How Mockingbirds Are: O'Odham Ritual Orations

Bahr

INDIGENOUS STUDIES The mediation of mockingbirds and the enduring significance of indigenous ceremonial speeches are deftly revealed in this brilliant analysis of ritual orations created and delivered by the O’odham people (also known as the Pima-Papago). Making their homes along rivers and washes across the arid expanses and mountains of the desert of southern Arizona and northern Sonora, the O’odham people traditionally lived in small villages with scattered brush-walled round houses. Public ceremonies involved many villages and centered around small brush-walled “rainhouses.”

Why? Drawing upon a rich reservoir of O’odham oral traditions and ceremonial performances, a meticulous deciphering of particular texts, and an insightful assessment of the impact of Christianity upon the O’odham people, Donald Bahr offers a brilliant analysis of why some indigenous stories cease to be relevant and told. The clues lie in the very different trajectories of the Pima and Papago communities in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, trajectories resulting in part with how Christianity fared in the respective communities. Donald Bahr is Professor Emeritus of Anthropology at Arizona State University at Tempe. He has published several books, including O’odham Creation and Related Events: As Told to Ruth Benedict in 1927; Piman Shamanism and Staying Sickness; Short Swift Time of Gods on Earth: The Hohokam Chronicles; and Ants and Orioles: Showing the Art of Pima Poetry.

Mockingbirds How Mockingbirds Are

One hundred years ago, two very different versions of a speech delivered during rain ceremonies were heard at these rainhouses. The Pimas (Akimel O’odham) told of nearly silent and stately events—the calming of a heaving earth, the building of a house on the stilled land, the breathing out of smoke, and the coming of gentle rain. In marked contrast, the Papagos (Tohono O’odham) told of how raucous, drunken people caused clouds to rise and explode with quenching rain. Both stories featured mockingbirds and both involved the coming of rain. Today, the gentler, Pima version is extinct while the wilder Papago story endures.

How

Are

O’odham Ritual Orations

A volume in the SUNY series in North American Native Peoples, Past and Present Raymond Demallie and Douglas Parks, editors

State University of New York Press www.sunypress.edu

Donald Bahr

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How

Mockingbirds Are

A volume in the SUNY series in North American Native Peoples, Past and Present —————— Raymond Demallie and Douglas Parks, editors

How

Mockingbirds Are O'odham Ritual Orations

DONALD BAHR

Published by State University of New York Press, Albany © 2011 State University of New York All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission. No part of this book may be stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means including electronic, electrostatic, magnetic tape, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the prior permission in writing of the publisher. For information, contact State University of New York Press, Albany, NY www.sunypress.edu Production by Kelli W. LeRoux Marketing by Michael Campochiaro Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Bahr, Donald How mockingbirds are : O'odham ritual orations / Donald Bahr. p. cm. — (North American native peoples, past and present) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-4384-3525-1 (hardcover : alk. paper) 1. Tohono O'odham Indians—Arizona—Rites and ceremonies. 2. Tohono O'odham Indians—Mexico—Sonora (State)—Rites and ceremonies. 3. Pima Indians—Arizona—Rites and ceremonies. 4. Pima Indians—Mexico—Sonora (State)—Rites and ceremonies. 5. Speeches, addresses, etc., Indian—Arizona. 6. Speeches, addresses, etc., Indian—Sonora (Mexico : State) 7. Indian mythology—Arizona. 8. Indian mythology—Sonora (Mexico : State) 9. Arizona—Social life and customs. 10. Sonora (Mexico : State)—Social life and customs. I. Title. E99.P25B34 2011 979.1004'974552—dc22

2010031934 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

This book is dedicated to all the O’odham orators who preserved and voiced the histories of their people and in particular to Thin Leather, Thomas Vanyiko, William Blackwater, Jose Moreno, Philip Lopez, Joe Listo, Juan Dolores, Jose Antoin, J. Smith, N. Allison, and the “Unknowns.”

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Contents Illustrations Acknowledgments

ix xi

1 Introduction: The O’odham Mockingbird Texts, the Background, and the Argument

1

2 The Origin Stories behind the Wine Drinks

21

3 The Ceremonies

57

4 The Speeches

69

5 The Mockingbird: Big Talker or Rain Doctor?

109

6 Summary and Conclusions

117

Appendix 1. Two Non-O’odham Stories for Comparison

123

Appendix 2. Vanyiko’s Matches for All of the Portions of Thin Leather’s Speech

129

Appendix 3. Chart of the Texts; Orations and Stories

141

Notes References Cited Index

151 163 165

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Illustrations Figure 1. Saguaro Cactus. “Four days later something green came out of the ground on the spot where the boy’s bones were buried. . . . and this was the first saguaro or giant cactus in all the world.”

xii

Figure 2. Calendar Stick Fragment. The first to the right entry mentions the Feast at Kaic Muc (Santa Rosa) Village in the year 1899. The carver is Jose Maria from the village of Silnakia. (Arizona Historical Society 7192)

10

Figure 3. Tohono O’odham Settlement. Round house made of brush, Mexican style house made of sticks and mud and Wahtto or Shade. Tucson 1895. (Arizona Historical Society 13964)

22

Figure 4. Tokka Game. “She fixed her hair with a bright feather and put beads around her neck and went out to play Taw-kah.” Tokka playing circa 1979; the women wear painted faces, head scarves were the norm at the time. (Arizona Historical Society, MS 1255 f. 410[D])

27

Figure 5. Saguaro Cactus with Ripe Fruit. Saguaro plants are scattered on the south slopes of the mountains. (Arizona Historical Society, MS 1255 f.408 [E])

36

Figure 6. Cactus Harvest. The saguaro fruit is boiled into syrup or dried. The strained seeds are also spread out to dry. (Arizona Historical Society MS 1255 f. 408 [c], BOX 27)

58

Figure 7. Travel by Horse and Wagon. People from three villages traveled to the village were the Sit-and Drink Ceremony would be held. (Arizona Historical Society 55359)

70

ix

x / Illustratrations Figure 8. Round house or Council house. (University of Arizona Special Collection) 92 Figure 9. Rafters holding up the roof of the council house. “Measuring Worm . . . broke into four parts and I took them and stood them. Gopher. . . . Much grass of his biting here put . . . and with it I roofed it. . . . See this council house is where everything has its foundation.” (Property of Bernard Fontana, McGee Expedition 277a B) 128

Acknowledgments I thank the following for their help in the writing of this book, either in reading some or all of it or in understanding various O’odham words and ideas: Adelaide Bahr, David Brumble, John Bierhorst, Raymond DeMallie, Gary Dunham, Larry Evers, Bernard Fontana, Ives Goddard, Jeffrey Grathwohl, Arthur Hatto, Connie Jackson, Joseph Jorgensen, Mandy Jose, Dorothy Lopez, Philip Lopez, Ronald Mason, Dean Portman, Barbara Robinson, David Shaul, Dena Thomas, A. Chris Villareal, Jo Van Volkinburg, J. Mark Wood, and Paul Zolbrod. Additional thanks are for the American Philosophical Society and the Indiana Archives of Traditional Music for permission to reproduce Herzog’s texts; the Arizona Historical Society and the University of Arizona Special Collection for permission to reproduce photographs; and to Bernard Fontana for sharing his copies of pictures of the McGee expedition.

xi

Figure 1. Saguaro Cactus. “Four days later something green came out of the ground on the spot where the boy’s bones were buried. . . . and this was the first saguaro or giant cactus in all the world.”

1

Introduction The O’odham Mockingbird Texts, the Background, and the Argument

Preface This book is about a combination of mythology, oratory, and ceremony practiced by the O’odham people or Pima-Papago of southern Arizona, U.S.A., and northern Sonora, Mexico. Outwardly the O’odham are not typical of North American Natives in that they lack grassy plains and high mesas or forests. The desert of the Tohono (desert) O’odham is mainly of scattered bushes on barren ground (except when it rains), and their mountains are like small islands rising above a dry sea. The two rivers of the Akimel (River) O’odham are thin ribbons in the desert and intermittently dry. The unreliable rains of these lands supported crops of corn, beans, and squash, a wild supply of cactus fruits, mesquite beans and greens, and game animals such as deer, rabbits, and wild pigs. Seasonally nomadic except along the rivers, the indigenous O’odham lived in small villages with scattered brush-walled round houses and made baskets and pottery. Communal ceremonies centered around small, also brushed-walled, “rainhouses” and often united people from several villages. The River people (Pima) exchanged their more abundant crops for the fruits and seeds gathered by the Desert people (Papago). Ceremonies and oratory were also shared by the two people. Since the O’odham land straddles the present border with Mexico, during the early periods of European contact the O’odham received and embraced considerable influences from Mexico. They incorporated square houses, church and feast house complexes as well as “town” meals for feasts based on beef and wheat flour. Like some other North America Natives the O’odham have a very rich full system of oral literature whose span includes 1

2 / How Mockingbirds Are speeches, prose, and songs. The various ceremonies included dancing for rain, a harvest celebration, and a deer hunting ritual. The combination of the oral texts and the ceremonies reveals what the people thought of their desert homeland and shows them to be self-critical and proud.

The Two Speeches and the Plan to Explain Them This book explains two versions of a ceremonial speech used by the O’odham, or Pima-Papago. One version, from the Pimas or Akimel O’odham, is extinct, the other, from the Papagos or Tohono O’odham, is still in use. The one still used, from the Papagos, tells how raucous, drunken people cause clouds to rise and come to them and explode with rain like so many vomiting drunks. The extinct speech tells a story of nearly silent and stately events: the calming of a heaving earth, the building of a house on the stilled land, the breathing out of smoke, and the coming of gentle rain. Both speeches were used for rain ceremonies, the extinct one being without and the living one with the making and drinking of a wine made from the fruits of the local giant cactus, the saguaro. Both feature mockingbirds (su:g), birds understood to be great imitators of the calls of other birds. Such calls and those of another mysterious being are about the only sounds mentioned in the extinct earth-calming speech. In that speech the mockingbirds’ calls fail and then the mysterious being succeeds in quieting the planet. In the other raucous text, living mockingbirds carry the sounds of drunks to a place where winds live. There the sounds cause them to arise and carry clouds and rain to the drinkers. One task of the book is to present the two speeches, and most particularly to come to terms with a passage in the quiet, earth-calming, Pima one. In 1902 the passage was translated as: Yes, Black Mockingbird, if your plans for controlling the earth have failed, go far hence and leave the black winds and black clouds behind you. Your people will henceforth entreat your assistance from a distance. (Russell 1908, 348) With this statement the god credited with first making the speech dismissed the Mockingbird who had volunteered to quiet the earth for him. I had long wondered whether the original Pima says exactly what the translation says. I wondered partly because this is one of the few Native American texts I am aware of in which a magic or spirit helper is dismissed for trying and failing to help someone. Also, the O’odhams who I know do not talk English in this way and neither do I. Therefore, does the original Pima actually say words

Introduction

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3

equivalent to “plans,” “control,” “leave behind, ”and “entreat”—and if not, what does the Pima passage say; and why? Here to anticipate is my retranslation: Yes, Black Mockingbird, we’ll do this with your doings. And you way-off can stay [with] your black wind, with your black cloud, and you can stand there [with them]. Your people sometimes will cry kinship to you, and you invisibly, helpfully will speak (or mimic), staying way-off. My version, which I believe to be more accurate, makes three statements to the Mockingbird: 1. We will have further use for you. 2. You can keep your wind and cloud at a distance from us. 3. Your may help us in the future (for example, with your wind and cloud). The incorrect 1902 translation says: 1. Since you (bird) have failed (to calm the earth), you can go away from (not with) your winds. 2. You may help us in the future. We can see that my translation is less curt than the original one. Also, mine leaves the bird in contact with wind and cloud while the other one separates them. Moreover, and going back to the original wordings, my version lacks the words plans and control. These are replaced by the vaguer word doings, and I will argue that mockingbirds never divulge that they have any plans, and moreover in the Papago speech, which I think is the source of the Pima one, mockingbirds do not exercise direct control over winds and clouds. These are important and delicate matters, but I would say that the original translation misconstrues the Pima and more generally the O’odham thinking on mockingbirds. Most important, but this is not a complaint about the earlier translation, in the context of the whole speech the Mockingbird has just failed to help humanity by calming the earth, a task which, as it happens, does not involve wind or cloud. Nor as I have just averred do mockingbirds have any essential connection with or control over winds and clouds. In the Papago text that we will concentrate on, the birds have a decisive contingent connection. The bird arouses wind and cloud by imitating the sounds of drunken humans. I believe the Pima orator knew

4 / How Mockingbirds Are and alluded to this rain-bringing connection in his wind-and-cloud passage. Stimulating rain, then, is or could be the unstated future help of the Mockingbird. The original Pima text and both translations of it are all coy about this. But why was the orator coy? I think he was so because he wanted to say wind and cloud in his speech, and he even said “your clouds and winds” (in my improved translation—and no other O’odham oration says that), but he did not want to use wind and rain in his narrative as active properties of the bird. He did not deign to. He wanted to be different from the Papagos but to leave a sign, a tag, that he understood their idea. I will be happy if five, and thrilled if fifty, O’odham speakers will agree with my slight revision in translating this passage, and also of course with my interpretation. Because of the interpretation, this book is more than a language lesson. First, it puts the two full texts in the context of the whole of O’odham oral literature. This is done by locating O’odham oratory in a larger system that includes oral prose and song. All three forms occur in the ceremonies in which our two speeches were used, and we will deal with the ceremonies, or the performance contexts of the speeches. We will also deal with the prose stories, or origin myths, of the ceremonies. The songs of the ceremonies and O’odham songs in general, I must say, will not be well attended to in this book. They must wait. Second, we will consider aspects of O’odham drinking: what the origin stories say about it, how the ceremonies enacted it, what the speeches say (and in the Pima case do not say) about it, and what the United States said about the ceremonies. Essentially, the United States said, “Stop them.” The ceremonies were banned in both communities, but earlier, longer, and with more force among the Pimas. I will say that this ban had something but not everything to do with the “dryness” or wineless nature of the Pima speech we are interested in, and likewise with the different evaluations of mockingbirds in the two speeches. Third, and just briefly in this introduction, we will discuss the status and prospects for O’odham language literacy, because I wish the O’odham as well as white people to read the speeches and, I hope, this entire book. Now, if I may say what things readers who are not O’odham should find interesting in the book, or in other words what interested me the most in writing it, these are: to get close to the wordings and background of some intricately related texts; and to feel in the texts a force of intercommunity pride and mocking rivalry, a force that probably affected the texts before and surely did during and after the time of the ban on the wine ceremonies. The book presents three detailed bodies of fact, on the origin stories (chapter 2), the ceremonies (chapter 3), and the speeches (chapters 4 and 5). It explains the differences in all of these between the Pima and Papago communities as intentional and motivated by pride. This is a new kind of explanation and perhaps a new orchestration of detail—textual, mythic, and ceremonial—for

Introduction

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5

Native American studies. Pride in one’s community is my interpretation of the wind and cloud in the above passage and of much else in the speeches and ceremonialism and myths of these communities. What one community has depends on its awareness of and desire to be different from what another community has. I call this difference “parody” and discuss this more in note 8.

Background: Oratory, Prose, and Song I call the texts we will study orations. This section puts such texts in the context of the whole of O’odham oral literature. Literature for people without writing is stretches of language that are kept in memory for use and reuse. The O’odham have three forms of oral literature. Most familiar to the reading public are stories originally told face to face between individuals in a normal, quiet voice. I call this the prose of O’odham literature. Most of these more or less fixed and kept, and retold, prose texts tell of events of ancient times. These texts are generally called myths or legends, also oral traditions and oral histories, by whites. They tell of ancient times but they are not considered to be the exact language that was spoken in the ancient past. The preservation of exact language, including ancient language, is the task of the other kinds of O’odham literature, oratory and song. The latter also tell stories, and so they could be considered mythic if by that we mean “pertaining to and believed to be true of ancientness.” The O’odham do not have one word, such as mythic, for all such texts. They call their prose texts “Ho’ok A:gida, “Witch Tellings,” after the main character in one of them, an individual called “Ho’ok,” which name the O’odham translate as “Witch” because she was a woman with claws who ate children. There was no other Ho’ok but this one, however, so the word is effectively a singular and proper name. The second kind of O’odham oral literature, the oratory that includes our Mockingbird texts, is performed before large groups in outdoor public ceremonies. The vocabulary and pronunciation of these speeches are the same as in Witch Tellings, but the speeches—or orations—are delivered with a strong voice and in a cadence more measured than that of the prose texts. They are public addresses rather than private tellings. They are much shorter than the prose stories, being about ten minutes long as opposed to an hour or so. Also, the orations are more perfectly memorized than prose stories. Oratory is memorized at the level of the sentence, prose at the level of the episode. Consistent with the degree of memorization, the orations are not considered to be of the present speaker’s own wording or diction. Rather, they are the wording of a past, often godly person. It follows that there is more artistic freedom in telling or retelling a prose story than in reciting an oration. The orations are sometimes called “Windy Talk,” S-hewelim

6 / How Mockingbirds Are Niok (Saxton, Saxton, and Enos 1983, 46), perhaps in reference both to the amount of breath needed to speak them out forcefully or perhaps because of the swishing or windy sound of some speakers’ delivery. They are also called “talking-for-someone,” “niokculida.” This book then concentrates on a pair of orations used for rainmaking, one “wet” and one “dry.” A final difference between O’odham prose texts and orations is that the latter are virtually always spoken in the first person (“I”) and they normally also include the words “you” and “we.” These words are not interpreted as “I who now speak” and “you who now listen,” but as “I’s” and “you’s” of a long ago occasion when the speech was first given. Prose texts also have first- and second-person language, but in these texts the “I’s” refer (except in quotations) to the person who is telling the story. If we take all “I’s” to refer to the author of a given text, then the author of an oration is an ancient person, and the author of prose is the present speaker. The third kind of O’odham literature, “song,” (ne’i), is shorter, more melodic, more poetic, and still more perfectly memorized than oratory. A song is about a minute long and is memorized at the level of the syllable, while orations, ten or so minutes long, are memorized at the level of the sentence. Songs are repeated many times in performance and are usually sung in series. Whole orations usually are not repeated in performance (frequently passages are, with minor changes, e.g., for colors or cardinal directions); however, like songs orations are usually performed in series. Song series generally tell or suggest a single unfolding story, and sometimes serial orations are portions of an unfolding ritual drama. One of the two orations we treat is part of such a series given at the Santa Rosa rainmaking ceremony, the other is not. Both kinds of text, song and oratory, can be used in the same ceremony. Also, both songs and orations are included in the mainly prose Ho-ok A:gida or “Witch Tellings” of ancient times. When included, the songs and orations are taken to be the actual words of ancient characters, quite like Western historians’ quotations from primary sources. Therefore, the O’odham have what they consider to be historical documents, that is, songs and orations. The prose tellings are not documents (although they may be “documented” by our recording them) they are equivalent to a historian’s authored narrative.1 Traditionally, of course, the O’odham did not write. Interestingly, their word for “to read,” which now nearly all of them do in English, is “niokculid,” the same word that designates an oration. The word’s parts can be analyzed as follows: “niok” means “to talk in words”; “to speak a language”; “-cul-” is a modification of “-cud”, meaning “to cause”; “-id” means “for someone”; and “-a” means “the act of doing that.” Thus, “niokculid /to make a speech” and “niokculid/to read” both mean, at bottom, “to give articulate voice to a fixed piece of language”: to give voice, thanks to one’s memory on the one hand and to one’s knowledge of letters on the other.

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Why not call all three kinds of oral literature niokculida? Since they all depend on memory and are all articulated in the O’odham language, are they not all “readings” from memory? The fact is, they are not all so called by the O’odham. The Witch Tellings are not, I suggest, because they are memorized at the level of the episode, not that of the sentence. Thus, the diction—the actual talk—of one such is only a paraphrase of the talk of another. Why then are songs not referred to as readings, since they are memorized even more scrupulously than orations? I suggest they are not because they are sung and not talked. To sing is one thing in O’odham, to talk is another.2 We can now state exactly what an O’odham niokculida is: a reproduction of talk, normal speech. Thus, when O’odham read a song they voice the “notes” and as well as the words of a song, the voicing of that reading is called “singing for someone” (neoculida), not “talking”: song reading as distinct from talk reading. All strictly oral peoples, without writing, must have, or have had, the equivalent to the O’odham span of literary forms. It is a pity that the full span is rarely discussed in a single scholarly study. This book focuses on two texts from the middle of the span, two niokculid or orations. The designation “oration” is somewhat arbitrary. Texts of the same nature may also be called prayers3 or chants or speeches. In any case one purpose of this book is to describe how our two orated texts are supplemented by texts of prose and song and are connected with a rainmaking ceremony. We will discuss as many prose texts as can be found on the origin of rain ceremonies and on the role of mockingbirds at the time of creation. There will be less to say about songs because there are few songs that treat either of those topics—although one song on mockingbirds will be key in justifying our interpretation of the meaning of the bird in the orations. In centering this book on orations it may seem that we are treating a kind of text and a literature that counts for less than prose, the medium of history, or song, the medium of art. I would not diminish those two, but I point out that for the O’odham oratory is the medium in which the gods’ speech is preserved. No doubt their gods also spoke in prose, but that speech is not preserved. They also sang, and that is preserved, but, let us say, they spoke at greater length in oratory. Therefore, oratory holds a more important place in the O’odham economy of literature than it does in our—my (white)—own.

Background: Drinking Another purpose of this book is to give an instance of traditional Native American drinking, an instance that the people—the O’odham—believe originated among themselves in ancient times. The O’odham are not unique

8 / How Mockingbirds Are in having had their own way of making and using liquor at the time of the European arrival (in the 1600s for them). So did many other peoples of the U. S. Southwest and Mesoamerica make wine at least for private celebrations (see Driver 1969, ch. 7 and maps 12, 41, and 42). Some archaeologists believe that ancient corn, the Central and North American food staple, was initially domesticated to produce a fermented drink. What distinguishes the O’odham from the other peoples, and what this book is about, is their making and drinking of wine to improve the world by bringing rain. Nearly everyone agrees that Native America in general now has a large problem with liquor bought in town and manufactured by whites. The O’odham think they were better off before, and I agree. Now, however, they have white peoples’ liquor and also modern technology and representative constitutional government, a national library, a community college, and many other things the old-timers did not dream of. They need to understand all of that, and yet, if I may say so, an understanding of their transition from the old drinking to the new is as important as any of it. This book makes the barest beginning on this by assembling the materials on the old manner of drinking. All O’odham now distinguish between cactus wine, which they think was meant for their use in bringing rain, and “white-people wine” (milgan nawait—the word here covers the whole range of white-made liquid intoxicants), which they blame for alcoholism (or as they call it i:’idag, “drinking-way” or “drinking as a way of life”)4 and its bad effects. I would like to say that the old way of wine drinking was a sacrament, but I am not sure this is true. If we define sacrament more or less as Catholics do, as an outward sign (the serving and drinking of cactus wine in this case) of an inward coming of spiritual grace, then the Wine Drinks Ceremonies (Nawait I’ita), as they call them, were not sacraments. The O’odham had and have their own sacraments by that definition. They blow sacramentally over sick persons as a form of prayer and to aid the heart of the patient; and they give new-born babies and pubescent girls a mixture of white clay and water to drink as a prayer and an aid to the heart. People today explain these actions as acts that help the soul.5 The stories of the rain ceremony’s origin do not say that it was intended by a god for the O’odham, or that a god or other ancient person instructed the people in how to make wine or how to pray for rain with their drinking. Nor has anyone said to me that something special happens to the heart or soul when the serving and drinking are done. After the cactus originated, the stories say that the people (and talking animals among them) hit upon the idea of making wine by adding water to the pulp of its fruit. They thought that turning to wine was a virtue of the fruit of the saguaro cactus. They did not, so far as I know, consider fermentation to be a process distinct from rotting or souring: it is just that

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cactus fruits and a few other things “rot” into a wine which then rather speedily sours. Furthermore, their most widely spread story on the origin of cactus-and-wine does not say that the first Wine Drinks were meant to make rain. All that happens is that the drinkers get drunk and act badly. Yet at the end they do not swear off the ceremony. Eventually, although no story tells how, the ceremony simply took root as a way to get rain. Drunkenness is not described by the O’odham as a heightened state of the soul or consciousness. People dream and get visions without drinking, and no story says, and I have not heard, that drinking makes dreams or visionary experiences better, brighter, or more memorable. As we will see, the wine-free rain ceremonial speech is cosmic, and it seems to come from a private vision or dream. The implication is that drinking did not help to produce that brilliant speech. I conclude that the O’odham took a prosaic attitude toward their traditional drinking. They did it, they enjoyed it, it made and still makes them misbehave, and it is not the unique means to anything good—except that, as the “wet” speech affirms, people eventually learned that the sounds of their drunk singing when transmitted by mockingbirds can be rewarded with rain. It is a most modest claim. I will say this in favor of the old way of drinking. When people drink cactus wine they sing their old-style songs, which they trace back to someone’s dreaming: cactus wine drinking brings out those songs. When people drink American or Mexican liquor they seem to get drunk faster and in any case they are less inclined to sing the old songs. I cannot say that old-time drinking still brings, or ever brought, fresh songs to people, but it does bring out old songs, which I consider to be a great virtue. It makes people who are inclined to sing, sing.

Background: Rain Ceremonies and the Law The speech that does not mention drinking describes a liquorless rain ceremony and dates from 1902, twelve years after Wine Drinks were banned by the U.S. Superintendent of the community where the speech was recorded. This was the community of Gila River Pimas, now called Akimel O’odham (“River People”). The speech that extols drinking was recorded in 1970 and is still in use. It comes from a geographically larger but less densely inhabited community, formerly called the Papagos, now Tohono O’odham (“Desert People”). The Papagos had no U.S. Superintendent until 1915. When one came, he too abolished the ceremonies, around 1920, but the Papago reservation had too many remote places for the ban to be completely enforced. By the middle of the 1930s the federal policies on native ceremonies had changed from suppression to support, or at least toleration, and both

10 / How Mockingbirds Are

Figure 2. Calendar Stick Fragment. The first to the right entry mentions the Feast at Kaic Muc (Santa Rosa) Village in the year 1899. The carver is Jose Maria from the village of Silnakia. (Arizona Historical Society 7192)

communities had self-governments with the sovereign power to reinstate wine ceremonies. The Tohono O’odham formally legalized theirs, although their remoter villages probably had never stopped them. The Akimel O’odham did not revive theirs, perhaps because they had been longer and more persuasively suppressed. A good portion of the Pimas had converted to Presbyterianism by the 1920s. These people, unlike the then Catholic Pima minority, rejected Wine Drinks and most of O’odham religion. The proportion of Catholics to Presbyterians was the reverse with the Papagos. Perhaps this is why the Papagos did and the Pimas did not revive the ceremony. During the ban, both communities produced martyrs for the old religion, specifically for the Wine Drinks. In each case the martyrs died a very few years after the inception of the ban. In each case a village chief was arrested for organizing a Sit and Drink event (see chapter 3, this is a wine-serving ceremony in which oratory is used), and the arrested person died in the reservation jail within the year. We know of these jailings from “calendar stick” records kept in each community. The sticks were the long, flat, thin ribs of the saguaro cactus, the source, too, of the fruits for the wine. Onto the stick the owner would carve symbols, and sometimes apply colors, to stand for one or two events of the year. A mature stick, one perhaps made and added to by two or three individuals in succession, could cover a hundred years, each year separated from its neighbors by a year-marking line carved across the stick like the inch marks on a measuring tape. The stories were recited in prose, some stories being as long as a short Witch Telling tale. In the calendar stick tellings, however, unlike the Witch Tellings, the characters were precisely located in space and geneaology, and the events if not seen by the teller were considered to be reliable or at least disputable. This was the temporal territory of oral history as distinct from oral tradition (see Mason 2006, for this distinction). Bernard Fontana lists all of the several O’odham calendar sticks that were recited for whites and published by them in Russell (1908, reedition

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of 1975, xi–xii). None was taken down in the O’odham language and only one of them, taken by Ruth Underhill from a Papago, has many long stories. She and the teller, Jose Santos of San Havier village, gave two weeks to the telling and writing down. The printed text is forty-four pages long (Underhill 1938). From the Pimas of 1902 Frank Russell took down three still rather good recitations totaling twenty-eight pages (1908, 38–66). Here is Santos’s entry, which is brief, for 1922–23. (The O’odham year begins in July.) First is a terse account of a man dying from encountering a ghost while cutting wood, then, equally terse, comes this: The head singer and Smoke Keeper [village chief ] was taken by a man at the new agency [seat of the U.S. Superintendent]. The police took him for making liquor. [I assume because of his office that he made it for a Wine Drinks.] He died in jail. The People [the O’odham] got his body. (Underhill 1938, 62) The account in Russell, from Blackwater village, was given by Juan Thomas (identified in Russell 1908, 60). The arrested Pima chief lived at a different village, at the opposite, west end of the Gila River community: The chief at Gila Crossing favored tizwin [cactus wine] drinking and resisted the progress that was beginning to manifest itself. He died in jail at Sacaton [the agency headquarters; I assume he was arrested for his attitude or practice]. (1908, 63) Here is the Pima calendar stick entry of 1889–1890 on the abolition of Wine Drinks, from the Salt River village stick kept by a man named Owl Ears: In a tizwin drink at Salt River Santco was killed. Soon afterwards another general debauch resulted in the death of Hitiraki. These events caused the order prohibiting the Pimas from making tizwin. (Russell 1908, 61) The three Pima sticks are thicker in entries on Wine Drink troubles than the Papago one. All of the sticks dwell mainly on Apache fighting from the sticks’ beginning (1833–34 for two of the Pima, 1851–52 for the other; 1839–1840 for the Papago) until about 1875, when the Apaches were effectively pacified by the U.S. Army with O’odham and Maricopa Indians’ help. In the Pima sticks the years 1875 to 1890 mark a change from Apache deaths to deaths at Wine Drinks—actually Wine Drinks deaths supplemented by deaths involving White-man’s liquor. The last Pima mention of a Wine

12 / How Mockingbirds Are Drinks death is from 1895–96, and this was at a Papago not a Pima village. In the same year the successor chief at Gila Crossing “fell dead in the prisoner’s chair when on trial at Sacaton [agency headquarters] for selling whiskey” (Russell 1908, 64), a martyr we may say to American-style mercenary bootleg drinking. Impressionistically then, the Pimas had more violence at Wine Drinks than the Papagos. (The latter, however, had more medicine men killed for practicing sorcery.) Here are the important points: first, both communities suffered the loss of a village chief in the defense of Wine Drinks. Second, neither calendar recitation states the chief ’s name. I suspect this is not because the narrator did not know the name, but because of reluctance to say the name of the dead, especially of those dead who might come back to haunt one (Underhill comments on this: 1938, 17). Last, there seemed to be no O’odham memory of either chief in 2005. At least, no Pima whom I asked had heard of the Gila Crossing chief and Bernard Fontana, who has lived at San Havier since 1956, says he has not heard anyone mention the jailed chief of 1922. Nor has a little searching resulted in a white record of the jailings and deaths. Calendar sticks stopped being made or added to in the 1930s or ’40s. People began marking printed American calendars instead.6

A Possible History As we have seen, Pimas and Papagos differ in the events of their contacts with whites. The two Mockingbird speeches are also different and so it appears were the two communities’ ideas on the origin of Wine Drinks and their rainmaking ceremonies. I say “appears” because the available facts point that way, but the facts are skimpy, especially about Pima wine and rain ceremonies. Chapter 2 treats what is known about the origin stories and chapter 3 does the same for the ceremonies. The alleged (by me) difference is: the Papagos embraced Wine Drinks and the Pimas looked askance on them. Of course, the differences are not surprising considering the government suppression and the inverse proportions of Christian conversion. What is challenging is, first, to find the evidence for the differences between the speeches, and then decide whether they are real and are adequately expressed by the words embraced and askance; and second, to state the cause for the difference. On this second matter I argue that the suppression and conversion were a cause, but another was that each community desired to be and took pleasure in being different from the other, and different not only relative to geography (desert versus river) but also, and especially, relative to character, precisely to embrace drinking or to look askance at it. The pleasure in that

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difference, I argue, could have preceded the suppression and differential Christian conversion. Therefore, the difference could have existed in 1850, and not only in 1902 when Frank Russell took down the speech and sketched the “dry” Pima rainmaking ceremony. Here are the weaknesses of the argument: we have no facts of any sort from 1850; and the evidence on the post-suppression, dry Pima rain ceremony is poor. All that is solid therefore are the two texts (subjects of chapter 4) and to a lesser extent the origin stories (chapter 2), which is why this book is best taken as a study of literature. What might seem the airiest of topics—the contents of two ceremonial speeches—is the most solid part of the argument.

On Literacy This book is meant to promote O’odham language literacy. In the 1960s and ’70s, Native American communities such as the Pima/Akimel O. and the Papago/Tohono O. began to staff and govern their own schools and other public services. Sometimes the communities officially designated themselves “nations” (thus the Tohono O’odham Nation), sometimes “communities” (the Akimel O’odham are components of two such, the Gila River Pima-Maricopa Indian Community and the Salt River Pima-Maricopa Indian Community). Sometimes they remained self-designated “tribes,” but whatever the name, they all became bureaucratically self-governing. As those changes took place many whites, including myself, expected that Native American communities would take up literacy in their own languages. Not only would the languages continue to be spoken, but newspapers, essays, governmental resolutions, internal contracts, personal letters, and of course poetry would be written in them. In fact, as of now (2007) the languages are less spoken and the writings are skimpy. Of the O’odham I would guess that only a tenth or less of the people born since 1970 speak the language fluently, and at the other extreme the many people over fifty years old who do speak the language fluently complain, for example, that they themselves don’t know the word for “elbow.” They feel that English has captured their thinking on elbows and much else. A language suffers when people do not address each other in it. The most important addressings from the point of view of language health are parents-to-children. Second are children-to-children, and third come adults-to-adults. This book will not save the language. It is in English and is addressed to adults. Still, the central objects of the book are texts in O’odham, and I have taken care to aid in the reading of those texts. The inspiration is simple: since nearly all O’odham are literate in English and

14 / How Mockingbirds Are nearly none are literate in O’odham, it makes sense to approach the reading of O’odham by means of passages, not isolated words, written in English. It also makes sense that some of the passages should be whole texts that the old people held dear. The texts here, of course, are the rain ceremony speeches. I am sure that the Pima text that was published in 1908 is now gone from the live memory of its community. I am also confident that no O’odham has ever read through and understood the Pima it was published in. Anyone who has tried, I imagine, would say after a few minutes, “This must be a very old speech because it has words that we no longer use.” In fact, most of the words are still in use, but they are spelled in ways that make them difficult to recognize. If I am correct that this text is illegible as it stands, then it is a good one to put into more legible form and to use for practice in reading. The other text is still in use, or at least it was used somewhat recently in Santa Rosa and is still securely memorized. That text was published by some Papagos and me in 1980 and it was republished by Ofelia Zepeda in 1982. Some O’odhams have surely read it, but none has discussed reading it with me. The speeches are difficult to memorize and the right to use them belongs to particular families. Other people can hear them and can ask the speaker about them, but it is considered impolite for a person unrelated to the speaker to try to learn, much less to use, them. Therefore, if this book succeeds in making the O’odham texts more readable than before, could that success spread the speeches farther than the past privileged families would wish? If the families are worried about a reader of this book learning to recite the texts perfectly, I say they should not worry. I don’t believe I have written the O’odham perfectly, so whoever reads the texts aloud is warned that Thin Leather and Jose Moreno, the two original speakers, might be very dissatisfied with the result. I believe, however, that the writings will enable fluent speakers of O’odham to come close to Thin Leather and Moreno, especially if the reader commits the recitation to memory and has heard some actual oratory. If the families do not want anyone not of their choosing to know anything about the texts, I say that the O’odham texts and their translations are already published and so this book only improves upon what is already available. Of course, I hope the families, whoever they are, for I do not know if Thin Leather has descendants, will like to read the texts and will be pleased with this book. Now the technicalities: my method for coordinating passages of English and O’odham is easy to state but difficult, because ultimately arbitrary, to execute: write the O’odham first, and punctuate it with periods, question marks, exclamation points (as needed), commas, and dashes. Do not use colons or semicolons, because colons are used in the present word spelling method to show vowel length and semicolons look too much like colons. Then translate the O’odham into English phrase by phrase, a phrase being

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the amount of O’odham included between punctuation marks. Use exactly the same punctuation marks for the English translation, so that exactly the same stream of phrases is marked off in each language. There is no one best, agreed-upon way to punctuate the phrases of O’odham. Linguists have theories of the underlying or deep structures of O’odham phrasing, but those theories do not enable one to mark the flow of O’odham speech in any uniquely best way. Therefore, there is latitude, and thus arbitrariness, in the punctuation and also the phrasing of O’odham. Of course, the same is true of English: punctuation is variable and is a matter of style. Also, although the procedure for matching English to O’odham is simple, there is no easy to state method for rendering O’odham words. This is true of punctuation as was just stated, and it is also true of dividing words, that is, of deciding where words start and stop. What to write as a word is more settled for writers of English than for little-written O’odham. Finally, and worst of all, there is great uncertainty on how to spell O’odham words. This is partly because the people of the different communities and villages pronounce their words differently (these are dialect differences); and partly because some words sound one way when said carefully in isolation and another way when said in rapid speech; and partly because the different spellers of O’odham have used different letters of the alphabet to write what they might (or might not) agree is the same sound. Most of the O’odham who have written their language were trained by whites, each of whom has had different ideas on word rendering. The one point that they all agree on is that O’odham should not be written by spelling O’odham syllables in the same way the syllables would be spelled in English. Rather, all of the writers, but in different ways, have used an orthography, that is, a sound-writing alphabet, that they believed was capable of representing all human language sounds. To spell English speech in any of those systems makes English illegible to most people who read English. This is because the ordinary spelling of English was not arrived at rationally, as were the various scientific orthographies. The ordinary spelling of English is inconsistent: the same sound is written in various ways, while the scientific method aspires to one and only one letter for a given sound, whenever and wherever that sound occurs. A few O’odham have learned to write their language according to each of the three or four different scientific orthographies that were developed for that purpose. Also, a few O’odham have developed their own ways to spell words in their language. All of the homemade ways that I am aware of are varieties of the same thing. They spell the syllables of O’odham the same as the syllables are spelled in English, and they put a dash between each syllable of a word. Thus, the O’odham word for “water” would be written “shoo-dack,” while the same word is written in the orthography that I use as “su:dagi.” Or, an important O’odham god’s name would be written “Ee-ee-toy,” while

16 / How Mockingbirds Are the scientific spelling is “I’itoi.” We can call this syllable-writing practice “the peoples’ ” spelling, as opposed to “the scientific” one. No linguist has accepted the peoples’ spelling, for the good reason that any language will have some (perhaps only a few) sounds that English does not have, and so words with those sounds cannot be spelled in “the peoples’ ” fashion. The advantage of the scientific way is that all sounds can be spelled (or represented) by it. The disadvantage is that so far as I know no people with a previously unwritten language has become literate through the use of a scientific orthography. I suspect that whenever writing has spread from the literate speakers of one language to the not-yet-literate speakers of another, some of the “starting-up” people have already become literate in the “patron” language, and these people use the spellings (or ideograms, etc) of the patron language as the base for their own writing. The result will be some form of “peoples’ way.” And, I believe about the O’odham and suspect about other languages, that the linguists who have developed the scientific orthographies have cared too little about the tribal peoples’ “peoples’ ways” of writing. The result with the O’odham, as I can confidently attest, is that thousands of O’odham can read and write English, and yet they cannot begin to read, and therefore cannot write, a text written in the scientific orthography. This book’s contribution to literacy is to use punctuation to show (1) the boundaries of phrases that are written, alas, in scientific O’odham, and (2) to make those phrases correspond to the phrases of English translation. I demur from trying to spell in “peoples’ O’odham” partly because there truly are O’odham sounds that English lacks, and partly out of respect for the Tohono O’odham Nation, which has adopted the orthography, developed by Kenneth Hale, that is used in this book. The Akimel O’odham to my knowledge have not formally adopted an orthography.

On Translation A final point, which is more a necessity than a purpose: translation. Many linguists and anthropologists, including Russell, give both word-for-word and free, therefore double, translations. The translations in this book are tied to phrases, which practice seems to me to make a good compromise between readability (low in word-for-word translation) and literalness (low in free translation). Thus, the translations in this book are my best guess as to how to express in English what is said in a corresponding, identically punctuated, phrase of O’odham.7 The result is a single rather than a double translation, and the single translation is quite clearly spaced and aligned via columns to the written O’odham original. I must point out, too, that I hypenate English

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words, for example “medicine-man,” when the hyphenated result stands for a single O’odham word (ma:kai in this instance). Here is a simple and important way in which such translations are better than those of the “classic” period of Native American ethnography, 1895–1920. Into this period, of course, falls Russell’s presentation of Thin Leather. Russell and his colleagues habitually made and published double translations, one word-for-word and presented in “interlinear” format, that is, English equivalents were written immediately below each native word, and one “free,” in quite legible English. These were placed separately on each page. My method takes a middle path, namely, the path of the phrase. The result is at once legible (unlike most word-for-word translations) and precise (tied to phrases). This is basically the same “facing page” or “facing column” format that is norm for translating modern poetry, except those translations rarely coordinate their punctuation, therefore their phrasing. My method feels agreeably humane. The double format, I feel, treats texts inhumanely, and haughtily, as if one cannot catch the details (as the interlinear does) and flow (as the free does) in one English product. I feel one can do that, even though the flow may be twisty. The speeches are difficult for O’odhams to understand, and still more so for me. I may be mistaken in major as well as minor points. Therefore, I ask the reader’s patience in the few places where I enter into the meanings of particular passages or words. We have already seen the most important of them, on the dismissal of the Mockingbird, and there will be a rather few more.

The Historical Argument, in Brief 1. It is as difficult to imagine wine ceremonies without speeches on wine as to imagine Christian communion services without speeches about the body (bread) and blood (wine) of Christ. Therefore, since we know the Pimas had wine ceremonies, we must suppose they had ceremonial speeches on wine. Those speeches are lost, but there is a trace of them in the speech we are studying, in fact in the dismissal passage quoted at the start of this chapter. This is the association of mockingbirds with wind and clouds, a gratuitous association in that the birds’ actions, in that speech, have nothing to do with wind and clouds. 2. The lost speeches would therefore be like those of the Papagos in associating the bird with wind and clouds. But that

18 / How Mockingbirds Are association is coincidental if not gratuitous in this sense: in the Papago Mockingbird speeches, the bird does not own or control winds or clouds. It only carries the sounds of human drunkenness to wind and cloud. As I read the speeches, it is the bird’s imitation of drunks, not its control of winds, that brings wind and cloud to the humans. 3. I venture but do not know for certain that no people has ever viewed mockingbirds as intrinsically rainy or as masters of wind and clouds. But many, even all, peoples have noted the birds’ imitativeness. The Papagos put this property to the unique use of mediating, by carrying sounds, from drunk humans to wind, clouds, and rain. That the Pimas retain the wind and cloud part while dropping the drunkenness part implies that their speech is derived from, or was once similar to, the Papago ones. We specialize in one Papago speech but will refer to a few known others. 4. In several respects the Pima and Papago speeches we will study are good counters to each other. The Pima speech is cosmic while the other is earthy; the one is serene where the other is ecstatic; one alludes to the story of creation where the other does not; and one disparages the services of mockingbirds where the other praises them. Therefore, not just in the wind and cloud retention but from beginning to end I consider the Pima speech to be a masterful parody of the Papago version. It burlesques, but it does so in a manner that makes the Pimas seem more dignified than the Papagos.8 5. Common to both speeches is the idea that the bird imitates—and perhaps only imitates—other creatures. Therefore, what the bird says is not original. There is evidence from these and other O’odham (Pima-Papago) texts that this is the reason why the Pimas disparaged the bird, a criticism by them that extends to all of the world’s ritualized speech and canned sentiments. The extension commends the speeches to everyone. Whoever is not interested in rain, drinking, or the history of the the Pima-Papagos may still take note of the Mockingbird as a symbols of canned sentiments, or of what we call in English “parroting.” I admire the O’odham for having a liturgy about something very important to them (rain) that contains a critique of all liturgy. 6. I would like to think that the wish for a reworking in the direction of self-dignity was sufficient to produce the Pima

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speech even before the United States imposed its ban on their wine ceremonies. Lacking any texts from the Pima “wet period,” however, I cannot prove that they did this, in other words, that the prime Pima speech dates from the years 1850 or 1800. Nor can I guess how they would have distinguished themselves at this time from the Papagos. I merely expect that they would have had some clever rejoinder to what they knew the Papagos were doing.

More about the O’odham Finally, here are some additional brief remarks and references on the history and civilization of the O’odham. As noted in the preface, outwardly the O’odham are not distinctive among Native Americans. This is in part because they live in a desert environment, in part because their material culture is spare, and in part because they remodeled their domestic and communal architecture to resemble that of a Mexican town. The reason for that change is that the traditional O’odham territory straddles the present (since 1850) U.S.-Mexican border. There was equal O’odham land on both sides. What is now the U.S. side received little Spanish or Mexican settlement during those periods of O’odham history (1694–1850), but what is on the Mexican side received a considerable amount. “Civilization” to the O’odham therefore meant “Mexico.” Until the United States came, however, that civilization and the O’odham themselves were sorely pressed by Apaches. That pressure ended soon after the United States arrived on the scene. From 1850 to 1950 the O’odham portion of Mexico, in the state of Sonora, developed with little regard for O’odham rights, while the territory in the United States developed with O’odham rights protected through the creation of four Indian reservations (Sells, or Papago; Ak Chin, also Papago; and Gila River and Salt River, a combination of Pimas and Maricopas, the last being linguistically unrelated to the O’odham). Two U.S. cities, Tucson and Phoenix, and various towns were also built in former O’odham territory (Tucson, however, was established during the Spanish period). It was in those hundred years that the O’odham in the United States, aided by O’odham immigrants from the Mexican side, converted to Mexican-syle architecture. Square adobe houses replaced the old round, brush-walled ones. Each house or house cluster had a corral because cattle raising, as in Sonora, became a focus for, especially, men’s life. And each village built at least one “church complex,” consisting of a chapel; a dance ground as in Mexico; a covered shelter for a Mexican-style orchestra (guitars, violin, drum, accordion, and later, saxophone); and a feast house where free Mexican-style “town”

20 / How Mockingbirds Are meals (chili with meat, yeast bread, coffee, dessert) were served to all who attended a fiesta. This complex supplemented the brush-walled “round house” or “rainhouse” where the traditional communal ceremonial life was centered. The point is, the O’odham civilized themselves. The fiestas were for them. They served each other the town meals, centered on beef, in a round robin of village fiestas. The book is about the native combination of mythology, oratory, and ceremony. This combination will show the poetic concern of these people for their arid environment and their pride in their spoken literature. If I may say so, their Mexican side was not so exciting poetically. It was a folk religion of Mexican songs and prayers. I should say, finally, that their Mexican side is now waning, more so, perhaps, than the Native side. Few O’odham in the United States now speak Spanish; the cowboy life has given way to jobs in schools, clinics, and casinos; and O’odham Christianity is now more integrated with that of the United States, both Catholic and Protestant, than with that of Mexico. U.S.-based missions of both kinds began coming to them in the 1880s. The fiestas persist, especially among the Papagos, and so do the Spanish language hymns, sung by the laity. In my opinion these are the most useful books to read on the O’odham: Frank Russell’s The Pima Indians (1902, prominently used in the present book); Alice Joseph’s, Jane Chesky’s, and Rosamond Spicer’s The Desert People (1949), on the Papagos, Edward Spicer’s Cycles of Conquest (1962), on the O’odham and several other peoples, in fact all of the native peoples, of Arizona, Sonora, New Mexico, and Chihuahua, Mexico; Bernard Fontana’s Of Earth and Little Rain (1989), and Ruth Underhill’s Papago Indian Religion, on the Papagos; and Byrd Baylor’s Yes Is Better Than No (1972), a work of fiction on the Papagos. An important book about Pima folk ornithology was published by Amadeo Rea in 2007 after this manuscript was completed. The book has a comprehensive section on Pima beliefs about mockingbirds, including songs and sections of the myths (Rea 2007). Scores more books have been written on the O’odham, and some of those will be drawn upon in the present book; but the above are the best general references. As for the present book, it is specialized and not general. I hope it will be received as an intricate and readable and unusually good work in Native American literary criticism, specifically in the criticism of an “old-times” form of literature.

2

The Origin Stories behind the Wine Drinks

The O’odham are disposed to believe as history a body of stories (Ho’ok A:gida) about ancient times that we non-O’odham usually call myths.1 I say “disposed to believe” because the stories in question are impossible to prove. What one hears about them from an O’odham is, “I’m not sure if this is true, but my father told it and I believe it,” in other words, faith in the unprovable. While the two speeches or orations we are concerned with center on mockingbirds (su:g), these birds are nearly unheard of in O’odham prose mythology. This illustrates a difference between the texts used in ceremonies and the O’odham Ho’ok A:gida, the Bible-like, oral, chronicalized remembrance of ancient times. Simply, every important ceremonial act, and every important ceremonial text, does not have a stated ancient origin based on a story; and neither is every important event in the mythology enacted in ritual or ceremony. Still, and as is stated in chapter 1, there is the supposition that the oratory of the ceremonies originated in gods even though some of those gods and events are not located in the Ho’ok A:gida. Although lacking in mockingbirds, the Ho’ok A:gidas do tell, but variously, the origins of rain ceremonies and saguaro cacti, the latter being the source of the peoples’ traditional wine. After a hundred years of story collecting there are abundant materials to work with, namely, thirteen stories from the two communities. Of those, we will concentrate on four (Corn and Tobacco, How Morning Green lost his Power, The Giant Cactus, and First Wine Drinks) with the following results: first, when the origin of the cactus is told, the cactus is usually said to be the a transmogrified or metamorphosed child; and once in existence the cactus is said to be put to use for a wine ceremony; but in these stories the ceremony is generally not used to bring rain, either in our four or in the rest of the versions. Thus, in the stories the “end” of the cactus is wine, but the end of the wine is not rain. Rather, the end is fun, followed by mayhem. Also, these wine-for-fun stories tend 21

22 / How Mockingbirds Are

Figure 3. Tohono O’odham Settlement. Round house made of brush, Mexican style house made of sticks and mud and Wahtto or Shade. Tucson 1895. (Arizona Historical Society 13964)

to emphasize a kind of drunken song that is used in the ceremonies. Less often do they mention the kind of oratory we are interested in. Second, among the thirteen, and also in the four sampled here, there is a second and quite different type of story, which does describe the origin of wine ceremonies for rain. In this story the ceremony follows and is intended to remedy a loss of wind and cloud from the human community. This story usually but not always includes the making and drinking of cactus wine, but unlike the other type, the story does not state the origin of the cactus or the wine. Also, the wine ceremonies in these stories are less rowdy than those of the first, cactus-originating kind. The ceremonies mentioned include oratory and they may also include songs. These orations do not mention mockingbirds, whose role in our focal Papago speech, it will be recalled, is to carry the sounds of drunken singing to wind and to cloud. There are just three published examples of this type of story (plus another, discussed below, in which the loss is of Corn and Tobacco, not Wind and Cloud). Two of them are Pima (given in Bahr et al. 1994, 33–35 and 108–10) and one is Papago (Saxton and Saxton 1978, 317–40). A listing of all thirteen stories can be found in Table 4, Appendix 3.

The Origin Stories behind the Wine Drinks / 23 Third, the cactus usually originates in the person of a suicidal child while the ceremonies with speeches usually originate in the wind and cloud stories. The child kills itself after suffering maternal neglect, for the mother prefers playing Tokka, a hockey-like game, to motherhood. The loss of wind and cloud is due to their expulsion for voyeurism, specifically for exposing and peering at the “privates” (the crotch) of a young girl.2 Thus, both types of story concern a character fault. Fourth, on the present evidence of the thirteen texts, the first type of story, on the cactus, is a Papago specialty and the second, called “The Loss of Wind and Cloud,” is Pima. This is not absolute: there is one Papago Wind and Cloud story with a rowdy wine feast, and there are three Pima stories on the origin of saguaros, with rowdy ceremonies.3 Therefore, there is no black-and-white difference between the two communities, only an apparent tendency to prefer one or the other story type [see Table 3]. There being no overall mythological authority in either community, the tendency would be voluntary on the parts of hundreds of mythology-keeping individuals. Of course we need more texts to be sure of this tendency. Last, both types of story, which always vary somewhat from narrator to narrator, come from the middle of the overall chronicle of ancient times: after the creation of the earth, sun, stars, and humanity, and before the time when human marriage and procreation were well established, and also before the time when the main O’odham prose mythological concern was with humans fighting each others in wars. Also in this middle period of the mythology come the origin of food crops and tobacco and the killing of monsters who threaten human existence (including the monster Ho’ok for whom the entire mythological chronicle is named). It is difficult to say what this middle part of the mythology is essentially about, but I will try. It is about humanity’s earliest attempts at marriage. This explains the failings in mothering and lack of masculine self-control. Those are bad acts and they turn out badly, but as we will see they gave humanity saguaros and rain ceremonies. When we do such acts now, they are merely bad. In Middle Ancientness they were creative. In this chapter we will deal with four of the thirteen prose texts, one recently republished from an obscure original source and only summarized here, two more from other obscure publications, and one recently recorded and published here for the first time.

Story 1, Pima: Corn and Tobacco (or, Wants to Get Married) The first story is from Thin Leather, the source of our prime Pima rainmaking speech and probably also of the sketch of the wineless Pima rain ceremony

24 / How Mockingbirds Are discussed in the next chapter.4 J. William Lloyd took the story down from Thin Leather in 1904, a year or two after Frank Russell had come to him. The Lloyd text of Thin Leather has elements of both the “main” types of wine ceremony origin stories, but it differs from them in its principal characters. It gives an origin of the cactus and of wine drinking as in the Papago type, but it replaces the usual game-loving girl with a pair of Corn and Tobacco, male and female respectively. A quarrel between them results in an absence of rain, which situation resembles the other usual story, but here it is the departure of Tobacco, not of Wind and Cloud, that causes the drought. In addition, the suicidal child is replaced by a Dog-Pumpkin child who is broken up by the other careless children and becomes the saguaro. Wine is made but there is no mention of drunkenness or rain coming from it. This story, given to Lloyd, is absent in the mythology that Frank Russell obtained from Thin Leather. Except for the calendar stick records, there is no mention of current or mythic wine drinks in Russell’s book, which is the standard ethnographic source on the Pimas. (Lloyd’s book is entirely given over to Thin Leather’s mythology.) We know that Thin Leather produced slightly different results in the two times he was visited by white collectors. I will not state all the differences since the collections are quite large. Suffice it to say that the differences are mainly in the middle part of the full tellings and yet several of the other stories in that section, including the important Ho’ok (monster killing) one, from which the mythology is named, are essentially the same. In my view, the fact that Thin Leather was heard twice mainly assures us that he took kindly and spoke freely and fully to each visitor. Still, that he told some stories to one that he did not tell to the other5 shows that his chronicle was not absolutely fixed. When he did tell the same story to both, the versions were very similar. (The portions of the story that I have summarized are indented, the portions that are reproduced verbatim from Russell are flushed left.)

Corn and Tobacco Narrator: Thin Leather; Collected by J. William Lloyd There was a powerful mahki [medicine man] who had a daughter who, though old enough, was unmarried and who grew tired of her single life. She asked her father to bury her, hoping that then men would like her. She grew out from the grave as tobacco which her father took and smoked at mens’ meetings. She came out from the grave as a woman again and gambled in a stick dice game with Corn. Corn won all that she owned, but she gave him only a few things. They quarreled about that.

The Origin Stories behind the Wine Drinks / 25 She told Corn to go away because she, being Tobacco, was more loved than Corn: tobacco brings rain which is needed before people can plant corn. Corn said that the people all like to eat him and not her, so she and not he should leave. In fact Tobacco left and arrived at a remote, secret, western place. Corn remained. When corn planting time came, no one could plant for lack of moisture. The people scolded Corn for sending her away, so he left too, eastward. The people sent a bird, Gi:sopi, the flycatcher or black phoebe, who found Tobacco and asked her to return. She refused but gave the bird some seeds with instructions on how to grow them. [It seems that the plant she had turned into no longer existed.] The people grew new tobacco and took turns in smoking it, stating their kinship relations to each other for the first time as they smoked [there being no normalized blood or kinship relations before then]. Corn and his friend Pumpkin [or squash] approached humanity from their eastern haunts. Corn came upon a human woman and her brother gathering and roasting the buds of a shrublike cholla cactus [not saguaro]. The boy referred to him as uncle. Corn shot an arrow into the buried, roasting buds and changed them to corn and pumpkins, to the humans’ surprise. Corn then asked if the woman Tobacco had returned. Yes, he was told [contrary to what the story said earlier], and she is still unmarried. Corn then sent the human boy to tell the people he would return if they wanted, and he would like to marry Tobacco. When Tobacco’s father consented to the return and marriage, Corn asked that a house be made for him and Tobacco, and that everyone put broken pots outside their houses. That night, as corn stood among the houses, corn and pumpkins rained into the pots. Corn and Tobacco, having married, produced a baby called Dog, or Broken Neck, Pumpkin. The village children broke the baby with their rough play. Corn went away, making two speeches [one on corn and squash growing and one on rain] as he left. The broken but still living baby sank in the ground and went eastward and emerged as a saguaro cactus. Its mother and grandfather got Coyote to seek the lost child. Coyote returned with a faint idea of what and where the child was. He asked Buzzard to make certain. Buzzard found the cactus and told the people to go there and find something good. The people found the cactus in full fruit.

26 / How Mockingbirds Are The people gathered it [fruit] and made tis-win [Mexican-derived name for Indian-made wine or homebrew] and took the seeds and spread them out in the sun. And Badger stole the seeds, and when the people knew it they sent Toehahvs [Coyote] after the thief. Coyote found Badger and tricked him into showing the seeds he held closed in his hand. Coyote slapped the open hand to scatter the seeds to the places where they now grow. (Lloyd 1911, 212–30; and Bahr, ed. 1994, 94–107)

Story 2, Papago: The Giant Cactus. Origin of Saguaros (or, Bad Mother) Next, a Papago girl-who-loved-tokka story. Of six known versions of this,6 all but one Papago, I pick one collected by H. Wright, with a skillfully used “peoples” orthography (see chapter 1) and a particularly sharp rendition of the characters of the girl and her child. In all versions the mother neglects her child and the child commits something like suicide: dies as a child but becomes a cactus. Of course, a similar event occurs in Thin Leather’s Corn and Tobacco story. There, a young woman is buried for lack of suitors, and she changes underground into tobacco. Later her Dog-Pumpkin child is broken up and transformed into a saguaro. In the present story a boy child sinks in the earth for lack of motherly attention, and he changes to a saguaro: we have suicide stories of a boy child and a teenage girl. The first is widespread among Papagos, the second is unique to Thin Leather. (Now, in 2007, I know a few Tohono O’odham who know the first but no Akimel O’odham who knows the second.) There are hints that Thin Leather constructed his story anew from widely known pieces. Thus, many O’odham had a story on the origin of tobacco from an old woman who was buried by her sons after being killed by the people of her village. Thin Leather told this conventional story to Russell (1908, 221–24) but not to Lloyd—a few years later he created, or pulled from his memory, a new and different story, Corn and Tobacco, for Lloyd. Moreover, the Corn and Tobacco story has some illogicalities of character that most O’odham stories avoid: the girl becomes a tobacco plant but she soon reappears as a girl; and she sends seeds to humanity but then reappears among them herself. In general in O’odham stories when a character changes from something to something else, the original being does not reappear in the story. Here, Thin Leather multiplies his characters illogically. Why? I suggest he wished to counter, that is, to parody, the conventional origin of saguaro. Instead of the usual cactus from a bad mother’s child, Thin Leather wanted a saguaro from a good man’s Corn-person baby.7

The Origin Stories behind the Wine Drinks / 27

Figure 4. Tokka Game. “She fixed her hair with a bright feather and put beads around her neck and went out to play Taw-kah.” Tokka playing circa 1979; the women wear painted faces, head scarves were the norm at the time. (Arizona Historical Society, MS 1255 f. 410[D])

The Giant Cactus (Hah-shahn [Hasan]) Narrator unknown8; Collected by Harold Bell Wright Why an Indian mother, no matter what she is doing, always goes to herchildwhenshecries.TheÞrstsahuaro,orgiantcactus,andhow thebirdsandanimalsbehavedattheÞrstfeastofthecactuswine [Wright’s subtitle]. In a certain village there lived an Indian girl who did not wish to marry. This girl would never listen to the women when they tried to teach her things. All she wanted was to play taw-kah (tokka) all day long. Taw-kah is a game very much like shinny or hockey. It is played by the Indian women. And this girl was a very swift runner and such a good player that the people who bet on her would always win. Finally the girl’s father and mother grew tired of her playing taw-kah all the time. So they married their daughter to a good man. And they made her a fine new house where she and her husband went to live.

28 / How Mockingbirds Are But very soon the new house was dirty. There were never any beans ready for the husband when he came from the fields. Again the young woman was spending all her time playing taw-kah. At last the young woman’s husband grew tired of the dirty house and of having to work all day and then prepare his own supper. So he went away and left her. After a while the woman had a son. The older women of the village thought that surely now this young mother would stop running about playing her favorite game. But the young mother filled a big gourd with milk and put it beside her baby. Then she fixed her hair with a bright feather and put beads around her neck and went out to play taw-kah just as she had always done. But the women of the village did not like to play taw-kah with anyone who always won. And they did not like to think of this young woman’s baby alone, crying. So the women of the kee-him [ki:hin: village] would not play with this young mother. And she went over the mountain to another village where the people did not know her. She played taw-kah with the women of this kee-him and went to a more distant village where she continued to win. Now when this woman’s child was left alone he began to grow. He looked around the room and saw all the beads and feathers and baskets and ollas [clay jars] which his mother had won playing taw-kah. He saw the gourd filled with milk. He drank the milk and got larger and larger. Then he arose and put a feather in his hair and took all the bright things which his mother had won and went outside the house. When the women of the kee-him saw the boy they said: “Here is the boy without a mother.” But the boy said: “No, I have a mother but she is playing taw-kah somewhere. Can you tell me where?” The women could only tell the boy that his mother had gone away over the mountains. So the boy started after his mother. He carried all the things which his mother had won from the other women. And as he traveled he gave those things to the people who gave him food. But the way was very long. After a time the boy came to some cultivated fields which belonged to a man who had a great deal of wheat and was busy clearing out the weeds. And the boy asked him his question again: Where could he find his mother?

The Origin Stories behind the Wine Drinks / 29 And the man answered that he knew the boy’s mother well. He said she was always playing taw-kah and always winning; that she always wore a bright feather in her hair; and that she was in a kee-him on the other side of a black mountain. So the boy started up to the black mountain. The trail was long. Sometimes Hoo-e-cut [Hejet]—a lizard—would stop long enough to laugh at him. Sometimes Oo-oo-fick [u’uhig]—the birds—would fly very near and tell him not to be troubled. Finally the boy reached the top of the black mountain and saw the village which lay below. There were some women playing taw-kah. And as the boy watched he saw a young woman who always won. And in this one’s hair there was a bright feather. The boy went on down the mountain to the village. But he did not go into the kee-him [village]. He stopped in an arroyo near where there were children playing. And the boy asked one of the children to go to the woman who was playing taw-kah—the woman who had a bright feather in her hair and who always won—and tell her that her son had come and wanted to see his mother. The child carried the boy’s message. But the woman answered: “I will come as soon as I win this game.” The boy waited some time. Then he went to another child with a message to his mother. But the boy’s mother had not yet won that game of taw-kah so she sent the same message back that she would surely come when she had won. Again the boy waited. And the boy was hungry. So he sent the third child to his mother begging her to please come because he wanted to see her. But this game of taw-kah was very long and the boy’s mother had to run very swiftly. So she answered the messenger, “Yes, yes, tell him I will come when I win this game.” When the third messenger returned the boy was angry. And he asked the children to help him find the hole of Hee-ah-e [Hian]—a tarantula. When they found a tarantula’s hole the boy asked the children to help him sing. So the ah-ah-lee [a’ali]—the children—formed a ring around the boy and began to dance and sing. And as the boy and the children danced and sang the boy sank into the tarantula’s hole.

30 / How Mockingbirds Are With the first song he sank as far as his knees. He asked the children to sing louder and to dance harder. And as they circled around him singing and dancing he kept sinking into the ground. When only the boy’s shoulders were above ground one of the children ran to his mother, who was still playing taw-kah, and told her she must come quickly because the strange boy was almost buried in the tarantula’s hole. The mother dropped her taw-kah stick and ran as fast as she could. But the sun was in the mother’s eyes and she could not see to run very swiftly. And when she reached the arroyo there was nothing to be seen but a bright feather sticking out of a tarantula hole. And the sand was closing on the feather. Then the woman began to cry. And Pahn [Ban]—the coyote—who was passing, came to see what all the noise was about. The mother told Pahn that her son had just been buried in the tarantula’s hole. And she asked Coyote to help her dig her son out of the ground. Now, Coyote was hungry with all his work, and he couldn’t see why he should take this boy to a mother who had never done anything for her son. So he ate the boy. When the bones were well cleaned Coyote took them out of the hole and gave them to the woman with a bright feather. And Pahn said to the woman: “Some one must have eaten your son. This is all I could find.” The woman with the bright feather looked at the bones. But the bones of her son were not very bright and she had no use for them. She told Pahn to bury them again, which Coyote did. Four days later something green came out of the ground on the spot where the boy’s bones were buried. In four more days this green thing was a baby saguaro—ah-lee-choom hah-shahn [al cem hasan]. And this was the first saguaro, or giant cactus, in all the world. This giant cactus was a very strange thing. It was just a tall, thick, soft, green thing growing out of the ground. All the Indians and all the animals came to look at it. Ah-ah-lee—the children—played around it and stuck sticks into it. This hurt Hah-shahn and he put out long sharp needles for protection so the children could not touch him. Then a-ah-lee took their bows and arrows and shot at Hah-shan. This made Giant Cactus very angry. He sank in the ground and went away where no one could find him and he could live in peace.

The Origin Stories behind the Wine Drinks / 31 After Giant Cactus disappeared the people were sorry and began looking for him. They hunted over all the mountains near the village. They asked all the animals and birds to help them. After a very long time Ha-vahn-e [Hawan]—the crow— wandered over Kee-ho Toahk [Giho Duag], which means Burden Basket Mountain. And Crow told the people that he had seen a very large cactus where there was nothing but rocks and where no animals nor Indians ever hunted. Kooh [I don’t know this word, it may be a personal name]— the chief—called a council of all the animals and the people. And Kooh told the people to prepare four large round baskets. Then Chief gave Crow orders to fly back to the giant cactus. And Kooh told Ha-vahn-e what he should do when he arrived. When Crow reached the giant cactus he found the top of Hah-shahn covered with fruit. The fruit was red and large and full of juice and sugar. Crow gathered the fruit as Chief had told him to do, and flew slowly back to the village. The people were waiting. And Crow put hah-shahn pah-hee-tahch [hasan bahidaj]— the cactus fruit—into ollas, which are large jars, and which were filled with water. Chief placed the ollas on the fire and from sunrise to sunset the fruit kept boiling. For four days this syrup—see-toe-ly [sitol]—was cooked. Then Kooh—the chief—told all the people to prepare for a special feast—nah-vite ee [nawait i:’i]—which is wine feast, or wine drinking. They were to have a wine which they had never had before. Oo-oo-fick—the birds—were the quickest to get ready for the feast. They came dressed in red and black and yellow. Some of the smaller ones were all in blue. Then Kaw-koy’ [ko’owi]—the rattlesnake—came crawling in. And Kaw-koy’ was all painted in very brilliant colors. The birds did not like it because Rattlesnake was painted so bright. They gossiped and scolded and were jealous. Rattlesnake heard O-oo-fick [the birds] talking and rolled himself in some ashes. And that is why, even in these days, you will find the skin of Kaw-koy’ marked with gray. The gray markings are where the ashes were caked onto his new paint. Choo-ah-tuck [ciadag]—the Gila monster—gathered bright pebbles and made himself a very beautiful coat. And Gila monster’s beautiful coat was very hard. You can see it today because he is still wearing it.

32 / How Mockingbirds Are So all the people—Indians and animals and birds—gathered around and drank the nah-vite—the wine. And nah-vite was very strong. It made some sing. Others it put to sleep. Others were sick. Choo-hook Neu-putt [perhaps Cuk, black; then surely Ne:pod]—the Nighthawk—who was dressed up in gray and yellow, did not wish to spoil his breast feathers so he brought a stick of cane to drink through. All the Indian girls thought this very wonderful of Choo-hook Neu-putt and he received a great deal of attention. And Saw-aw [So:’o]—the grasshopper—who had borrowed Tawk-e-toot [Tokdot]—the spider’s—web and with it made himself beautiful new wings, was very jealous to see the attention given Nighthawk. Grasshopper felt he must do something to make the people notice him. So he pulled off one of his hind legs and stuck it on his head. When Nighthawk saw Grasshopper with his new headdress he laughed and laughed and laughed until he could not stop laughing. He laughed so hard he split his mouth. And it is that way even until this very day. That is why the Nighthawk never flies in the daytime. His mouth is so big and white and ugly that he has to fly at night so people will not see him. And that is why he darts past you so quickly in the evening. Often in these days, too, you will see Saw-aw—the grasshopper—jumping around without a leg. After a while, as they kept on drinking nah-vite, the birds began to fight. They pulled each other’s feathers. And some had bloody heads—just as you see them today. When Kooh—the chief—saw the fighting and the bloody feathers, he decided that there should be no more wine feasts or wine drinking like that. So when the wine was gone, Kooh very carefully gathered all the seeds of the giant cactus fruit and he called a messenger to take them away toward the rising sun. The people watched the Chief ’s messenger take the seeds away into a strange country and they did not like it. So they held a council. And Coyote said he would go after Chief ’s messenger. Coyote traveled very fast. He circled around the one who was carrying the seed and came back so that when he met the messenger it appeared that he was coming from the opposite direction. Pahn [Coyote] greeted Messenger and asked what it was that Messenger carried in his hands.

The Origin Stories behind the Wine Drinks / 33 The one who had the saguaro seed answered: “It is something Kooh wants me to carry away off.” Coyote said: “Let me see.” Messenger said: “No, that is impossible.” But Coyote begged: “Just one little look.” At last, after much coaxing, Pahn persuaded Messenger to open one finger of the hand which held the seed. Then Coyote complained that he could not see enough and begged Messenger to open one more finger. And so, little by little, Messenger’s hand was opened. Then, suddenly, Coyote struck Messenger’s hand and the seeds of Hah-shahn—the giant cactus—flew into the air. Huh-wuh-le [hewel]—the wind—was coming from the north. And Huh-wuh-le caught up the seeds and carried them high over the mountaintops and scattered them all over the south side of the mountains. And this is why the saguaro, or giant cactus, still grows in the Land of the Desert People. This is why Hah-shahn is always on the southern slopes of the mountains. Ever since this time, once a year, the Indians have held nah-vite ee—the feast of the cactus wine. (Wright 1929, 109–22) There is no drinking for rain in this story. There is only dressing up for drinking and then getting drunk and disorderly. All the origin of cactus stories are like this, except Thin Leather’s to Lloyd. Neither, however, does that exceptional story say that drinking brought rain. Rain is an issue in that story, but the implication is that tobacco smoke and not drinking brings the rain. We will see the smoke connection again in the Pima Thin Leather’s Mockingbird speech. Actually, the Papago Mockingbird speech is the only text I know in which a causal connection is drawn between drinking and rain. The bird stimulates clouds by carrying the sounds of drunk humans to them, and the clouds then imitate what the present text calls the “sickness” of the drinking humans. The clouds vomit rain and there is a stormy sky-to-earth mayhem. So far, then, the O’odham posit two causal mediators between humans and rain: human-exhaled tobacco smoke, which is visible and can be smelled at a greater distance than plain human breath; and the sounds of human partying, which are transmitted from humans to distant “great-houses” by mockingbirds. In addition, one tokka-girl text says that the boy gave rain-attracting songs to humans prior to his turning into a cactus (Densmore 1929, 149–50).

34 / How Mockingbirds Are

Story 3, Pima: How Morning Green Lost his Power over the Wind Gods and the Rain Gods (or, A Girl Exposed) Narrator: Thin Leather; Collected by Fewkes The next text gives a fourth means of mediating between humans and rain: a gift of a rope made from a human girl’s hair enables Wind to lead Rain in a visit to humans.9 Morning Green [the chief of an ancient village at the present day Casa Grande Ruins National Monument] is reputed to have had special magic power over two supernatural beings, known as Wind-man and Rain-man. It happened at one time that many people were playing a game with canes in the main plaza of Morning Green’s settlement, on the south side of the compound; among these were Rain-man and Wind-man. The latter laid a wager that if he lost, his opponent should look on the charms of a certain maid. When Wind-man lost, in revenge he sent a great wind that blew aside her blanket, at which indignity she cried and complained of Wind-man to Morning Green, who was so angry he made Rain-man blind, obliging him to be led about by his servant, the wind; he also banished both from Casa Grande. They went to the San Bernardino Mountains in what is now California and lived at Eagle Mountain, near the present town of Wadsworth, where as a consequence it rains continually. After the banishment of these two the rain ceased at Casa Grande for four years, and Morning Green sent Humming-bird to the mountains where Wind-man and Rain-man resided. Humming-bird carried with him a white feather, which he held aloft to detect the presence of wind. Three times he thus tried to discover Wind-man by the movements of this feather, but was not successful. When at last Humming-bird came to a place where there was much green grass he again held up the feather to see whether it showed any movement of the air. It responded by indicating a slight wind, and later he came to the spot where Wind-man and Rain-man were, but found them asleep. Humming-bird dropped a little medicine on the breasts of Wind-man and Rain-man, which caused them after a time to move and later to awake. When they had risen from their sleep Humming-bird informed them that Morning Green had sent him to ask them to return and again take up their abode with him at

The Origin Stories behind the Wine Drinks / 35 Casa Grande. Rain-man, who had no desire to return, answered, “Why did Morning Green send us away?” and Wind-man said, “Return to Morning Green and tell him to cut off his daughter’s hair and make from it a rope. Bring this rope to me and I will tie it about my loins that Rain-man, who is blind, may catch hold of it while I am leading him. But advise all in Casa Grande to take the precaution to repair the roofs of their houses so they will not leak, for when we arrive it will rain violently.” Humming-bird delivered this message to the chief at Casa Grande and later brought back the twisted rope of human hair. Wind-man and Rain-man had barely started for Casa Grande when it began to rain, and for four days the downpour was so great that every roof leaked. Morning Green vainly used all his power to stop the rain, but the magic availed little. (Fewkes 1912, 47–48)

Story 4, Papago: First Wine Drinks The last text is from the year 2001. It is part of a Ho’ok A:gida telling given by Philip Lopez to a group of about twenty people at a community building (not anyone’s house, but a place for public meetings) at a new neighborhood of suburban-style houses called North Santa Rosa in the Tohono O’odham Nation. (“Old” Santa Rosa, where the orator Moreno lived, is to the south of it.) The traditional place for such tellings is in the home or, as Lopez points out in his presentation, among cowboys at night during cattle roundups. The roundup tellings are similar to the North Santa Rosa event in being away from anyone’s house and open to people who are not immediate family members. A few posters had been put up to announce this event, but still those who came were mainly close relatives, evidence that traditional Ho’ok A:gida tellings are mainly family affairs. Knowing the teller somewhat well, I wanted to come. I had brought (but left in my car) a tape recorder in case someone wanted the event recorded, but no one had a machine. So I recorded the telling. It was in January, the building was chilly, and various people had to go to work the next day. The event was about two hours long once it began, not nearly the old night-long ideal. (To “tell everything in the ancient past” would require several full nights.) Mr. Lopez used some time at the start to speak about how Ho’ok A:gidas used to be told and to profess his incomplete knowledge of the whole chronicle. Here below are excerpts from his telling on the origin of Wine Drinks, which was one of his main topics. I believe this origin was important to him because the Wine Drink is now nearly the only traditional old communal (not household) ceremony still held

36 / How Mockingbirds Are

Figure 5. Saguaro Cactus with Ripe Fruit. Saguaro plants are scattered on the south slopes of the mountains. (Arizona Historical Society, MS 1255 f.408 [E])

at his village. Thus, telling its origin is as important as telling the origin of the sun or of humanity, for example. Lopez addressed this origin for about twenty minutes. He drew on his memory of a telling by his father that had lasted for several hours. The story is similar to the one published by Wright, but it is briefer in its principal parts. Embedded in the story, however, is a prose sketch of the Mockingbird speech (oration). Below are excerpts from his telling. A few of those present for the event, including myself, were not fluent in O’odham. Mr. Lopez was practiced in speaking mainly in that language but shifting now and then to English in order let those poor in O’odham know what topic or point he had addressed (there was no one present who knew absolutely no English). The portions spoken in English are placed in italics in the left column and are not translated in the right. The following is Mr. Lopez’s complete telling that night. It is a complex narrative, because it combines several items. Besides telling the story of the origin of the saguaro and first wine drinks, he recalls how he heard it from his father and goes on to include the text of a song and the partial text of a Mockingbird oration. Thus, the narrative consists of a stretch of Ho’ok A:gida, plus commentary, plus song, plus a stretch of oration.

There over there, which is called Ancient-chief ’s Great-house,

Amai gn hu, mo hab a’aga Siwan Wa’aki,

The first it [wine-making season] came around, the first time they did the Sit-and Drink, [and it was done by] these birds.

Wepeg e-ahijid, wepeg hab ju: g dahiwak i: amai i:dam u’uhig.

That we hear fairy tales about it in the Miligan books when we were kids.

That there’s stories about it [stories like this, with animal characters, set in ancient times], that we even hear it [such stories] in the Miligan [white peoples’] stories,

That [but] I know that one time,

I don’t know, like I said, that I don’t know how it started,

For they say that the first wine was made there.

Mo hob kaij, matp am wepeg e-nawait amai.

Casa Grande Ruin

[I will tell something of ] What happened, when it was the first Wine Drink,

[Narrative]

Matp hab e-ju:, mat eda am wepeg Nawait I’it,

Narrator Philip Lopez; Translated by D. Bahr

The First Wine Drinks

And it [the cactus] stood somewhere.

K as am hebai ke:k amai.

She was playing, uh, tokka with those other ladies [away from her home],

K hab e-wua hegai je’ej, mat p gm hu memdac, ha-tokkad.

Which I don’t perfectly understand, about how it happened, well, that a woman had as her child this Saguaro [a child who became the first saguaro cactus],

Man ep pi am hu amicud hegai, mas has mahama hab e-jun, kaij, mas g uwi am hema mads i:da hasan,

And that mother did this, that she would [habitually] run off and, play tokka.

[Story—Origin of Saguaro]

. . . Then [after the earlier, more ancient events] something happened, about that-one there, as it’s said, as it’s told about the Wine Drinks

They existed, when we [older people] went to school,

. . . Amjed junhim hegai ha’icu, ab amjed hegai amai, o hob masma hab kaij, mo om b s a:ga ab amjed hegai Nawait I’ita,

And I remembered one about the donkey and his [musical] band. . . . [He sketches the story, then he speaks briefly of the earliest events of the Ho’ok A:gida, then returns to the first Wine Drink.]

That they had it,

Mo hob cu’ig, mac eda t-mascam,

Right now they [reservations schools] don’t have it [such a curriculum], but during my times,

And it [child] asked [permission from] the tarantula, that it[child] could do, to enter below the ground, Because of what the children had done—bothered him, threw rocks at him, And he sang, too, [did] the Saguaro, who stood there. And it [child] said,

S am i ta:n hegai Hian, mat hab o ju:, mat gm hu o wa: g jewed weco,

[G] hekaj mats hab e-wua g hegam a’al—kudut, ma’ikas hohodaikaj,

K as am hab ep, ne’e, ep, hegai hasan, mo om ke:k.

C heg hab kaij,

B s cece.

It [child] said.

“Tarantula, tarantula. Go-in-and [unknown word], Go-in-and [unknown word],”

Then it happened, that it [child] discarded them and went, and stopped someplace, where a Tarantula had a house, and there stopped the Saguaro [to-be—still a human child].

At p oiya hab e-ju:, mat p am s-ha-o:hot k am him, mo hebai ke:kiwa, ma s g Hian im ki:, c ab kekia hegai hasan.

“Hiani, hiani, Wapag o o mi:, Wapag o o mi:,”

And then they did it, those children [where Saguaro lived], that they [other children] threw things at that Saguaro, who stood there, that-one.

K at p oiya hab e-wua, hegam a’al, matp ma’ikas hegai Hasan, mat p am ke:k, hegai.

And it went-in [a hole], and went-in. And they told that-one, its mother, “Over-there, it seems it sank, your child, beneath the ground.” Then she ran, off-there she ran-up-to-it, She tried to get it [out], but it was this way, that it had thorns. Because its arms were thorny, and she couldn’t get her child, And away it [child] went-in beneath the ground. Well, Saguaro, they tried to find it, But it wasn’t there, it went off someplace, And so they would hunt for that-one Saguaro, that went somewhere.

K i wa:pkim, k i wa:pkim.

S am aha a:gid, hegai je’ej,

“Gam hu, at ki hu wa:, g m-mad, jewed weco.”

S am aha medk, gd hu meliuw,

S am cem bebbe, eda hab cu/’ig, mo s-hoidag.

Hekaj s-ho’igas hegam no:nowi, c pi bei g e-mad,

C im hu wa:k jewed weco.

Pegi, Hasan, at s am cem ga:g,

Oiya pi edag, mat s hebai hi:.,

C amjed ma s am ga:g hegai Hasan, mat s hebai hi:.

About that cactus that went under the ground.

Then it’s a very long story, hegai [that-one],

And down sank that-one, Saguaro,

K gm hu abs i wa:k hegai, Hasan,

There [in a truck, with the teller] sat my late-father, [and] with me Dorothy [the teller’s wife], she also sat.

Gm hu dahiwa g n-o:gbad, n-we:m Dorti, ep daha.

[Resuming the story] And so they tried to send that-one,

And so mat s am cem a’ad hegai,

So they did-it-and, they told them, that they would search for that-one. Well, where did Saguaro go?

Mat hab e-wuadc, mat s hab o a:g, mat am o ga: hegai.

Pegi, mat s hebai hi: hegai Hasan?

Those different kinds of flying animals,

Then he told, and told-us, and told-us, until almost reaching Nogales [about three-fourths of the way to Magdalena], then he finished the story.

Amjed am b i a:ga, k t-a:ga, k t-a:ga, cem al o ge wo’i Nowal amai, mat am i ku:g hegai stori . . .

And he started the story when we got close to Covered Wells [village, fifteen miles from home on the way to distant Magdalena]

It [my father] told it when we ran [drove] toward Magdalena [a town in Mexico where people go on a pilgrimage].

Hab a:ga mat gm hu wopoi Mali:na wui.

[Narrative]

That [is,] they-told that Coyote, And they told him, “Don’t leave out any of the world, and run and look-for-it.”

Mas g am aha nab a:gid hegai Ban,

C hab a:gid, “Pi hebai wia g jewed, c am melhim c an ga:g.”

He said the water was rotten there, hence “Rotten” [the name] there. And hence it is called “Rotten,” “Covered Wells” [the English name for the place called “Rotten” in O’odham], Rotten. . . .

B s kaij mo mo s-jewo hegai su:dagi abai, amjed “Jewaki” abai. K amjed hab a’aga hegai “Jewaki,” “Covered Wells,” Jewagi. . . .

Like I said, I wasn’t listening [to everything that was told on the way to Nogales, to] what he called those others, those other places, . . . [a little more is said about Coyote, then the story shifts without explanation to the efforts of Buzzard].

[The Coyote went to one water place and tasted the water, which was bitter, hence the present name of that well. Then:] he ran up to Rotten [a place] and again drank the water there.

K ab meliwa Jewag ab, kam ep cem i: g su:dagi abai.

[Narrative]

So they were telling him, and he [Coyote] did it, and ran. . . .

Cam si a:gahim, c hab e-ju:, k am mel amai. . . .

“See if you can find out, where that Hasan [Saguaro] went.”

So they sent-him [Coyote],

Mat s g am a:’ad,

Well, as I said, . . . that . . . something is the Buzzard. They said to him, “So you go around too, and you see everything, and [so] you find the place, wherever this Saguaro is.” And he did it, that he found it, Carrying-basket Mountain [near to “Rotten”]-at. So there stood the Saguaro, in a wash. And it happened, that that, he ran [flew] back, and told them [who had sent him]. “There stands the Saguaro.” Then they told him, saying, “Go and pull [bring into the ceremonial circle] your Nighthawk!” And there was also one called Thrasher, Then one [not clear who] remained, and then it [someone] made-a-speech, who stood up a talk. They said, “Where did Nighthawk go? He’s not here,”

Pegi, man hab kaij, . . . mat s . . . hascu ud Nu:wi.

Heg hab a:, “Map a:pim ab oimmed ep, c we:s ha’icu am i neidahim, c at p am hebai am i ce:, mat p am hebai has o cu’ig i:da Hasan,”

Kut p oi hab e-ju:, mat gm hu ce:, Giho Duagc-ed. . . .

Ku s am ke:k hegai Hasan, akic-ed amai.

K hab e-ju:, mats med, gm hu u:pam hi:, k am ha-a:g,

“Gm hu o ke:k hegai Hasan.”

C oiya am a:gidk s hab kaij,

“Oi g e-wancud g e-Ne:pod!”

C am a g ep hegai mo hab a:g Ku:dwij,

Matp oi am a hema wi:, k am aha hema niokculi, mo ab ep ke:k g niok.

K s hab a:gid, “T hebai hi: g Ne:pod? Pi ha’icu,”

[Resuming the story]

Then he [Buzzard] told, that he would get the fruits of it. He brought it, and told them. . . . Then they brought-it, that-one [fruit]. They liked looking at it, Then they did, that they made that-one, syrup. And they did it, they made wine there. Then it was, . . . that they made wine there, for the first time there, [did] those various birds, that they, made wine. . . . There was that . . . Nighthawk, who also lay there, And they will sit him [for the ceremony] at the east. . . . Then it happened, that he didn’t go, When they tried to tell him [to go], He said, “There with-it talks [or, should talk] the Nighthawk.” But he said, “Yes, I [not clear who] will go,” But he didn’t go.

Oi hab a:g hegai, mats am o ho-bei g bahidaj.

Gan am hu i bek, am o ha-a:g. . . .

Matp am uapa, hegai.

Matp am s-ho:ho’idk nei, K oi hab e-ju:, matp am na:to hegai, sitol.

K am b o ju:, mats am a nawai, amai.

C oi hab cu’ig, matp am e-nawai amai, wepeg amai, hegai na:nko ma:s u’uhig, am na:to g nawait. . . .

Mo om wud heg . . . Ne:pod, mas hebai wo’o,

Mas ep wo dai ab si’alk. . . .

T oi a b e-ju:, matp pi am hu hi:,

Mo cem a:gid heigai.

Mas has kaij, ”Am we:maj niokhim hegai Ne:pod.”

S hab-a hab kaij, “Heu’u, bant o wa hi:,”

Oiya pi im hu him.

And they said he was playing somewhere. They said, “There he’s lying, at the base of the salt-bush, He won’t go [to do his job].” Then they went again, and really told him, And he went-and, sat there in the east. He looked around, no-one at all was around there [at the ceremonial ground]. So he said, “And who will I drink with? [I] sit here, but the way it is, there are no people [or birds] here.” That they said there, at the Sit-and Drink, that [ceremonial] talking— That song—that they stand [perform] there, Those who sit at that-one [place], in the east. Look, he said [sang],

C a:g mo hebai cici.

S kaij, “Ga: s hu wo’o, dadsag son am,

“Pi ap hu i hi:.”

T oi am aha ab ep hi:, k hab si a:gid,

S am aha himk am dahia amai, sialto.

Cem neidc, pi hedai n hu ha’icug g hemajkam

S oi hab ab kaij, “Heu’u, mant hedai we:m o n-i:?

I daha, k eda hab cu’ig, mo pi in hu hedai ha’icu g hemajkam.”

Mo om b a a cecce amai, Dahiwak I:c-ed, hegai niok—

Hegai ne’i—mo on b a ke:k,,

Mo ob dahiwa ab hegai, si’alc-ed.

Ne:, mo om kaij,,

He said. Nighthawk sat there alone, Then they also followed, the song[?], Then they did, the various [tape interrupted]all sat down [the recording stops]. . . . That they drink up the wine,

Ab hejel daha hegai ne:pod,

S oiya ap ep s si has oidc, s ab i ne’i,

B abs e-ju:, g na:nko . . . [tape interruped for about a minute, leaving a gap in our text.]

Mo ab i: hegai nawait,

“And I ran up, Who will drink with me? [This line is not understood.] Not any with-them play. And just-then drink with me. Beautiful clouds with me arrive, And I with somebody will drink,”

Bas kaij.

“Kum tia me li wa, Te dai we mo ni me. He kya ke kai ne lo, Piyo ho hai we ma ci ci wi: me. Kun se dayo o ni hi me. Ke kui ce we ha ni we ma cyo ho ji ji wim. Kune se dai we mo ni hi hi i me,”

Then they stand-up [declaim] that Wine Drink talk, which they say, About that-thing [rainmaking], That this-way they do it, so as to request rain, So that I’itoi [a god—but this word may have been misheard] the rain will make happen. They bring that-one [speaker], that he will tell everything [the set of Mockingbird speeches], About the east direction [and the other directions], So it will be, that they will finish-drinking, they will tell us [a speech], they will tell, that-one, When [as the speech says] they will drink one-of-the “chief ’s served-drinks.” Because that’s what is made there, they say, at the “Chief ’s Rain-house” there [according to the speech], So that’s why it says that, [in] that-one, Sit-and Drink,

Mo om p ep cuccia ep g eda hegai nawai i:’i niok, mo om e-cecce,

Ab amjed hegai,

P has masma am hab e-ju:, hegai mo ob i ta:n g ju:ki,

Mat g I’itoi g juki matp hab o o-ju:.

Am o uapa hegai, mo we:s ha’icu am a:g hegai,

Ab amjed g si’alig tagio,

Matp hab cu’ig, mat p am i’ito, b o wa t-a:g, t ab o a:g, hegai,.

Mat hema am ab ha-i: g “siwan wasbid.”

Nat pi an ha’ap e-na:to amai, hab kaij, “Siwan Wa’aki” amai,

Heg hekaj hab masma b e-cecce, hegai, Dahiwak I:,

“That now they swallowed the rain-chief served-liquid, medicine-man served liquid.” He [ceremonial speaker] tells them that, “Away they see the east standing rain-house, which stands there, Where inside the Mockingbird hung, the White Mockingbird hung-and, Upward tilting [he] talked.” Upward tilting-and told-it, that-one. “Back-and-forth moving and talked,” So he back-and-forth looking-and tell-it, that-one, That he was excited, and he told this, too, That the earth thought itself to be far [stretching]-and, it was that way, But then they—far-off they saw the lightning. That it went high,

“Mat hemu ab ha-ba: siwan wasbid, ma:kai wasbid.”

Am o ho-a:g mat g “Wa:s hu neid [g] si’alig ke:kam wa’aki, mo ob ke:k,

Mo g eda g su:g ab nagia, Toa Su:g ab nagiac,

Da’imo’o ab niok.”

Da’imo’ok an a:gid, hegai.

“A’ai da’iwanc niok,”

Mat a’ai ne:nc an a a:gid, hegai,

Mo wa:s cu’ig, c am ep a:gid hegai, e:p,

Mo g jewed cem me:k hab-elidc, hab cu’ig,

C hab s hab-a mat—me:k mat neid g wepgi,

Matp am o u:g amai,

The lightning and the storm,

That they say, [in the speech],

Mat hab o cei,

[Mockingbird Speech]

And it ran, And it says, that That the far world, that it thought itself to be far [very large] and said it. But then it [dust-storm] really knew [what to do], And it ran [did] that-one, the dust-storm. And it [rain] was beside it, And it ran, and it ran, And it reached us there. And it tells, that,

K ab o i me:.

K hab o cei, mas

Mas me:k jewed, mas si me:ko habs e-elid c hab cei.

S hab-a g oidk k ab si s-e-ma:c,

K a’i med hegai, jegos.

K ab huhugid ab,

K ab med, k ab med,

K ab o t-a’ahe amai.

K hab ep a:gas, mo ge,

That it just looks like, that then the water ran here, [did] that-one. And then next greatly came the rain.

Mo hob cem ma:s, mat g oidk in o me: g su:dagi, hegai.

Kut hab-a oiya si ge’e ji:va g ju:ki.

That there’s so many washes, that’s coming in from there,

That from that it had already started, [did] the dust-storm,

Matp amjed o i hi: hekihu, g jegos,

Dry-trash it flooded, then put it [trash] there. Away it piled everything, [did] that-one [flood water], And it tells,

Wapkola i wi’in, k am o ce: gnhu.

Gm hu si kekeis we:s ha’icu, hegai,

Mo hab a’aga,

Then from that came out the seeded somethings. They thought of themselves, and thought of themselves, and came out [did] the corn seed, Melon seed, Many things [crop plants] came out. Something fruited, that we will use [to eat], that-one, . . .

G amjed, im o wu:s g ha’icu kai.

Ge hejel e-elidk, s hejel elid, k am wu:s g hun kai,

Mi:lon kai,

Mu’i ha’icu am o wu:s.

Ha’icu bahidag, mac heg o hekaj, hegai, . . .

That from there

Away it overflowed,

Gm hu si s-ce:s hegai.

On our [local] earth, which as it is, that the earth is poor,

T-jewedga, mo hab cecce, mo so’ig g jewed,

Yet [on the other hand] it was for those Pimas,

That the water [always] ran, at the river there. . . .

G hekaj mo hab cu’ig hegam Pi:ma,

Mo om hi med g su:dagi, akimelt-am. . . .

It’s a poor dry land,

Which is how it was for us, here,

Mat ab hu’i masma hab cu’ig a:cim, i:ya,

52 / How Mockingbirds Are Unfortunately, Mr. Lopez did not live long after this text was recorded. I went over a part of the tape with him, but not this part which is why some words in it are left uninterpreted. There are differences in detail between his and the story published by Wright, for example, Buzzard instead of Crow as the bird-person who finds the cactus; and Nighthawk as a reluctant singer as opposed to an unrestrainable laugher. These differences amount to different “takes” on the same story and I would count some of them as self-promotingly different. For example, Buzzard is the “totem” or as O’odhams call it the “helper” (wemgal) of Mr. Lopez’s clan, one-of-two-parts portion of O’odham families, and so it makes sense for Lopez to give him the finder role and also to state that first Coyote failed and then Buzzard succeeded in finding the cactus. Coyote is the totem of the other, opposite, clan or portion of O’odham families. The two versions, Lopez’s and Wright’s, have the same three-part, or three-act, architecture: the Child who Sinks, the Hunt for the Saguaro, and the First Wine Drinks. In both versions the child who sinks becomes the saguaro, who flees. This is what ties the first two acts together. Note, however, that neither story says that the saguaro remembers its time as a child and neither treats the mother’s life after her child, now a saguaro, goes away. Nor does the third act, on the first Wine Drinks, refer back to the characters and events of the first two acts. Thus, both plots have their segments disconnected in the same way, a good sign that we are dealing with the same story. The Wright version, however, has more substance in its three acts. Lopez, who gave the briefer text, is abstracted or, as we may say, he only outlines events he could have told more fully and vividly if he had had the time. (It was a cold night, the story time was short, and he had many topics to cover.) But he aids this book in a way that Wright does not because he includes bits of a Mockingbird speech, something I have said the Origin of Saguaro stories generally lack. Let us note how he does this and also note what Wright gives instead. Lopez follows his episode of the Nighthawk song with the event of the Mockingbird speech, thus weaving the speech into the fabric of his Act Three. Wright gives us a different Nighthawk episode: how the bird split its mouth in laughing at a one-legged Grasshopper. And, Wright follows that and other events of disorder with the chief ’s attempt to prevent saguaros from growing in his territory. One Wine Drink was enough for this native “superintendent.” I do not know if or why Lopez chose to exclude the episode of the chief, but it is clear that his version is pro- rather than anti-Wine Drinks: he passes into the Mockingbird speech, which ends with rain. By the inclusison of the speech he makes it clear, unlike Wright, that Wine Drinks bring rain.

The Origin Stories behind the Wine Drinks / 53 A final comment is in order on Lopez’s transition from the Nighthawk episode to the Mockingbird speech. In a phrase, he is very subtle. Until the start of the Mockingbird speech portion of that last episode, he tells in his own prose words what led up to and took place at the first Wine Drink. But in the passage marked by quotation signs (“That now they swallowed the rain-chief served-liquid . . .”) he recites for a moment the very words from the oration, words that represent what was actually spoken at the first Wine Drink. Thereafter, he weaves in and out of the memorized speech text, sometimes quoting phrases and sometimes paraphrasing or summarizing what the speech says. The speech, from his village of Santa Rosa, is given in chapter 4 of this book. Here is his oversubtlety. He is telling a story, of the first Wine Drinks; and the Mockingbird speech also tells a story, of how sounds from a Wine Drink are heard and repeated by a mockingbird at a “rain-house” (as he put it, “Away they see the east standing rain-house, which stands there, Where inside the Mockingbird hung-and, Upward tilting he talked”). Lopez’s subtlety is to gloss over, and not make clear, that the Mockingbird-person of the speech story was not present at the location of the first Sit-and Drink. A careful reading of the Lopez text (including the English translation, crude-looking but not casually made) will show that the locations are different, but a casual reading could make it seem that after Nighthawk finished its song, then Mockingbird, another reveler, stepped up and commenced to talk. In fact Lopez says that an unnamed person (refered to as “that-one”), not a mockingbird, stepped up and commenced a speech that refers to a mockingbird at a distant rain-house. The oversubtlety consists in using a pronoun (“that-one”) instead of an unambiguous concrete designation (“an animal or man or bird at the drinking ground”). To summarize, Lopez replaced Wright’s chief, who wished to prevent further Wine Drinks, with a “that-one” who made a speech about a mockingbird whose mimicry brought needed rain. In so doing he showed his support for Wine Drinks. About sixty years separate the Wright and Lopez tellings. The similarities are remarkable but also the differences. In Wright’s times the wine drinks were being suppressed by the government, in Lopez’s time they were the most important remaining native ceremony, a source of pride.

Conclusions: Wine Drinks in O’odham Mythology We have considered four of the thirteen known stories10 about either the origin of saguaros or the loss of Wind and Cloud. Taken together, and accepting

54 / How Mockingbirds Are the additional “Corn and Tobacco” (Wants to get Married) as a combined play on the loss of Wind and Cloud and the origin of saguaros, these are the only O’odham stories that include the origin of wine ceremonies. Judging from them, in general when the O’odham tell stories about the origin of saguaro cactus, the story will include an origin of cactus wine and a rowdy wine ceremony; and rain will not be an issue. (Lopez’s narrative concludes with rain only because he incorporates the Mockingbird speech.) And when they tell stories where rain is an issue, there is no origin of saguaro cactuses, usually no wine making, and usually no ceremony. The rowdiness in these latter stories is really about the dirty-minded Cloud whose fulfilled wish causes his and Wind’s expulsion, which causes a drought, which causes them to be enticed back to society, but only for visits. The two stories do not contradict each other. The first establishes a means for wine ceremonies, the second establishes a need for them, or rather, an absence of rain the ceremonies can remedy. Therefore, we might expect some full Ho’ok A:gidas to include both stories, and for Pimas and Papagos to tell both equally. In fact, no narrator of record told both stories, and the Papagos seem to specialize in one and the Pimas in the other. The data are feeble, however, since there are only three Wind and Cloud stories, of which two are Pima— but there is also the Pima Thin Leather’s similar Corn and Tobacco story, given above. Three of the nine Origin of Saguaro stories are also Pima, so two-thirds of those are Papago and one-third are Pima. However if we consider only the stories of the neglectful Tokka playing mother we find that five out of six of these stories are Papago (See Table 2 in Appendix 3). There are some curiosities to note. First, the Wind and Cloud story concerns drought, but this story is a Pima specialty and the Pimas, as Lopez points out, had the Gila River to irrigate with. Possibly the river flow was very dependent on rains and the Pimas realized that. The Origin of Saguaros ignores rain but the desert Papagos depended on rain more than the Pimas. Therefore, the stories are out of phase with the geography. The communities appear to make light of geographical determinism, and if so, hats off to them! Second, each story is about a young person’s flaw: a mother’s toward her child, a man’s toward a woman. I am not aware that anyone has studied the theme of character flaws in Native American literature, so it is unwarranted, or better, unwarrantable, to say, but I do anyway, that these flaws are invoked because the O’odham regard drinking itself as a flaw: it makes one forget what one ought to do, it brings, or lets out, the bad in people. That the subjects of wine making and rain attracting are attached to these stories of flaw makes us wonder what other Original Flaws peoples believe lie behind their religious practices. I have no theory on this and mention it as a topic for future study and reflection. Next, and back to the communal differences, it seems from the present spread of stories that the Papagos play up the “flaw”

The Origin Stories behind the Wine Drinks / 55 of drinking more than the Pimas. Thus, the one Wind and Cloud story that ends with a wine ceremony is from the Papagos; and most of the origins of wine ceremonies (always rowdy) are from them. This is consistent with the contrast we will draw on the Mockingbird speeches, but it is well to keep in mind that although the record of stories looks this way, the record is feeble, especially on Wind and Cloud. Finally and as proof that the two stories are indeed about flawed characters, a cleaned up, de-flawed version of each was written for publication by an O’odham author. An Origin of Saguaros story was written by Susie Ignacio Enos while a student at the University of Arizona in the early 1940s. It was published in 1945 and was reprinted in The South Corner of Time (Evers, ed. 1981, 176–80). A derivative of the Wind and Cloud story was written by Anna Moore Shaw in connection with writing classes at Phoenix Technical School in the early 1950s. It was published in a book by Shaw in 1968 (29–31). Thus, both are Native American offerings to the wide world. Instead of telling a story to the narrow world of family (recall that Ho’ok A;gida stories were told face to face and there were no official versions of them), these were submitted to and disseminated by a publishing house, the University of Arizona Press in both cases. Here is a summary of each: Saguaro. A girl’s dying father tells his young daughter that she will become something special. She matures. Her mother goes regularly to distant places to get food for the two of them. One day the girl follows her. With the help of animals and birds she finds the village where her mother has gone. As the children of the village will not lead her to her mother, she sinks in the ground. Then too late the children summon the mother, who regularly leaves food and water at the place where the girl has sunk. A year later the ex-girl grows out as a saguaro. The plant makes fruit for people to eat and enjoy. They keep the birds and animals from the same. The girl leaves and is discovered at a distant place after much searching. The girl/cactus explains that she left humanity so the birds and animals could enjoy her, too. Wind and Cloud. A broken piece of pottery grieves to Wind that he or she was happy many years ago as a beautiful pot but now no one sees, much less appreciates, him or her. [I think it would be “her.”] Wind blows sand over the piece with the promise that things will get better. Years later the piece calls Wind back and repeats the complaint. Wind gets Rain, who is blind, to wash the piece after Wind first exposes him/her. A

56 / How Mockingbirds Are beautiful girl finds the piece and takes it home and makes a new pot with the same painted design. “ ‘I am so happy!’ whispered the little shard. ‘Now I am useful and I will be a link between the Hohokam [ancient culture, subject of Ho’ok A:gida stories] of the past and the Pima of the present.’ ” I rejoice that these stories are published and regret that there are so few other published O’odham authors. The question is, why did these authors make their changes from the prototype stories? The only answer I can think of is that the authors wanted to remove the flaws so as to avoid making their people look bad to white readers. We see that in addition to removing the character flaws, the authors also remove any reference to wine. Barbara Robinson of Sells, Arizona, told me an additional reason for the changes: the authors made the stories into ones suitable for telling to children, analogous to the American films that are made for child as opposed to adult audiences. I thank her for that good suggestion. Not only did the authors wish to make their people “look good” to whites, they also addressed the whites as O’odham children. I hope the O’odham adults of today and tomorrow will find use for these stories of flaw, either by matching or continuing them.

3

The Ceremonies

Papago Rain Dance Ceremony: Wine Preparation and Dancing It takes two days for the O’odham to make their kind of wine, which lasts for just a day before turning to vinegar. The wine is never inert. It is kept under watch for its entire existence, which begins with the mixing of saguaro cactus syrup with water (a pint of syrup per gallon of water according to Densmore 1929, 153; equal parts syrup and water according to Underhill 1946, 44—I believe Densmore is correct). The jars in which the wine ferments are placed by a smoldering fire in a dark, closed, old-fashioned, round dirt-roofed house. This communal wine, to be used in a public ceremony, is guarded day and night by two men (Densmore, same book, 15; Underhill, ditto, 45). They watch the progress of the wine, which should foam over four times and must stay warm lest it sour (Densmore, 155). The brewing wine has a will which is addressed at the start as follows: I am now mixing you up. Do me the favor to bring good wind and rain, and keep the people from bad behavior after they have drunk the wine. (Densmore, 153) And the watchers sing, for example: The eagle is flying in a round circle and makes a round shadow on the ground. I am walking around under that shadow. The blue hawk is flying in a straight line and makes a straight shadow. Under that line I am running. (Densmore, 154)1

57

58 / How Mockingbirds Are

Figure 6. Cactus Harvest. The saguaro fruit is boiled into syrup or dried. The strained seeds are also spread out to dry. (Arizona Historical Society MS 1255 f. 408 [c], BOX 27)

In the two nights in which the wine develops, the community dances just to the east of the wine house, which is called the “round house” (o:las kii) or “great-house” or “rainhouse” (wa’aki).2 As the people dance hand in hand in a large circle, a medicine man, or two or more, peers into the night from inside the circle for clues on when and where it will rain. At the dawn after the second night of dancing, the wine is ready for a limited tasting. At this time the medicine men tell what they have learned about future rains. Then the people go home to rest for the wine ceremony proper, called the “Sit-and Drink,” which occurs around noon. The entire life of the wine from the mixing to the drinking is ceremonialized, and the parameters of the ceremonies are set by the wine’s pace: an afternoon, a night, a day, a night, and a morning. And while the ripening of the wine proceeds in the round house, the families of the village will set batches to brew at their own homes. After the Sit-and Drink, these different family batches become ready over the next days and nights. One

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learns of these batches from the sounds of singing that accompany the drinking at the houses. Whoever wishes can go and join those celebrations. For the formal Sit-and Drink, when the speeches are given, from four (Densmore 1929, 153) to ten (Underhill 1946, 44) jars or ollas (Spanish; O’odham nawaitakud, “wine-things,” or nawait ha:ha’a, “wine pots”) of wine are made. These, collectively, could contain from twenty to a hundred gallons. A bit of this would be drunk after the two nights of singing at the dawn of the day of the ceremony and the rest at the noon ceremony. The ceremony lasts for about an hour. If one hundred adults attend (both men and women drink), the communal brew supplies between less than a quart to nearly a gallon per person. The quantities drunk during the ceremonies I have seen were about halfway along the quart-to-gallon scale. The drinks were given in servings of about a cup, usually three or four servings in each of two rounds of drinking. Once the ceremony has finished, the “real drinking” begins, at peoples’ houses, but the first, ceremonial, drinking is enough to make one vomit, and a few hours later, after drinks at someone’s house, one usually also gets diarrhea. These purgings are expected and one drinks and therefore stays tipsy despite them. One naps when sleepy and eats when hungry, night and day for as long as the wine lasts. There is no general public convocation for the private wine drinks after the noon ceremony. The ceremonial house and ground are left vacant. The scene shifts from there to the rest of the village, that is, to the family houses and the spaces between them (the households are scattered, with desert in between). The desert circulates with tipsies. During the noon ceremony a speech anticipating this is given. This speech is not an oration because the “I” is not a god, rather the village leader who gives the speech.

