Bancroft Hunt, Norman, 2002 Shamanism in North America, Toronto, Key Porter Books, 232 pages.

Shamanism in North America is a beautiful book to look through and hold. A casual reader will appreciate the clarity of the writing, its uncluttered layout and the generous number of excellent quality, full colour illustrations. Amongst the book’s virtues are its scope and its underlying organizational principle. In each of seven geographic areas, Bancroft Hunt shows how topography and climate shape a bioregion’s shamanic practice. Beginning with the Eskimo-Aleut of the North American Arctic, the chapters move to the Subarctic and Great Lakes, the Northwest Coast, the Southwest, California and the Plains. The author traces the connection between place and culture; for instance, the Subarctic is described as a land of meager or scattered resources which could support only tiny isolate groups except for occasional communal celebrations when weather conditions were favourable: “Spiritual life reflects the uncertainties of Subarctic living. There are few organized cults or associations of shamans, and there is little formal training for anyone who wishes to take up shamanism as a vocation.” Nevertheless, and this is something many ethnographers have ignored or been unaware of, “the influence of the shamans is apparent in virtually every activity” (p. 47). Though perhaps physically absent in the Subarctic, the shaman has been a pervasive and immediate force through charms and healing herbs passed on to descendants and through direct interventions often in dreams. Thus shamanism and shamanic dreams join these scattered groups like beads on a necklace in a common spiritual heritage. Similar connections are made in each chapter, but I will focus on the Arctic which shows, perhaps, the fullest conjunction of shamanic life and the environment. Bancroft Hunt’s writing is sensual, even poetic: As the background to life in the Arctic is uncertainty, shamans face uncertainty and danger in the spirit world where they may be mutilated or die; or, they may return with spiritual mastery. Their peril is the peril the community faces every day but their triumph is to aid their community by placating or diverting spirits whose motives are self-serving; by attending to the social fabric by evoking confessions of wrongdoing from community members, thus defusing anger and resentment which might otherwise have exploded in the long winter night; or by intervening to heal the sick or calm a blizzard. There is a bibliography for the volume rather than for each chapter and it is not very extensive—certainly it doesn’t acknowledge the vast amount of historical and ethnographic writing on the Arctic (and summarized, for example, in Merkur 1992) much of which contains some reference to shamanism. Historical and ethnographic references include a substantial account from Freuchen (three pages out of approximately 18 pages of text) but Freuchen’s name doesn’t appear in the index or the bibliography which is pretty much limited to only three specifically Arctic sources (Burch, Fitzhugh and Kaplan, and Rasmussen). In his Introduction, Bancroft Hunt uses the gender-neutral he/she when writing about shamans but he doesn’t extend this into the Arctic chapter. Not once is a female shaman mentioned or the female pronoun used. Nor is the problem of translating the gender-neutral Eskimo language into English discussed or even acknowledged, as in this example: “His own spirit—known to the Eskimo as the inua, or soul […] is nervous and frightened yet must show no sign of weakness which could be taken advantage of” (p. 18). Inua translates as “its person” or “its human being” meaning spiritual inhabitant visualized as a tiny human being—male or female. The chapter gives the distinct impression that all Arctic shamans were and are male. In the historical literature, we might forgive this male bias …