Thanksgiving and Hobamock

2010.12.04
Days Remaining: 178

01. This particular post has been continually deferred for the past week or so. I start bits and pieces of it, and then get distracted and do something else. It's now 805pm on Saturday night, and I would like to finish this before settling down for the night to read the novel for my Native American Religions course this coming week (Susan Power's very interesting The Grass Dancer).

02. Two Wednesday mornings ago, at 430am, I drove to Wilmington for Thanksgiving. Once more, the early morning (earlier, this time, due to it being a week day, than when I drove down for my mom's birthday party) trip took almost exactly 4 hours from door to door. Clearly my previous long-delayed trips to Delaware were avoidable if only I had been in the habit of leaving before the sun rises. Live and learn, I suppose. The trip back last Sunday, however, took approximately 7 or 8 hours due to traffic, all of which started in NYC (up to that point I was only going marginally slower than my trip southwards).

03. Thanksgiving is not my favorite holiday; until my mom and dad got together (when I was 15) I had never been a fan of turkey in any form. My dad's method of cooking turkey, however, changed that (he smokes it on a grill), and so my alimentary animus against Thanksgiving dwindled (it also helped that, as I got older, I came to appreciate mashed potatoes via gravy), though it never abated entirely. I still loathe stuffing and sweet potatoes and (shudder) green bean casserole. All of that said, this Thanksgiving was actually lovely. I stayed at Selena and Iunius' house, and Thanksgiving morning my various siblings and parents came over to have a leisurely breakfast (Pilsbury Cinnamon Rolls) and watch the Macy's Thanksgiving Parade. I love spending time with the kids, and it seemed like everyone was very relaxed and having a good time.

04. Then the moving started, as we all helped mom and dad begin the move to their new house. We (several siblings and siblings-in-law + me) did 3 hours on Thanksgiving proper, then I did 6 hours on Black Friday (emptying the garage), then Selena and Iunius did an enormous amount on Saturday while I helped Aurelia and her fiance move into their new house (from Newark to Kennett Square, PA), then on Sunday Selena, Iunius and I did the rest (my eldest younger sister, Agrippina, helped throughout). On Saturday my parents hired professional moves to handle the large, heavy, wicked, difficult, frustrating furniture (the movers did a fantastic job, according to everyone who saw them work). So I participated in two moves in four days, and both were close to completion (only small things and cleaning left) when I drove home on Sunday. Moving is always stressful, and especially so over the holidays. I made it through with only minor injuries: several bruises on the insides of my arms (I'm pretty sure that was the filing cabinets, Aurelia - I shouldn't have been so stubborn about moving them myself!), a pulled muscle on the inside of my left knee (still tender), and a very sore right butt cheek (I have no idea how that happened). When I got back to New Aldwych on Sunday night I showered and then laid down to sleep for a very long time.

05. This past week has been fairly pedestrian, I suppose. I think a lot about the way that my life fits together, and one of my predominant working metaphors became clear to me this week: life as a filing system. I spend a great deal of time picking up ideas, images, words, texts, social interactions, etc., and then (an often even longer) time organizing them into a system. I have a bazillion bookmarks on my browser, for instance, thousands of PDFs of scholarly articles, thousands of books, hundreds of music albums, Word files, etc. My life is a library, and keeping it going in a clear fashion is a major undertaking. There are times when I wish I could somehow simplify it, but every time I stay in one place for more than a few days I begin to acquire books. This is what I do: I intake knowledge, either directly or in a deferred fashion (writing as memory-storage enhancer). Maybe what I love about teaching is the ability to share it again.

06. I was invited to sit in for a "Theories of Religion" senior-level seminar on Wednesday, which also involved lunch at a local restaurant (I had one of the tastiest chicken gyros I've ever eaten, which was nice). I really enjoyed it; the seminar was about 3 hours long, and it was very nice to be able to talk about theories of religion, their up- and downsides, and how to apply them to actual data with folks who know what we're all talking about (which, in this case, means the professor and the students).

07. Today I went to the Mashantucket Pequot Museum (which I heartily recommend: http://www.pequotmuseum.org/) with approximately 2/5 of the students from my Native American Religions class. Originally it was all 27 of them, but attrition (read: this is a Saturday near the end of the semester) slowly cut down those who could make it. Baskerville College (go hounds!) paid for it, which was nice. This was my 3rd trip to the museum in as many years, but I'm still always impressed by it, both as a museum and as a rhetorical statement by the Mashantucket Pequots (whose Native identity is still hotly contested among the larger population around here - it's astonishing how quickly and thoroughly anti-Native American stereotypes and sentiments flared up). Anyway, this time around the museum's exhibits were expanded so I got some new information, including a more detailed (though still sadly summary) discussion of pre-Contact Pequot ritual healing experts (powwows, as opposed to the pnieses, who seem to have been hunting and war-focused). The information was very sparse, but it included mention of the spirit being with whom powwows were most intimately connected, Hobamock (spelling of this name differs wildly).