Admonitory Speech Author unknown; collected by R. Underhill I am going to speak to you a little, my friends and relatives. Today the time has again arrived when you will all listen to this good thing. Everywhere this speech is being made, to the men and to the boys. You must believe this. This is our purpose. For this the liquor is made; that you may feel happy; that you may drink; that you may sing beautifully; that all may be well. Now, when you see each other here, let no one speak ill to his kinsmen and his friends. Some whom we have seen in other years are not here now. And when the time comes, some of us, too, will not be among the living. Therefore, this year, while we

60 / How Mockingbirds Are are together, let us be happy. Let no one misbehave, for we are not here for that. Whoever established this liquor drinking for us, did so that we might ask for rain. That is our purpose. For we have no rivers [like the Pimas]. Therefore we must obtain rain. This is the belief of all our kinsmen. It is not we who established this (feast). I’itoi [a god] gave it to us,3 that all might be well and that good might come from it. Let none of you injure anyone’s property. Let none steal any property. And if any of you fight, that is not right. . . . But now we can all look upon each other and feel that the end [of life for us] is far off and that the festival will come again. Now we are happy, but we do not know if all of us shall see this again [next year]. . . . You must all remember this speech, because everywhere this good talk is given. All of you will always listen, at a drinking feast, to what the speaker tells you. . . . Thus, you will go home [after the drinking], you will reach your house. You will talk freely and beautifully [while here], you will sing freely and beautifully. Happily you will arrive [back home afterward]. Here I finish what I must say to you and what you must know. (Underhill 1946, 57–58)

The Pima Ceremony We turn now to Russell’s description of the Pima rainmaking ceremony, which seems like a Papago Sit-and Drink ceremony but with the wine making and drinking excised: When rain is desired one of the leading men who understands the ceremony will notify the medicine-men, the orator or reciter, and the singer[s—see next paragraph]. These agree upon beginning the ceremony at the end of four days. On the third day they send one or two men as criers to announce to the people of the adjoining villages that the ceremony will be held on the morrow. When all have assembled in the evening the leader calls out the names one by one of the medicine-men, who take their position behind the fire, facing toward the east. Then the names of those who will sing are called. The leading singer sits behind the medicine-men and his assistants place themselves on either side of him and around the fire. Then the orator is named and takes

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his place with the medicine-men. When the leader announces that it is time for the ceremony to begin, the orator recites Thin Leather’s Mockingbird speech (Russell, 1908:347). This speech will be given in full in Ch 4. This is not the full description of a ceremony because nothing is said about what the medicine men and singers do. The inference is that whatever they do, or did, would come after the speech, therefore in the daytime. Not so with the Papago medicine men. They study for signs of rain throughout the two nights of dancing. (The dancers circle a fire, the medicine men pace and peer as they stand between the moving line of dancers and the fire). Their work is finished at the dawn of the day of the ceremony. The Papagos have one kind of singing for the nights of dancing (these are called gohimeli songs), and another kind (called Dahiwak I, or “Sit-and Drink” songs) for the noon ceremony.4

The Papago Rain Dance Ceremony: Sit-and Drink Here is the program of the day of the Papago Sit-and Drink as it was practiced in Santa Rosa Village in the 1960s and ’70s. I follow my notes from the 1972 ceremony, which are the best notes that I took. These events take place after the two nights of dancing. 1. At dawn the dancing stops. The dancers form a curving line facing eastward at the west end of the dance ground. Behind them, under a wall-less, roofed sunshade-ramada sit the old experts who have selected and started the songs of the last two nights; and behind the shade is the “round house” in which the wine was made and is now ready. As the sun rises the people sing a special song whose key phrase is “Give me a served-drink.” The women’s voices are pitched higher than the men’s, perhaps by an exact octave, and the song is triumphant. The dancing is finished, the sun is rising, and the wine is ready. The wine is brought in baskets to the medicine man, or men, whose “seeing” or divining work is also now finished. These seers serve the wine into small cans to everyone, and tell when it will rain. Then comes a statement from the man or men (there were two in 1972) who have overseen the planning for the entire rain ceremony and who arranged for the medicine men, the lead nighttime singers, the orators, and the Sit-and Drink pourers. Essentially, what they say is that everyone should go home and rest until noon. 2. While everyone else rests, one or a pair of men “run” on foot, or by horse or car or truck, to three other villages to deliver the “Running” oration at each village. This is an invitation for the people of each village to

62 / How Mockingbirds Are come at noon and gather at a short distance to the east, north, and south of the Santa Rosa ceremonial ground. Santa Rosa, as host, will hold the west position at the sunshade where the dawn singing and drinking were done. The three invited villages are Ge Aji, or Gu Achi, whose people will sit at the east; Anegam, to sit at the north; and Ak Chin, to sit at the south. The person who receives the invitation speech responds with an orated answer to it. (These speeches are given in Underhill et al. 1979, 25–28.) The persons in these speeches, “I” and “you,” are an ancient human who makes wine and journeys to a god’s “rainhouse,” and a god who lives at this rainhouse, which is full of clouds and seeds. The man invites the god to come and drink the wine. The “I” of the Running speech is the inviter, the “you” is the god; and vice versa in the “Return,” or “Response to the Runner” speech. The two speeches say nearly the same thing in the same order, but with the “you’s” and the “I’s” reversed. Thus, the people of the invited village assume the role of the ancient god in the first oration. 3. The people from the three villages gather at a slight—fifty yards— remove from the ground where they will sit during the ceremony (the host villagers go directly to their area at the sunshade). The next step is to summon the visitors to their portions of the drinking circle. The person who gave the Running speech does this with a “Seating” oration. There is no return to this speech. The inviter and the head of the visiting delegation simply run together (hand in hand, as I remember) to where the invited person will be seated. A canvas (earlier a woven mat) has been spread there. The ground is hot. The canvas is welcome but it is reserved for the principal person and two or three close associates. The rest of the people from each village come and sit on the dirt at their portion of the circle. The circle becomes complete, sometimes two persons deep. Perhaps a hundred people are sitting, and another hundred may linger in the background. The Seating speech has roughly the same content as the Running one, but in this speech the inviter gets rained on a bit more while journeying to the god’s rainhouse. He returns to his own ”rainhouse” (that word is not used for his home place in the former speech) and he finds it is already wet. He serves wine to the arrived god. They celebrate and there is still more rain. (This speech is given in the next chapter.) 4. Once the orated-to godly persons are seated, people can sit or kneel where they wish in their village’s portion. The next event is the admonitory, or Be Considerate, speech, such as the one quoted earlier. Sometimes, a pair of men make these addresses. Those of the 1960s and ’70s normally ended with, “May God bless us,” said in O’odham, and were responded to with the same phrase by the audience. These are the only appeals to God (Jios) in the rain ceremony. They mean that if the Wine Drinks turn out well, the good outcome would be thanks to God, a Great One who wants nothing but

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good for people, especially for those engaged in risky but well-intentioned acts such as the O’odham Wine Drinks. 5. Then comes a short oration in the style, and with some of the content, of a Mockingbird speech but with no mention of mockingbirds. This text is missing from the speeches and songs, mostly from Santa Rosa (given in Underhill 1946 and Underhill et al. 1979). I imagine it was used in Underhill’s time, but perhaps she missed it because it is short. I have heard two versions of it. One starts with a statement on drinking the “ancient-chief served-liquid,” a phrase also used in the Mockingbird speech and repeated by Lopez in his First Wine Drinks story. Then comes a passage I don’t understand, then a statement, also present in the Mockingbird speech, on wind and cloud running over and moistening the earth, a scene reminiscent of the end of the prose Wind and Cloud story. This speech ends with the growth of corn. The other version begins with a statement about a distant rainhouse in which there are various ripe food crops. Then comes a statement that I don’t understand but that may refer to getting and bringing those things to the home village. Thus, one version speaks of drinking to bring rain, the other omits that and speaks of getting crops. Either is addressed in turn to the people seated at each of the directions, in the sequence: east, north, south, and west. Most things at the Sit-and Drink are done in pairs. Thus, the giver of the above speech is accompanied by someone from point to point, and when the speech is finished, at the west, the two make a circuit counterclockwise, the same course the nighttime dancers follow. As the two men walk past them, the seated people shout out their kinship relation to the speaker; or if not related the seated person calls out “friend!” (nawoj!). The circulating speaker responds loudly with the appropriate term. (The admonishing speech, it will be recalled, ended with a call and response of “May God bless us.”) 6. Next comes the first of the ceremony’s two servings of drinks. For this event, four pairs of young men servers, each with a basket and a small can-cup (or perhaps two) proceed from inside the round house, where their baskets were filled, to a cardinal direction point on the circle. Some say the pairs must be of the opposite “halves” or clans of O’odham society, Coyotes or Buzzards. One of the servers puts his basket before the principal person at each point (or perhaps both do this). The principal man dips his fingers in the wine, then rubs the edges of the basket, then wets and flicks his fingers to sprinkle the air with the wine (Underhill 1946, 59). Densmore describes the same act as follows: The two to the east set their baskets in front of the singer to the east [etc.]. . . . He extended his hands, side by side, hanging

64 / How Mockingbirds Are downward from the wrists so that the fingers touched the wine, then he held them up with the fingers pointed to the sun. He repeated this four times and after the fourth time he made a sweeping gesture to include the full circle of the earth. (1929, 156–57) Then, from the four points the servers make their way around the circle, one of each pair moving clockwise and the other counterclockwise. With each individual serving there is the exchange of kinship relation or “friend.” The can-cups range from the size of a baby food can to that of a ten or fifteen ounce vegetable can. The wine is warm. One drinks it right down in a couple of seconds or, if a big drink, two or three quick swallows. (The orations speak of “swallowing”—ba:—the wine, not sipping it.) If each person gets three servings, that might amount to a quart, in five minutes. 7. After the first round of drinking come the Mockingbird speeches, addressed to the four directional parties in the sequence east, north, south, and west. This speech, which is nearly the same for each direction, is sampled by Lopez in the last chapter and is given in full along with the Pima one in the next chapter. At Santa Rosa the speaker was different from the speaker of the oration immediately before the drinking, Jose Moreno for this text and Joe Listo for the prior one. Moreno also knew the prior speech (one version, discussed above, is from him), but probably for family descent reasons it fell to Listo to give it. A few other people knew these speeches and could have been called upon to give them if either of those two had resigned or retired from the position. Please recall that in his story of the first Wine Drinks Mr. Lopez said that the songs, of which he sang just one, preceded the Mockingbird speech. We should also note that Lopez did not say when or how the original wine drinks were served. It seems that the people and birds all got drunk first, and then some sang, and then came the speech. The actual Santa Rosa sequence is different: the two preliminary speeches, then the drinking, then the Mockingbird speech, and then, as we will see, the singing. Recall, too, about the Lopez story that the speech was not delivered by a mockingbird, but that a man (actually a “that-one”) was appointed to make a speech in which a mockingbird figures. Perhaps in other villages the speech comes before the songs,5 but at the ceremonies I saw (Santa Rosa, Covered Wells, Anegam, Ge Aji) the order was always as given here. In my opinion, the sequence might logically be either way. What matters is that both events come after the first round of drinks, so that the people at the ceremony are somewhat drunk. (The wine, although not strong, is quick-acting.) I would say that it makes more sense to have the Mockingbird speech first because that text is about being drunk. While the songs in general do not say, “I am drunk,” they are sung drunkenly: their melodies and pacing mimic drunkenness, or at least lend themselves

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to drunk locution. Therefore, it also makes sense to have them after the Mockingbird speeches so as to give the wine more time to have its effect. 8. The songs, one for each direction, are sung by the person from the guest villages who received the Inviting and Seating speeches. These songs have not been well and soberly recorded. In the one live recording that I know (made by me at an Anegam Sit-and Drink), the tape is acoustically unclear and the singing is a bit careless (the repeated lines vary a bit). Underhill gives translations of four such songs (1946, 62–63). One of these mentions drinking (“They made me drink the cup./Here I cause the wind to blow./Red spiders run on the field./They made me drink the liquor./ Here I cause the cloud to fly./The centipede walks on the field”). The others are about clouds and water. Densmore makes an apposite comment on such songs: “The tempo . . . is particularly slow” (1929, 157). In my experience they tend to be in slowly paced, mirthful, loudly sung, four syllable segments. The opening words are nearly shouted, quite as if the singers expect the sounds to carry to a mockingbird who will fly them to the wind at a distant rainhouse. 9. Then comes the second and last round of drinking, the same as the first. After that the people disperse, most of them having been invited to someone’s house where there is wine ready and waiting for them. The private wine batches continue to be ready at staggered times over two days and the drinking and singing continues for that time duration.

Conclusions These are the communal positions or offices that must be filled for the Santa Rosa rain ceremony: One organizer/administrator (or two) One medicine man (or two or more) One person to choose and start the songs for the two nights of singing One person to head the line of dancers for the two nights Four Running and Seating speakers One Admonishment speaker One Mockingbird-like speaker One Mockingbird speaker One west side Sit-and Drink singer Eight wine servers (And possibly people to pair with each of the speakers) That makes twenty-one people from the home village. All of them are men. As indicated in the list, additional officials can be used, and I must now

66 / How Mockingbirds Are add that the same individual can hold more than one office, for instance, one person may give the Running and Seating speech for people from two directions, or a medicine man may also be the Sit-and Drink singer for the home village. Still, a ceremony with twenty-one officials and one or two hundred other participants is a complex production. The Pima ceremony so scantly described by Russell has just six officials: one “leading man,” at least two medicine men, and at least three singers. Considering that the Pimas were more concentrated and materially richer than the Papagos, we can conclude that the Papagos were more energetically involved with rainmaking than the Pimas. This could be because Russell’s description is incomplete, or because of U.S. suppression, or because of a Pima cultural preference. I imagine that all three are true. Let us now consider how the complexity and longevity of the Papago ceremony relate to the quality of the published descriptions of the ceremonies and to the history of suppression among them. Concerning the descriptions, we have information obtained by Densmore in the 1920s, Underhill in the 1930s, and me from the 1960s to today. Both of the earlier authors wrote about the ceremonies in the past tense—not how they are, at the time of the visit, but how they were a generation or two prior to the visit. Densmore’s times with the Papagos were limited to the spring and fall of 1920, so she could not have seen a Wine Drink even if some were held in that year. I assume that Papago wine ceremonies were held in some places in 1920 despite the official suppression, but I am sure that Densmore and her sources were more comfortable in talking about how things were in the days before suppression than how they were currently. Underhill visited the Papagos five times between 1931 and 1935, and two of those visits—in 1931 and 1933—included a summer (1939, v). But she, too, wrote of the past: “as [the ceremonies] . . . occurred in the youth of [my] old informants” (1946, 41). I assume that she saw some ceremonies during her summer visits, and I wish she had told us exactly what she saw then, near the end of the time of the official opposition to Wine Drinks. As for me, what I saw in the 1960s and ’70s was basically what Underhill reported as having happened in the youth of her older sources, in other words, what she heard had been done in the 1880s. Perhaps she was wrong about how the 1880s ceremonies really were, but the fact is, for Santa Rosa at least, the Wine Drinks of 1970 were quite like those of 1930—and it seems certain that the people of 1930 felt they were upholding an older tradition. Santa Rosa and many other places were faithful to their Wine Drinks into the 1970s. Since then the custom has been dying off. It seems that when the generation of ritual leaders born from 1900 to the 1920s died, those officials were not replaced and the complex Sit-and Drinks stopped.

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They were the last generation born into a world where travel was largely by foot, where water was hand-carried in clay pots, and the majority of food was obtained by farming, hunting, and gathering. That kind of world, or subsistence, lasted longer for the Papagos than for most Native Americans, including the Pimas, and this was the last Papago generation born into it. Since the 1980s I have attended a very few nights of dancing at Santa Rosa and no Sit-and Drinks. My understanding is that the Sit-and Drinks stopped around 1978 with the deaths of the then current Mockingbird speaker and of one of the two co-administrators of the ceremonies. The other administrator lived for several more years, but there were never again enactments of a full Sit-and Drink. Rather, the ceremonies ended with a brief dawn drinking of wine, and the Sit-and Drink was either omitted or given in attenuated form at dawn. (I understand that the latter is also now the custom at the village of Big Field, Ge Oidag.) Thus, there are still rain dances, and there is still drinking at houses, but now the big ceremony with the speeches is gone.

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4

The Speeches

To recapitulate the principal conclusion of chapter 2, on the origin stories, the twentieth-century O’odham told two different stories on the origin of wine ceremonies, one featuring a flawed mother and the other a voyeuristic Cloud-man. I note as well that the O’odham consider drinking as a flawed and not as a purely noble or sacred practice, for drinking did and does lead to rowdiness. The principal conclusion of chapter 3, on the wine ceremonies, is that at least among the Santa Rosa Papagos the drinking is the culmination of a slow-motion ritual drama that begins at dawn with the delivery of speeches to invite godlike persons to sit down and drink at noon. Also, we noted that the ceremony involves twenty-one actors from four villages, three as formal guests and one as host. We know little about the early-twentieth-century Pimas except that their ceremony was described as wineless by Thin Leather. While Russell acknowledged that Pimas prepared and drank cactus wine, its association with rainmaking is unclear (Crosswhite 1980, 50). This chapter gives all of the published O’odham rain ceremony speeches not given or sketched in chapter 3. These include various admonishment speeches and the Santa Rosa “Running” speech and its response. Our principal concern, however, is the pair, Papago and Pima, of Mockingbird speeches with their contrasting statements on the bird and on wine drinking. We discuss the other speeches to learn what they say on the following subjects: Do they mention mockingbirds?; and if so, Do they attribute to them power over winds and clouds?; and, Do they involve the bird in calming the earth?; and, Do they refer to an ancient “I” as most O’odham orations do, or do they only refer to the here and now of the present rain ceremony? Note that the words speech and oration are used interchangeably. This chapter also gives the prose origin stories that pertain to parts of the Pima Mockingbird speech, for these stories do not involve wine ceremonies and therefore are not mentioned in chapter 2. These are the Navicu and the Quieting of the Earth stories. We will deal first with the speech from Santa Rosa that is used to bring representatives of different villages to their place at the drinking 69

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Figure 7. Travel by Horse and Wagon. People from three villages traveled to the village were the Sit-and Drink Ceremony would be held. (Arizona Historical Society 55359)

ground. This is called the “Seating speech.” We will see that it does not mention mockingbirds. We will see, too, a common, indeed standard, theme for O’odham ritual oratory: the speech tells of the journey of an ancient human “I,” in this case a journey to and back from a distant “rainhouse.” This “I” returns with and sits with and drinks with the godlike owner of the distant house, a process that is dramatized in the wine ceremony by the act of “seating” a godlike guest as part of the noontime Sit-and Drink. These facts of speech composition and of ritual action are material to our concerns over mockingbirds as follows. The Santa Rosa speech, given later in this chapter, is constructed as if its actions are in the here and now, and it lacks the journeying “I,” while the Pima speech, also given later, retains the ancient, but in this case quite stationary, “I.” Then we take up four Papago wine ceremony speeches that have been published from villages other than Santa Rosa. Two of these, by J. Dolores, are set in ancient times by means of the Papago “Loss of Wind and Cloud” story sketched in chapter 2. These speeches are very short. The second of them has the expected “I,” but this “I” is neither a god known from elsewhere in the mythology nor a journeyer. The “I” says he got drunk and he sang, and a wind blew and it rained. He is an unremembered, unnamed human who would have made this speech at an original wine ceremony. The other speech of this pair, while grounded in ancientness, lacks an “I” and, like all

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rain ceremony speeches, it describes winds, clouds, rains, and planting. There is no mention of mockingbirds in either speech. The other two speeches by J. Antoin, also rather short, are not grounded in any ancient-times story. One has an “I” but the “I” makes no journey and both of these speeches, like the first two mentioned, are confined to events either at or impinging upon a ceremonial ground. One speech of the last pair features a mockingbird and credits the distant bird with control over wind and clouds. This speech is like the Pima speech and unlike the Santa Rosa Papago one, and it joins the Pima text in breaking my rule on how mockingbirds “ought” to be spoken of. Although the speech lacks an O’odham transcript, I think it was accurately heard and I accept it as valid. Its mockingbird is different from the Pima one both in its task and its success. The task is to cause rain, and the bird succeeds. (The task in the Pima text is to quiet the earth, and the bird fails.) The other speech of this pair is like the “I-less” Delores speech discussed above in being wholly dedicated to describing winds, clouds, rains, and crops. In sum, and in respect to the questions listed above, only one of the four speeches refers to a mockingbird and that one puts the bird in charge of wind and clouds. One of the four has an ancient-referring “I,” although this “I” has no name or fame in the prose Ho’ok A:gida stories. And like the Santa Rosa Mockingbird text, all four of these speeches are oriented to rain, not to calming the earth as in the Pima one. Our discussion then turns to two sets of Pima texts. First, the orator Thin Leather, in the text recorded by Lloyd, inserted a portion of his Mockingbird speech, with the passage on the dismissal of the bird, into a prose story of ancient times centered on a character named Navicu. This story is off the main line of Thin Leather’s mythology and is included in only one of the two full, prose tellings that were recorded from him. The story includes rain but it has no wine ceremony, and the rain is disconnected from the point in the story to which the speech portion refers. Unlike the prose story, which does not include a calming of the earth or a mockingbird, the speech portion unaccountably includes both; and like Thin Leather’s full rainmaking Mockingbird speech, this portion attributes wind and clouds to the Mockingbird. Second, a different Pima narrator, named Thomas Vanyiko, gave both a full prose Ho’ok A:gida that includes an episode with mockingbirds and an oration that features them. The task for the Mockingbird in Vanyiko is the calming of the earth, but contrary to Thin Leather, Vanyiko has the bird succeed in this task both in his prose and orated accounts. As with Thin Leather, this world calming has nothing to do with rain, wind, or cloud; and most agreeably for my theory on mockingbirds, Vanyiko says nothing about clouds or wind either in his prose or orated version. This supports my belief that Thin Leather inserted the wind and cloud in his oration to poke fun

72 / How Mockingbirds Are at the Papago idea (admittedly, stated only in the Santa Rosa speech) that the birds imitate drunks in order to stimulate wind. A further difference between Thin Leather and Vanyiko is that while the former attaches his Mockingbird reference to the prose story on the god Navicu, the latter attaches the bird to a story involving the much more prominent god Earth Medicine-man. This person and the god Elder-brother (mentioned only once so far in this book, in connection with a Pima story on the origin of wine ceremonies) are the two main characters of the O’odham Ho’ok A:gida. It is a bit disconcerting—if we outsiders have a right to be disconcerted—that these two wise men would disagree not just on whether the mockingbirds succeed in their tasks, but also on where and how the birds fit into world history. We will leave the analysis of their differences until the full texts are given, but it is well to note here that the men are internally consistent: the birds fail in both of Thin Leather’s orated references and they succeed both in Vanyiko’s prose and his orated account. Moreover, and consistent with my theory on Pima-to-Papago parody, their references to the birds have nothing to do with drinking or with the bringing or causation of rain; and finally, as noted Vanyiko omits the alleged wind-and-cloud poke at the Papagos in his statements on mockingbirds. To make matters more complex, Ruth Benedict also recorded a full Ho’ok A:gida and included a speech on calming of the earth. It is not clear if the speech is from Vanyiko or another Pima narrator named Blackwater. This speech has all the elements of Thin Leather’s Mockingbird speech. Here, as in Thin Leather’s, the Mockingbird fails to calm the earth and is dismissed while being given power over wind and clouds (Bahr 2001, 179–82). Having given a preview of the chapter we now give the speeches.

The Santa Rosa Seating Speech This speech was published earlier by Ruth Underhill in Papago with English translation (Underhill et al. 1979, 28–30). Here the Papago is left out because there is no reason to change it and it can be found in the Underhill book. The translation is exactly the same as before except for the addition of a few commas, which are marked by brackets. I have also changed one word of the translation. This is marked by a footnote, and the reason for the change, pertaining to words for “speech acts,” is explained in the next chapter. The text has a six-part journey of an “I.” Before the journey comes an introduction, also with an “I,” about the here-and-now of the wine feast. The speaker has run to the delegation gathered at the edge of the village, and he says:

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[Introduction: Here we are] So I did my friend, now I have run up here again. Somehow something good is my desire and now it has happened. At first I didn’t know. The “I didn’t know” sets the stage for the six-part body of the text. Uttering those words, the “I” has turned ancient. The meaning is not that the orator doesn’t know what he is doing. He is a man from Santa Rosa telling a delegate from Ak Chin (Anegam or Gu Achi) to trot with him to the Sit-and Drink ground. The meaning is that the speaker has entered into the words of a past man who, as in a movie flashback, is jarred into the mixing and making of wine in ancient times. [1. Confused] I crawled off and couldn’t stand it[,] But there was my girl, my boy, who something seemed to know[.] They brought it here, in my hand they put it [syrup]. Then I the water mixed with it[,] A little pot of remains [of winemaking] I put. Toward it I bent over then and sat[,] Hoping for speed. [2. On the Way Out] I thought of my house and came out[,] Just went in front of it, turned and returned back again[,] Talked to myself and wiped it [pot of wine.] Then it pitied me and in two days was beautifully finished. The someplace sitting medicine man I then remembered[.] The road toward you shines bright and was put[,] Reaching you here[.] And I followed and did things. On the way to the medicine man the hero encounters promising signs about what the ceremony is for: wind and sprinkling rain. He reaches the “house” of the medicine man and finds it agreeably wet. He gathers things—water and water plants. It seems that the local god is not at home, as he should not be. He is on his way to the ancient Sit-and Drink, on the analogy of the here-and-now ceremony. The local medicine man and his delegation should be listening to this speech as they wait a few yards from the Santa Rosa ceremonial ground.

74 / How Mockingbirds Are [3. Wind Comes] And I made a stop[.] There was my wind[,] And it reached me. So very nice and wetly it ran[,] I felt it and did things. [4. It’s Wet] I made another stop[,] There was my cloud[,] It reached me. Very nice and wetly it sprinkled[,] I felt it and did things. I reached you and looked,] Inside [your rainhouse] your wall straighteners bases already wetly stood, your house posts’ bases very wetly stood[.] Around it water shortly ran[,] Below it waterplants lay[.] I liked it and gathered it up. The hero goes home. He finds that his home place is also wet, he pulls (Papago wanckwua, Densmore’s “draw” word) the visitor to it, he sits him down (the here-and-now ceremony is called “Sit-and Drink”), serves him wine, and receives in return good talk and the visitor’s good dreamed songs. I confess I don’t understand the picture or scene of the last lines in part 6, on leftovers and beds. [5. On the Way Back] I emerged and around you [I] looked[,] It was my mountains, already with drizzles arched over them [they] stood[.] Below them the earth covered with waterplants lay[,] I liked it and gathered it up. [6. Drinking with Me] Then homeward I turned[,] Followed our road that lay there[,] Reached my rainhouse that there stands[,] And in it many winds lay, many clouds lay, many seeds lay. In it I had already done something and that way I joined it[.] From that my mountains already with drizzles arched over them stood.

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In there [rainhouse] already the red serving I had put[,] I told you to drink it and toward it pulled you[,] Toward it sat you. You swallowed it, you drank it[.] Beautifully drunk, beautifully dizzy You didn’t keep from me the good telling.1 Your good dreams, good songs. And the leftovers you dropped off here[.] To my bed [I?] arrived[,] Below it [I?] buried them[,] Lay them down and lie on it. Now comes the conclusion of the ancient story: it rains two days after the inviter and his guest have drunk—and then comes the return to the present, as the speaker invites the delegation at the edge of the village to accompany him to the ceremonial ground, “Come now and . . . drink the water that I have rotted.” [Conclusion: It Rains] Then two mornings [passed,] Then the wind from the east understood and ran[,] Continued and went, [so there was] wetness lying. And that is what we did[,] How we wetly put it [earth] and finished. Look, thus you may wish and plan[,] my friend[.] Come now and do something and go, drink the water that I have rotted. (Underhill et al. 1979, 28–30)

Four Short Papago Speeches These are two pairs, both from the early twentieth century. The first pair was produced by the Papago Juan Dolores (1880–1948). He was employed from 1912 until his retirement in 1948, first as a guard, then as a research fellow, then as a preparator at the Anthropology Museum of the University of California at Berkeley. Taught to write Papago by Alfred Kroeber and J. Alden Mason, he made several trips to take down texts from his people, especially in 1918–19 and 1937 (Kroeber 1949, 97–99). He found his own sources, did his own writing, and made his own translations. The texts he prepared include many prose stories and songs and a few orations. Many of the total, including this pair, were revised somewhat (chiefly in spelling, or

76 / How Mockingbirds Are “orthography”) and published for the first time by Dean and Lucille Saxton in 1973. This pair of speeches is included in a Loss of Wind and Cloud story (the Saxtons title it “Rain Goes Away” [1973, 317–40]). The story ends with a first Wine Drinks, which was held, it is said, in order to attract Wind and Rain back to society. As far as the story is concerned, saguaros were already in existence, and so perhaps was winemaking. What was new and necessary was a Sit-and Drink ceremony with its songs and speeches to attract Wind and Cloud. The story says that Coyote first volunteered to make a speech, but after drinking the wine he only howled and yelled. Then he ran off into disgrace. Here and elsewhere the idea is that drinking reduces and does not enhance coherence—see chapter 3. After Coyote, an unidentified human made the following speech. Saxton and Saxton, after Dolores, give it in written Papago with a fairly precise phrase matching translation. I render their paragraphed rendition into lines and retain their punctuation.

Speeches Recorded by J. Dolores Drink what we have prepared, my relatives, and be revived, be elated— [B]egin from the east side to draw the east closer. A beautifully shining ancient house stands there in the east, wrapped in white clouds. Start there and be kind to us, [something at the house is] mixed within, speaking softly within, lightning moving very zigzag, roaring beautifully, pattering rain and moving along. Although the earth is wide, the clouds are braced across it and will come, though far away. They [clouds] are hung on the heads of the mountains standing there, and will come. They will leave the earth soaked everywhere, even the highest hills. The water will gently flood the little washes [erstwhile dry], wherever they are. The driftwood is stopped sideways where the trees are standing [near the washes]. The sound of rushing water echoes down the valleys. It will leave the earth well moistened. After that various kinds of seed will sprout. All over the land, greet one another, my relatives. Call one another by your [kinship] relationship.

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Then comes a round of drinking, and then songs, and then a short final speech: Maybe it’s like that, my relatives, as the man [previous speaker] said. The mountains which were in the west—one roars inside and thunders and there is poured out [a] yellow liquid. When I drank it I got drunk and started the song. Then the wind began to blow bringing in the clouds, and it sprinkled. Afterward various things came out with wide leaves and undying seed, [A]nd ripened. All that happened is our relatives[’] due. (Saxton and Saxton 1973, 335–39) We see that although one of the speeches includes an “I” and the other a “we,” these persons go nowhere. It is a question of getting rains to come to the humans at their ceremonial ground. In the second speech the “I” drinks and sings, and the rain comes. This is exactly as in the Santa Rosa Mockingbird speech (below), but in that speech the rain comes thanks to a mockingbird who carries the sounds of the ceremony to the home of the winds and clouds. In short, the present speech, which is couched in a story of the loss of Wind and Cloud, makes it seem that the sounds of the drunks are enough. No mockingbird is needed to broadcast the sounds.

Speeches Recorded by Frances Densmore The second pair of speeches was obtained by Frances Densmore, and only in English, in 1920 from Jose Antoin of Pisinimo village. Densmore treats the whole as one speech, but it appears to be two, and she presents the whole in two paragraphs. I do not divide these texts into lines because the phrasing of the Papago is unknowably different from that of Densmore’s English. In my view, one should not rework a text unless one knows the original wording, that is, one should not rework a poem and credit it to the original author unless one knows the author’s wording. My friends and relatives, you drink the wine I have prepared expressly for you, and if any [of you] have power to draw the rain from the east where stand the oldest ruins2 (in that old ruin lives the lightning doctor whose name is Mocking Bird)[,] let the man ask the Mocking Bird doctor to send the best kind of

78 / How Mockingbirds Are wind and after that the best kind of clouds. Ask him to send the white clouds and after that the black clouds, and to make them cover the earth as they come toward us. The sky looks so high to us, and the clouds start from the earth and extend to the sky. In them is the thunder and the lightning which we welcome because we know they bring good to us. We hear the sound of the thunder in the mountains around us. Let us all join in our feeling to have rain. Let us all be glad to see the water running in the little washes to moisten the fields where we plant our seed. Let us see the shape of the edges of the washes that look so beautiful to us. The plants that come up will be green and beautiful in the field, and when they have finished growing we will get the food for which we are now hoping. From our center turn your thoughts toward the east where stand the white ruins. In those ruins are white winds and white clouds. Have your feeling and ask for the rain to be sent to us. From those ruins come the white winds and white clouds which contain the heaviest rain. From our center turn your thoughts to the west where stand the black ruins. In those ruins are the black winds and black clouds. Have your feeling and ask for the rain to be sent to us. From those ruins come the black winds and black clouds which contain the heaviest rain. From our center turn your thoughts to the north. There stand the green ruins. In those ruins are the green winds and green clouds. Have your feeling and ask for the rain to be sent to us. From those ruins will come that which will make all green things on the earth grow faster. From our center turn your thoughts to the south where stand the yellow ruins. In those ruins are yellow flowers. Have your feeling and ask for the rain to be sent to us. From those ruins will come the yellow clouds, that will be the finishing touch on our plants and on all things that grow on the earth. In finishing we have our feeling toward the four points of the winds and are sure we will get some help from the four ruins. (1929, 158) Although we lack the Papago transcripts for these texts we can be sure that Densmore and her interpreter Hugh Norris3 took care in translating the orator Antoin. We can see this care in the repetitions in the second text. Once the translators had arrived at their English for a long and repeated stretch of Papago, they repeated the stretch religiously. We see their care, too, and more revealingly, in the long, awkward, baffling very first sentence of Antoin’s first speech. This sentence must follow the flow of thought of the original, and yet I at least am baffled by the following: if one of the drinkers can “draw” rain, then why ask the Mocking Bird to “send” it?

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I think I know at least part of the answer. The O’odham word translated as “draw” is probably wanckwua (“pull away, wrench away, win the allegiance of ” [Saxton, Saxton, and Enos 1983, 62]). The same word is used in the seating speech, part 6. I think therefore that the expression on drawing rain is a play on the ceremonial pulling of a person who represents a rain god. I do not think that Antoin actually meant the latter, rather I think he meant that people can, or could, draw rain to them by their drinking. But why then did he next have the speaker (himself or some original past speaker) ask the Mockingbird, as lightning doctor (a medicine man), to send rain? In sum, one of these four speeches affirms that drunk singers bring on rain, but it doesn’t say how or why—to which I say, mockingbirds do it! Another speech says mockingbirds “do it” on their own power, to which I say, no, they only carry the sounds of the drunks to the cloud-blowing winds. I do not fault the two orators for saying otherwise, but I submit that the next text is intellectually the more satisfying because it includes the full set of ideas: people drink and sing, bird hears, bird repeats, and wind blows—and they all make sense.

The Santa Rosa Mockingbird Speech Jose Moreno, recorded by R. Underhill There is no “I” in this speech—that hallmark of O’odham ceremonial oratory is absent. Therefore, of course, there is no extended first-person journey. There is, however, a you at the beginning and end. This “you” refers to a here-and-now drinker, specifically the principal singer/medicine man whom the orator addresses. This speech is addressed to the people sitting in the circle at the Sit-and Drink and was repeated in the four directions after the first round of drinking. [Introduction: Here We Are Drinking] Ready, it seems that now it is fine my friend, now you have swallowed The medicine man’s liquid, the rain maker’s liquid, mixed with your tears you have swallowed it[,] Mixed with your snot you have swallowed it. [A Mockingbird Copies Us] Far off [you] see the eastern4 standing rainhouse that stands there[,] Where inside the white feathered mockingbird hangs.

80 / How Mockingbirds Are Four times he bends upward and talks[,] Jumps up and down and talks, bends downward and talks, wiggles back and forth5 and talks[,] And the world is wet. The word talks (ñiok in O’odham is distinct from three other words about speech acts that will occupy us in connection with the Pima speech, namely words for “cry,” “tell,” and “speak/say.” “Talk” is an intransitive verb, like “cry” and “speak/say.”6 “Tell” and only “tell” is transitive, meaning that something is actually told to someone else, that a communication of meaning occurs. But “talk” as I understand the O’odham (and also the English) seems social; one talks in the company of someone. The difference between telling and talking is that the first implies real communication and the second is neutral and noncommittal, in that regard, as of course is “speak/say.”7 In this instance the Mockingbird talks by itself or seemingly to itself, as drunks, too, sometimes do. The bird chatters. And what happens? [Storms.] Ready, then far off something moved at the edge of the earth, the wind understood and ran[.] Standing trees it [wind] shook, trash it blew and piled at their feet, it continued and arrived at the west. Homeward it turned and looked. The lying earth was clean and finished. On top of that came out the white bottomed cloud[,] To the top of the sky it bumped and stood, with many round ends it stood[,] And it went. With many dust-storms, with many lightnings, with many thunders, with many clouds, with many rainbows, it started to go. From within wet mountains, more [clouds] came out and joined it[,] Plucking white from their breasts, coughing out white from their breasts. The world seemed so far to its edge[,] But they [clouds] went clear to the edge and beyond and looked. And the little washes told8 to themselves that so many of them lay side by side, they can carry off anything, they thought[,]9 But it [flood] couldn’t be stopped, at their mouths the driftwood piled crossways.

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Thus it [storm] did and completed[,] Homeward it turned and looked[.] The lying earth was beautifully wet and finished. On top of that came out something seeded, thick was its root, thick was its stalk, wide was its leaf, good were its silks, good was its tassel, well did it ripen. [Conclusion: Rain Pretty Soon] It was this that was our last wish and it happened[,] As you will see. To conclude, the Santa Rosa Mockingbird speech culminates a ritual drama with a practical purpose. The drama integrates four villages in a round-robin high noon ceremony whose practical purpose is to obtain rain. The drama has three stages, marked by orations: Invite (two speeches, one to and one from each of three guests), Seating (one speech for each guest), and Sit-and Drink (an admonition speech, and a preliminary and a Mockingbird oration). And it has its songs at the end, its arias, we can say on the analogy of opera, as opposed to the “recitatives” which are the orations.10 The speeches fit together as follows. In the Inviting and Seating stages the speakers “become ancient” by reciting first-person texts originally spoken by gods. In the Sit-and Drink stage, the speakers are themselves, completely so in the admonishing speech, and themselves impersonating past humans and telling about rains in the short preliminary speech (chapter 3) and the Mockingbird speech. In this last speech the bird is added to the mix as mediator between the drinking and the rains. It is a comic culmination: Want rain? Get drunk and trust in the bird to hear and carry the sounds to kindly disposed winds.

