Spirit(s) of Place, Part 2
Restoring orenda, and getting our vision checked.
This is Part 2 of what is turning into a three-part series, looking at “Orenda and a Definition of Religion” by J. N. B. Hewitt. You can find Part 1 here; a shorter reflection on why orenda might matter for us today is here.
Despite his professional success, John Napoleon Brinton Hewitt appears in the margins of his writing as a tragic figure.
He was a man stuck between worlds: orphaned from his biological parents, a refugee from the world that shaped his people’s culture, struggling to assimilate into a colonial society that (he felt) held the keys to his survival.
Life in the apartheid system of the reservations was harsh. These places were not set up to protect the wellbeing of their inhabitants. American kids are taught to think of the reservations as, at best, magnanimous gifts from a victorious country; at worst, a tragic case of negligence, combined with the occasional atrocity committed by individual bad actors. The official line is that reservations were a chance for the indigenous people to keep living—a way to go along to get along, an opportunity to lift themselves up from savagery. Even calling them “reservations” implies that they were areas set aside for the people living in them.
But the reservations were always, always, always warfare by other means: when killing people’s bodies becomes too logistically difficult, killing their spirits is just as effective.
For a supposedly materialist culture, the reservation system exhibits a fiendishly brutal understanding of orenda: by cutting people off from the land and the “environing bodies” that support them—forcing them onto alien soil, taking away their ritual relationships with the metaphysical ecosystem that sustains them—they will lose their will to fight, to resist, and, eventually, to live. There’s no need to waste resources on a costly campaign of extermination when you can just let people die.
Hewitt came of age at a time when the colonial system1 was innovating a new technology of containment. The science of ethnology was an extension of the indoctrination process that began in the colonial schools: forcing colonized people to adopt the language, clothes, and religion of the colonizers made them compliant, to a point. But these were only superficial methods. The myths of a better world that had been stolen from them would survive, could be passed on to inspire future resistance.
The true victory would be making that troublesome world unreal.
And so ethnology, under the guise of better understanding—objective science—set to work defining away that other world’s existence. The cosmos that the whispered myths carried forward wasn’t real. It was just a misapprehension, a set of quaint beliefs held by stupid, primitive, backward people. Modern people—the ones permitted to enjoy the benefits of the dominant society—knew better. Through the science of ethnology, all those other worlds could be boxed up and laid out next to each other, like dead butterflies pinned on a board, to be defined against the truths of objective reality2.
The colonial system needed collaborators to do this work. Native guides would lead the ethnologists into that other world, capture its magic in the language of modernity, lock it safely away in books and dictionaries and display cases.
And so Hewitt was offered a chance to escape the reservation.
He was recognized as intelligent, a quick study in the sorcery of scientific language. He had the right pedigree: a Tuscarora mother and a British father, orphaned into an assimilating family, with the implied aristocracy of that goddamn starched shirt of a name. He’d dropped out of school for health reasons; at twenty-one years old, he was back on the rez, farming, when the acolytes of this new science came looking for him.
He was offered a Faustian bargain: join the colonizers. Denature his people’s world into the anodyne language of science. Slice and flense and dissect that living cosmos into smaller and smaller specimens, to be made transparent and fixed onto glass slides, inert and harmless. Do this, and be accepted into the dominant culture. Get off the rez. Put on a suit. Live in a nice house, far from the desperation of his people’s doomed world. Preserve the memory of their culture in the only place it would be safe: between the pages of a book, tucked away in the imperial libraries, alongside all the other worlds that were cut down. Keep this history—and it is history, now, buried in the past that modernity built—from being erased forever. Dead things need preservation.
And so he did.
Who wouldn’t?
Ontological bracketing: what “they believe”
From this perspective, Hewitt—while ostensibly speaking with the unbiased, objective voice of modern science—was actually engaging in some very subjective social positioning. The primary audience of “Orenda and a Definition of Religion” was not some imagined future student of ethnology. That was what the Academy wanted him to create: a means of controlling the future by defining the past. But that wasn’t his main concern in writing it. His true audience was the gatekeepers of the Academy. The continued acceptance of his work meant a career, a livelihood, social standing; if he couldn’t prove his fidelity with this new reality—if he was suspected of divided loyalty, holding onto the “primitive beliefs” of his mother’s people—he would be dropped back into obscurity3.
Consequently, “Orenda and a Definition of Religion'' is a prolonged exercise in ontological bracketing.
I was first introduced to the concept of ontological bracketing in Jack Hunter’s book “Manifesting Spirits”; he, in turn, cites Jeremy Northcote’s essay, “Objectivity and the Supernormal”4. Here’s an excerpt:
The sceptical bias that such analysts exhibit towards the supernormal can be seen on the occasions when, having not ignored the area altogether or reduced it to a curious oddity, they adopt a general pattern of discrediting proponents of such ideas, portraying them as irrational, gullible, fantasy prone, pseudoscientific or downright fraudulent (Eglin, 1974: 324). Even the more sympathetic treatments of supernormal proponents have tended to be characterised by a reductionist tendency that treats supernormal ideas as purely social or psychological constructs without a basis in objective reality.
It’s a fancy-pants anthropological concept that can be summed up in two words: “they believe.”
Ontological bracketing is the lethal poison in modernity’s killing jars. With those two words, phasmatopian cosmologies can be rendered lifeless, ready for the scalpel. It’s a phrase so innocuous that we still use it today, without considering its implications: the inherent othering of “they,” the dismissive paternalism of “believe.”
It’s a powerful spell—a compound so potent that it still settles into our bones and colors our vision, centuries after it was first introduced.
And if we’re going to talk about orenda, we need to neutralize that ontological bracketing; then, maybe, we can look clearly at what people saw when they first recognized it.
Restoring Orenda
Here is the world that Hewitt recalls, with the ontological bracketing stripped away.
First, he offers a valid observation, albeit for the wrong reasons:
“It is most difficult, if not relatively impossible, to learn to think and feel with the elder time. But if the thoughts, motives, feelings and activities of savages [people unencumbered by modernity] are the subject-matter of serious study and interpretation, this must be done insofar as it may be possible to do so.”
True enough.
Here’s the what people saw from within that “elder time,” as Hewitt remembers it: