 1988, more than
38:39
Speaker 1: a century had passed since the killings. By then, the
38:42
Speaker 1: event had been filtered through military reports, agency documents, trader correspondence,
38:48
Speaker 1: family memories, and later historical interpretation. Blue's strength was that
38:53
Speaker 1: she did not treat any one of those sources as
38:55
Speaker 1: a perfect record, because both the written documents and the
38:59
Speaker 1: oral histories carried their own limitations. Her documentary material included
39:04
Speaker 1: Indian service and military records, trader correspondence, the Indian agent's diary,
39:10
Speaker 1: and reports connected with Fort Wingate and Fort Defiance, while
39:14
Speaker 1: the oral material included interviews from the Ganado region and
39:17
Speaker 1: projects such as the Doris Duke Oral History Project and
39:21
Speaker 1: the Hubble Ethnohistory Project. Some oral accounts were recorded roughly
39:25
Speaker 1: 90 years after the purge, meaning they were family traditions
39:29
Speaker 1: rather than eyewitness testimony. But the contemporary American documents were
39:34
Speaker 1: also limited by translation, prejudice, incomplete knowledge, and the immediate
39:39
Speaker 1: purposes for which they were written. Charles Hubble's letters from
39:42
Speaker 1: May 31, 1878 are a perfect example. because he was
39:46
Speaker 1: writing in the middle of a crisis rather than trying
39:48
Speaker 1: to produce a balanced history. A man had already been killed,
39:53
Speaker 1: several others were said to be marked for death, armed
39:56
Speaker 1: groups were gathering, and Hubble feared the violence might reach
39:59
Speaker 1: his post. His letters established that serious violence was happening
40:03
Speaker 1: at a specific time and place, but he was not
40:05
Speaker 1: trying to explain Dene religion or preserve the motives of
40:09
Speaker 1: everyone involved. He was trying to get help. The oral
40:12
Speaker 1: histories preserved a different kind of information. and one of
40:15
Speaker 1: Blue's important sources was a 1976 interview with Amos Johnson,
40:20
Speaker 1: whose grandfather was said to have participated in the killing
40:24
Speaker 1: of Hastine Bowowsi. Johnson was not an eyewitness, but the
40:28
Speaker 1: family account remembered that witchcraft crisis had begun before the
40:31
Speaker 1: open killings, with sickness, livestock losses, jealousy, and accusations that
40:36
Speaker 1: harmful practitioners were collecting personal materials and burying them in graves.
40:42
Speaker 1: Bawasi was remembered as a major figure within that feared group,
40:45
Speaker 1: giving the Purge an internal history of supernatural attack that
40:49
Speaker 1: the hurried American correspondents barely recorded. The same family account
40:53
Speaker 1: also preserved the role of clan obligation during Bawasi's death.
40:57
Speaker 1: Granado Mucho insistently resisted the killing because Bawasi belonged to
41:01
Speaker 1: the same clan and was therefore understood as a relative.
41:05
Speaker 1: But after another man argued publicly that Bawasi had caused
41:08
Speaker 1: too much harm, Ganado Mucho stepped aside and the killing proceeded.
41:13
Speaker 1: An American report might simply record that a suspected witch
41:17
Speaker 1: had been killed, while the oral history preserves the argument
41:20
Speaker 1: over whether clan responsibility should protect someone believed to be
41:24
Speaker 1: destroying other families. Blue also identified places where oral and
41:28
Speaker 1: written evidence supported one another. Lieutenant McGonagall's June 1878 report
41:34
Speaker 1: reported Ganado Mucho saying that accused medicine men had placed grass, hair,
41:39
Speaker 1: horse dung, and sheep dung in a relative's grave, while
41:42
Speaker 1: the later oral tradition also remembered harmful materials being buried
41:45
Speaker 1: with the dead. The details do not match perfectly, but
41:49
Speaker 1: the overlap suggests that this accusation was not simply invented
41:52
Speaker 1: generations later. The comparison also reveals how easily translation could
41:57
Speaker 1: distort a record, because McGonagall wrote that one accused medicine
42:00
Speaker 1: man was Gennaro Mucho's brother, while Blue notes that a
42:03
Speaker 1: clan relationship may have been translated into an English kinship
42:06
Speaker 1: term that the officer understood too literally. A government document
42:11
Speaker 1: can therefore look precise while still carrying a misunderstanding created
42:15
Speaker 1: before the words ever reach the page. Indian agent John E.