Thin Leather’s Navicu and Mockingbird and the Problem of Attaching Orations to the Prose Ho’ok A:gida Since the Santa Rosa rain ceremonies persisted until recent times, we can see how meaningfully the speeches were integrated in the ritual drama or the ceremony. We have no similar documentation from the Pimas. What we have instead is story tellings in which the speeches are sometimes embedded. I talk about “attaching” rather than “basing” orations on the prose stories because what is told in the Ho’ok A:gida (the prose telling of world history) has no necessary connection to, let alone necessary basis in, what is recited in oratory. The first is historical narrative, the second is sacred theater. The O’odham simply tend, sometimes but not always, to connect their ceremonial

82 / How Mockingbirds Are orations to their histories. In this section we see this yes-and-no tendency in Thin Leather. He leaves his whole Mockingbird speech unattached to history (as, too, is the entire series of Santa Rosa wine ceremony orations), but he connects a portion of it to one place in his history, and Vanyiko, the other Pima narrator also treated in this section, attaches a similar but different portion of the speech to another place in his prose narration. Therefore, we cannot say that all orations are based on a uniform prose Ho’ok A:gida, only that they are optionally and variably attached to it. If oratory is “the voice of history” (primary sources, documents preserved from the past) and the Ho’ok A:gida is “the historian’s voice” (secondary extrapolations, based on the primary sources of orations and songs), then the O’odham historians sometimes choose at will from the speeches of the past. Thin Leather’s full Mockingbird speech, which he gave to Frank Russell, has no place in the Ho’ok A:gida that he told to Russell. Thin Leather told most of the same prose stories to William Lloyd, but as noted in chapter 2, he told a Corn and Tobacco story to Lloyd that he omitted from the Russell telling. And he told a loss of Wind and Cloud story to a third person, Fewkes, that he omitted in both other tellings. This is not all. He also told the story of a god named Navicu to Lloyd and to no other, and to that story he attached a portion of his Mockingbird speech. However, the portion he attached does not mention the bird. The name and figure of Nawicu are important in O’odham culture because the largest and most splendid of O’odham ceremonies, called the Wi:gita, features costumed, masked, bow and arrow–carrying “clowns” called nanawicu (plural of nawicu). These ceremonies, performed at two fixed places in Papago country, are described in Underhill (1946, 137–61) and Bahr (1997, 185–217). To my knowledge, the text given to Lloyd is the only one from any O’odham that tells a prose story on who Nawicu is and how he came to be. This story does not mention the Wi:gita ceremony, but it names several of the characters who appear in it, and it must be taken as an origin story of the ceremony, albeit from a Pima and not from a Papago. I repeat, Thin Leather attached part of a Mockingbird speech to a story of Navichu, a character who is associated with the Papago Wi:gita Ceremony and not the rain ceremony. The following is my condensation of the story as given to Lloyd.

The Story of Nahvauchoo (Navicu) Thin Leather, recorded by Lloyd Ee-ee-toi [I’itoi, another name for Elder-brother], wandering, found some moss after a world flood and decided to make something living from it. The sun shone on what he had made

The Speeches / and the result was a turtle, named or called Wee-hee-kee-nee.11 Next he found driftwood on which the sun shone to produce a masked human [Navicu, or Nawicu in Papago]. The two new creatures left I’itoi. They traveled west to the Blue Vahhahkee [va’aki, “rainhouse”]. The sun rose. Its beams frightened the two by shining blue through the rainhouse. They left, following a black road over which black birds flew to keep them from being seen [not clear by whom or what]. They reached a black night in which a black bow was frighteningly stretched. They feared to sleep. The next day they came to a blue road with blue birds who struck them. They came to a blue night with a blue bow and they feared to sleep. It was the same the next day with a white road, then the next day with a yellow road. The next day they reached a mountain called Co-sovah-taw-ap-kih, or Twisted Neck Mountain [Kuswo To:pi Duag, “Neck Twist Mountain,” a mountain about halfway between the present towns of Gila Bend and Yuma, Arizona]. Navicu ran to it leaving the slower Turtle behind. Turtle stopped at nightfall, made corn, pumpkins, and a fire, and roasted the first two in the fire. When Navicu heard popping from the roasting, he ran to the place and tried to take a piece of the fire [so the text says]. When Turtle would not allow this, Navicu made his own corn, pumpkins, and fire. The next morning, after both had eaten, Turtle sank into the ground and went to a place beneath the ocean. Navicu sank and went to the ocean shore. From there, but along the shore, he went eastward. He found much driftwood and many flowers, and drew strength from them and made a home. One day he felt the earth shaking. He ran south, west, and north to find the source, which was northward. He put on his mask and went that way. The pulse and sound of the shaking increased. He came to people singing Wah-hee-hee-vee songs [I do not recognize this word] and dancing the Vee-pee-nim dance. They wore masks pieced with small holes [the Wipinim are one group of Wi:gita performers]. With them were Kawk-spahkk-kum [Kokspakam] dancers with cloth masks with “a little gourd, full of holes, over the mouth-hole, to sing through.” There were also dancers of the Tawt-a-kum [I don’t recognize this word] in which the dancer wears a cloth bonnet like Navicu. The people sitting around the dance scraped notched sticks. The peoples’ life consisted in that. [In rest periods they would] bundle the sticks and stand up the bundles. Navicu, a

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84 / How Mockingbirds Are great hunter, thought of deer. He left the dancers and tracked one. He measured the tracks with his arrow and concluded the deer could not run fast. The deer sensed him and ran, but Navicu caught and killed it. He took it to the dancers who ate it ravenously, including the bones. A person from the dancers approached him and said that, being a great farmer and hunter, he should stay with them. The speaker said the people would not join him in his hunting, for they have infinite corn and beans and so will he [but he should bring them meat]. He stayed and sang with them. One day they told him of a pair of rainhouses where See-pook (Redbird) [sipuk, “cardinal”] and Wah-choo-kook-kee (Oriole) [wajukuk, “oriole”] live. Although they told him of these places, they did not actually permit him to go. One day he slipped away and found wonderful things in each: clouds in both and red and yellow feathers in one and the other. A corn mill (grinding stone) lay at the door of each. He stole one stone and went eastward. He noticed that both the east and the west now looked green. Clouds came and deluged upon him. He reasoned this was because he had stolen the grindstone, but he kept it and returned with it to Twisted Neck Mountain. He felt faint but revived himself with a root called cheek-kuh-pool-tak [I don’t recognize this word] that he carried. The rain stopped. He went to Quojata Mountain. [There is a village named Kuhadk; it is near to the next named village, and perhaps there is a mountain with that name near to it; I do not know what the word means.] Then he went to Ahn-naykum [certainly the village A:ngam, “Willow-having,” near to Kuhadk], then to Odchee where he left the grindstone [probably Ge Aji, a village near to Anegam, where one of the Papago W:i:gita ceremonies was customarily held]. Then he went to Kee-ahk Toe-ahk [probably the village of Giho Duag, “Carrying-basket Mountain,” not far south of Ge Aji] to rest and smoke. Then he went to his own home where he made a speech: [This speech does not mention Mockingbird and is a summary of the events of the prose story, which could either mean that the speech is based on the story or vice versa. I quote only the start and end of it. The start mentions being drunk and so qualifies it as a wine ceremony–like speech. This start tells more than the prose text about how Nawicu outfitted himself. The

The Speeches / end of the speech mentions a Shining Rainhouse, which would be in the east and would be the “home” that Navicu went to at the beginning and returned to at the end of the prose story. The Pisinimo and Santa Rosa speeches mention this rainhouse, as does Thin Leather in his full Mockingbird speech.] [Navicu Speech: Beginning] Where shall we hear the talk that will make us drunk and dizzy with the flowers of eloquence?” There was near the water the driftwood lying, and from above the sun breathed down and a being was made. And it was with beautiful daybreak that I took and wiped its face with, and the remains of darkness that I painted its face with. And there were all kinds of bird’s feathers that I made a feather bonnet from. And there were joining [sic] wasps that came and flapped on the bonnet. And there were many butterflies that flapped their wings upon the bonnet, upon its feathers. And it was from the rainbow that I made its bow, and from the Milky Way that I made its arrow. From a red skin I made its saw-suhbuh [I don’t recognize this word], to cover its arm for the bowstring not to injure it. And it was a red kuess-kote [I don’t know this word] that I made and put in its hair to scratch with. And it was the gray fog that I fastened in its shoulders for a mantle. And the strong wind it was that I used for its girdle, around its waist. In the middle of the earth lay a square water moss, and the sun breathed on it and it turned into a creature, a turtle. And from there the Driftwood-Being [= Navicu] went west with it. . . . [Then comes a summary of the events detailed in the Rafter. Of note is the line “there came the wind that refreshed him and pleasant clouds that sprinkled him with water”] [Navicu Speech: Ending] [Final portion of the speech] And he [Nawicu] refreshed himself four times and went on, and found the Tonedum Vahahkkee

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86 / How Mockingbirds Are [Tondam Wa’aki, “Shining Rainhouse”], the Vahahkkee of Light, and there he gave his power to the people who were gathered together, and said: ‘My relatives, I want you to think of this, that our country will be more beautiful and produce more, because you know our country will not hereafter be what it has been’ ” [This last, quoted segment, like the first two lines of the speech, seems to refer at once to an ancient “we” when the speech was first spoken and to a present “we” at the time of the current ceremony.] This speech and story are tucked near the end of Lloyd’s rare book. He published it under “The Lloyd Group” and he must have been a businessman. He came upon Thin Leather through the accident of meeting his grandnephew Edward Wood at a Pan-American Fair in Buffalo, New York, in 1901. Because of the importance of the Wi:gita ceremony I have taken care not to remove any important details. The “I” of the oration, as we know from the prose story, is I’itoi, an important god in the O’odham Ho’ok A:gida, although one little heard of in the texts included in this book. I’itoi makes Navicu and oversees the creation of Turtle. Then I’itoi, and soon Turtle, drop from the story. In the oration, the only first-person language is at the start, mainly on the making of Navicu, then at the end in an address to some unspecified human audience, presumably the first people to hear the speech. One would think the speaker at the end is I’itoi (if the “I” is the same person throughout), but, whether due to Thin Leather or his interpreter Wood or to Lloyd, the final “I” seems to be Navicu. We will soon see that a portion of Thin Leather’s prose story, and the whole of his second Navicu speech (given below), are attached by a different Pima to a different “I,” Earth Medicine-man. This portion is critical to the present book’s argument, for it treats the calming of a shaking earth. In the Navicu story, the earth’s shaking sets that god on his journey to a northern people with a perpetual supply of corn and beans. It seems that the shaking originates in them, perhaps in their dancing. They lack meat, which they eat ravenously once Navicu supplies it to them. Their situation resembles that of the people at the start of the Loss of Wind and Cloud story. In each case there is a society with an abundance of something that would later, and normally, be scarce: rain or grain. And they also lack something: the sight of a girl’s “privates” for Cloud, deer meat, or any meat at all, for the people of this story. The meatless people also have two rainhouses full of feathers and moisture and provided with grindstones. We can surmise that the latter are the source of the corn and beans, so not only do these people not toil for

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their food (or their rain in the other story), they do not even plant and harvest it. They merely get it, ready-ground, which, we may surmise, is why they can sing and dance all the time. Navicu steals one of these stones and he eventually deposits it at a village called Aji, the place as noted in a bracket where one of the two Papago W:igitas was held (the other is at Quitovac, Mexico, and is still held; the Aji, or Ge Aji, ceremony is extinct). The set of villages that Thin Leather names at this point includes two (Aji and Anegam) that participate in the Santa Rosa Sit-and Drink. The old name for Santa Rosa, not mentioned by Thin Leather, is Kaij Mek, Seeds Burnt. Thus, Thin Leather’s story pertains at the end to places around Papago Santa Rosa and not to any Pima place along the Gila River. Really, the geography in his story is at first far to the west (Twisted Neck Mountain, in Maricopa territory), then to the north (the mysterious northern place where the meatless, ever-dancing people lived), then to the south (around Santa Rosa) and finally to the east (Shining Rainhouse) of Thin Leather’s immediate homeland. After the above speech Thin Leather gave Lloyd the following one which is quite the same as a portion of his rainmaking Mockingbird speech. He does not treat of rain in this textlet as he did after the theft of the corn grinder in the above speech, albeit in a line I did not quote, “There came a wind that refreshed him, and pleasant clouds that sprinkled him with water.” In his prose version rain is actually an unwanted punishment for the theft of the mill, so we might call this a rain-stopping, not a rain-bringing speech. Here is his second Navicu oration: It was after the creation of the earth, and there was a mud vahahkkee [rainhouse], and inside of it lay a piece of wood burning at one end, and by it stood a can-tube pipe, smoking, and we inhaled the smoke, and then we saw things clearer and talked about them. In the West there was a Black Mocking Bird, and from him I asked power, and he brought the news and spread it over all the earth, and to every hill and mountain and every tree, that the earth would stand still, and it did not, it still moved. (And you, Black Mocking Bird, take back your Black Winds, and your Black Clouds, and stay where you are, and your relatives may sometimes come to you for power.) [The parentheses are provided by Lloyd.] Then come two identical sections, but lacking the parentheses, on southern Blue and Eastern “of Light” mockingbirds.

88 / How Mockingbirds Are And above there was darkness, where lived the Feather Nested Doctor, who was famous for his power, and I asked him for power, and he spread the news, as the others had done, but the earth still moved. And in the North lived a Yellow Spider, and I asked him for power, and he stretched his news, and made his web, and tied the earth up with it, and made a fringe like a blanket fringe at each corner, and laid his arrows over it. The fringe at the West corner he made black, and covered it with the Black Vahahkkee to hold it down; and he put the blue fringe at the south corner, and over it the Blue Vahahkkee to hold it down, and he put the black arrows over the Black Vahahkkee, and the blue arrows over the Blue Vahahkkee. And in the East he put the Vahahkkee of Light over the fringe and the arrows of light over it. And after all this was done the earth stood still. And after this is done you are carried away like a child, and are set down facing the East, and your heart comes out towards it, and can be seen going up and down until it reaches it. And over the land your seed shall spring up and grow, and have good stalks and many flowers, and have good wide leaves and heads of good seeds. And after the seed is ripe they [people] will take it and put it away and grind it with sunbeams, and the boys and girls shall eat and be happy, and all the old men and women shall eat it and lengthen their lives. (Lloyd 1911, 214–15) There are small and even large differences (“heart” in this one, and “good news,” that is, talk, spread by the spider) between these lines and those of our main Thin Leather speech, which will be given at the end of this chapter. I suspect that the same Pima language was spoken in each case, and so the differences are due to the combination of Wood and Lloyd. We will not bother with them, but it is worth noting that the Wood/Lloyd rendition of our key lines is a bit more correct than the rendition of Russell. Wood/Lloyd leave out altogether the portion Russell somewhat misrendered as “if your plans for controlling the earth have failed.” I fault Wood/Lloyd for leaving that portion untranslated, and I give for it the vaguer but more accurate, “we’ll do this with your doings.” I praise Wood/Lloyd for their “take back your Black Winds, and your Black Clouds, and stay where you are, and your relatives may sometimes come to you for power.” Russell, it will be recalled, gave for this, “go far hence and leave the black winds and black clouds behind you.” We see above all, however, that both the Russell

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and Lloyd versions of Thin Leather credit the Mockingbird with winds and clouds, and both have the bird fail in quieting the earth. In those matters Thin Leather was consistent and his translators were accurate.

Vanyiko’s Earth Medicine-man and Mockingbird Thomas Vanyiko, together with William Blackwater, gave a full Ho’ok A:gida and many orations and songs to the anthropologist Ruth Benedict through an interpreter, Paul Azul,12 in the summer of 1927. A few days or weeks after Benedict left, the linguist and musicologist George Herzog arrived to do what Benedict could not, that is, to write Vanykio’s stories, speeches, and songs in Pima and, aided by Azul, to make his own literal translations of them. Herzog stayed for a few weeks and returned for more work in the summers of 1933 and 1936.13 Both Benedict and Herzog produced typed manuscripts of their Pima materials, but neither saw her or his manuscript through to completion. I edited, commented upon, and saw to the publication of the Benedict materials (2001), and I am partway through the same process with those of Herzog. Vanyiko, then, like Thin Leather, was heard twice (Thin Leather actually three times, for Fewkes heard him, too); and like Thin Leather Vanyiko spoke somewhat different substances each time he was heard. Most of what each man gave was the same each time, and yet they spoke differently on the topics we are interested in, the prose-told history of, and the speeches usable in, wine ceremonies. I say “usable in” because neither Thin Leather nor Vanyiko gave speeches that they said were for wine ceremonies. I suspect that the reason why they spoke differently was that their speeches are like those that other O’odham orators used for that purpose, and they wanted their speeches to be for other than that, for wineless rainmaking in Thin Leather’s case and wineless “praying” for rain in Vanyiko’s. Thin Leather, we know, attached a bit of his rainmaking speech to a prose story of Navicu. Vanyiko attached a similar portion and more, but with differences, to a story on the god Earth Medicine-man. Those, of course, are difference between the two men. As for the differences between the different tellings of each, we have seen that Russell and Lloyd received different materials from Thin Leather (Lloyd received the Nawicu story and speeches). From Vanyiko both Benedict and Herzog received some Mockingbird oratory tied to a prose story on Earth Medicine-man, but Benedict gave this as a speech virtually the same as Thin Leather’s rainmaking speech, in which the Mockingbird fails to quiet the earth. Herzog, however, says he received from Vanyiko four disconnected speeches that add up to what is covered in the Thin Leather speech. Herzog attaches two of those four to different moments in Vanyiko’s Ho’ok A:gida. The other two he does not attach to any prose story.

90 / How Mockingbirds Are And in the Herzog hearing of the Mockingbird portion, unlike in Benedict’s, the bird succeeds in calming the earth. I am baffled by this inconsistency on the Mockingbird, and I wish Herzog and Benedict had straightened it out while they had the opportunity.14 This book will follow Herzog’s hearings and renditions, for he wrote them in Pima. Benedict’s Thin Leather–like version of the Mockingbird speech is given by Bahr (ed. 2001, 179–82).

Vanyiko Ho’ok A:gida, Given to Herzog (I partially summarize it and partially quote from it. I include some of the songs and the passages of the Mockingbird speech.) The god Earth Medicine-man made the matter that became the earth by creating a greasewood shrub (segoi) on which he released ants and “wood-lice” (hiopc—the word means both human body lice and termites [Saxton, Saxton, and Enos 1983, 22]). The wood-lice crawl over the shrub and feed on it and defecate soil, which accumulates. The shrub, ants, termites, and soil do not stay still. Earth Medicine-man sets darkness (to be the night sky) upon it and jumps on the whole and sings: I am going, I am going, To make the darkness I am going. In the East I made the darkness, With it weighted down the earth. In the East I made the darkness, With it weighted down the earth. The god next makes Buzzard from the shadow of his eyes; then he causes the man-god Elder-brother (or I’itoi) to be born from a union of the sky (the spread darkness) and earth; then the woman-god Nasia is made by the sky (darkness) joining with a mountain. And he makes stars, the sun, and the moon from a combination of his spit and fragments from an internal crystal. “It was good. Still the earth did not lie well, it still swayed back and forth [a’ai vidut].” He weighs it down with feather cuttings [their source is not stated]. These become clouds on the mountains. He asks Elder-brother to press the earth into stability. This act has partial success. The earth still “quivers” [gigivk] and “wriggles” [banmed—the word also means “crawl”]. Then Earth Medicine-man makes a mockingbird and sings: Little mockingbird, Little mockingbird magician [medicine-man],

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He alone is the talker, Acting powerfully he does things. Now in prose, “Passing around all the trees, it talked; in front of the sky it turned back, tied its talk onto the tops of the mountains, tied again its talk to the sky, went all over the earth and the mountains; and by this the earth was quieted.” [This passage with its cadence and parallelisms seems like a passage of oratory and indeed there is a similar passage in Thin Leather’s although not in Vanyiko’s oration.] Then the Earth Medicine-Man also made the Winged Spider and sang: Winged Spider, Winged Spider Magician, He performs like a magician, Acting powerfully he does things. Back to prose, “Winged Spider tied its thread on the tops of the mountains. Going way up it tied it right to the sky. From there descended, tied its thread on the tops of the mountains, and tied it at the sky.” Tied it to the tops of all the trees, Tied it on the tops of all the mountains. Tied it at the sky. It went all over the earth, the mountains, the standing trees. It made the earth more firm. And then it was quieted. [This passage, too, seems like an oration, but again it is not included in any Vanyiko oration.]15 Then Earth Medicine-man makes Red Spider who finishes the stabilization. Then Buzzard formed mountains and river valleys for the earth with his wings (Herzog manuscript, edited by Bahr, n.d., 2–13).

Vanyiko’s Mockingbird Speech Vanyiko’s oration with a mockingbird comes at a slightly later point in his telling,16 when Vanyiko tells of Earth Medicine-man’s building of a first “council house” for humanity. This is the village “round house,” sometimes called va’aki, or “rainhouse,” discussed in chapter 3. If there were a wine feast, the communal wine would be made there. Wine, however, was not the issue at this stage of world history.

92 / How Mockingbirds Are

Figure 8. Round house or Council house. (University of Arizona Special Collection)

Although Earth Magician [Medicine-man] went away [temporarily], afterward he came back again to those people [whom he had made]. He made the council-house, a round house. He asked them for the uprights, cross-poles, bent ribs, frame, brush covering, and dirt with which to cover it. These people did not know that he was Earth Magician.

The Oration [We in a Mud House] And in the mud house I sat you, An ember burning toward-you [I] stood-it-up. [Measuring-worms Make a House Frame] In the west was the Black Measuring-worm, And I called kinship to him. Then he felt kindly to me.

The Speeches / He fell [to ground], broke in four parts, And I took them, stood them up. In the south was the Green Measuring-worm, And I knew what to call kinship to him. Then he felt kindly to me. He fell, broke in two parts, And I took-them-and, laid them across [the posts]. In the east was the Shining Measuring-worm, And I knew what to call kinship to him. Then he felt kindly to me. And he fell and, then broke in many parts, And I took them, straightly laid them. In the north was the Red Measuring-worm, And I knew what to call kinship to him. Then he felt kindly to me. There he fell-and, then broke in uncountable pieces. And I took them very bent them, then across very laid them. [Gopher Roofs the House] In the west was the Black Gopher, And I called kinship to him. Then he felt kindly to me. Much grass of his biting, [with it] he arrived, [And] here put it. In the south was the green gopher, And I called kinship to him. Then he felt kindly to me. Much grass of his biting, [with it] he arrived, And here put it. In the east was the Shining Gopher, And I called kinship to him. Then he felt kindly to me, Much grass of his biting, he arrived, And here put it. In the north was the Red Gopher, And I called kinship to him. Then he felt kindly to me, Much grass of his biting, he arrived, And with it I roofed it [house], good thin cloud told [intended] and did. The earth already was four-times mounded.

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94 / How Mockingbirds Are And I moved it, with it really stamped-on-it, and finished. Beautiful snow told [intended] and did, on top made a fire. [Mockingbird] In the east the Shining Mockingbird, [a] very soft telling took-and, arrived. House-posts between strung it [the telling], house-ribs between strung it. All across laid it. Then to tree end strung it, to mountain peaks strung it, to sky strung it. With that the earth very calmly lay, as he told [intended] and did. And there was his soft telling, “And you can put-it-on-your-back, and far-away do, Whenever the people need something from you, You will continue to be so.” Now in prose: See, this council house is where everything has its foundation. Peoples’ desires, if [some] one desires something, in this [house] is where it is made right, the desire. That is the purpose of this council house. If one is troubled with something, in this [house] there is made right, the desire. (Herzog manuscript, edited, 42–54) Here then is a text that starts with the marvelous making of a house and ends with a mockingbird calming the earth with words, an odd juxtaposition. The ending harks back to the above quoted portion of Vanyiko’s world history. Why is it attached to this text? The answer is probably that the whole is one oration according to Vanyiko, and so it should not be divided. Curiously, however, the name of this oration is “Prayer for Rain 2, of Earth Doctor” (Herzog’s “Pima Speeches,” 27–30). There is nothing about rain in the text. The title seems arbitrary.17 The text does, however, cover portions of the narrative contained in Thin Leather’s Mockingbird speech, which is about rain. As we will see, though, Thin Leather puts the two topics of the present speech, house building and Mockingbird, in the reverse order of Vanyiko.18 Unlike Vanyiko to Herzog, the speech given to Benedict by either Vanyiko or Blackwater has Mockingbird failing to calm the earth:

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Yellow (Blue, Black) Mockingbird Shaman you failed. But you left us your yellow (blue, black) winds and your yellow (blue, black) clouds. When we ask you will give us what we desire. The Benedict recorded speech continues with Downy Nest Shaman and Spider Shaman calming the earth, as in Thin Leather. It continues with the building of the council house by Measuring Worm Shaman and Gopher Shaman and the bringing of clouds and rain through tobacco smoke (Bahr 2001, 179–82). I believe that this speech told to Underhill by Vanyiko or Blackwater in 1927 is a faithful version of the one Thin Leather told to Russell before 1908.

Thin Leather’s Mockingbird Speech Finally, we are able to consider the Mockingbird speech given at the wineless Pima ceremony described in Russell. This is the speech that we initially contrasted with the Mockingbird speech given by J. Moreno at the Papago Sit-and Drink ceremony. Thin Leather’s two full prose mythological tellings (Russell 1908, 206–50; Lloyd 1911) say nothing about calming the earth or making a first council house. Therefore, his oration, called a Rainmaking (Ju:ckida) speech, is ahistorical, that is, not tied to his narrative of origins and creations. Therefore, there is nothing to say about the speech’s mythological background, except perhaps to ask why there could be none for Thin Leather.19 The speech will be given in the O’odham language with translation; therefore, I will say a few words about previous transcribers and about my version. Frank Russell, who published this text, was, with George Herzog, the best linguist to come to the O’odham before the 1960s. Of the others, Jesse Fewkes, J. William Lloyd, Harold Bell Wright, and Ruth Benedict did not try to write the language except for a few isolated words. Nor did Frances Densmore except for the odd but important prose word and the “song language” syllables of a few songs (she mostly left the syllables’ pronunciation unwritten). Ruth Underhill was almost as good as Russell and Herzog. Like Densmore, she took down song syllables in O’odham, but she did this more consistently; and she also wrote the orations she heard in O’odham. She had a good feel for what is a word in the language and her spellings are consistent. Thus, she was a better linguist than Densmore, due to her longer contact with and greater courage to write in the language. She did not publish her Papago language texts immediately. The oratory texts were published by Underhill et al. in 1979; the songs are unpublished.

96 / How Mockingbirds Are Each non-Indian who has written the language owes a great deal to an interpreter or consultant who would speak an orator’s or prose speaker’s or singer’s words clearly and say what the words mean. Russell’s interpreter was Jose Lewis (this relationship and what is known of Russell’s life are well described by Bernard Fontana in his introduction to Russell’s The Pima Indians [1975]). Herzog’s interpreter, as noted, was Paul, or Johnson, Azul. Underhill was assisted by several interpreters whose names are listed on page 139 of her Papago Indian Religion (1946). I have consistently altered the word divisions of Russell/Lewis and Herzog/Azul (those texts are given in Appendix 3) to conform with the word divisions used in the dictionaries of Saxton, Saxton, and Enos (1983) and Mathiot (n.d.). For example, sometimes the original writers wrote as one word what would now be considered as two. I have also changed many of the earlier writers’ spellings. An important reason for this is that the post-1960 linguists have agreed that the O’odham language has two series of “stop” consonants, one series voiced and the other unvoiced. These are now usually written as “b,” “d,” and “g” for the voiced and “p,” “t,” and “k” for the unvoiced. Russell and Herzog did not recognize this double series and so they did not use the letters “b,” “d,” and “g.” There are other differences between the old and more recent spellings. For example, in the writing of vowels and the older use of paired letters to represent what are now taken to be single sounds. Whenever I could find a word in a dictionary or where I was fairly certain how the word is said, I spelled the word according to the orthography (alphabet) that has been officially adopted by the Tohono O’odham Nation—or with a few small changes to accommodate Pima ways of pronouncing.20 When I did not know a word, I kept the original spelling except when it was obvious how it would be spelled according to current practice. Both Russell and Herzog made double translations for their texts, an interlinear word-for-word (or “literal”) version and a free version. I prefer something in between: a single translation tied to punctuation-marked phrases, such that each phrase of English is my best guess of how to translate each phrase of O’odham. Russell wrote his literal and free translations in paragraph form, while Herzog used paragraphs for his literal translations and wrote his free translations as verse. I use verse lines for the O’odham and the translation, and I make the lines’ phrases match each other. These lines, I may add, might better be called “chunks,” or better “small chunks,” than verse because I have no fixed criteria to decide how much to include in a line. I do not believe there is a single best way to establish what an O’odham oratorical line should be. Thus, some of my chunks could be further subdivided, and some could be combined. The punctuation enclosed in brackets was supplied by me, the unbracketed punctuation is that of Russell/Lewis.

That we sat there and, knew something told? It was in a house. In it lay an ember remnant. A cane cigarette toward-it stood. And we inhaled from it and, knew-and, something told.

Kuc s heg eda dahakc[,] hab s-ma:c [g] ha’icu a’ag[?]

Ko va wud heg eda ki:[.]

Heg eda am ka:c heg ku:ck wi’idag.

Oacki ton heg wui am ke:k[.]

Kuc heg ab howick, hab s-ma:cc[,] ha’icu a:g.

There was the world, newly made, Inside it wiggled and lay, inside it bumped-up-and-down and lay. In the west there was the Black Mockingbird,

Kut g jewed[,] hemu i e-ju:[,]

Am eda hoinc ka:c, am eda cu:cuakc ka:c.

O wa in hudunig tagio g S-cuk Su:g[,]

[2. Mockingbirds Fail]

Was it like this?

[1. You and I in a House, with a Cigarette Ember]

No hems hab-a cu’ig[?]

Narrator Thin Leather; Recorded by Russell

Rain Making Speech with Mockingbird

And he felt kindly to me-and, then arrived. Plenty of his tellings this world [over] he stretched-and, [On] mounded earth, he foot-tapped-and, [On] tree tips foot-tapped-and, finished. “Oh yes! From this it [earth] can just lie [still]!” he told and tried to do. Oh yes! Inside it jiggled and lay, inside it bumped-up-anddown and lay. “Yes, Black Mockingbird, we’ll do this with your doings.

“And you, way-off can stay [with] your black wind, your black cloud, and you can stand there [with them]. “Your people sometimes will cry kinship to you,

Kut ab si n-ho’ige’itam e-ta:tak, amjed jivia.

Ha’akia ha’icu e-a’aga id jewed cem me:k vaopak[,]

Jewed cuvidk,] ab ke:spahimk,

U’us ku:kug ab kekespahimk[,] na:to.

[“]O va[!] Heg hekaj cem si ka:ck[!”] o heg a:g [c] hab cem ju:.

O va[!] Am eda hoic ka:c, am eda cu:cuakc ka:c.

[“]Aheu’u[,] ge S-cuk Su:g[,] va a:cim p hi am e-ju:21 heg m-cu’ijig[,]

“]Kup[,] va:saj i ulin ge s-cuck g e-hewelig[,] ge s-cukc g e-ce:wagig[,] kums hi ap ke:kiwan.

[“]Heg e-hemata hebaijed g ab am g m-i:mig sosoakan[,]22

[“]Kup pi masko va i ve:mkam b at a cei[,] k wa:saj i ul.[“] “And you invisibly helpfully will speak, staying way-off.”

And I knew what kind of kinship to call to him,

Kont g hab cu’igkam ma:mck ab i:mig sosoa[,]

Oh yes! Here above us the circling darkness lay. Oh yes! In there to-the-right held-out the great Down Nested Medicine-man, And I knew what kind of kinship to call to him[,] And he felt kindly to me. Plenty of his tellings he grasped, [and] then came [to me]. Plenty of his tellings the world [over] stretched-and, On mounded earth foot-tapped, On mountain tips foot-tapped, On tree tips foot-tapped and finished-and,

O va! Ia t-da:m heg s-cuhukam ge sikolc ka:c.

O va! Ed si’om p e-ulic heg ge Vi:k Koskam Ma:kai[,]

Kunt g hab cu’igkam ma:mck ab i:mig sosoa[,]

Kut ab sa n-ho’ige’itam e-ta:tk[.]

Ha’akia ha’icu e-a’aga sa’ak[,] amjed jiwia.

Ha’akia ha’icu e-a’aga id jewed me:k vaopank[,]

Jewed cuvitk ab keispahimk[,]

Do:da’ag ku:kug ab kekespahimk[,]

U’us ku:kug ab kekespahimk na:tok[,]

[3. Down Nested Medicine-man and Gray Spider Quiet the Earth]

[Omitted here are two sections identical with the previous one, but with “south” and “east” instead of “west,” and with “blue” and “shining” birds, winds, and clouds instead of “black.”]

Then it [earth] slightly quieted. Then ended, surprisingly, [the] inside jiggling, [the] inside bumping-up-and-down. In the west was Gray Spider[,] And I knew what to call kinship to him. And he felt kindly to me[.] Sticks of his cutting he grasped, [and] then came. Earth’s edges he really staked-and, finished. To the west he pulled the black hand-patter,23 with the black rainhouse he covered it, with the black arrow he fastened it down. To the south he pulled the blue hand-patter, with the black rainhouse he covered it, with the black arrow he fastened it down. To the east he pulled the shining hand-patter, with the shining rainhouse he covered it, with the shining arrow he fastened it down.

At a hekaj am he’es totolim e-ju:.

Am ha’asa[,] i hi g o va[,] am eda hoinc ka:c, am eda cu:cuakc ka:c.

Im hudunig tagio ge S-ko:magi Tokdod[,]

Kunt g hab cu’igkam ma:mck ab i:mig sosoa.

Kut ab si n-ho’ige’idam e-ta:tk[.]

U’us e-hikiaga sa’ak[,] amjed jivia.

Id jewed hohogid ab si koapitk[,] na:to.

Im hudunig wui i vanok ge s-cuk mawatadag[,] ge s-cuk va’akikaj am si ma’isitag[,] ge s-cuk o:mkaj si keis.

Im ka:ck wui i vanok ge s-tatk mawatadag[,] ge s-tatk va’akikaj am si ma’isitag, ge s-tatk o:mkaj si keis.

Im si’alig wui i vanok ge s-tondam mawatadag[,] ge s-tondam va’akikaj am si ma’isitadag[,] ge s-tondam o:mkaj si keis.

In the west was the Black Measuring-worm, And I knew what to call kinship to him, And he felt kindly to me. Then four-times he raised himself and in four short-parts broke himself and to-the-right became houseposts and, finished. In the south was Blue Measuring-worm, And I knew what to call kinship to him, And he felt kindly to me. Then four-times he raised himself and in four short-parts broke himself and to-the-right across lay-himself and, finished. In the east was Shining Measuring-worm,

Kunt ag hab cu’igkam ma:mck ab i:mig sosoa[,]

Kut ab si n-ho’ige’idam e-ta:tk[.]

Amjed gi’igko i e-cevidkatk am so’ospol e-o’omink am si’om e-cetontafk[,] e-na:to.

Im ka:cim tagio ge S-tatk Ocvig[,]

Kunt ag hab cu’igkam ma:mack ab i:mig sosoa[,]

Kut ab si n-ho’ige’idam e-ta:tk[.]

Amjed gi’igko e-cevidkatk am so’ospol e-o:mink am si’om ga:gai e-vaopa.

Im sialig tagio ge S-tondam Ocvig[,]

[4. Measuring-worms Make a House Frame]

Because of that it [earth] got calm.

Im hudunig tagio ge S-cuk Ocvig[,]

Heg at a hekaj am ahawa dodolim e-ju:.

And he felt kindly to me. Then four-times he raised himself and in four short-parts broke himself and to-the-right straight-across lay. In the north was Red Measuring-worm, And I knew what to call kinship to him, And he felt kindly to me. Then four-times he raised himself and in four short-parts broke himself-and, bravely arched-and, finished.

Kut ag si n-ho’ige’idam e-ta:tk[.]

Amjed gi’igko i cevidkatk am so’ospol e-o:mik am si’om se’esel e-vaopa.

Im nanki oid tagio ge S-wekium Ocvig[,]

Kunt ag hab cu’igkam ma:mck ab i:mig sosoa[,]

Kut ag si n-ho’ige’idam e-ta:tk[.]

Amjed gi’igko i cevidkatk am so’ospol e-o:mink am si’om kikiotatk[,] e-na:to.

In the south was Blue Gopher. And I knew what to call kinship to him[,] And he felt kindly to me.

Im ka:cim tagio ge S-ta:tk Jefho[.]

Kunt ag hab cu’igkam ma:mck ab i:mig sosoa[,]

Kut g si n-ho’ig’idtam e-ta:tk[.]

[5. Gopher Roofs the House]

And I knew what to call kinship to him,

Kunt ag hab cu’igkam ma:mck ab i:mig sosoa[,]

This he mounded and grassed [the roof ] with and, finished. Big beautiful flat cloud, he told and did. Around it the earth four-places he mounded, and he moved it, and with-it he covered-it [roof ]-and, finished. Big beautiful snow, he told and did. Around-it [house] the earth he smoothed, some-kind of baby in your likeness he [gopher?] hugged, [and] this [baby?] he set inside. A flame burning ember [he?] took, below-it [the house? the

Cigarette cane [he? I? the house?]toward-it [ember?] stood.25

Heg i cuvidk hekaj ab si saijidk[,] na:to.

Ge s-keg komalt ce:wagi[,] ta a:g hab ju:.

An we:gaj jewed gi’igko ab moasan[,] t heg i himcudk, hekaj ab si hiasp[,] na:to.

Ge s-keg gefita[,] a:g hab ju:.

An we:gaj jewed i dagkomk[,] hascu ali m-wepodag id g im ko:mk[,] id eda im hu daswa.

