TheMaterialismofBiologicalEncounters 123
healers, and especially the shamans, had no way of stopping the mass
death and how this de-legitimated their authority together with the
cultureonwhichthisauthorityrested.Notonlyfromademographicbut
also from a cultural point of view, then, the pandemics of the 17thand
18 thcenturies played into the hands of the European settler colonists, at
least in the long run, so that "in some instances, survival convinced
individualstobelieveintheChristianGod.Thelossofinheritedcultural
knowledge aided Christian missionaries' attempts at conversion, as
manyritualsandsacredbundlesfellintodisusewhenshamanandother
elders died" (Halverson n. pag.). In retrospect, this dual medical and
cultural catastrophe was by its beneficiaries inserted into a providential
narrative, already by William Bradford, later and most notably by
Cotton Mather in hisMagnalia Christi Americana(1702). From the
viewpointofmaterialistculturalcritique,hisprovidentialreadingof"an
[sic]horribleandunusualplaguewherebythey[sc.theNativeAmerican
population] were consumed in such vast multitudes, that our first
planters found the land almost covered with their unburied carcasses"
(Magnalia1: 51) can be understood as the medical version of the
ideology ofterra nulliussince it made the land "free" for European
settlement.^76
(^76) This idea was not only a core assumption in Puritan culture but had existed
evenbefore.Twogenerationslater,in 1769,AmosAdams,ministeroftheFirst
Church at Roxbury MA, develops a similar scenario in a sermon: "Some have
conjectured,becausethesmallpoxhasprovedsomortaltoIndians,thatthiswas
thedistemperwhichdepopulatedthecountry,buttheIndiansgiveanaccountof
the disease that does not so well agree to the small pox. According to them it
was a pestilential putred fever. Some however, think it was the plague, and tell
us the savages shewed those scars which proved it to be the plague. But
whatever the destemper was, it was a wonderful providence thus to prepare the
wayforourfathers.Whenthemosthighwouldbringoveravineandplantit,he
prepared room before it, and by his own hand cut off the heathen, who might
otherwisehavedisappointedthedesignsofourfathers"(n.pag.).–Ataboutthe
same time, Judah Champion, again in sermons, tells his congregation that the
"mortality among the natives, just before the settlement of N▪England, was
chiefly near the place where the first planters settled. GOD laid wonderful
restraintsupontheheathen,andstop'dtherageofthosethatsurviv'd,togiveour
fathersapeaceablesettlement"(n.pag.;spellingoriginal).