42:19
Speaker 1: Pyle gives another example of the outsider problem because his
42:22
Speaker 1: diary treated Diné belief in witchcraft as an obstacle to
42:26
Speaker 1: what he called civilization. Pyle tried to persuade people that
42:30
Speaker 1: the accusations were foolish, but the attempt failed because the
42:34
Speaker 1: people he was addressing were did not see themselves as
42:36
Speaker 1: defending a superstition. They believed they were confronting people responsible
42:41
Speaker 1: for actual deaths. Lieutenant Colonel Swain appears to have understood
42:45
Speaker 1: the practical problem better, recognizing that simply insulting those beliefs
42:49
Speaker 1: would do little except damage trust. The oral histories have
42:53
Speaker 1: problems of their own, because stories change as they pass
42:56
Speaker 1: through generations. Family narratives can give confusing events cleaner beginnings
43:01
Speaker 1: and endings. and descendants may remember an execution as either
43:04
Speaker 1: necessary protection or unjust killing, depending on where their family
43:08
Speaker 1: stood in the original conflict. Blue openly acknowledged that some
43:11
Speaker 1: Ganado informants had not yet been born when the purge occurred,
43:15
Speaker 1: which is exactly why her method is so useful. She
43:18
Speaker 1: does not ask us to choose blindly between oral tradition
43:21
Speaker 1: and documentary record, but to compare what each can and
43:24
Speaker 1: cannot tell us. The written sources are strongest when telling
43:28
Speaker 1: us when violence was reported, when soldiers were dispatched, what
43:32
Speaker 1: traitors feared, and what officials believed they had been told.
43:35
Speaker 1: The oral accounts are strongest when preserving why particular people
43:38
Speaker 1: were feared, how clan relationships mattered, what accusations meant inside
43:43
Speaker 1: the community, and how descendants understood the purpose of the killings.
43:47
Speaker 1: Neither archive is complete, but together they make it much
43:50
Speaker 1: harder to dismiss the Purge as either simple political manipulation
43:54
Speaker 1: or meaningless superstition. Blue's broader interpretation points toward an internal
43:59
Speaker 1: Diné crisis, shaped by supernatural belief, kinship obligations, economic disruption,
44:06
Speaker 1: interpersonal conflict, leadership, and relations with the United States. That
44:10
Speaker 1: does not remove politics from the story, and it does
44:13
Speaker 1: not require us to accept supernatural accusations as factual descriptions
44:18
Speaker 1: of what the accused actually did. It means only that
44:21
Speaker 1: the purge cannot be understood from the outside by treating
44:25
Speaker 1: the word superstition as a complete explanation. The hardest question
44:29
Speaker 1: remains why these beliefs became so deadly at this particular moment,
44:34
Speaker 1: because harmful witchcraft had been feared before 1878 and continued
44:38
Speaker 1: to be feared afterward. Cluckone later wrote that his informants
44:41
Speaker 1: remembered the period from roughly 1875 to 1890, shortly after
44:46
Speaker 1: the return from Fort Sumner, as an especially intense era
44:50
Speaker 1: of witchcraft accusations, trials, and executions. That memory places the
44:55
Speaker 1: Ganado killings inside a wider period of tension rather than
44:58
Speaker 1: treating them as one isolated event? The first part of
45:01
Speaker 1: the answer is also the easiest to overlook. Many of
45:04
Speaker 1: the people involved genuinely believed harmful witchcraft was taking place.
45:09
Speaker 1: If a family believed someone had buried personal materials, projected
45:12
Speaker 1: objects into a body, poisoned a relative, or deliberately turned
45:16
Speaker 1: ceremonial knowledge towards sickness and death, then the suspected witch
45:20
Speaker 1: could appear to be committing murder through hidden means. Political
45:24
Speaker 1: or personal motives do not have to replace that belief
45:26
Speaker 1: in order to matter alongside it. Cluckone's later research connected
45:31
Speaker 1: accusations with jealousy, professional rivalry, resentment toward wealth, family tension,
45:37
Speaker 1: and competition among ceremonial practitioners, which helps explain how a
45:41
Speaker 1: supernatural charge could attach itself to an existing relationship. A
45:46
Speaker 1: family might already distrust the neighbor, remember an insult, resent
45:50
Speaker 1: a successful singer, suspect someone of theft, or feel threatened
45:54
Speaker 1: by another person's influence, and a serious illness could suddenly
45:57
Speaker 1: make those old attentions look like evidence that something darker
46:01
Speaker 1: had been happening all along. The rebuilding of the reservation
46:05
Speaker 1: economy probably intensified some of those pressures, because livestock was
46:09
Speaker 1: central to family survival after Basque Redondo. Sheep, horses, and
46:14
Speaker 1: cattle represented food, wealth, status, and the ability to rebuild
46:18
Speaker 1: a household, so theft or unexplained loss could be devastating.