Siwota mehedam ku:ck i beik[,] im hu weco ant24 ju: baby?] I put it.

Oacki ton heg wui am kei.

{He? I?] stepped-up-and, arose-and, eastward puffed. Then whitely they [smokes] stood-up, went-and, slowly reached to the east.

T ag ab ke’esk[,] vamsk[,] am sialkg wui si i:pwua.

Da:m ge s-to:tam e-cu:cia[,] himk[,] sialig s-bab:bagi ce:mo’o.

[6. White Rainbows East]

With much brush of his killing he arrived.

Ha’akia sa’i. e-muatag amjed jivia.

Below the earth is beautifully shadowed complete to the east. Below the earth is beautifully mossed.

Weco jewed s-ap masma e:kahiml sialig s-ba:bagi ce:mo’o.

Weco jewed s-ap masma mamadodagk ju:.

Then sprout your many kinds of seeds. Big thick stalks, wide leaves, beautifully tasseled flowers, and of course your undying ripe seeds. Then it happened, then to-the-right he [not clear who] did it-and, took it [harvest], and put it [in storage]. There were sun rays-and, they touched it [food]. Then with it [food] swallow something, and feel nothing [bad or sorrowful]. Your big beautiful boys, with your big beautiful girls, they’ll feel nothing. And one remaining old man, one old woman will kiss,

Heg da:m wu:s heg na:nko cu’igkam m-kaitta.

Ge’e savadk vaik[,] tatatan ha:hak[,] s-keg mudadag hiosig[,] hik m-pi-mu:kam kaikij bai.

Da:m e-ju:, da:m si’om has i ju:k[,] bei[,] am ce:.

Ka ud tas sisiwotagc[,] heg ed kukugwa.

Kut ag we:nadk am hascu ba’ak[,] wa cem ge pi haskam ha’icu ta:tam.

Ge s-keg em-viapoke’elga, s-keg em-cehiaga we:m[,] k o pi haskam ha’icu ta:tam.

Ka ud hemako vi’ikam keli[,] mhokam26 oks ab cinwa[,]

[7. Plant, Grow, Harvest, Eat, Live, Kiss, Crawl]

Big rainbows stretched, and slowly reached to the east.

Ge s-to:ta kikihod e-vaopan[,] sialig s-ba:babagi ce:mo’o.

Ha’ap ko hems o elidk taccua[,] hemu heg oid hi hab ma:sin hegai t-jewedga[.] Kuc heg neid[,] an nac apa hob27 sosoigkam t-ta:tam.

We cem go:k hudunig e-wui niac[,] k am va:m banmed. So thus we can wish and desire, considering how our land is. As we look at it, it makes us feel sad.

For two evenings they look at each other, and excitedly crawl.

106 / How Mockingbirds Are Like the Santa Rosa and Vanyiko Mockingbird speeches, the action in this text is centered on one place. Like Vanyiko’s text there is an “I” and a “you.” (The Santa Rosa text has a “you” but the word I is not spoken. The implicit “I” in that text is the inviter, the “you” is the invited.) Given its place in the prose story, Vanyiko’s “I” would be Earth Medicine-man, and we can infer from that story that the “you” is humanity, for whom the council house is built. I think that no one can identify the “I” and “you” of Thin Leather. We only know what they do: the “I” needs and receives help in calming the world (parts 2 and 3); a house is built for the “I” (parts 4 and 5); something “like” the “you” is hugged and is put in the house (part 5); the “I” puts a flaming ember below someone or something (part 5); the same person stands a cigarette toward the cane (part 5); someone, perhaps the “I,” puffs cigarette smoke eastward (part 6); the “you’s” seeds sprout (part 7); and the “you’s” boys and girls prosper (part 7). Those ambiguities are present in the Pima text, and I do not think that Azul or Russell misheard or misrepresented Thin Leather.28 The Pima language can be clear about such things. I cannot envision the progression of actors around the house and, perish the thought, I doubt that Thin Leather could either. We will see in Appendix 3 that Vanyiko treats this scene differently. In particular he places the house setting and ember standing at the start of a speech on house building, and he doesn’t follow this episode with any tobacco puff and subsequent rain. Thin Leather also has an opening house and cigarette episode. His distinct move is to place this episode again in the narrative of the events in front of the magically built house. I think that Thin Leather or a prior composer loved the long sequence of magic house/baby/ember/cigarette/smoke/shadow/rain, and part of their love for this was due to how that sequence differs from the Santa Rosa Papago one of drink/sing/imitate/rain. And I stress, we can envision what the actors do in the Papago sequence and also in Vanyiko’s Pima version, but we (at least I) cannot envision what or who does what in Thin Leather’s sequence, neither the short one in front of the house nor the longer one that sweeps through the whole text. His speech is a cosmic show. I suppose this is why his “I” in particular is so indistinctly drawn. Really, the “I” is an observer watching the show “come true,” from world creation to fed children, as if in a dream vision. It seems to me that the visionary could be Thin Leather himself or, if not he, then some immediate Pima predecessor. The speech could be something like the revelation of St. John. The speech’s sweep from the earliest beginnings of the world to the present time, and the dream hypothesis would also explain why Thin Leather did not attach the speech as Vanyiko did to his Ho’ok A:gida. The text is an oration of Revelation, not of Genesis. Of course,

The Speeches /

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neither Russell nor Lloyd say that Thin Leather got the speech in a dream, this is only my speculation. The important points of the speech relative to the argument of this book are: 1. There is no mention of drinking. 2. The Mockingbird has wind and cloud, but he does not use them in this speech. 3. The rain in this speech comes at the end and is the result of someone’s puffing smoke from a rainhouse. 4. The rainhouse is mysteriously made upon an earth that is said to be newly created and calmed. 5. The Mockingbird fails to still the newly created earth.

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5

The Mockingbird Big Talker or Rain Doctor?

My argument on mockingbirds is that they have nothing intrinsic, or by their own nature, to do with wind and clouds. They are not rain doctors or rain medicine men, notwithstanding that one Papago text says otherwise. By my argument, then, the Pima texts’ hint of such a connection must be due to the Papago text that makes a contingent connection between the bird and those things, via the bird’s intrinsic imitativeness—or if not to a Papago text, then the source must be to an old Pima text that says the same thing as the Papago. That argument has now been made except for the imitativeness part, which is the business of this chapter. Mockingbirds are notoriously, flamboyantly talkative birds. Let us go back to those qualifications. They are talkative by the definition given in chapter 1, if we grant that they emit a great deal of language, especially human language. So far we have established that in Papago opinion they transmit the sounds of human drunkenness to waiting winds. We will return to this, and I will say that they talk: talk but say nothing new. They are flamboyant as anyone white or Indian familiar with them can affirm, because especially in the spring they start to sing in the middle of the night and sing almost nonstop through the dawn and into the day. This makes them extreme singers, but there is more to it. They produce a tremendous range and variety of songs and they switch from one song to another with abandon, each bird being in effect a one-man band. They are notorious because their flamboyant production is imitative of other birds. In sum, they talk but say nothing from the heart, albeit with great range and skill. Here is a song that tells us as much: Sun dies, Sun dies, Earth everywhere darkens. 109

110 / How Mockingbirds Are Just then the birds stop their cooing, Earth doesn’t echo. A mockingbird Pitifully speaks, Alone, distantly Talks. (Bahr et al. 1997, 131) The lines in this text are defined by criteria that are discussed in the 1997 book. Thus, although the written “chunks” of oratory are established casually, the writing of O’odham song-poem lines is, or can be, rigorous. This song is Pima and is used for “social dancing,” that is, for celebrations of good fortune such as good harvests, war victories, or, nowadays, American holidays such as the Fourth of July. Although about a mockingbird, the text is attributed to someone receiving a dream from orioles. In fact, such social dancing songs are dreamed from a variety of creatures, but especially birds. The songs learned from a given source cover more than the doings of that species. Hence, an oriole can give an original Oriole poem about mockingbirds. The idea in this case is that the death of the sun would put an end to all original bird callings. All that is left is a lone mockingbird imitating the last bird vocalization it had heard, like a tape recorder replaying and replaying the last voice it had registered. Now, although there are many kinds of bird-given social dancing songs—Oriole, Blackbird, Woodpecker, Swallow, and many more—I have never heard of Mockingbird social dancing songs, and I think there is a good if only implicit O’odham reason for this: mockingbirds have nothing original to say. Now that I have made the case for the Mockingbird’s lack of originality I need to mention the fact that for the Maricopa, a people closely allied to the Pima but linguistically and culturally different, dreaming of mockingbirds is the way young men become great orators in adulthood (Spier 1978, 247–48). In this way by denying the Mockingbird originality the Pima are distinguishing themselves and parodying their neighbors.

Speech Acts The O’odham language has ample words for acts of communcation, of which we have discussed two: one for telling (a:ag), as in “Witch’s Telling,” and one for talking (niok), as in reciting an oration or reading. There are two additional O’odham words to attend to, one for call or cry, as in “to call kinship to him,” and one for speak or emit sounds, as in “to speak.” Both occur in our texts. The first of those is soak, whose base meaning is actually “to cry” as in tearfully crying, and the second is cei.

The Mockingbird /

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We see the “talk” (niok) word at the end of the above song, as proof of my contention that mockingbirds can be said to talk,1 such as reciting or repeating a text, and we saw the “tell” (a:ag) word, in “Witch’s Telling,” the O’odham name for their mythology or chronicle on ancient times. Let us proceed from the least to the most important of the four words as far as our speeches are concerned. Cei, “speak, emit sounds,” occurs only once, in one speech, Thin Leather’s Mockingbird text: And invisibly helpfully [you, Mockingbird] will speak,[emit sounds] staying way-off. The bird from Thin Leather’s point of view has just tried and failed to calm the world by crisscrossing it with “tellings” (a:aga). The sense of the above passage is that the tellings have failed and so they are proven to be worthless. Cei is the least committal and also least praising of O’odham words about vocalization. All that it means is that someone has made audible sounds. There is no implication that the sounds make sense or that anyone understands them. Thus, Thin Leather relegates the Mockingbird to making meaningless sounds. Soak, “cry/call/beseech,” is also limited to the Thin Leather text where it occurs several times. It is actually a very common but stereotyped word in O’odham oratory. One “cries” or “calls” in the spirit of kinship (e.g., “And I knew what kind of kinship to call to him”). In the orated narratives the spirit always responds favorably (e.g., “And he felt kindly to me and . . .”). Sometimes I translate soak as “cry,” which is the literal meaning, and sometimes as “call.” Although the “call” translation seems otherwise, the O’odham verb is intransitive. The addition of O’odham ab to it creates a transitive phrase, “to cry to.” Niok, “talk,” (orate, recite) we have discussed in chapters 1 and 4. Thin Leather does not say in his speech that mockingbirds talk, but I imagine that he could have. The Santa Rosa speech surely has them talk (55), and so does the Vanyiko prose text (his orated version lacks the word). In connection with the prose Vanyiko sings: Little mockingbird. Little mockingbird magician, He alone is the talker, (niok) Acting alone he does things. And he says in his prose, Passing around all the trees, it talked in front of the sky; tied its talk onto the tops of the mountains, tied again its talk to the sky, went all over the mountains. . . .

112 / How Mockingbirds Are A:ag is the most important speech act word in our texts. It means “to tell,” and also “to mean,” or “to think.” Illustrative of this last sense of a:g is a phrase often heard in everyday serious conversation, “Ban a:gc hab kaij,” “I think-and say.”2 (Kaij is imperfect for cei.) The statement is equivalent to the English, “I’m speaking my mind,” or “Mark my words.” A:g, then, is to speak meaningfully, in contrast to cei which is merely to speak, and niok which is to speak language, and soak which is to cry, bemoan, or call out. Now, just as I wish that no O’odham would credit mockingbirds with wind and clouds, but some of them do, so do I wish that none would credit these birds with “telling” (a:ag), and also some of them do. Both Thin Leather and Vanyiko do this. Vanyiko’s prose version lacks the word, but his oration says (see page XX): In the east the Shining Mockingbird [a] very soft telling (a:ga) took-and arrived. . . . And there was his soft telling, “And you put-it-on-your-back, and far away do. Whenever the people need something from you, You will continue to be so.” I interpret this passage to mean that the mockingbird tried to calm the earth with “tellings” (meaningful words)—for example, to tell the earth to kindly become quiet—and he succeeded. Here is Thin Leather, who has many “talks.” Here he is on the Mockingbird: Plenty of his tellings (a:aga)this world [over] he stretched-and. . . . “Oh yes! From this it [earth] can just lie [still]!” he told (a:g) and tried to do. Oh yes! Inside it [earth] jiggled and lay, inside it bumped-up-and-down and lay. “Yes, Black Mockingbird, we’ll do this with your doings. And you way-off can stay [with] your black wind, your black cloud, and you can stand there. Your people sometimes will cry kinship to you, And you invisibly helpfully will speak [cei], staying way-off.” My feeble defense on these nonobservances of the rule of no “tells” for mockingbirds is that these were mythic birds for whom it was possible to attempt some telling—and Vanyiko felt that this telling was sufficient for the task while Thin Leather felt (correctly in my view) that it was not. And

The Mockingbird /

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I would retort that post-mythic, post-ancient mockingbirds by rights would tell nothing. Thin Leather used the word telling (a;ag) while the Mockingbird attempted to quiet the earth giving him the benefit of the doubt. But when the Mockingbird failed he coldly relegated him to mimicking (cei). There are still more “tells” in Thin Leather: [In part 1] “And we inhaled from it [cigarette] and knew-and, something told [a:ag].” This comes at the start of the speech and the “we” is “we the people who are gathered for a rain ceremony.” Truly, people can and should “tell, expecially important events of the past—there is no problem with this usage. Then after the Mockingbird episode comes one about Down Nested Medicine-man’s successful quieting of the earth (from part 3): Plenty of his tellings (a:ag) he grasped, [and] then came to me. Plenty of his tellings he the world [over] stretched-and, . . . Then it [the earth] slightly quieted. The first of those lines is missing from Thin Leather on the mockingbirds, possibly due to an oversight; the second line is identically present in his Mockingbird segment; and the third line differs from that segment in speaking of success instead of failure at calming the earth. Different, too, is that the character is called Down Nested Medicine-man, which implies power and probably also insight and clarity of purpose. The Mockingbird is not always called a medicine-man, appropriately not, I would think in the mind of Thin Leather. Down Nested Medicine-man is a murky figure in O’odham prose mythology. I do not recall hearing or reading of him from Papago sources. He is mentioned by all three tellers of Pima mythology (Russell 1908, 211; Bahr et al. 1994, 73; and Bahr, ed. 2001, 15), always in roughly the same way: a flood destroys all earthly life except for a few survivors some of whom are birds who attach themselves to the sky so they won’t drown. Either some or all the birds cry from the cold and wetness, and so a mysterious Down Nested man plucks feathers from his breast to make floating vessels for each of them (Russell); or one of the birds cries and the others pluck down feathers either from themselves or from the crier. With the soft feathers they make a dry, soothing nest for the crier. Everyone always survives. One version identifies the crier as a curved-billed thrasher (kudwij or sometimes kul-wicigam). Another version says the bird came to be called Down Nested Medicine-man, but that narrator did not remember what

114 / How Mockingbirds Are bird that was (Bahr et al. 1994, 72). Russell, whose information came from Thin Leather, does not identify the source of the feathers but calls the source “a god.” It is not clear to me how or why this episode could motivate Thin Leather’s orated portion on Down Nested. Surely, the curved-billed thrasher is about the same size and shape as a mockingbird. It is dull brown, in contrast to the mockingbird’s combination of gray, black, and white. It belongs to the same ornithological group as mockingbirds, the Mimidae, and it sings in repeated phrases of “sweet quality” (Phillips et al. 1964, 123–24). I have heard a social dancing song (the same sort of song as the Oriole one about the Mockingbird) about this character, but I forget what the song says. The best I can conclude is that the thrasher, if that is what Thin Leather had in mind, may be considered to be more diligent and clear thinking than a mockingbird; but how and why it got a mythic, celestial down nest is beyond me. Its nest is not described in Phillips et al., who do say, though, that its preferred desert habitat is “dense thorny brush,” especially in “meadows” of the thorny shrub-like cholla cactus. They report that thrashers who live in today’s cities and towns go back to the chollas for nesting time. To continue with Thin Leather’s “tellings”: the Gray Spider who assists in calming the earth provides no “tellings.” The spider brings sticks to stake the earth and “hand-pullers” to weigh it down. Nor do the Measuring-worms talk or tell. They break their own bodies to form the woody components of the house that is built on the calm earth. (These creatures are also called “inchworms” by whites. They progress by “inching along,” anchoring their body first at the front, then forming an inverted “U” with the rest of the body, then anchoring the tail end of the “U” and extending forward again with the front end.) The next and last tellings are in part 5, by Blue Gopher who with a repeated phrase confirms for us that Thin Leather took a dim view of mockingbirds: Big beautiful flat cloud, he told (a:g) and did. . . . Big beautiful snow, he told and did. Recall that Thin Leather said nearly the same thing about the Mockingbird: “Oh yes! From this it [earth] can just lie still!” he told (a:g) and tried to do. Simply, when the Mockingbird tried to cause something marvelous by telling, he failed; when the Gopher tries he succeeds.

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Conclusion on Mockingbird’s Talking Mockingbirds talk but in general, I insist, they don’t tell. That is, they talk language, in fact many languages, whatever they hear; but they don’t tell anything authentically their own. This combination served humanity well in the Santa Rosa situation where they transmitted the sound of drunks, as in transmitting a speech or prayer. My insistence on no “telling” is frankly belied by Vanyiko’s speech where the bird tells and the earth quiets. It is semi-belied in Thin Leather’s speech where the bird tells and the earth does not quiet—as if to say, “Your telling is really a no-telling, you are no good.” A thrasher, it appears, can tell, a mockingbird can’t. And a gopher can tell. Indeed Thin Leather urges the Mockingbird from that time on to make sounds in mimicry (cei) not to try to tell meaningfully. Thus, mockingbirds talk but inadequately tell and are only successful in parroting or mindlessly imitating other sounds. I call the mockingbird’s combination of talking but inadequate telling insincere, but I confess that this is not the main meaning of the American concept of insincerity. The main meaning is to mislead or lie about how one feels or about what one will do. To be insincere one needs something to conceal or to lie about, and on my theory of the O’odham theory of mockingbirds, the birds do not lie or conceal, they only repeat, perhaps without understanding. I have certainly heard O’odhams remark that the birds imitate other birds (ce’is, to-imitate or reproduce-the-sounds-of). If we accept my argument, we can see how the bird’s actions embody a criticism of recited and repeated liturgy if it is not well understood. The critique would be: humans who merely recite prayers they have learned, are mockingbirds. Would this criticism destroy religion? No, it only makes us ask if we really understand and mean what we say. I admire the O’odham for that criticism, or that hint of it. It is different from anything else I have heard, read, or thought about mockingbirds.3

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6

Summary and Conclusions

This Book and Textuality The anthropologist Richard Bauman recently published a book on intertextuality in folklore and oral poetics (2004). Since not many extra-O’odham studies were cited in the present book, I will now relate the book’s concerns to Bauman’s ideas and instances of intertextuality. For him, intertextuality is a special name for the long-standing topic of literary influence (1). More precisely, it is the process by which a “mediator” either replicates or changes a “source” text in presenting the source, whether modified or not, to a new “target” (133). Thus, a mediator (a person) receives, and passes on, or revises or interpolates a text. Bauman does not use the word interpolate, but I think he could have, in place of his term mediate. The act of interpolation/mediation he also calls “decontextualization” (4), by which he seems to mean recontextualization. To him, thoughts (in the mind) are entextualized in performance, for example by being formed according to the conventions of a known genre, and are contextualized to fit here-and-now circumstances (7), and may be re- or decontextualized—or interpolated—for further, reborn, or transformative use. The present book concerns two levels of mediatory textualization. First, the O’odham speeches are meant to be perfectly repeated (or reiterated, as Bauman would say) from one performance to the next, not just in the performances of one orator but between teachers and students or apprentices. The unbroken chain of replication should extend back to a speech’s original, godly utterance. Although this level is not our main interest, except in one sense, we have some instances of successive recordings so we can consider how nearly (not perfectly) that ideal was attained. The sense in which this is a main interest is that O’odham theory holds that mockingbirds replicate the sounds of drunks to winds beyond the drunks’ hearing. Second, and also important to us, we showed how separate O’odham communities differed “parodically” in their rain ceremony orations about mockingbirds. To see this, we had to understand each speech quite well, and understand the use to which 117

118 / How Mockingbirds Are each was put. Also, in our analysis we did not see one community’s speech as the source of another as a target, to revert to Bauman’s terms. Rather, we will see the different speeches as flags, so to speak, put up to praise the home community and to demean that of the neighbor. We presented the speeches as poetic, liturgical works created in good-natured rivalry. Since we have nothing but the two rather latter-day (1902, 1970s) speeches to go on, the argument on parody, as I call it, or on poetic flag waving, depends on the readings, that is, the interpretations, of the texts. Therefore, the speeches must be well understood, and therefore I was at pains to say what I know and don’t know about the language of the originals. As was stated in chapter 1, we were concerned with nuances of language that few people can appreciate or verify. I wrote the book partly because I think I can say better than anyone at present what the nuances are, and also because I fear that if I do not write them down, they may slip from the world’s, including the O’odhams’, reckoning forever.

Parody This book’s focal claim is that Thin Leather’s Pima Mockingbird speech was formed under the influence of a speech that was like Jose Moreno’s Papago Mockingbird speech. The clue to the similarity and the concrete evidence for this claim is the “gratuitous” phrase “your black wind, your black cloud” in the Pima speech. The phrase is gratuitous because the bird’s business at hand, calming the earth, does not involve wind or cloud. Rather, the bird does what it always, and I would say only does in O’odham opinion. It crisscrosses the world with imitative talk that turns out to be merely imitative. The Moreno speech says as much, and that speech credits the bird with success in a task different from the one Thin Leather assigned to it. Moreno’s bird traverses the world with the sounds it hears from drunken humans. Winds hear those sounds and, as the speech says, they “understood and ran” to carry clouds to make a great rain for the humans. I claim that Thin Leather knew the Papago idea that the bird’s vocal imitativeness could stimulate wind, but Thin Leather did not voice that idea. Rather, he chose to cast the bird as a failure in earth calming and deleted any mention of wine and drunkenness from his speech. He did, however, leave in the reference to wind and cloud, a reference that proves he knew the Papago idea. He left the fingerprint of the Papago speech on his own, and I think he did so purposefully. Thus, the focal claim concerns two speeches and the key to the claim is one phrase. The explanation for the presence of the phrase in Thin Leather and for general relation between the two speeches is parody. By parody I mean the clever recasting by one person of a text of another. Thin Leather

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or some Pima predecessor parodied some Papago predecessor of Moreno, and not vice versa. The motivation for the parody, I claim, is community pride. This claim of and explanation by parody is one of the important general ideas of this book. I am not aware that the claim and explanation have been used much before. Implicit in them is the idea that what neighbors say may have a greater or equal effect on texts of oratory and prose history than what actually happened in the past and, indeed, than the stories told in the home community a hundred years prior. It is the stories and speeches of neighbors, I believe, that among other factors make literatures change and adapt. The past is the past, and what makes it live and change, and what breathes life into it in the present are, among other things, the stories of neighbors. (I think this is true of oral literatures. Written literatures can change their concepts of the past by finding new documents from the past.) Another general claim of this book is that a given people’s kinds of texts must be studied in relation to each other. With the O’odham this is a question of orations and prose stories and songs; of orations relative to other orations within a single unfolding ceremonial drama such as the Santa Rosa Wine Ceremony; and of prose stories relative to other prose stories within a comprehensive history of ancient times, the Ho’ok A:gida; and of songs as illuminations of details within the stories; and finally of orations as divine words (the “voice of history” so to speak) with or without a grounding in a narrator’s Ho’ok A:gida (the “historian’s voice” so to speak). All of those kinds of intertextual relations came up in this book, as they could and I think should come up in many other studies. There are surely exceptions, but I feel that the study of Native American texts has mainly been limited to prose stories taken in isolation, or, more precisely, to the diffusion or spread of different versions of a given story type, for example, the North American Orpheus story or Star Husband or Trickster story. True, in the era when most Native American prose texts were collected, roughly from 1880 to 1955, great comprehensive collections were made. But these collections rarely contained the full tellings of individual narrators. They contained representative stories from several narrators, often several versions of each kind of story (which is good), but they did not give a Thin Leather’s or a Vanyiko’s or Moreno’s full telling of all of the ancient events that the narrator knew. The published mythologies, then, are composite works, not the full visions of individual native historians. In effect, the hands of the white editors obscured the marks, or the full visions, of native mythological/historical authors. As we saw in the present study, the historians’ voices in prose and the assumed gods’ voices in oratory are in constant flux. In literate Anglo-America histories become out of date, but they are kept indefinitely and without change except that the books fade and crumble in libraries. With the O’odham prose histories (or myths, if you please) and orations, there was constant,

120 / How Mockingbirds Are self-erasing change. Showing how this is true, or was true, was the most intricate task of this book. The O’odham prose histories explain the gods’ orated words—and those words (as those of songs) are precious anchors for the prose histories—but as we have seen, there are not only orations with no histories, but also different historical explanations for the same oration. And there is also much prose history with no oratory to recall or support it. And the words of the orations themselves eventually change. One can complain that these matters are too intricate, as I did myself in trying to understand them (oh, if only the O’odham were simple!), but the truth is that the O’odham and all oral peoples do not have definitive histories, they only have drafts of them. Each telling or recitation is a draft, each teller or orator is a drafter. When we have enough versions, and we think we understand them in their native language details down to the last difficult phrase, we can enter into the flux of these drafts. After parody and the merits of attending to the “draftedness” of histories in oral societies, I count as important this book’s attention to character, and particularly in this case to kinds of characters we do not commonly find in studies of Native American literature. On character in general, I confess to a weariness about studies of the cosmos—the sacred directions, the earth, sky, and underworld, and so on. To me, those are just places for characters to act, and I prefer the characters’ actions over the places. It is a personal preference and I would surely not rule out further attention to the cosmo-visions of Native Americans. I do feel that overattention to that leaves out this other aspect of stories, and orations, namely what the persons (godly or mortal, human or human-animal) are like and how they behave. On character in the specific we have in this book the Mockingbird, in whose honor the book is written, and we have the flawed human characters of the stories on the origin of wine ceremonies. Scholarship has heard amply about Coyotes and a few other animals (of whom one of the best in my opinion is the opossum as traced as a kind of non-obvious symbol in Mesoamerica by Alfredo Lopez Austin [1993]). Yes, and there are Eagles, Deer, and Buffalos, all prominent, and with reason, in representations of Native North America. Now in some small way there are the Mockingbirds, birds that fail at independent tasks but excel at passing on drunken messages. On the flawed humans, I was surprised to find them—the child driven to suicide by a neglectful mother, the lecherous cloud-man driven to exile—and I was not surprised to find these very flaws taken away in revised versions of the stories that O’odham authors prepared for white readers. As an O’odham man, Steven Listo, once said to me, “When we tell stories to the whites, we take out the miracles and dirty parts.” Yes, and as Barbara Robinson (quoted earlier) said, “This is because those parts are not suited for children.” But we must also note on the adult versions that, apart from the flawed characters,

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each story has one other character: Humanity in general, or Plain People. Humanity gained saguaros in one story and gained occasional but ultimately sufficient rain in the other. As a final point, to be introduced by an anecdote, I once knew a singer named Paul Manuel who knew more songs than he knew. He never counted them. He would sing about thirty at a time to another man (a Pima) and me when we went each week to learn them from him. Nominally, they were Swallow songs and were understood to have been dreamed by someone, not Manuel, from a Swallow bird-person. It seemed, though, that he sometimes added other songs he knew to a supposed Swallow song series. After about a year I changed from tape recording each session to recording about every fourth one, so as to take in any new songs that had come into his ever-changing series. He never varied the individual songs, just the selection and sequencing of them. By the nineteenth session he had sung 206 different songs. What he did was what I imagine all Native American nations did before they were unified in some large degree by Anglo-American culture. They cycled through a larger pool of ideas than any person, or one people, could know. Different communities (e.g., Pima and Papago O’odham) and peoples (e.g., O’odham and Yavapai, or O’odham and Winnebago) formed variations on each other’s ideas, sometimes on purpose (parody) and sometimes by virtue of the discrete but vast pool of Native American ideas. The Winnebago text and the Jicarilla story given in the appendix are examples of the latter sort of thing. Anthropology in the years from 1830 to 1955 collected and published more of those ideas than any one scholar can know. No one has counted them. No one has even counted the O’odham texts. If Mr. Manuel knew three hundred different Swallow songs (which is conservative), I imagine that the libraries and archives hold three thousand oratory, prose, and song texts from his people; and that there are three hundred thousand texts in storage from all of Native North America. Unlike Mr. Manuel’s songs, the printed ones are permanently fixed, and of course unlike the case with Mr. Manuel, the printed O’odham and total North American ones can never be internalized—learned, taken inside—by a single person. We should try to be a bit like Mr. Manuel: take in a few at a time. We should analyze them, however, not just repeat them in ever-changing sequences. (Mr. Manuel hated to talk in the time that I knew him. All he wanted was to sing, preferably in unison and harmony with someone else.) In the case of a single people such as the O’odham, we can try to be exhaustive of, for example, all the stories on the origin of wine ceremonies. We cannot be exhaustive of the potentially informative comparative texts from other peoples. Two such are given in Appendix 2, one from the Winnebago and one from the Jicarilla. These last comparisons are of high value despite their haphazard

122 / How Mockingbirds Are nature, because they show that the O’odham were a chorus in a throng of choruses, the combined chorus of Native America. The Winnebago and Jicarilla examples help show what was distinctly O’odham on the themes of the calming of the earth and the loss of Wind and Cloud. Likewise, I suppose a study centered on those other peoples would be helped by instances from the O’odham. This is what anthropology is for, to know a people, especially our own, by reflections off others—and, I must add, to try to explain what we know though material cause and effect, even if—especially if—operating through a principal of parody whereby neighboring communities and peoples insist on being different from each other.

Appendix 1 Two Non-O’odham Stories for Comparison A Winnebago Text on Calming the World Here is a text from the Winnebago of Wisconsin that covers quite the same time span as the O’odham Ho’ok A:gida, from world creation and calming to providing for human longevity. It was taken down, but only in English, by Paul Radin around 1910. Longer than our texts, the Winnebago one reads somewhat like a memorized speech. This could be due to the Radin’s choice of English style. (He doesn’t say how the text was memorized—by episode, which would make it prose, or by word or phrase which would make it oratory.) It is on the origin of the Medicine dance, a ceremony held inside large “lodges” built for that purpose. The account begins by relating how a man-god called “our father,” or Earthmaker (like Earth Medicine-man in Vanyiko), made and stabilized the earth: What it was our father sat on when he came into consciousness is uncertain. Then his tears flowed and he began to cry. Not long did he think. He saw nothing and nothing was then anywhere. He took something from the seat on which he was sitting and made a portion of our earth. Then he sent the earth below him. From where he sat and as he looked down on his own creation, it became similar to our earth. However, nothing grew upon it and it was entirely without a covering. It had not yet become quiet but was spinning around. Suddenly he thought, “If I do this, it will become quiet.” Then he made a covering (hair) for it. He took a weed from his seat to make grass for the earth and earthward he sent it. That he did and then he looked at his own creation. It was not quiet, but still kept on turning. “This way I will do again,” he thought. He took a tree and toward the earth he sent it and again looked 123

124 / Appendix 1 at his creation, but still it kept spinning around. Then he sent four men, brothers, and placed one in the east, one in the west, one in the south, and one in the north, and again looked at his creation. It was, however, still spinning around. “Perhaps it will become quiet in the following way,” he thought. So he made four of what are called water-spirits and below the earth he placed them, and for that reason they are called island-weights. Then he scattered a female spirit over the earth, by which stones are meant. Finally he looked at his creation and he saw that the earth had become quiet. (Radin 1923, 302) He made the animals, birds, insects, and people, then he decided the people, his last project, were too weak. Bad spirits killed them easily. He made several special humans to go to the earth and either strengthen the humans or weaken their enemies. The first four—Foolish-one, Turtle, Bladder, and He-who-wears-human-heads-as-earrings—failed in turn and in turn he called them all back. The last, Hare, succeeded in killing the bad spirits and bad birds. Hare stayed on earth and went to Grandmother, who is the earth. She told him the job is not finished. She ordered him to lead the humans someplace without looking back at them. He looked back, therefore humans must die. Hare got sick. Earthmaker sent the four previously specially created humans to bring him [Hare] to Earthmaker’s heavenly place. The first three could not make him move, the last succeeded in moving him but to the Thunderbirds house [first mention of that god], not to Earthmaker’s. In front of that house on a mound was a small red-painted war club. The Thunderbird chief made it thunder, Hare recovered somewhat. The still partly sick and quite sad Hare was taken to Earthmaker who showed him [from heaven] a lodge in which white-haired old people would be conducting a ceremony. [This would be the future Medicine dance, a means to long life and also to reincarnation.] Earthmaker told Hare that he and the four special humans would institute the ceremony on earth. Hare returned and told the plan to his Grandmother (Earth). The other four special humans arrived and sat down. Grandmother volunteered to contribute the last necessary ingredients [unknown to the others] for the Medicine dance: white corn grain and green corn leaves. Both were in the flesh of her breasts which she opened for them. “You were going to help us, Grandmother, I [Hare, quoting himself ] said. You may now fix your breast.” She did.

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Hare built the ceremonial house by throwing female snakes for the arched poles. He tied them with more snakes. Still more snakes framed the doors, reed grass was the walls, other grass was the floor mats, and on the mats were placed bear and deer skins. A live mountain lion and bear became roaring doors. Light appeared in the lodge. More animals and birds were called to the lodge. They arrived crippled and old. They told Hare that humanity would praise him. Humans and spirits arrived and entered. They praised Hare, he acknowledged them. Hare became a baby before grandmother. Then he became adult, then middle-aged, then old. He said, “Well, Grandmother, if any of my uncles and aunts [humans] perform this ceremony properly, this way they will live.” She became young, too, then middle-aged, then old (on behalf of all women). Hare thanked her. This is a ceremony about living until old age, which is the last topic brought up in Thin Leather’s Mockingbird speech. Both the O’odham and the Winnebago texts identify corn as a means for gaining old age, but it is corn as revealed within the breast (or behind it, within the rib cage) in the Winnebago (perhaps a “milk-corn” that young women naturally produce) and corn as grown normally from the earth in the O’odham. And the Winnebago Corn divinity is named Grandmother Earth, a person distinct from the Winnebago Earthmaker. Corn is a man-god in Pima-Papago mythology, as we saw in chapter 2 in Thin Leather’s story on Corn and Tobacco. I said above the Winnebego speech reads like an oration, but we don’t know if it was one, that is, whether it was a word and phrase memorized speech delivered in a loud voice during a ceremony. If it was an oration, it is a departure from the usual plot form of those speeches, for they usually confine themselves to the doings of one hero, whether stationary or making a journey. Thus, the Mockingbird speech centers on an “I” who needs the world to be stabilized and who then got a house built in front of him. The Winnebago text starts with such a hero, Earthmaker, then changes to another, Hare, and comes to involve a third, Grandmother. This makes the Winnebago text more like a drama than the normal single O’odham oration. Hare and Grandmother have an adventure together, not just in talking with each other but in surprising and resisting each other. Let us compare the Winnebago Earthmaker and Hare with the hero of the Pima texts. The latter is identified as Earth Medicine-man by Vanyiko. He has the same initial problem as Earthmaker, namely, to stabilize the world (Pima mythology states that Earth Medicine man also made the world and in a manner not unlike the Winnebago god—see Bahr

126 / Appendix 1 et al. 1994, 45–65). The Winnebago hero solves the stabilizing problem on his own, but the Pima hero needs and gets help. Only afterward does the Winnebago Earthmaker encounter a problem he can’t solve alone, namely, the preservation of humans from bad spirits. Hare does that for him, and then Hare causes human mortality by failing to do what Grandmother has ordered. Then comes the last problem, which Hare could not anticipate and in which Earthmaker is not mentioned: how to obtain longevity for mortal humanity by means of Grandmother’s milk-corn and the institution of the Medicine dance. Here are the coordinates in the Pima text. Thin Leather’s “I” gets a house built (echoed by Hare’s flinging of snakes), and then comes the mysterious and ambiguous treatment of someone or something like a baby. Then comes smoke puffing, then clouds, then rain, then corn growing, and finally longevity through “normal” eating of corn. Surely, the Winnebago text is clearer on the rejuvenation of Hare. I assume that the similarities between these texts are coincidental, and the Pimas of Arizona and Winnebago of Wisconsin had no direct influence on each other. There could be an indirect influence or affinity by virtue of both being native peoples of North America. We will only know that by finding additional texts on earth making, earth stablilizing, lodge building, and longevity seeking. I am inclined to think, first, that those ideas are not special to North America, and second that they are rarely all addressed in one text anywhere. Therefore, the Pima and Winnebago convergence is accidental, and what is interesting is how these two peoples obtained different results through these accidentally similar means (rainmaking and a medicine society).

