4. ‘Hideous Acclamations’: Captive Colonists, Forced Singing, and the Incorporation Imperatives of Mohawk Listeners

Music and sound mediated all manner of interactions between European colonists and Haudenosaunee Indians during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, from diplomacy to trade to sacred worship to warfare. This chapter focuses on scenarios in which Mohawk Indians took colonists captive and forced them to sing. Forced singing was frequently accompanied by acts of physical violence performed by the captors. Unlike European torture rationales, the Mohawks’ aim was not merely to inflict pain nor to extract information or confession. Rather, the ritual practices were aimed at aiding the incorporation of captives into Indigenous society and thus were a necessary part of their survivance. Drawing on captivity narratives, proto-ethnographic descriptions, and descriptions warfare, this chapter considers the implications of instances of forced singing both for how they illuminate the importance of vocal music for Haudenosaunee peoples and how we might reconsider the discourse on music, torture, and warfare by focusing on such musical encounters in extremis.