The religious overtones in Morton’s metaphor are well placed. Neither the Indians nor the Pilgrims had our contemporary understanding of infectious disease. Each believed that sickness reflected the will of celestial forces. As the writer and historian Paula Gunn Allen put it, The idea that the realm of the spirits or the supernatural was powerfully engaged in the day-to-day life of nations as well as of villagers was commonly held on both sides of the Atlantic.… Both [Indians and Europeans] predicted events by the position of certain stars on the ecliptic plane around earth as much as by
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