A Jicarilla Apache Text on the Loss of Cyclone and Thunder This text, called The Quarrel between Cyclone and Thunder and the Ceremony for Rain, was taken down in English in 1934 or 1935 and was published by Morris Opler in 1938 (reprinted 1994). The following is my condensation of it. Cyclone and Thunder quarreled over who is the more powerful. Thunder strikes and breaks trees, but Cyclone picks them up and moves them. Cyclone wins. The two stop cooperating so there is no rain. The people suffer. An old man offers a pipe to invite the help of four men who know a rain ceremony. They come. The old man asks the people in general to provide buckskins for use in the ceremony, a dance for rain. For the dance, twenty-four men and twenty-four women form parallel lines facing east, the men and women in alternation.

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Two old men smoke one kind of pipe in front, two more smoke another kind in back. The old men sing rain songs, the dancers dance in place. One old man represents Old Man Salamander, another Old Man Blue Water Frog, another Old Man Yellow Crayfish, and the last Old Man Red Turtle. The original old man sings and the people dance in a circle. The dance starts in the morning daylight. Soon there are clouds and rain. The people stand in the rain. Their clothes are soaked. The four men have thunder and wind in their bodies, so they can bring rain. This ceremony was used for a long time, but by the 1930s the deerskin costumes were difficult to get. (Opler 1994, 216–18) The story does not make perfect sense because the persons who lead the ceremony have the same things that were lost through the quarrel. The story does not explain what become of the original Cyclone and Thunder. In any case, what is important to us is that the lost characters are not expelled for a flaw, and their loss is remedied by reverent singing and the smoking of tobacco, not by getting drunk, singing, and being imitated by mockingbirds. In short, sobriety replaces drinking, and tobacco smoke is added to the singing. Recall that the first of the four O’odham texts given also involves tobacco as used to get rain, and of course this is the means in Thin Leather’s Mockingbird speech. It is possible that tobacco is quite generally and broadly (through the continent) considered to be a way to bring rain—and the Papagos’ get-drunk-and-sing and get-imitated method is considered a special, even comical method, even by them. Surely, on the morning before the Sit-and Drink the medicine man tells the assembled rain dancers what he has learned about future rains through his night of smoke-aided divinations. In this instance smoke seems to be used to help the medicine man “see” the rain clouds and it is not used to attract them. But perhaps what the medicine man sees is the clouds being drawn forth by the scent of the smoke.

Figure 9. Rafters holding up the roof of the council house. “Measuring Worm . . . broke into four parts and I took them and stood them. Gopher. . . . Much grass of his biting here put . . . and with it I roofed it. . . . See this council house is where everything has its foundation.” (Property of Bernard Fontana, McGee Expedition 277a B)

Appendix 2 Vanyiko’s Matches For All of the Portions of Thin Leather’s Speech The following are the Vanyiko speeches, taken down by George Herzog, that correspond to the Thin Leather speech. I give the Vanyiko speeches in the order that matches the progression in Thin Leather. Between them they cover the whole of the latter man’s speech. Except for the last item, once a Vanyiko text is begun I give the entire text and indicate with bracketed comments which parts of Thin Leather correspond to the Vanyiko passage in question. The Vanyiko texts are cited according to their place in two manuscripts: a typescript edited by me of Vanyiko’s Ho’ok A:gida, including the speeches and songs; and a typescript folio made by Herzog of Vanyiko’s orations. The former is held by the Archive of Traditional Music at Indiana University and the latter is held by the American Philosophical Society in Philadelphia. Some speeches exist in one manuscript and not the other. I have altered Herzog’s Pima transcript and translation in both manuscripts similarly to how I altered those of Russell’s Thin Leather (chapter 4). The spelling alterations bring the Pima spellings into line with present practice, and those of translation are for accuracy and legibility. It was a great help to have the two Herzog and the one Russell renditions of what are basically very similar and yet difficult O’odham texts. One rendition would help in understanding another. That help is manifest in my Pima spellings and English translations, which, of course, are still improvable.

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An ember burning toward-you [I] stood-it-up.

Ku:ck wi’idag m-wui kei.

In the west was the Black Measuring-worm, And I called kinship to him. Then he felt kindly to me. He fell [to ground], broke in four parts, And I took them, stood-them-up

Am hudunig tagio S-cuk Ocvig,

Kunt ab i:mig soso.

Amjed si n-ho’ige’idam e-ta:t[.]

Am gei, am gi’ikpa o:m[.]

Kunt am ui[,] aps i cu:cua.

(This portion corresponds to Thin Leather’s Part 4, “Measuring-worms Make a House Frame)

And in the mud house I set you,

Kunt o wa bit ki: eda am m-daswa,

(This portion corresponds to Thin Leather’s Part 1, “You and I in a House, with a Cigarette Ember.”)

Text 1. Prayer for Rain 2, of Earth Doctor (so named in the Herzog. folio, 27–30. The text is also in the typescript of Vanyiko’s Ho’ok A:gida, 42–44.)

In the south was the Green Measuring-worm, And I knew what to call kinship to him. Then he felt kindly to me. He fell, broke in two parts, And I took them and, laid them across [the posts]. In the east was the Shining Measuring-worm, And I knew what to call kinship to him. Then he felt kindly to me. And he fell-and, then broke in many parts, And I took them, straightly laid them. In the north was the Red Measuring-worm, And I knew what to call kinship to him. Then he felt kindly to me.

Am vakoli tagio S-cehedagi Ocvig,

Kunt hab cu’igkam ma:mc, ab i:mig soso[,]

Amjed si n-ho’ige’idam e-ta:t[.]

Am gei, am go:kpa o:m.

Kunt am u’uk, am vauppa.

Am sialg tagio Tondam Ocvig,

Kunt hab cu’igkam ma:mc, ab i:mig soso[,]

Amjed si n-ho’ige’idam e-ta:t[.]

K t am ke:ck, am mu’ipa o:m.

Kunt am ui, am se’esel si I vaupa.

Im na:naki oid tagio S-wegiom Ocvig,

Nt hab cu’igkam a ma::mc, ab i:mig soso.

Amjed si n-ho’ige’idam e-ta:t[.]

And I took them, very bent them, then across very laid them.

Kunt am ui[,] si ki:kihotat, am ga:gai si i vauppa.

In the west was the Black Gopher, And I called kinship to him. Then he felt kindly to me. Much grass of his biting, [with it] he arrived, [And] here put it. In the south was the Green Gopher, And I called kinship to him. Then he felt kindly to me.

Hudunig tagio Cuk Cevho,

Nt ab i:mig soso.

T amjed si n-ho’ige’idam e-ta:t[.]

Ha’akia sa’i e-ki’imuna[,] tag ji:via[,]

In i toa.

Im ka:ck tagio ge Cehedagi Cevho,

Nt ab i:mig soso[.]

Amjed si n-ho’ige’idam e-ta:t[.]

(This portion corresponds to Thin Leather’s Part 5, “Gopher Roofs the House.”)

There he fell-and, then in uncountable pieces very broke.

Am ke:ke:ck, am pi mackam o:m.

Much grass of his biting, [with it] he arrived, And here put it. In the east was the Shining Gopher, And I called kinship to him. Then he felt friendly to me. Much grass of his biting, he arrived, And here put it. In the north was the Red Gopher, And I called kinship to him. Then he felt friendly to me, Much grass of his biting, he arrived, And with it I roofed it [house], good thin cloud told [intended] and did.

Ha’akia sa’i e-ki’imuna[,] tag ji:wia,

In i toa.

Sialig tagio Tondam Cevho[,]

Nt ab i:mig soso[.]

Amjed si n-ho’ige’idam e-ta:t[.]

Ha’akia sa’i e-kimuma tag ji:wia,

In i toa.

Na:naki oid tagio S-wegiom Jevho,

Nat ab i:mig soso[.]

Amjed si n-ho’ige’idam e-ta:t[,]

Ha’akia sa’i e-ki’imuna[,] tag i ji:wia,

Kunt hekaj ab si sa’ic[,] s-keg komal cewagi a:gk hab ju:.

And I moved it, with it really stamped-on-it, and finished. Beautiful snow told [intended] and did, on top [I] made-a-fire.

Kunt ab i himc, hekaj ab si keispahi[,] k na:to.

Ge s-keg gev a:gk hab ju:[,] da:m eda nai.

In the east the Shining Mockingbird, [a] very soft telling took-and, arrived. House-posts between strung it [the telling], house-ribs between strung it, All across laid it. Then to tree end strung it, to mountains peaks strung it, to the sky strung it, With that the earth very calmly lay, as he told [intended] and did.

Sialig tagio heg S-tondam Su:g, si s-moimma ha’icu a:ga bek, i ji:via.

Ce:cendag ab i giahi, kikiho soson ab i giahi,

An ga:gai si vaopa.

Amjed u:s ku:g ab i giahi, do:da’ag ku:kug ab i giahi, da:m a:cim ab i giahi,

Hekaj heg jeved am si do:dolim ka:ck[,] a:g hab e-ju:.

(This portion corresponds to but contradicts Thin Leather’s Part 2, Mockingbirds Fail.)

The earth already was four-times mounded.

Kut hekihu jeved gi’ikpa e-mu’umka, e-do:doa.

“And you can put-it-on-your-back, and far-away do. Whenever the people need something from you, You will continue to be so.”

“Kupt ag komck[,] va:saj hab o i e-ju:.

Kut hekid heg hemajkam hem-wui ha’icu taccu,

Kupt ag oidc am p o wa cu’ig.”

There was the earth, inside it wiggled and lay, Inside it bumped-up-and-down and lay.

Ko va id jeved, am o eda hoinc ka:c,

Am o eda cu:cuakc ka:c.

(This portion roughly corresponds to Thin Leather’s Part 3 “Down Nested Medicine-man and Gray Spider Quiet the Earth.”)

Text 2. Vi:g Koskam’s Speech, for Rain. (So named in the Herzog folio, 11. This speech is not included in Vanyiko’s Ho’ok A:gida, which text credits the Mockingbird with quieting the earth, and says nothing about the quieting activities of this god, Down Nested Medicine-man.)

And there was his soft telling,

Ko va vud heg s-moimma ha’icu a:ga,

Inside excitedly he-told-to-himself. In the west a black hand-patter1 he hanged, In the south a green hand-patter he hanged. In the east a white hand-patter he hanged, In the north a tallow hand-patter he hanged. And from that the earth got calm

Heg eda am si va:mk e-a:g.

Am hudunig tagio ge s-cuk mawatatag am nagia[,]

Im ka:ck tagio ge s-cehedag maowadag am nagia[,]

Im sialig tagio ge s-toa maowadag am nagia[,]

Im nanki oid tagio am ge s-uam maowadag am nagia.

Kut o va hekaj am dodolimad g jeved ka:cim.

(This portion may be analogous to Thin Leather Part 1.)

Text 3. Second Speech at the neicuda. (So named by Herzog on his folio, 19–20. This is also the first oration that appears in Vanyiko’s Ho’ok A;gida, 16–17, at a point where Earth Medicine-man has made the first clouds, lightning, and rain. Presumably the speaker is Earth Medicine-man, although Vanyiko doesn’t actually say that. The movements of the earth have already been stopped, but at that point in his narrative of the stopping Vanyiko does not give the speech, quoted above, of the successful Mockingbird. That speech comes later in Vanyiko’s prose narrative, at the point when the first council house is constructed.

And there was then the Down Nested Medicine-man,

Ko va g eda g Vi:g Koskam Ma:kai[,]

And you made-me-go and, arrive, [At] my cleared land’s edge [I? you?] step and stand. Look around! Poor appears my land, With broken pots covered it lays. Hacked-off hair [lies everywhere].

Kup eda n himcc[,] i ji:wia,

Jeved n-cu’ita hugid ag keisk kekiwa.

Gam g i ne:nok!

So’ig o ma:s [g] n-jevedga,

Ha’akia ha’a ha’inkaj e-maisc ka:c,

Mo’o hikivonig.

There in the west rain the beautiful wind, Nicely wafted me, reached to the east. Behind it followed the black cloud, this spread mat [earth, being] crossed-edge-to-edge, slowly reached to the east.

Ko va im hudunig tagio i me [g] s-keg hewelig[,]

S-ap ta:hadkam n-vi’um, sialig ce:mo’o[.]:

Oitk i hi: [g] cuk ce:vagi, id wa:kta ka:cim si hohokidagwa[,] sialig ab s-ba:bagi ce:mo’o.

(This portion corresponds somewhat to Thin Leather’s Part 6, “White Rainbows East.”)

So it happened, bad-doings, [my] friend,

B at ki hems e-ju:, am cu’ijig, nawoj[,

Then followed a black bird, Blackly wing-flapping, blackly seeding as it went. On earth mounds scattered them [seeds}, reaching the east. Then followed the gray cloud, Gray bird, grayly wing-flapping, grayly seeding as it went.

On mesquite-tree canopy-dents scattered them, reaching the east. Then followed the red cloud, Red bird, redly wing-flapping, redly seeding as it went.

It reached the east. Then followed the white cloud, White bird, whitely wing-flapping, whitely seeding.

Ab oidk i hi: [g] cug u’uhig,

Cuckam a:ngevhim, cuk kaijitahimk i hi:.

Jeved cu’uvidk da:m gantad, sialig ab ce:mo’o.

Ab oidk i hi [g] s-k,okomafgi ce:vagi,

Kokomagi u’uhig, kokomagiim a:gevihim, kokomagi kaijitahimk i hi:.

Kukui ce’ecpelk da:m gantad, sialig ab ce:mo’o.

Ab oidk i hi: [g] s-vepeg ce:vagi,

S-wepeg u’uhig, s-wepeg a:ngevhim, s-vepegim kaijitahimk i hi:.

Sialig ab ce:mo’o.

Ab oidk [g] s-to:ta ce:vagi,

S-to:ta u’uhig, to:ta am a:gevhim, to:ta am kaijitahim.

Then ran the beautiful wind, Then followed gentle rain. Then came out the wild-greens, beautifully flowered.

Kut ab i mel ge s-keg e-hevelig[,]

Oidk pi va:het2 k am ju:.

Am wu:s heg i:vagi, s-keg hiosig.

(Most of the speech has nothing to do with Thin Leather’s text. The end, however, corresponds to Thin Leather’s Part 7, “Plant, Grow, Harvest, Eat, Live, Kiss, Crawl.”)

Text 4. Coyote’s Speech, Gamber’s War, from Herzog folio, 37–43. Vanyiko’s Ho’ok A:gida has part of a story about two warlike Coyotes. I assume that Herzog stopped taking things down from Vanyiko before this text was completed; and I assume that the complete version would include this oration.

Along water-wash-channels scattering [seeds], it reached the east.

A’aki e-ci:cin g oidk gantanahim[,] sialig ab ce:mo’o.

And the medicine-man’s house very renewed itself, with wind, with clouds.3 Then it whitely drizzled. The land spread below us showed wet.4 Then on that drop the various kinds of seeds. And then came out the thick root, thick stalk, wide leaf, beautiful tassel, navel, undying seed, and they ripened.

Some old-man surviving, old-woman surviving, will eat it, Therefore excitedly they crawl.

Kut heg ma:kai ki: si e-wecicud, hevelkaj, ce:vagikaj.

Kut o amjed s-to:to’am si:pi,

T-weco ka:cim jeved va’akpank ce:.

Kut ag da:m am sel ge na:nko ma:s kaijga.

Kut am o vu:s [g] savadk tatk, savadk va’ot, tadan ha:hag, s-keg mudadag, hiosig, hikum, pi I mu:kikam kaikc[,] bai.

Hascu keli vi’ikam, oks vi’ikam, heg ab hug[,]

Hekaj am si i va:m banmed.

Appendix 3

141

Author/Recorder Thin Leather/Russell

Thin Leather/Lloyd

Thin Leather/Lloyd

Vanyiko/Herzog

Rain Making Speech with Mockingbird

Navicu Speech 1 No Mockingbird

Navicu Speech 2 with mockingbird

Prayer for Rain of Earth Doctor 2, with Mockingbird

Pima Akimel O’odham

Title

Speeches (Orations) Niokculida

Texts, Orations, and Stories

Context

In Quieting of the Earth story, after building the council house.

In Navicu story

In Navicu story

In description of Pima Rain Ceremony. Not tied to any prose narrative.

Table 1.

Page

Ch. 4, pp. 92–95 Appendix 2

Ch. 4, pp. 87–88

Ch. 4, pp. 85–86

Ch. 4, pp. 97–105

Comments

Earth Medicine-man builds council house. Mockingbird calms the earth. No wine, clouds, wind or rain. Ancient I is Earth Medicine-man, you is the people.

Mockingbird fails to calm the earth, Spider does. No council house or tobacco smoke or rain or wine. Seeds grow. Ancient we and ancient I.

People drink. Navicu makes his costume. Navicu gives his power to the people. I is the god I’itoi, and Navicu; we is the people.

Mockingbird fails to calm earth. Council house is built. Smoke attracts crops and rain. No wine. Unidentified ancient I and you.

Vanyiko/Herzog Vanyiko or Blackwater/ Benedict

Coyote Speech

Rain Ceremony, Mockingbird Speech

Author/Recorder Moreno/Underhill

P. Lopez/Bahr

J. Listo/Bahr

Unknown/Underhill

Name

Santa Rosa Mockingbird Speech

Mockingbird Speech

Preliminary speech to seated people

Running Speech and Response

Papago Tohono O’odham

Vanyiko/Herzog

Speech of the neicuda

In Santa Rosa Rain Ceremony

In Santa Rosa Rain Ceremony. Referenced only

In First Wine Drinks Story

In Santa Rosa Rain Ceremony

Context

Not attached to a narrative

In Vanyico Ho’ok A:gida not given here.

Ch. 3, p. 61

Ch. 3, p. 62

Ch. 2, pp. 48–51

Ch. 4, pp. 79–81

Page

Ch. 4, pp. 94–95

Appendix 2

Appendix 2

Not given.

People Drink, Wind and cloud come. Crops grow. I impersonates past humans. No Mockingbird.

People drink wine. Mockingbird in far rain house hears and talks. Wind and rain come. No I.

Wine is made. Mockingbird in far rain house brings sounds to wind and cloud. Rain is made. No I, but present day you.

Comments

Mockingbird fails to calm the earth, Council house is built. Tobacco smoke attracts clouds and rain. Ancient I is probably Elder Brother.

Wind and rain come I probably is Earth Medicine-man.

Land is dry, then clouds come. Birds scatter seeds. I is probably Earth Medicine-man. No Mockingbird or wine.

Author/Recorder Unknown/Underhill

J. Dolores/Saxton

J. Dolores/Saxton

J.Antoin/Densmore

J.Antoin/Densmore

Unknown/Underhill

Name

Sitting Speech

People Drink and Rain Comes

Mountains Pour Yellow Liquid

My Friends and Relatives

Turn your Thoughts in the four Directions

Admonitory Speech

Papago Tohono O’odham Context

In Santa Rosa Rain Ceremony

None given

None given

In Loss of Wind and Rain Story

In Loss of Wind and Rain Story

In Santa Rosa Rain Ceremony

Page

Ch. 3, pp. 59–60

Ch. 4, pp. 77–79

Ch. 4, pp. 77–79

Ch. 4, pp. 75–77

Ch. 4, pp. 75–77

Ch. 4, p. 72

Comments

Not a true traditional oration/speech.

Wind and clouds come from ruins summoned by people’s thoughts. No I. No Mockingbird. Wine is being drunk.

Wine is drunk. Mocking bird is asked to bring wind and cloud from ancient ruin. A present-day I does not journey.

People drink. Wind and cloud bring rain. An I does not journey. No Mockingbird.

Wine is made. Clouds come from distant rainhouse. No I. No Mockingbird.

Guest is seated and wine is drunk. Rain comes. No Mockingbird.

Ancient I goes to distant rain house.

Author/Recorder Thin Leather/Lloyd

Thin Leather/ Fewkes

Blackwater/Bahr

Smith, Allison/Bahr 94

Unknown/Bahr 94 from Font/Fewkes

Corn and Tobacco or Wants to get Married

How Morning Green Lost his Power or Loss of Wind and Cloud

Girl becomes Saguaro

Origin of Cactus Wine

Bitter man

Pima Akimel O’odham

Name

Prose Story Ho’ok A:gida

Cited only

Cited only. Has description of wine drinking ceremony.

Cited only

Context

Page

Bahr 2001, pp. 88–89

Story 3, Ch. 2. pp. 34–35

Story 1, Ch. 2, pp. 23–26

Comments

Wind and Cloud are sent away by mean Bitter Man. Crops fail. Bitter Man brings them back.

I’itoi helps man find saguaro. Wine is made. People drink in ceremony and misbehave.

Mother plays tokka and neglects girl. Neglected girl becomes saguaro. Saguaro pops up in Papago country Wine is made, people go crazy with drink.

Wind and rain are banished for rude behavior. They are called back by humming-bird. They bring back too much rain. Mediator is rope made by girl’s hair.

Girl becomes tobacco, Dog pumpkin baby becomes saguaro Wine, and drinking does not bring rain. Tobacco smoke brings rain.

Moore Shaw

Drinker Man

Wind and Cloud

Thin Leather/Lloyd

Vanyiko/Herzog

Navicu Story

Quieting the Earth

Other Pima stories

Author/Recorder Unknown/Bahr 94 from Font/Fewkes

Name

Pima Akimel O’odham Context

Mockingbird speech is embedded after council house building.

Contains Navicu speeches 1 and 2

Much cleaned up for publication.

Cited only

Ch. 2, pp. 90–91

Ch. 4, pp. 81–86

Ch. 2, p. 55

Page

Earth Medicine Man makes earth. Mockingbird quiets the earth by speaking. Spider also quiets the earth. Later Earth Medicine-man makes a council house.

I’itoi makes Navicu. Navicu is attracted by Earth shaking, dancing people with endless corn supply. Navicu provides meat which they lack. Navicu steals grinding stone and brings it to Aji. Clouds come and rain. Navicu makes speech.

Wind and Rain first bury then expose pottery shard. Girl copies pattern into new pot.

Drinker Man (I’itoi-like figure) is angry at people. Turns people into saguaros.

Comments

Author/Recorder Unknown/Wright

P.Lopez/Bahr

Unknown/Saxton,Saxton

Antoin/Densmore

Name

The Giant Cactus

First Wine Drinks

Rain Goes Away

Saguaro Story

Papago, Tohono O’odham

Cited only

Cited only Includes an oration and description of rain ceremony.

Context

Page

Densmore 1929, 149–50

Ch. 2, pp. 38–47

Ch. 2, pp. 27–33

Comments

Mother plays tokka Neglected child becomes saguaro. Wine is made. A song is sung.

Wind is banished for uncovering girl privates, rain follows. Hummingbird is sent to bring them back. Wine is made and people sing. Rain comes.

Mother Pays Tokka. Neglected boy becomes saguaro. Wine is made. Sit and drink ceremony. Mockingbird speech is recited by someone. Mockingbird hears and calls rain.

Mother plays tokka. Neglected boy becomes saguaro. Wine is made, people like animals misbehave. Chief wants to ban cactus. Coyote scatters seeds. Wine does not bring rain.

Author/Recorder Garcia/Densmore

Unknown/Underhill

Jose/Santa Rosa School

S. Ignacio Enos

Name

Untitled

Untitled

The Legend of the Saguaro

Saguaro Story

Papago, Tohono O’odham Context

Sanitized for white audience

Cited only

Cited only

Cited only and characterized by Papago informant as Pima story

Page

Ch 2, p. 55

Underhill 1934

Densmore 1929, 161–62

Girl becomes saguaro. Fruits make people and animals happy.

Mother plays tokka. Neglected child becomes saguaro. People/animals make wine and misbehave.

Mother plays tokka. Neglected child becomes saguaro. Wine is made. People misbehave. I’itoi tells people to drink in order to bring rain.

Medicine man makes saguaro but does not like it. Coyote scatters seeds. People make wine and sing for rain.

Comments

Saguaro Story (Antoin/Densmore) Untitled (Garcia/Densmore) The Giant Cactus (Unknown/Wright) First Wine Drinks (Lopez/Bahr) Untitled (Unknown/Underhill) Legend of Saguaro ( Jose/Santa Rosa School) Girl Becomes Saguaro (Blackwater/Bahr) Orig of Cactus Wine (Smith, Allison/Bahr ’94) Drinker Man (unknown/Fewkes, Bahr ’94) Loss of Wind and Cloud Stories Rain Goes Away (Unknown/Saxton & Saxton) Morning Green (Thin Leather/Fewkes, Bahr ’94) Bitter Man (Unknown/Fewkes, Bahr ’94) Stories Containing Elements of Both Corn and Tobacco (Thin Leather/Lloyd)

Saguaro Origin Stories

X

X X X X X X X

rowdy

X

X

X X X

Pima

X X

X X X X X

X

tokka

X (X) X

X

rain

Rowdiness and Rain Making According to Type of Story

Table 2.

X

X X X X X X

Papago

150 / Appendix 3

Table 3. Themes According to Tribe Papago Stories Saguaro Story (Antoin/Densmore) Untitled (Garcia/Densmore) The Giant Cactus (Unknown/Wright) First Wine Drinks (Lopez/Bahr) Untitled (Unknown/Underhill) Legend of Saguaro ( Jose/Santa Rosa School) Rain Goes Away (Unknown/Saxton & Saxton)

Loss of Wind/Cloud

Saguaro Origin X X X X X X

X

Pima Stories Girl Becomes Saguaro (Blackwater/Bahr) Orig of Cactus Wine (Smith, Allison/Bahr ’94) Drinker Man (unknown/Fewkes, Bahr ’94) Morning Green (Thin Leather/Fewkes, Bahr ’94) Bitter Man (Unknown/Fewkes, Bahr ’94) Corn and Tobacco (Thin Leather/Lloyd) **These Pima saguaro origin stories are “non-Tokka.”

X X** X** X X (X)

(X)

Notes Chapter 1. Introduction 1. They are equivalent in that the “I” is the present historian or “Witch” teller. But there are differences between the oral teller’s situation and that of the literate author. The oral teller must be heard in person and this teller does not try to be original or analytical. Rather, the teller presents a traditional, sacred, or special, and venerated story which the audience feels privileged to hear. Literate historians are keen to improve on their predecessors by providing new or reinterpreting old documents. Actually, I think that oral tellers do this, too, by taking pleasure in differing with each other according to a practice I call parody, to produce a literary and cultural condition I call flux. 2. Although some O’odhams may disagree, I hold that the “songs” of birds are actually their “talk,” since those vocalizations are the birds’ normal means of conversing or communication. Songs to the O’odham, I propose and believe, are perfected, perfectly fixed, ideally absolutely invariant, multisentence texts. Birds “talk” in beautiful tones and phrases, but what they talk is more casual, spontaneous, and variable than O’odham songs. 3. All of these alternative labels designate pieces in language, that is, texts. The typical prayer of the Western tradition, it seems to me, is the petition or request addressed to God or a saint. For example, the rosary asks Mary to “pray for us sinners now and at the hour of our death.” This is a request that Mary intercede with God on the prayer’s behalf. The rosary is an important prayer for O’odham Catholics. The old-timers usually recite it in Spanish. It seems to me that the native O’odham tradition lacked prayers like the rosary. What I call their orations are not of this nature. The orations are generally first-person stories that tell what an ancient character experienced and did. Within them we quite commonly find a formula such as “And I knew what kind of kinship to call to him,/ and he felt kindly to me—and, then arrived” (this is from the Pima Mockingbird speech). The key phrases are “called kinship” and “felt kindly to me.” In O’odham these are i:mig sosoa and n-ho’ige’itam e-ta:t, literally, “kinship cry [as in tearfully cry]” and “kindly-to-me-in-himself-felt.” The standard way to say “to-pray” in O’odham is ta:n g ho’ige’ida, “to-ask the kindness [or the blessing],” a good roundabout way to say “to petition,” which of course is what a rosary is. (People do not use this cumbersome expression when they

151

152 / Notes to Chapter 1 speak about saying the rosary. Instead they say, “let’s rosary,” using the verb losalt, “to-rosary,” from the Spanish rosario.) The “to-pray” word is not, however, a good description or characterization of an O’odham “talking-for-someone/oration.” 4. A word now very much used and translated as “religion” is himdag. Etymologically this is him, “to-go” and -dag, “way-of-something,” so the word means “way-of-going.” I:’idag has a similar structure, but it means something bad, roughly “alcoholism.” 5. Actually, neither of these acts is given origin in stories of ancient times. It is just that people today explain them as sacraments, that is, as acts that affect the soul. I have not heard this about the wine-drinking ceremony, although I think that some people could feel and could speak in this way. 6. Here are three letters on the suppression of Wine Drinks, one from the Pima superintendent of 1897 and two from Papago superintendents, of 1916 and 1917. I thank Dean Portman for supplying the first letter and Bernard Fontana for the second and third. The letters were found at the U.S. National Archives, Pacific Region, Laguna Niguel, California. Thanks also to the archive for providing them. From the Pima, in response to a news article published in a Los Angeles newspaper: Sir: In your issue of Saturday October 2nd, under the head of “Phoenix News,” your correspondent closes his letter with the following letter. [This document is missing. It would be a report of a Wine Drinks.] While possibly true, the above item is calculated, if passed without comment, to leave a wrong impression in the minds of your readers. Since the Pima Indians were first known to the white man their XX [illegible word, possibly “cattle”] feasts or tiswin [cactus wine] dances have prevailed except of later years. The more intelligent and educated Indians have abandoned them wholly, while the uneducated indulge in them less frequent, but still occasionally. By the present agent they are regarded as not only immoral, but vicious and dangerous, sometimes resulting in murder, hence strict orders have been given to the Indian Police who patrol the reservation to notify the Indians that these dances shall not be held, and when such rule is transgressed, the leaders if found are arrested and promptly punished. If the “eye witness” as above quoted by your correspondent [reporter of the Wine Drinks] will be kind enough to forward such information, as to time, place, and the Indians engaged in this dance and drunk . . . , to the agent at Sacaton, Arizona, a lesson will be taught to the perpetrators that will serve as a wholesome warning against such indulgence in the future. . . . Already several of these fiestas have been located and stopped by the watchful, faithful Indian police. . . . Very respectfully, Henry J. Cleveland [this last name is difficult to read and I may have it wrong], U.S. Indian Agent. October 5, 1897.

Notes to Chapter 1

/

153

From the Papago, from the Sells [Papago] Agency Superintendent’s Annual Report of 1917 to the Commission of Indian Affairs: Some action should be taken to put a stop to the making of tis-win from the cactus fruit and the impositions of medicine-men in the form of singings and rain-making incantations indulged by them in their ceremonies which they represent as calculated to “make it rain.” These practices are indulged in only by the Indians of the northwestern part of the new [as of 1915] reservation and in the portion of Papago country under other supervision [from the Sacaton, Pima, agency]. Last year the biggest celebration was held at Jackrabbit [in the north, probably under Sacaton supervision] but one was also held at Santa Rosa, under this [Sells Agency] jurisdiction[,] and though I have advised against it and done all possible to put a stop to it [,] even to holding under arrest their chief who instructs them to continue it, still there are indications that some of them plan to defy the laws and regulations and again “make wine” as they call it. . . . Jewell D. Martin And from an earlier letter, of January 1916, by the prior superintendent to the commissioner in Washington: These fiestas are often arranged on short notice and the naaiwak [wine] is not made until the last [two days before the drinking]. The best method in my opinion to control the manufacture and use of this drink, is to try and have some good man in each village to take enough interest in his people to come and inform the agency employee or policeman whenever they hear the naaiwak is to be made, and then to destroy all the drink found in the containers. . . . Henry McQuigg 7. Almost everyone uses commas in writing English, including English translations of Native American languages, and almost no one uses them in writing Native American languages. The principal present writer of O’odham, Ofelia Zepeda, does not use commas for O’odham (e.g., Evers, ed. 1980, 110–21). George Herzog, whose work figures in this book, did as Zepeda now does. Frank Russell used commas in writing O’odham language songs but not in writing O’odham language orations. Dell Hymes, America’s leading scholar in Native American ethnopoetics, reduces the need for commas by writing the works that he studies as verse, the short lines of which do not invite commas in either the native language or in English. He does not abjure commas in either the native language or the translation, and he does not use them with absolute consistency (this of the native language goes with that of the English). At least he is not consistent in one of his more recent papers on an Arikara text (1996). David Bringhurst, who renders Haida texts into lines about the size of those used by Hymes, uses commas at the end of some Haida language lines

154 / Notes to Chapter 2 but never within them. His English translations have commas within lines. (Hymes sometimes puts a comma within a native language line.) All of the above writers use periods to mark off equivalent longish segments— sentences—between their native language texts and their translations, but they balk at using commas to equate portions within the sentences. They grace their English with commas, but they leave their native language texts uncomma-ed. I suppose they do this to afford “elbow room” in translating their verse lines and sentences. I prefer marked equivalent short subdivisions over elbow room. 8. “Parody” is not the perfect word for the relations I believe exist between these texts because we normally think of parodies as jokes in which the parodic text is less dignified than the text—a story or whatever—it plays upon. To parody in the normal sense, then, is something like “to reclothe and lower, for fun.” Thin Leather’s speech-story is “higher” in dignity and content than the speech I consider it a parody of, but I cannot think of a better word for the intertextual (see below) relation that I have in mind. Beneath this problem of tone is a more challenging one on textual relations and in fact on truthfulness. If parodies are invented, that is, are made up, then they are not truthful accounts of what actually happened in history. They are responses to texts and not (or not much) to past historical realities. I believe this is true of these two and also of other texts discussed in this book. And yet the O’odham in their separate communities took them as history. To the O’odham I say that I believe the texts are parodies but I cannot prove it. If I were born to the texts and someone told me they are parodies, I would say “prove it,” and as just stated there is no certain proof that the texts are as I say. Now let us contrast parody with two other acts, one bad and one good, plagiary and revision. In parody, in the texts we are concerned with, one text retains another’s key character but changes what the character does. Thus, the mockingbird succeeds in getting rain in the “original” version, but the bird fails to quiet the earth in the parody. In plagiarism the new text retains both the key character and what the character does (indeed, it retains the entire story). Also, in tribal societies the new text usually changes the locus of the action: it says the events happened “here,” in our ancient past, not “there” in the past of the people it reacts to. (There is plagiary in tribal societies. This is the process called “borrowing” by earlier students of Native American stories. I fault those students for overemphasizing plagiary and ignoring parody.) In revisions, finally, one retains the key character and event, but one improves on the story, for example by deleting or elevating its gross and embarrassing aspects. Examples of this are discussed at the end of the next chapter.

