Hoodoo: Origin of the Word by Bill Casselman

Who knew hoodoo isn't from voodoo? Well, the Oxford Canadian Dictionary still thinks the word hoodoo is a mere alternate of the word voodoo, even in the face of current research that updates the African linguistic evidence. But we'll pay Oxford's lexicographical stodginess the minor attention it deserves in a moment.

First, what is a hoodoo? Every kid who ever traipsed the badlands of Alberta near Drumheller and saw hoodoos has remembered these spooky spikes. Hoodoos are oddly-shaped pedestals of earth or pillars of rock that develop through erosion by wind and water, especially in areas where the sedimentary layers alternate between soft and hard material, for example in horizontal strata of shale and sandstone. Typically a column of stone is created when a hard shale cap-rock on top protects softer underlying sandstone from erosion.

You can see hoodoos in Alberta's Dinosaur Provincial Park, down in the border country near Alberta's Milk River as in our illustration at the top, on the banks of the Columbia River north of Cranbrook and in the Okanagan Valley in British Columbia. I saw small hoodoos on a raft trip I once took down the Kootenay River. And there are plenty in Hoodoo Valley near Leanchoil on the edge of Yoho National Park in B.C.

The term hoodoo is general across the west of North America, and is not of Canadian origin. French Canadian voyageurs dubbed these odd rock formations demoiselles or 'young ladies.' The Dictionary of Canadianisms (1967) states that hoodoo is "of African origin, related to voodoo." No, it is not. Less forgivable is the lazy passing-on and picking-up of this flabby etymology of hoodoo by the Oxford Canadian Dictionary, a project that had far more money and time than the Dictionary of Canadianisms. And yet what did they do with their time? They just copied the tired old origin, without once checking the modern etymological literature (abundant) on borrowings into English from various African languages.

To repeat: NO, hoodoo is not related etymologically as a word to voodoo. There is a thin strand of semantic connection only. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, black slaves of Hausa origin brought with them to their enslavement in the American south a distinct magic practice called "hoodoo." The word comes directly from the Hausa language where the verb hu'du'ba means 'to arouse resentment, produce retribution.' Voodoo is a different word and quite a different concept. The word voodoo comes from another African language called Ewe where vodu is the name of a specific demon or tutelary deity. Voodoo passed into American English by way of Louisiana Creole voudou. Very early in America, hoodoo came to mean 'jinx' or 'cast a spell on' as a noun and a verb: "Something hoodooed me out in the swamp last night. I think it was my ex-husband."

They are different words entirely, obviously. But not according to the Oxford Canadian Dictionary. The Merriam-Webster Dictionaries, the authorative compendium of American English, does accept the new research. You know, our knowledge of word borrowing has advanced quite beyond the clichés of Victorian "philology" upon which the Oxford English Dictionary was founded. We now understand that, when two groups speaking utterly different languages mingle and must communicate, the loan of a word is not always in one direction. American aboriginal peoples of the northwest picked up the word hoodoo from English-speaking fur trappers and, like them, used hoodoo to refer to any malignant creature or evil supernatural force. That's how it came to be applied to the curious columns of earth or rock. For they were thought to be evil in the mythologies of many first peoples. But, borrowing works in the other direction as well. For example, in Siksika (Blackfoot) mythology, the strange hoodooesque shapes were giants whom the Great Spirit had turned to stone because of their evil deeds. Deep in the night, the petrified giants could awaken and throw boulders down upon any humans passing nearby. European newcomers to what would become the Canadian and American west heard aboriginal peoples' description of these strange formations and translated certain Siksika words and terms from several Siouan languages like Dakota and Lakota and used the word hoodoo as the translation. In some cases the English word displaced the Siouan word. In other cases the Siouan word remained.