Oky ontatechiata

Abstract

This article focuses on the Wendat Panic of 1635–1645.While details of popular moral panics such as the Salem Trials of the 1690s are replete, historians continue to question not only the general characteristics of witchcraft in Native society (how it functioned on a day-to-day basis) but also more specific queries concerning the degree to which Native witchcraft was a colonial product and the influence of social structures such as gender and class on accusations. By applying an ethnohistorical approach to several seventeenth-century Wendat case studies, brief glimpses into the Wendat world are uncovered and serve to answer some of these questions. Taken as a whole, an investigation into the Wendat experience places unique Wendat notions of witchcraft within the more general human historical context of the early modern world.