Can These Bones Live?: Death and Life in Early America

Can These Bones Live?Death and Life in Early America John Saillant (bio) Erik R. Seeman . Death in the New World: Cross-Cultural Encounters, 1492-1800. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010. 372 pp. Illustrations, notes, and index. $45.00 (cloth); $24.95 (paper). Death in the New World commences with the observation that at the time of first contact among Africans, Europeans, and Native Americans, ordinary people as well as leaders in arts, trade, politics, and religion were intensely curious about the deathways of foreign peoples—the ways those of other cultures buried, mourned, and remembered the dead. Deathways were seen as a clue to the culture of the alien society, not only for understanding but also for hostile strategy. In our own time, this curiosity is much subdued although not absent—which is the subject of the brief conclusion to this book. Erik R. Seeman observes that responses to alien deathways fell into one of two categories: a recognition of the familiar or a surprise at the strange. Recognition of the familiar in deathways tended toward an inclusive view of humanity (supported by biblical monogenesis), which could foster intercultural cooperation yet could also provide opportunities for inhumanity insofar as, if one understood the enemy's deathways, one could violate them effectively—for instance, by mutilating corpses or desecrating graves. Surprise at the unfamiliar in deathways tended toward an exclusive view of humanity (articulated in the birth of modern racism as a focus on seemingly essential differences among "races"), which could be and was used by Euro-Americans in establishing hegemony over Africans and Native Americans. The study of deathways yields so much valuable information because of the longstanding curiosity about funerary practices and the like (the oldest example Seeman provides is from Herodotus) and because of the ubiquity of death in the colonial world as an inevitable part of violent conflict over land and other resources, pathogens spread by human migration, and circumstances such as harsh weather, inadequate food, and overwork. This analytical framework—deathways as a window into culture as well as deathways as a tool in intercultural contact, conflict, and cooperation—is carried through a number of topical chapters. The first chapter, "Old Worlds of [End Page 6] Death," includes examples from Africans, Europeans, and Native Americans. Chapter two, "First Encounters," shows "how a New World of death began to emerge from the Old" (p. 47), as Europeans and natives began to use their knowledge of each others' deathways in violent confrontations. Chapter three, "Burial and Dismemberment in the Chesapeake," examines a fluid situation in early Virginia in which, on the one hand, both Algonquian Indians and English settlers attacked through violating the other's understanding of a proper death and burial; and, on the other hand, both Indians' and settlers' deathways changed because of colonial circumstances. For instance, Indians began to adopt some European practices, while settlers departed from European ways by using coffins, prohibitively expensive for most Europeans but easily available in Virginia because of the abundance of lumber. Chapter four, "Holy Bones and Beautiful Deaths in New France," shows that French Jesuits and native groups like the Micmac and the Huron achieved a different ratio of inclusion to exclusion than did the English and the Algonquians. There were significant parallels between the Catholics' and the Native Americans' notions of a proper death, although Jesuits were dismissive of some Indian practices, such as the use of healers and ideas about the material quality of the afterlife in which worldly goods would be useful to the departed. Still, violence erupted and deathways were modified in response, as when the settler Christophe Regnaut did something very unusual for a Christian in exhuming the corpses of two Jesuits killed by the Huron: removing the flesh from their bones and transporting the remains to Quebec, where they were (and still are) venerated as relics. The remaining four chapters treat New England, African Americans, Jewish Americans, and the Seven Years' War, generally showing the dominance of Protestant understandings of death, burial, and the afterlife, yet also the survival of some alternative traditions under the sacred canopy of American Christian deathways. By 1800, for "most residents" of the eastern third...

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