Spirit(s) of Place, Part 3

Gods, guns, and grimoires.

This is Part 3 of what is now becoming a four-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; Part 2 is here.

J.N.B. Hewitt’s essay is, ostensibly, an objective account—a scientific reporting of facts, collected by a neutral observer and presented with as little bias as possible. 

It’s consistent with the whole promise of ethnology as a science: the idea that a rational observer can function as a brain without a body, scooping up factual information and faithfully distilling it into academic language. That understanding has been tempered over the past century. We’ve recognized that true objectivity is more elusive than the pioneers of the field first imagined. Nevertheless, those early assumptions still lie in the foundations of how modern people understand reality.

As I wrote about previously, “Orenda and a Definition of Religion” suffers from a strong cultural and ontological bias. That bias would seem to discredit it from a purely scientific perspective. However—at the time it was written, when modernity was still driving down the stakes that marked out its domain—Hewitt’s subjective biases were an asset to the larger project of unmaking competing cosmologies.

This is particularly obvious when Hewitt shifts his attention away from the provincial phenomenon of orenda, and sets his sights on a universal definition of religion.

A close reading of Hewitt’s essay points to the religious trauma we might expect in someone who grew up on the reservation. Colonialism was a form of spiritual warfare; religious conversion was often compulsory. Schools were run by missionaries who were determined to drag their charges onto the path of salvation by any means necessary. Hell and damnation and divine wrath were the rhetorical sticks that evangelists used (along with actual sticks) to whip their pupils into shape.

It’s no surprise, then, that Hewitt grew up with the idea of gods as domineering forces. When he writes about the “environing bodies” that put forth their orenda, he sees them primarily as unsympathetic tyrants: “[People learned] from these constraining relations to feel that these bodies, through the exercise of their orenda, controlled the conditions of his [sic] welfare and in like manner shaped his ill-fare… he came gradually to regard these bodies as the masters, the arbiters, the gods, of his environment, whose aid, goodwill, and even existence were absolutely necessary to his well-being and his preservation of life itself” [emphasis mine.]

The development of religion, therefore, began with people trapped in these “constraining relations”—cowering before the entities that held the power of life and death over them. People were compelled to offer “gifts, offerings, praise and flattery or worship, and even self-abasement the most abject,” in order to preserve themselves; they developed rites, ceremonies, rituals, and dogmas as a means of appeasing the powers that stood over them. Thus, “the story of the operations of orenda becomes the history of the gods.”

That’s how religion was presented to Hewitt as a child; that’s how he understood the God of Abraham; consequently, that’s how all gods must be.

From this perspective, undoing these “primitive beliefs” is not just about educating people: it’s about emancipating them. Who wants to spend their life at the mercy of these imaginary beings? Who wants to live with the anxiety of constantly attending to the whims and vanities of invisible, inscrutable forces? Isn’t it better to live in a purely material world—where a mountain is just a mountain, a lake is just a lake, and a storm is just a storm? If worship is just metaphysical extortion, aren’t we better off without it? Shouldn’t we take our rightful place as the masters of our own destiny?

In Hewitt’s essay, we can already see the precursors of the evangelical atheism that has taken hold in modern culture. We’re rightly unsettled by his casual references to “savages” and “primitive beliefs.” But we still accept that it’s the responsibility of educated, scientific, right-thinking people to rescue the unenlightened from their religious beliefs. While we’ve removed the colonial coding of “primitives,” we still talk despairingly about what “they” “believe.”

It’s worth asking, in this case: is this actually how the Haudenosaunee understood their world? Or is it just an alignment of Hewitt’s religious trauma with the colonial mission of the Academy?