46:23
Speaker 1: That helps explain why later records sometimes blur witch, thief,
46:27
Speaker 1: and raider into overlapping descriptions of the same dangerous person,
46:31
Speaker 1: particularly when leaders were trying to prevent renewed raids from
46:34
Speaker 1: provoking another American military response. The memory of Basque Redondo
46:39
Speaker 1: also matters without becoming a one-word explanation based on trauma.
46:44
Speaker 1: The Diné had returned only 10 years earlier after forced removal, imprisonment, disease, hunger,
46:50
Speaker 1: and catastrophic losses of livestock and property. then had to
46:54
Speaker 1: rebuild while adapting to reservation boundaries, American agents, new trading relationships,
47:00
Speaker 1: and new forms of policing. Those conditions did not invent witchcraft,
47:04
Speaker 1: but they created a setting in which unexplained sickness, unequal recovery,
47:08
Speaker 1: livestock loss, and political conflict carried enormous consequences. Illness may
47:13
Speaker 1: have been especially important because it created the kind of
47:15
Speaker 1: uncertainty that supernatural accusation could answer. If repeated treatment failed,
47:21
Speaker 1: that family could begin to suspect that another person was
47:23
Speaker 1: deliberately preventing recovery. And once ceremonial diagnosis, reputation, buried material,
47:30
Speaker 1: or confession pointed towards someone, action against that person could
47:33
Speaker 1: feel like an attempt to save the victim rather than
47:36
Speaker 1: an act of revenge. The strongest explanation is therefore not
47:40
Speaker 1: one cause but a collision of causes. Harmful witchcraft was
47:44
Speaker 1: sincerely feared. Unexplained illness created opportunities for accusation. Jealousy and
47:49
Speaker 1: family conflict influenced suspicion, livestock theft and raiding produced material enemies,
47:55
Speaker 1: leaders were trying to avoid renewed war, and all of
47:58
Speaker 1: it happened inside a society still recognizing itself after Bosque Redondo.
48:03
Speaker 1: The Purge was not less religious because politics were present,
48:06
Speaker 1: and it was not less political because people believed in witchcraft.
48:10
Speaker 1: Those different pressures became dangerous precisely because they were operating together.
48:15
Speaker 1: Modern retellings often reduce the event to the claim that
48:18
Speaker 1: the Diné killed around 40 skinwalkers in 1878. But the
48:22
Speaker 1: historical evidence is much broader than that label. Claucon distinguished
48:26
Speaker 1: several forms of harmful supernatural practice, and the accusations connected
48:30
Speaker 1: with the purge included buried personal materials, sickness, harmful substances,
48:35
Speaker 1: supernatural projectiles, medicine men supposedly shooting stones into people, and
48:40
Speaker 1: ceremonial knowledge believed to have been turned toward destructive purposes.
48:44
Speaker 1: The figure popularly called the Skinwalker belongs most closely to
48:48
Speaker 1: what Cluckone classified as witchery way. One particular complex of
48:52
Speaker 1: Dene witchcraft beliefs involving animal transformation or movement in animal form.
48:58
Speaker 1: But the Purge record does not describe 40 people being
49:00
Speaker 1: accused of that specific practice. Some accused individuals may have
49:05
Speaker 1: been associated with it, but the safer historical statement is
49:09
Speaker 1: that roughly 40 Dene people may have been killed during
49:12
Speaker 1: a period of intense accusations involving several forms of harmful witchcraft.
49:17
Speaker 1: That distinction is worth making because modern paranormal culture has
49:21
Speaker 1: turned the word skinwalker into a generic southwestern monster, often
49:26
Speaker 1: detached from its Diné religious context. The 1878 purge does
49:31
Speaker 1: not need the modern mythology to make it disturbing. because
49:34
Speaker 1: the actual accusations involved ordinary people becoming convinced that other
49:38
Speaker 1: ordinary people possessed hidden powers capable of causing sickness, death,
49:43
Speaker 1: and destruction. For this episode, that broader witchcraft panic is
49:47
Speaker 1: the story that matters. Calling the events of 1878 a
49:51
Speaker 1: witch hunt is useful as long as we do not
49:53
Speaker 1: mistake the phrase for evidence that Ganado was simply another Salem.
49:57
Speaker 1: The religious systems were completely different. Salem operated with impurity, Christianity,
50:02
Speaker 1: and ideas about Satan, demonic covenants, and spectral attack, while
50:07
Speaker 1: the Dene accusations involved harmful supernatural knowledge, buried materials, projected objects, poisoning,
50:14
Speaker 1: ceremonial power, and other forms of injury that had developed
50:17
Speaker 1: independently of European demonology. What the two events share is
50:22
Speaker 1: not a theology but a dangerous mechanism of accusation. In
50:26
Speaker 1: both cases, visible suffering could be blamed on an invisible
50:29
Speaker 1: human attacker, and once a person was named, ordinary pieces
50:33
Speaker 1: of that person's life could be reorganized as evidence of
50:36
Speaker 1: hidden guilt. An old argument could become a motive, a
50:40
Speaker 1: failed healing could become a sabotage, an unusual reputation could
50:43
Speaker 1: become threatening, and another accusation could make the first one
50:46
Speaker 1: look more credible. Both systems also made confession dangerously powerful,
50:51
Speaker 1: because Salem's courts used confession and accusations from other suspects
50:56
Speaker 1: to expand the hunt. While Diné accounts describe accused witches
51:00
Speaker 1: being pressured to admit responsibility, for supernatural attacks. In either setting,
51:05
Speaker 1: confession could validate the community's fear, while denial offered limited
51:08
Speaker 1: protection if the accused was already believed capable of deception
51:12
Speaker 1: and hidden harm. The major difference was institutional, because Salem
51:17
Speaker 1: converted accusations into formal criminal prosecutions with warrants, examinations, prisons, courts,
51:24
Speaker 1: and executions under colonial law, leaving behind an enormous archive.
51:29
Speaker 1: The 1878 purge remained decentralized, with accusations handled through relatives,
51:35
Speaker 1: local groups, leaders, ceremonial judgment, armed parties, and direct confrontation.
51:41
Speaker 1: There was no single denier court to close when the
51:43
Speaker 1: violence became dangerous, which helps explain why American intervention had
51:47
Speaker 1: to work through multiple families and communities rather than one
51:51
Speaker 1: legal institution. The victims also appear different from popular European
51:55
Speaker 1: image of the persecuted witch. because surviving Diné evidence points
51:59
Speaker 1: heavily towards men, including ceremonial specialists and politically significant individuals.
52:05
Speaker 1: The deference reminds us that a witch hunt should not
52:07
Speaker 1: be defined by gender, costume, religion, or supposed powers of
52:11
Speaker 1: the accused. What matters is what happens when a community
52:14
Speaker 1: becomes convinced that hidden human enemies are responsible for suffering
52:19
Speaker 1: and begins punishing those enemies on evidence that becomes increasingly
52:22
Speaker 1: difficult to challenge. Ordinary conflict can intensify that process without
52:28
Speaker 1: making the supernatural belief fake, because Salem's accusations became entangled
52:33
Speaker 1: with family rivalries, church disputes, property tensions, and reputation, while
52:38
Speaker 1: Ganado involved sickness, ceremonial rivalry, jealousy, livestock theft, raiding, leadership,
52:45
Speaker 1: clan obligations, and the rebuilding of Diné society after Bosque Redondo.
52:50
Speaker 1: In both cases, The accusation gained power because it could
52:53
Speaker 1: pull several different problems together and give them one human face.
52:57
Speaker 1: That is the point where the belief becomes a purge.
53:00
Speaker 1: Because misfortune acquires an author, invisible harm becomes intentional violence,
53:06
Speaker 1: confession strengthens fear, ordinary disputes gain supernatural meaning, and killing
53:11
Speaker 1: the accused can be understood by the participants not as
53:14
Speaker 1: a murder but as protection. The specific witch may look
53:18
Speaker 1: different from culture to culture. but the danger begins when
53:21
Speaker 1: identifying the hidden enemy becomes more urgent than proving the accusation.
53:26
Speaker 1: By the time the violence around Granado faded, nobody had
53:29
Speaker 1: disproved witchcraft, identified one mastermind behind the accusations, or officially
53:34
Speaker 1: declared the dead innocent. The purge ended without the clean
53:38
Speaker 1: resolution we might expect from a courtroom story, because outside
53:41
Speaker 1: pressure increased, reservation policing changed, local political conditions shifted, and
53:47
Speaker 1: the particular combination of fear and instability that had made
53:50
Speaker 1: mass violence possible began to weaken. That ending is important
53:54
Speaker 1: because it shows that belief alone cannot explain what happened.
53:57
Speaker 1: Diné ideas about harmful witchcraft existed before 1878 and survived afterward,
54:03
Speaker 1: yet the killing did not continue at the same intensity forever.
54:07
Speaker 1: The extraordinary violence belonged to a particular historical moment when
54:11
Speaker 1: older supernatural fears collided with illness, economic disruption, livestock loss,
54:16
Speaker 1: political uncertainty, raiding, changing authority, and the unfinished consequences of
54:21
Speaker 1: American conquest. The people carrying out the killings did not
54:25
Speaker 1: necessarily think of themselves as murdering innocent neighbors, because many
54:29
Speaker 1: appeared to have believed they were stopping people who could
54:32
Speaker 1: kill without ordinary weapons. If supernatural harm was real, waiting
54:36
Speaker 1: for conventional proof could seem dangerous, and if a healer
54:39
Speaker 1: identified the attacker, diagnosis could become accusation. If confession was
54:44
Speaker 1: believed capable of stopping the harm, coercing that confession could
54:47
Speaker 1: appear necessary, while a victim's later recovery might make the
54:51
Speaker 1: entire process seem justified. This is what makes The Witch
54:54
Speaker 1: Purge more disturbing than a story about whether witches were real.
54:58
Speaker 1: It shows what can happen when a community becomes convinced
55:01
Speaker 1: that suffering has a hidden human author and begins searching
55:04
Speaker 1: for that person among neighbors, relatives, healers, rivals, thieves, and
55:09
Speaker 1: political enemies. The accused do not have to look monstrous
55:12
Speaker 1: because the terror comes from belief that somebody who appears
55:15
Speaker 1: completely ordinary may secretly be responsible for extraordinary harm. The
55:20
Speaker 1: question that opened this episode was never simply why the
55:23
Speaker 1: Diné believed harmful witches existed, because those beliefs belonged to
55:27
Speaker 1: a much older religious world. The real question was why
55:31
Speaker 1: 1878 became a moment when those beliefs helped justify a purge,
55:36
Speaker 1: and the evidence suggests there was no single answer waiting
55:39
Speaker 1: at the bottom of that story. Religion, sickness, jealousy, livestock,
55:44
Speaker 1: family conflict, raiding, leadership, colonial pressure, and fear had become
55:49
Speaker 1: tangled so completely that separating one from the others may
55:53
Speaker 1: be impossible. Perhaps that is the most useful way to
55:56
Speaker 1: understand a witch hunt in any culture. It is not
55:58
Speaker 1: simply a moment when everyone suddenly becomes irrational, but a
56:02
Speaker 1: moment when invisible danger is given a human face, and
56:05
Speaker 1: enough people decide that removing that person is necessary for
56:08
Speaker 1: everyone else to survive. Around Ganado in 1878, that search
56:14
Speaker 1: may have left roughly 40 people dead. More than a
56:17
Speaker 1: century later, we cannot say with certainty who all of
56:20
Speaker 1: them were or whether the people who killed them ever
56:23
Speaker 1: came to believe they had done anything other than protect
56:25
Speaker 1: their families. Whatever the accusers believed about them, the people
56:30
Speaker 1: underneath the word witch were still people. And that is
56:33
Speaker 1: where the history of the Witch Purge of 1878 becomes
56:36
Speaker 1: much harder to dismiss as folklore. And that's the end
56:40
Speaker 1: of another Occult Rejects. Hope you all enjoyed, and until
56:44
Speaker 1: the next one.