08. Now, the northeast Algonquian-speaking Native American groups at Contact (1500s) gave us the word powwow, which has had two very different descendant terms that both worked in English, though one has fallen into disuse as much as the original meaning. The first was the expansion of the term powwow from the ritual expert to the healing ceremony (usually one with music and dancing), and from there to any ceremonial dancing ceremony. Thus one can find "Powwow Circuits" every summer; a cycle of dance ceremonies and competitions held on reservations all over the country, most of which are given by groups whose non-English language isn't Algonquian. The second meaning was again an expansion from ritual expert to ceremony, but it preserved the generally occult (religious or magical, depending on who is doing the talking) character of the word, and was used to describe a wide array (sometimes a "system") of folk ritual practices derived, logically given the Algonquian term, from German folk culture. This was due to a single book called Pow-wows, or the Long Lost Friend, a recipe and spell-book originally just called Der Lange Verbergorene Freund in German. Somehow, the English translator decided to append the word "Pow-wow" to it, and so the word now exists in American folk ritual practices, though it has dwindled in popularity with the rise of Asian, Egyptian, Near Eastern, Classical, and New Age influenced ritual systems.

09. Anyway, back to Hobamock. I was certain that I'd seen that name recently, and when I got home I did some poking around and discovered that Hobamock was the name (probably a nickname) of one of the Pilgrims' Native allies at Plymouth. He was a major opponent of Squanto's, and his name is often glossed as "mischief." That said, I had a great deal of trouble squaring that historical figure with the spirit being alluded to in the powwow exhibit at the museum. So, further digging confirmed that Hobamock is also a name for a spirit being relatively common among Algonquian-speaking Native groups of coastal New England (how far inland this went is unclear, but I would imagine most of the way since these groups were all in regular contact with one another). He is sometimes remembered in New England folk tales (Native and Anglo) as a sort of giant or tricky warrior, which is striking because in colonial times he was the figure most often translated as "Devil" by the Puritans! Turns out that he was a complicated figure, who often seems to have stood in symbolic contrast with the creator figure. The creator, for instance, lived in the southwest, and Hobamock was from the northeast (source of cold and wild winter storms along the coast). Creator's color was white, Hobamock's was black. So why was he the premier sponsor for powwows? Because, as I often emphasize to my students, that which can harm can also heal. The creator was pretty much a distant (physically and temporally) benevolent figure, and Hobamock was thought to be active in the world currently. He was often associated with snakes, but could change his shape and be invisible. He both caused and cured illness, and so when someone was sick the powwows would attempt to contact Hobamock and persuade him to remove the illness from the afflicted.

10. I mention all of this because this is a very common (as in, world-wide) way of conceiving divine power: as ambivalent. Apollo was as much a plague god as a healer in ancient Greece. The god of Israel smote and blessed, fairies can harm or help, Buddhist demons are benevolent so long as they're properly respected, and so forth. The desire to morally compartmentalize a deity into a "good" or "bad" frame is very much a theological imperative articulated by, in our culture, Judaic, Christian, and Islamic concerns with monotheism (where the only true deity is inherently good, and everything else is only as good as it serves him). So Hobamock (or Abbamacko, or Hobomok, etc.) illustrates what I think is a profoundly important theological corrective to Judeo-Christian expectations: the gods are neither good nor evil in much of the world; they're just powerful.

11. One thing that my students and I discussed today was the dearth of information on pre-Contact and early post-Contact Native American religions of the eastern seaboard. Even for groups with a history of their own writing and political independence (or successful resistance), such as the Cherokee, Choctaw, Creek, etc., the missionary activities of the Spanish and English were successful enough that we often have only fragments of what existed before. I think about the difference in Native American cultural products here in New England versus, for instance, in Oklahoma and points west, where the further west you go (until you hit Spanish mission country in California) the more likely you are to find people who grow up knowing the names and rituals associated with spirit beings (this is true even though the majority of Native Americans today are Christian). In Leslie Marmon Silko's (Laguna Pueblo) books, or N. Scott Momaday's (Kiowa Nation), or Susan Power's (Lakota), it's taken for granted that references to Changing Woman, or Tai-Me, or traditional ritual expertise, will be understood sufficiently to not be disruptive to communicating meaning. But no one here seems to have any living memory of Hobamock. It's all preserved in English historical writing, not personal memory. This is, to my mind, extremely sad. But the European invaders hadn't developed an idea of ethnography yet, and even if they had, the specific purpose of the specific invaders in New England was colonization and missionizing, not recording or understanding what was already there.

12. And that's about it.