The Navajo Witch Purge of 1878

The words "Navajo Witch Purge" might at first call to mind the similar phrase "Salem Witch Hunt" and all the lurid imagery that goes with it. A bit of investigating, however, produces a cultural and historical picture of the Navajo and their tradition of witchcraft profoundly different from anything ever imagined by those early New England Puritans. As the Salem Witch trials in seventeenth-century Massachusetts may have evolved as a societal response to the religious thinking of the day, so the Navajo Witch Purge of 1878 evolved as a cultural response to the effects of colonialism on the Navajo way of life. Witchcraft was always an accepted, if not widely acknowledged, part of Navajo culture, and the killing of "witches" was historically as much accepted among the Navajo as among the Europeans. The events of 1878 were a culmination of situation and circumstance that created the seemingly sensational out of what had been the cultural norm.

That witchcraft had been a traditional part of Navajo society is thoroughly documented in noted anthropologist Clyde Kluckhohn's monograph, Navajo Witchcraft. While Kluckhohn's work may seem somewhat dated to us—the book appeared in 1944—his information is, in this instance, more than forty-five years closer to direct sources than anything that might be gathered today. He discusses at length the four basic forms of NBehind the trading postavajo witchcraft, "Witchery, Sorcery, Wizardry, and Frenzy Witchcraft" (22), and the purposes each served in Navajo society. Of the four, it was sorcery and wizardry that were most apparent during the events of the 1878 purge. Sorcery was the burying of victims' articles and excretions, and wizardry the injection of foreign things into the victim (cf. Blue, Trader, Chapter 4).