Chapter 2. The Origin Stories behind the Wine Drinks 1. That they take as history what outsiders take as myth is consistent with how I like to use those terms. “History,” I propose, is a story that both the teller and hearer, or equally the writer and reader, believe to be literally true. “Myth” is a story that the teller/writer believes literally but the hearer/reader does not. “Fiction,” to me, is a story that neither party believes actually happened, and “lie” is a

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story disbelieved by the teller but believed by the hearer. Therefore, when I call an O’odham story a myth, this is because I think they believed it (so it is history to them), but I do not believe it. I wish there were a way to use the word myth that does not implicate my disbelief, but I don’t believe there is such a way. Therefore, I do not enjoy the use of the word, which seems to me to be a put-down, and I call this chapter “Origin Stories behind,” not “Myths behind.” 2. Now and in the past I stress that ancientness to the O’odham was a time before the normalization of human procreations and marriage. But this story’s act of expulsion, or we may say of shunning, points to an additional distinct feature of ancientness, and precisely of what I call the periods of Early and Middle ancientness. These were times before there was war. The third, “Late ancientness,” of a typical tribal mythology is the time of the onset of raiding and war, a part of ancientness that all oral peoples seemed to believe in. From that point in time on, down to the present, it was not safe for one or two persons to live or travel alone “in the middle of nowhere.” A fear of being discovered and killed by enemies, or “hostiles,” existed everywhere, and to be expelled from society was to be issued a death warrant. 3. The Papago story is in Saxton and Saxton 1978, 317–40). It has both oratory and songs. The orations are discussed in chapter 4 of this book. The Pima stories are in Bahr et al. 1994, 125–30; and Bahr, ed. 2001, 88–94. One of those is in “standard” form with girl who plays tokka. The other two have the cactus created by the god Elder-brother or Drinker Man. Densmore gives a similar story narrated by a Papago man but characterized by another Papago man as a Pima story (Densmore 1929, 161–62). It treats the god’s gift to humanity as a bane, due to the wine making and drinking that result from the gift. One of these stories is a mere two lines summary but is very ancient dating to 1775 (Fewkes 1906–07, 44). 4. Frank Russell says of Thin Leather: “From him was obtained the cosmogonical myth, many speeches, and much general information” (1908, 17). Russell doesn’t credit any other individual as a source of speeches, but J. William Lloyd (1911), mentioned in the next sentence, took down portions of Thin Leather’s Mockingbird speech. These portions are discussed in chapter 4. 5. And he also told a few to J. W. Fewkes. 6. Densmore 1929, 149–50; Wright 1929, 109–22; Underhill 1946, 42–43; Jose (Santa Ranch Rosa School) 1985; Bahr, ed. 2001, 88–89; and Lopez (this book). 7. Therefore, he needed Corn as an actor. But why did he pose Corn against Tobacco? As will be seen, he knew the standard Pima Wind Man and Cloud Man story on the origin of wine ceremonies. He did not tell this story to Lloyd, but he did tell it to Fewkes. I speculate that, wishing to use Corn in a play on the Tokka Girl story, he replaced Wind and Cloud with Corn and Tobacco. This argument depends on Thin Leather’s withholding from Lloyd two well-known stories that he told to others. That much is established. But the argument also depends on, or at least is enhanced by, the uniqueness of Thin Leather’s story of Corn and Tobacco. On the present evidence it is unique but of course one would like to know more tellers’ mythologies. 8. Harold Bell Wright’s book Long Ago Told (the title is an excellent translation of the O’odham expression hekihu a’aga) came about as follows. In the second half of the 1920s Wright lived in Tucson, Arizona. He was famous for writing novels about

156 / Notes to Chapter 3 simple, good white people of rural America. In Tucson he met a rancher who knew Katherine Kitt, a longtime white resident of the Papago country west of Tucson. Kitt had heard and written down in English many Papago stories. Aided by her and two Papagos, Wright formed some of those stories into a mythology book. The book is not clear on who the narrators were—probably several people who had spoken to Kitt over the years. Wright, Kitt, and their Papago helpers took the book draft to several contemporary Papago narrators for criticism, a rare and good step in Native American publication. The book was Wright’s sole published departure from novel writing. There is a good book on the “social gospel” aspect of his life and work by James Ferre (1983). Wright’s O’odham book has been ignored by scholars of anthropology, folklore, and literature, probably because he seemed too much the popularizing amateur. But he had an advantage over those who ignored him. He was alive to the O’odham narrators’ love of character. The academics then and now have favored reading stories for cosmology and “techno-economics.” I am sure that Wright and Kitt selected the stories to anthologize according to their preferences, and a “real” Papago mythology would be different from what was selected for their anthology. Still, all of the selections were part of some real mythology and many of them appear in no other publication. Therefore, Wright’s Long Ago Told is an overlooked star in the O’odham firmament. 9. There is a complication. Besides the summer wine drinks there was at least one other ceremony where saguaro wine was drunk and rain was invited. This is the Wi:gita, held in two places of anthropological record but known about throughout the O’odham area. In this book I cannot discuss this ceremony or all of its connections to rain. In chapter 4 we will, however, treat a story that Thin Leather told to Lloyd about an important Wi:gita character called Nawicu (1911, 206–16). Thin Leather included a snatch of his Mockingbird speech in the telling of that story. 10. Nine of those, listed earlier, are on the origin of saguaros. There are three on the loss of Wind and Cloud: Fewkes 1912, 43–44; and 47–48 (Morning Green and Bitter Man); and Saxton and Saxton 1973, 317–39. The first and second listed are Pima, the third is Papago. The last story, on Corn and Tobacco, contains elements of both.

Chapter 3. The Ceremonies 1. I doubt that this is a literal translation of the Papago. It is probably just a summary of what the whole song says. 2. This word does not analyze into meaningful parts and could equally be translated as “meetinghouse” or “ceremonial house.” Until about 1880, all O’odham houses in the U.S. part of O’odham territory were of this sort. By about 1880 the O’odham there began to make rectangular adobe houses modeled on those of the Mexicans, and the O’odham then living in Mexico. Having enough water to make adobe was a prerequisite for this change. By the 1940s, the only old style “round houses” left in O’odham country, that is, in Tohono O’odham country, were the ones used for communal ceremonies such as the Wine Drinks. Perhaps the Pimas did not have communal round houses in the twentieth century (but see Vanyiko’s oration on the building of such a communal house in chapter 4).

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3. As we saw in chapter 2, this is not entirely true. One Pima story says that Elder-brother (the same figure as I’itoi) caused the cactuses to be created, but the rest of the Pima and Papago stories leave I’itoi out of the history of the cactuses and the Wine Drinks. I believe that this speaker only meant that in a general way I’itoi is responsible for everything O’odham. 4. There is one other published Pima description of the rainmaking ceremony. It was told by Juan Smith as part of a full Ho’ok A:gida or “Witch’s Telling” in 1935. Like the Philip Lopez story discussed in the last chapter, Smith told an Origin of Saguaros that includes a first Wine Drinks. Like Lopez’s and also like Russell’s above account, the Smith account is sketchy on what happened at the Wine Drinks. It does however state that there was wine and the people drank and got drunk. When the cactus fruit was ripe, the man [who found them] didn’t think very right about how he would use the fruit. He made plans to make wine that would make people drunk. So when the fruit was ripe, they gathered it, made wine, and kept it for four days to ferment. When it was ready they called four powerful medicine men to drink the wine. They called the people together and took one of the medicine men and sat him on the north side, another on the west side. . . . When the sun was just coming up, two men put some wine in vessels and took it and gave it to the man who was sitting at the east. They gave him four full vessels to drink. When he drank the wine, he felt pretty proud, as though he was the wisest medicine man of any of them. He sang (the “drunkard’s song”): “Some blooming. Blooming wind, I’m sending my wind, I’m making the earth turn yellow.” [Wine is given to and songs are sung by the other three medicine men.] All the people got drunk and were running all around, and it happened that one old man was dead drunk, was lying down someplace, and they stepped on his head and smashed it. (Bahr, ed. 1994, 127–29) As with Thin Leather and Lopez, there is no mention of nights of singing, dancing, and divination. Could there be a kind of rain ceremony without those nights of activity? It seems that Smith and Lopez described one with wine, and Thin Leather described one without. The Smith and Lopez ceremonies could be called “Sit-and Drinks,” but what would the ceremony of Thin Leather be called, “Sit-and Listen”? Since it seems to take two nights to make the wine (although Smith says four), since the wine is communal, and since the ceremony is for rain (according to Thin Leather, Lopez, and everyone except Smith, who says the purpose was simply to get drunk), it makes sense that the community would gather to sing, dance, and divine in the nights while the wine matures. Still, I can’t say it would be senseless to have the community stay scattered until the Sit-and Drink, as Smith implies. Presumably, there would be no divination, which seems always to be done in the night.

158 / Notes to Chapter 4 5. An account of a Sit-and Drink from Pisinimo village is given in Densmore (1929, 156–59). As she reports it, there are two rounds of drink serving, with songs and then a Mockingbird speech between the two rounds. This is the same as Lopez’s sequence. Densmore also gives a sketch of a rain ceremony at San Havier village (1929, 162). This is a Papago place, but Densmore was told that the sketch of the ceremony is “Pima” and not “Papago.” As I read it, her description is entirely about the singing and divination of the two nights before the Sit-and Drink. There is nothing about the drinking of wine. The account given by Russell, of course, also lacks wine drinking, but that account covers a daytime event. I am inclined to think that the ceremony in Densmore would have included a Sit-and Drink. And I think the event in Russell would have included nighttime divinations like those that Densmore describes. The mystery is whether the Mockingbird speech in the Russell ceremony ever came between rounds of drinking. But if it did, the text as we have it is silent on the act of drinking.

Chapter 4. The Speeches 1. The 1979 translation has “talking” rather than “telling.” At that time I was less fussy about consistency in the English equivalents for O’odham a:g and niok. “Telling” is the appropriate translation. See chapter 5. 2. This would be the O’odham word wa’aki, which I translate as “rainhouse.” The parentheses that follow are Densmore’s. 3. I assume it was he. Densmore names two interpreters of whom Norris lived the nearer to Antoin. 4. Etc., for the other directions. 5. The phrase is a’ai da’iwan, translated in the 1979 publication as “moves back and forth,” here changed to “wiggles.” 6. “Talk” is normally intransitive, but niokculid, the word for “orate” and “read,” is a transitive verb built up via suffixes from that intransitive root: niokculid, “to-talk-for-someone,” “to-give-articulate-voice-to-a-fixed-piece-of-language,” as discussed in chapter 1. 7. This is how I understand the English words and it is also my understanding of the O’odham. I will welcome correction. 8. The 1979 publication has “thought of themselves.” I change to “told” in keeping with what is said in chapter 5 about the meaning of O’odham a:g. “Thought” is a perfectly good translation for the word in this context, but I wish to be consistent in translating the a:gs as “tellings.” 9. The O’odham word used here is elid, “to wish,” “to think.” The thinking denoted by this word is private and not necessarily communicated by speech, so elid is not a “speech act” word. 10. And by happy coincidence, we could call the entire ceremony an oratorio, which is the sacred, Lenten counterpart to Italian opera. 11. I do not know any word like this for “turtle,’ but the word might be a version of the name of the ceremony, wi:gita. That word means something like “bird-down” (wi:g) “-made” (-ta).

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12. This is what George Herzog called his interpreter. Benedict called hers, who I think was the same person, Johnson Azul. See Bahr, ed. 2001, xxvii–xxviii, for letter by Benedict on him. 13. So says Herzog in a preface he wrote for his nearly finished manuscript on the Vanyiko texts. 14. It is certain that Benedict and Herzog studied Russell’s book with its Thin Leather text. We also know that Benedict and Herzog discussed at least some of their Pima endeavors. I have read the Vassar College archive’s holdings of Benedict’s correspondence with Herzog and the American Philosophical Society’s holdings of Herzog’s correspondence with Benedict. In those letters Benedict says nothing about Herzog’s textual efforts while Herzog says a fair amount, generally corrective, about those of Benedict. Unfortunately, Herzog does not address Benedict’s Mockingbird text. The bulk of the Benedict manuscript is prose texts whose words and wordings are by nature more straightforward than those of orations. I am not sure that Benedict “fudged” on the Mockingbird speech, but I think it is possible that she took the four texts that Herzog heard as separate pieces and combined them (with a few significant changes) to conform with the older Thin Leather text. With no notebooks and no Pima language record from her we cannot know whether she did that. I suspect Benedict because it is difficult to believe that Vanyiko would have one speech that praises mockingbirds and another that dishonors them on exactly the same topic (the calming of the earth). Herzog’s Vanyiko collection has no internal contradictions, but as pointed out below there are signs of arbitrariness in how Vanyiko placed certain of his orations in the prose chronicle of creation. To conclude, I wish Benedict and Herzog had discussed their differences on Vanyiko’s Mockingbird speech: did Benedict hear Vanyiko correctly or not? And I wish Herzog, who spent more time than Benedict with Vanyiko, had inquired into the differences between (a) the orated speeches that Vanyiko would give outside of the the Ho’ok A:gida telling, and (b) the set of orated speeches that Vanyiko included within the telling of Ho’ok A:gida. 15. It is, however, in the Thin Leather text and also in the Benedict rendition of Vanyiko’s Mockingbird speech. Logically and on the analogy of Thin Leather and the Benedict text, this segment would go in a Vanyiko speech that Herzog called “Vi:g Koskam’s Speech for Rain.” That speech is in Appendix 1. I cannot guess why Vanyiko omitted it from the version he dictated for Herzog. 16. Recall that the material quoted above is Vanyiko’s prose, interspersed with songs. There are oration-like passages in the prose, but they are short and “ad lib,” the same as with Lopez in chapter 2. 17. Another text in the Pima Speeches collection is called “Earth Doctor’s Speech for Rain,” on pages 5–6. This speech, which is not included or grounded in Vanyiko’s historical narrative, is quite like the Running speech of Santa Rosa. An “I” goes to a rainhouse (called a “pueblo” by Herzog, but the O’odham word is the same: va’aki). The visitor complains to the owner that his homeland is desolate. The owner tells him to go home, and he does, and it rains. There is no mention of wine and so no invitation to drink it, as in the Santa Rosa Running speech. Thus, the speech is another instance of how the Pimas apparently purged mentions and perhaps acts of drinking from their rain ceremonies.

160 / Notes to Chapter 4 18. I should add that Thin Leather has no counterpart to the Speech for Rain discussed in the previous footnote. For Thin Leather, the rain just arrives at the end, as the result of a home person exhaling tobacco smoke. No journey to request rain is included in Thin Leather’s body of oratory. 19. Of course, there could be none. The telling of a full mythology is like the writing of a book in that both tasks are selective. Mythologies are authored works for precisely this reason. We know from the Russell and Lloyd hearings of Thin Leather that the author knew more stories than he told in either of those single projects, because he placed a few stories in each that are not found in the other; and he told a story or two to Fewkes that he did not tell to the others. The interesting question is whether he ever would have included what Vanyiko did, an account of the calming of the earth and one of the first council house. We have seen that he has an “uncalm earth” episode in his Navicu story, and there the rumbling is an attraction to Navicu, not an imperfection as it is to Vanyiko’s Earth Medicine-man; and Thin Leather used a portion of his longer Mockingbird speech to decorate or validate this idea of ancient earth shaking. Thin Leather has no known prose account of an original council house. That episode he orated, in the main Mockingbird speech, without “historicization.” 20. Unfortunately this official orthography is not identical with those used by either of the two dictionary makers, so one must make some adjustments between the dictionary spellings and those recommended by the Nation. I must state another change. I have bolded certain instances of the letters d, n, and s, where the official orthography writes the d and s with a dot under the letter and writes the n with a tilde above it. 21. I am not sure this is the right way to resolve what Lewis/Russell wrote. Their rendition is vatcem piam etcon hekem tcoitcik. Of course the meaning would differ according to how the passage is resolved. The Russell/Lewis free translation lacks this passage. Their word-for-word equivalents are: “———[a blank space corresponding to the Pima vatcem] may try your plan.” 22. This may not be the right resolution of Russell/Lewis’s Hek hem hemata hepai ctekak apamek mimhi rsprsoakan. Their free translation is: “Your people will henceforth entreat your assistance,” and their word-for-word equivalents are: “That your people some time future may entreaty.” 23. Russell/Lewis translated this word, which they wrote as mawatatauk, as “four corners of the earth tied with something.” Herzog/Azul, who wrote the word as mauwatak, translated it “weight.” I suppose the word is a noun made from the O’odham verb maowa, which means “to touch with the hand,” hence my “hand-patter.” As a guess, the entire spider with its eight legs may be envisioned as a kind of hand, and the idea may be that it goes to each corner of the earth, and squats there in a kind of “pat,” and stitches the earth tight with threads in a gossamer riveting process. 24. The text says wutcantcu for what I interpret as weco ant ju:. The ant seems to be the first person singular pronoun. If that pronoun were not spoken, the phrase probably would have been rendered as wutcatcu. 25. It is most obscure who are the “I,” the “you,” and the “he” in this episode. I cannot envision the scene. Thin Leather could have been clear—one can be clear about these things in Pima—but he was not. Vanyiko has an equally unclear but

Notes to Appendix 2 / 161 shorter version of this episode at the start of the first of his speeches as given in chapter 7. There is this difference between Thin Leather and Vanyiko: the former uses the cigarette episode to bring rain. The smell of the smoke, not the sounds of singing as at Santa Rosa, causes the rain. Vanyiko uses the smoke to open (not to close as in Thin Leather) his episode of magical house building. Thus, the smoke episode is not only unclear as to agency, it is also a “wandering” episode between Thin Leather and Vanyiko. One uses it for one purpose, the other for another. 26. I don’t know what this string of letters could be or mean in Pima. In the text they are attached to the word for “old-man” (keli), but I have separated them as if they are freestanding “particles.” 27. I don’t know how to divide (or segment) and interpret this string of syllables after the last inserted comma. 28. They represent the sounds of O’odham very accurately, although with a now outmoded alphabet or orthography.

Chapter 5. The Mockingbird 1. This may be a poetic stretch, but as I said in chapter 1, I think that the O’odham consider all birds’ vocalizations to be “talk” rather than song. 2. Kaij is the imperfect aspect form of cei, “say.” See Zepeda 1988, 59–62 on perfective versus imperfective aspects in O’odham. 3. A small but informative book by Doughty summarizes the ornithology and briefly treats the folklore of mockingbirds (1988). The theme of the folklore, including the Native American portion, is the bird’s mastery of all bird songs and even all human languages. There are stories in which the bird teaches humans the languages that they will have, and teaches other bird species their songs. Therefore the mockingbird emerges as the source of many or all “talks,” not in content but in sound and grammar—linguists’ languages/talks. The stories in Doughty do not treat the “tellings” side of the balance sheet, although one of them, from Mexicans in Texas, has a married couple of mockingbirds dispute over whether the male should claim credit to God for his ability to set flowers and humans to dancing. (Therefore as far as is reported, the bird couple had a real but quite limited conversational life.) I conclude that folkloric mockingbirds are flamboyantly talkative and their unoriginality, or at least “originality problem,” may be overlooked by all except the O’odham, whom Doughty does not mention. Or: other peoples may have told about this, too, and scholarship may have it in its old written texts, but we haven’t studied them.

Appendix 2 1. The Pima word is “mawadag.” Herzog translated it as “weight.” I speculate that the word comes from “mawa,” or “maowa,” “to press-with-the-palm-of-the-ha nd,” but it is not a word or meaning that I know. See note 37, of chapter 4. 2. Herzog rendered as one word: “pivahet,” which he translated as “gentle,” I am not sure of the Pima word or words, nor of the translation.

162 / Notes to Appendix 2 3. This statement “looks back” in effect to the earlier part of Thin Leather’s speech, about the magical building of what seems in that text to be the world’s first medicine-man (or any O’odham traditional style) house. 4. I am not sure of the Pima originals or of the translation of these last two words. Herzog gave one Pima word, “va’apanktce,” with stress makers over the first “a” and the final “c.” He translated this complex as “moistened laid.”

References Cited Bahr, D. 1997. Easter, Keruk, and Wi:gita. In Performing the renewal of community, indigenous Easter rituals in north Mexico and southwest United States, ed. R. Spicer and R. Crumrine, 185–217. Lanham, MD: University Press of America. Bahr D., J. Smith, W. Allison, and J. Hayden. 1994. The short, swift time of gods on Earth. Berkeley: University of California Press. Bahr, D., L. Paul, and V. Joseph. 1997. Ants and orioles: Showing the art of Pima poetry. Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press. Bahr, ed., with R Benedict, W. Blackwater, T. Vanyiko, C. Ahiel, W. Stevens, O. Wellington, and Kisto. 2001. O’odham creation and related events. Tucson: University of Arizona Press. Bauman, R. 2004. A world of others’ words. Malden, MA: Blackwell. Baylor, B. 1972. Yes is better than no. Tucson: Treasure Chest Publications. Bringhurst, D. 1999. A story as sharp as a knife. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Densmore, F. 1929. Papago music. Washington, DC: Bureau of Amercan Ethnology, Bulletin 90. Doughty, R. 1988. The mockingbird. Austin: University of Texas Press. Driver, H. 1969. Indians of North America. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Evers, L., ed. 1980. The south corner of time. Tucson: University of Arizona Press. Fontana, B. 1989. Of earth and little rain. Tucson: University of Arizona Press. Ferre, J. 1988. A social gospel for the millions: The religious bestsellers of Charles Sheldon, Charles Gordon, and Harold Bell Wright. Bowling Green, KY: Bowling Green University Press. Fewkes, J. 1912. Casa Grande, Arizona. Bureau of Amercian Ethology, Annual Report 28, 25–179. Washington, DC. Hymes, D. 1996. Arikara rhetoric: Ethnopoetic Suggestions. In nikotwasik iskwahtem. paskihtepayih! Studies in Honour of H. C. Wolfart. Algonquian and Iroquoian Linguistics Memoir 13, ed. J. Nichols and A. Ogg. Jose, E. 1985. The legend of the saguaro. Santa Rosa Ranch School. Publication of U.S. Department of Education. Kroeber, A. 1949. Juan Dolores, 1880–1948. American Anthropologist 51, no. 1:97–99. Lloyd, J. 1911. Aw-aw-tam Indian nights. Westfield, NJ: The Lloyd Group. Lopez Austin, Alfredo 1993. The myths of the opossum: Pathways of Mesoamerican mythology. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press.

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164 / References Cited Mason, R. 2006. Inconstant companions: Archaeology and Native American oral traditions XXX: University of Alabama Press. Mathiot, M. n.d. A dictionary of Papago usage. Language Science Monographs vols. 8/1 and 8/2. Bloomington,: Indiana University Center for the Language Sciences. Opler, M. 1938. Myths and tales of the Jicarilla Apache Indians. American Folklore Society, Memoirs XXXI (Republished 1994: Mineola, NY: Dover). Phillips, A., J. Marshall, and G. Monson. 1964. The birds of Arizona. Tucson: University of Arizona Press. Radin, P. 1923. The Winnebago tribe. Washington, DC: Bureau of American Ethnology, Annual Report 37. Reedition 1970 Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Rea, A. 2007. Wings in the Desert. Tucscon: The University of Arizona Press. Russell, F. 1908. The Pima Indians. Washington, DC: Bureau of American Ethnology, Annual Report 26. Reedition 1974: Tucson: University of Arizona Press. Saxton, D., and L. Saxton. 1973. O’odham Ho’ok A’agitha: Legends and lore of the Papago and Pima Indians. Tucson: University of Arizona Press. Saxton, D., L. Saxton, and S. Enos. 1983. Dictionary Papago/Pima-English, EnglishPapago/Pima. Tucson: University of Arizona Press. Shaw, A. 1968. Pima Indian legends. Tucson: University of Arizona Press. Spicer, E. 1962. Cycles of conquest. Tucson: University of Arizona Press. Spier,L. 1978. Yuman tribes of the Gila River. New York: Dover Publications, Inc. Originally published by the University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1933. Underhill, R. 1938. A Papago calendar record. The University of New Mexico Bulletin, no. 322, Anthropological Series 2, no. 5. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press. ———. 1939. Papago Indian social organization. New York: Columbia University Press. ———. 1946. Papago Indian religion. New York: Columbia University Press. Underhill, R., D. Bahr, B. Lopez, J. Pancho, and D. Lopez. 1979. Rainhouse and ocean: Speeches for the Papago year. Amercian Tribal Religions, vol. 4. Flagstaff: Museum of Northern Arizona Press. Wright, H. 1929. Long ago told. New York: Appleton. Zepeda, O. 1988. A Papago grammar. Tucson: University of Arizona Press.

Index A:ngam, 84 Admonitory speech, 59–60, 62, 81 Aji, 87 Ak Chin, 19, 62, 73 Akimel O’odham, 1, 2, 9, 10, 13, 16, 26. See also Pima alcoholism, 8, 152n4 ancient times, 155n2; mythology of, 5, 21, 23; in oratory, 6; and stories told by narrator from, 70, 71, 73, 81, 86. See also here and now Anegam, 62, 73, 84, 87 Antoin, Jose, 71, 77–79 Apache, 11, 19. See also Jicarilla Apache Austin, Alfredo Lopez, 120 Azul, Paul (or Johnson), 89, 96, 106 baby, 25, 26, 28, 106, 126. See also child Bad Mother (Papago story), 26–33 Badger (mythical character), 26 Bahr, Donald, 82, 90; and report of Santa Rosa Sit-and Drink, 61–65, 66 Bauman, Richard, 117 Baylor, Byrd, 20 Be Considerate speech, 62 Benedict, Ruth, 89, 90, 95; Mockingbird speech recorded by, 72; and Vanyiko Mockingbird speech, 94, 95, 159n14 Big Field village, 67 birds: and social dancing songs, 110; and song vs. talk, 151n2 Blackwater, William, 89, 94 Blackwater village, 11

Blue Gopher (mythical character), 114 Bringhurst, David, 153–54n7 Broken Neck Pumpkin (mythical character), 25, 26 Buzzard (mythical character), 25, 43, 44, 90, 91; substituted for Crow, 52 cactus, cholla, 25 Cactus, saguaro, 36, 58; as child, 21, 23, 25, 38; mythological origin of, 26–33; in origin stories, 24, 38–44; and origin of wine, 31, 44; and rainattracting songs, 33 cactus wine, 8–9. See also Tis-win calendar sticks, 10, 11–12 Call (soak), 110, 111 Calming the World (Winnebago text), 123–26 Ceremony, O’odham, 4, 5–7; and origin stories, 21–22; and rainmaking, 60–67; and winemaking, 57–59 characters, Native American, 72, 120–21 Chesky, Jane, 20 Child (mythical character): cactus as, 21, 25, 33, 38–40; neglected, 23, 28–30 Christianity, 10, 12, 20. See also religion Cloud (mythical character), 23, 54, 86 cloud. See wind and cloud Corn (mythical character), 26, 155n7 corn, 8, 124, 125, 126 Corn and Tobacco (Pima story), 23–26, 54

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166 / Index council house, 91, 92, 94, 95, 106, 128, 160n19. See also Rainhouse Covered Wells, 42 Coyote (mythical character), 25, 26, 30, 32–33, 42; and drunkenness, 76 Crow (mythical character), 31, 52 cry, 80. See also Call Cycles of Conquest (E. Spicer), 20 dancing, 2: and songs, 110, 114; and winemaking ceremony, 58, 61, 67. See also Medicine dance; Rain dance; Sit-and Drink ceremony Densmore, Frances: on Sit-and Drink songs, 65; and speeches of Antoin, 77–78; and transcription of O’odham language, 95; and Wine Drink ceremonies, 66; on winemaking, 57 Desert (Papago) people, 54. See also Papago Desert People, The ( Joseph, Chesky, and Spicer), 20 directions, cardinal, 78, 79; in ceremonies, 58, 60, 61 documentation, historical: and oral history, 10–12, 82; and oral literature, 6, 7 Dog Pumpkin (mythical character), 25, 26 Dolores, Juan, 70, 71, 75–77 Doughty, R., 161n3 Down Nested Medicine-man, 99, 113–14, 135–36 Downy Nest Shaman, 95 Ddrinking, 7–9, 54–55. See also drunkenness; drunks, sounds of drunkenness: and bringing wind and cloud, 77, 79, 81; as character flaw, 76; O’odham attitude toward, 9; and order of speeches in Sit-and Drink, 64–65; in origin of cactus stories, 33; in origin story of Wine Drinks, 157n4; and rain-bringing, 127 drunks, sounds of, 2, 18, 22, 33, 65, 72, 79, 81, 120

Earth, shaking, 83, 86; calmed by Mockingbird, 90, 94–95, 134–35; and Elder-brother, 90–91 Earth Doctor, 130 Earthmaker (Winnebago), 123–24, 125–26 Earth Medicine-man (a god), 72, 125– 26, 136–37; as narrator of Navicu story, 86; in Vanyiko’s Ho’ok A:gida, 90–91; and Vanyiko’s Mockingbird speech, 72 Elder-brother (a god), 72, 82, 90, 157n3. See also I’itoi Enos, Susie Ignacio, 55, 96 Feather Nested Doctor, 88 Fewkes, Jesse, 34, 82, 89, 95 First Wine Drinks (Papago story), 35–53 flaws, character, 54–55, 56, 76, 120 flux, 119–20, 151n1 Fontana, Bernard, 10, 12, 20 Ge Aji village, 84, 87 Ge Oidag, 67 Giant Cactus, The (Origin of Saguaros) (Papago story), 26–33 Giho Duag village, 84 Gila Crossing, 11, 12 Gila monster (mythical character), 31 Gila River community, 11, 13, 19 Girl Exposed, A (Pima story), 34–35 Gods: as authors of orations and songs, 5, 6, 7, 21, 62; as original orators, 81, 117, 119, 120; and participants at Sit-and Drink, 70, 81; as present at Wine Drinks, 62–63 Gopher (mythical character), 93, 95, 128, 132–33; and roofing a house, 102–3. See also Blue Gopher Grandmother (Winnebago character), 124–26 Grasshopper (mythical character), 32 Gray Spider (mythical character), 99, 100, 114, 135

Index Grindstones, 84, 86, 87 Gu Achi, 62, 73 Hale, Kenneth, 16 Hare (Winnebago character), 124–26 here and now: and action of O’odham oratory, 70, 71, 72, 73, 75, 79, 86; and Sit-and Drink, 81 Herzog, George, 89, 90, 129; as linguist, 95; and use of commas in O’odham, 153n7; and Vanyiko’s Mockingbird speech, 159n14 history: and O’odham oratory, 82; of O’odham people, 16–20; and O’odham stories, 21, 154–55n1; flux of in oral literature, 119–20 Ho’ok (Witch), 5, 23, 24 Ho’ok A:gida (Witch Tellings), 5; attachment of orations to, 81–82; and description of 2001 storytelling event, 35–36; main characters of, 72; taken as O’odham history, 21; and the unnamed “I,” 71; of Vanyiko, 129, 130, 136 house, communal, 156n2 How Morning Green Lost His Power over the Wind Gods and the Rain Gods (Pima story), 34–35 Humming-bird (mythical character), 34–35 Hymes, Dell, 153–54n7 “I”: identity of, 6, 62, 70–71, 72, 73, 77, 106; in Navicu story, 86; village leader as, 59 I’itoi (a god), 60, 157n3; creation of, 90; and rainmaking, 47; in Story of Nahvauchoo, 82–83, 86 intertextuality, 117, 121–22; and Pima/ Winnebago calming the earth stories, 126; and Vanyiko/Thin Leather matches, 129–40; and Mockingbird speeches, 71–72, 82, 88, 89, 94, 95, 106 Inviting speech, 81

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Jicarilla Apache, 126–27 Joseph, Alice, 20 journey, 62, 70, 72, 86, 125 kinship, 110, 111, 151; and Sit-and Drink, 63, 64; and tobacco smoke, 25 Kitt, Katherine, 156n8 Kroeber, Alfred, 75 Kuhadk village, 84 Language, O’odham, 5, 13–14, 15–16, 95, 96 Lewis, Jose, 96 Listo, Joe, 64 Listo, Steven, 120 literacy, O’odham, 6, 13–16 literature, oral: Native American, 72, 119–21, 121–22; O’odham, 4–7, 10; Pima-Papago differences in, 23, 54, 71–72 Lloyd, J. William, 86, 95; and Thin Leather’s Corn and Tobacco story, 24, 26, 82; and Thin Leather’s Navicu story, 71, 82, 87, 88 Long Ago Told (Harold Bell Wright), 155–56n8 Lopez, Philip, 35–36, 52–53, 64 Loss of Wind and Cloud (Papago story), 76 Manuel, Paul, 121 Maricopa Indians, 11, 13, 19, 110 marriage, 23 martyrs, 10, 11–12 Mason, J. Alden, 75 Measuring-worm (mythical character), 92–93, 101–2, 114, 128, 130–32 Measuring Worm Shaman, 95 Medicine dance (Winnebago), 123, 124, 126 Medicine man (mythical character), 73 medicine men, 58, 60–61, 127, 157n4 memorization, 5, 6, 7, 14 Mexico, 1, 19–20, 156n2

168 / Index Mockingbird: absence of from prose mythology, 21, 22; and calming the earth, 90, 94–95, 134–35; as failing at task, 2, 3, 71, 72, 87, 89, 107, 111, 118, 154; and imitation of drunks, 2, 18, 22, 33, 65, 72, 79, 81, 120; as medicine man, 113; nature of, 18, 109–10; and power over wind, 71, 72, 77–78, 80–81, 89; speech acts of, 80, 110–14, 115, 161n3 Mockingbird doctor, 77, 79, 109 Mockingbird orations: insertion into prose story, 36, 53; at Sit-and Drink, 64–65; of Thin Leather, 95–107; of Vanyiko, 91–95 Moreno, Jose, 14, 64, 95; Mockingbird speech of, 79–81; and Thin Leather’s parody, 118–19 Morning Green (mythical character), 34–35 motherhood, 23, 26–30 myth, 5, 21, 154–55n1 mythology, Native American, 119, 121–22 Nahvauchoo (a god), 82–89. See also Navicu narrator. See “I” Nasia (a god), 90 Navichu, 82. See also Navicu Navicu (a god): Thin Leather’s story of, 71, 72, 81–86, 87–89 Nawicu, 82. See also Navicu Nighthawk (mythical character), 32, 43, 44–46, 52 Norris, Hugh, 78 North Santa Rosa, 35 O’odham people, 4–7, 10; language of, 5, 13–14, 15–16, 95, 96. See also Akimel O’odham; Tohono O’odham Of Earth and Little Rain (Fontana), 20 old age, 125, 126, 140 Opler, Morris, 126 oral literature. See literature, oral oratory, O’odham: attached to prose Ho’ok A:gida, 81–82; definition of,

5–6, 7; and mediatory textualization, 117; and order of speeches in Sitand Drink, 64–65; and ownership of texts, 14 origin stories, 21–55 orthography, 15–16, 96, 160n20 Owl Ears, 11 Papago: and attitude toward Wine Drinks, 9–11, 12–13; and end of native lifestyles, 66–67; and literacy, 13–16; native lifestyles of, 1–2, 19–20; rain dance ceremony of, 61–65; winemaking ceremony of, 57–60 Papago Indian Religion (Underhill), 20, 96 parody, 5, 118–22, 151n1, 154n8; between O’odham communities, 19, 117–18; use of by Thin Leather, 18, 26, 71–72, 155n7 Phillips, A., 114 Pima: and attitude toward drinking, 95, 159n17; and attitude toward Wine Drinks, 9–11, 12–13; and calendar stick recitations, 10; and end of native lifestyles, 66–67; and literacy, 13–16; native lifestyles of, 1–2, 19–20; rainmaking ceremony of, 60–61, 157n4 Pima Indians, The (Russell), 20 Pisinimo village, 77 plagiary, 154n8 prayer, 7, 8, 115, 151n3 pride, community: and parody, 119, 122; revealed in O’odham literature, 4–5 prose, O’odham: definition of, 5, 6, 81; as history, 119–20; insertion of oratory in, 82 Pumpkin (mythical character), 25 punctuation, 14–15, 16–17, 153–54n7 quarrel between Cyclone and Thunder ( Jicarilla Apache story), 126–27 Quojata Mountain, 84 Radin, Paul, 123

Index rain: brought by mockingbirds, 2, 3–4, 18, 33, 53, 71; brought by tobacco, 25, 33, 95, 107, 127; and the desert Papago, 54; and drunkenness, 70, 75, 77, 79, 118; in origin stories, 54; as punishment, 87; as result of Wine Drinks, 52, 73, 76, 81; in Winnebago texts, 126 rainbows, 103–4 rain ceremonies, 2, 54; and Jicarilla Apache, 126–27; legality of, 9–12; officials required for, 65–66; in origin stories, 21–22, 47–51; of Papago, 61–65; of Pima, 60–61; and Pima/ Papago differences in, 12–13, 117; and wine drinking, 6, 8–9; without wine, 60, 89. See also Sit-and Drink ceremony; Wine Drinks ceremony rain dance, 2, 58, 67, 81 rain doctor, 109 rainhouse, 91; as home of gods, 70, 85; Mockingbird in, 53; as source of food, 63, 86–87; and source of rain, 62, 65, 107; in traditional O’odham society, 1, 20 rainmaking speech, Thin Leather’s, 95–107 Rain-man (mythical character), 34–35 Rattlesnake (mythical character), 31 Rea, Amadeo, 20 Red Spider (mythical character), 91 religion: and character flaws in stories, 54–55; and conversion of O’odham, 10, 12, 20; and sincerity of speech, 115 revision: of stories for parody, 154n8; of stories for white audience, 55–56, 120–21 rivalry, intercommunity, 4, 118, 121 River (Pima) people. See Pima Robinson, Barbara, 56, 120 rope, 34, 35 rosary, 151n3 Rotten (place name), 42 round house, 58, 61, 63. See also Rainhouse running oration, 61–62

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Russell, Frank, 129; and calendar stick recitations, 10–11; and Corn and Tobacco story, 24; and Down Nested Medicine-man story, 114; The Pima Indians, 20; and rainmaking ceremony, 60–61, 66; and stories of origins of tobacco, 26; and Thin Leather’s Mockingbird speech, 82, 95, 96; and Thin Leather’s Navicu story, 82; and translation of Mockingbird speech, 88–89, 106; translation and transcription methods of, 16, 17, 96, 153n7 sacraments, 8, 152n5 Salt River community, 11, 13, 19 San Havier village, 11, 12 Santa Rosa village: and continuity of Wine Drink, 14, 66–67; and geography of Thin Leather’s Navicu story, 87; Mockingbird speech given at, 79–81; and Seating speech, 69–70, 72–75; Sit-and Drink at, 6, 61–65 Santos, Jose, 10 Saxton, Dean and Lucille, 76, 96 Seating speech, 62, 69–70, 81; and play on word “draw,” 79; at Santa Rosa, 72–75 Sells reservation, 19 series, song and oratory, 6, 82, 121 Shaw, Anna Moore, 55 singing: contrasted with talking, 7, 151n2; of mockingbird, 109; and Papago wine ceremony, 61, 62, 64, 65, 66; of Paul Manuel, 121; stimulated by wine drinking, 9, 59 Sit-and Drink ceremony: and attracting Wind and Cloud, 76; and cardinal directions, 62, 63, 64, 65; and ending of tradition, 66–67; description of, 58–60; officials needed for, 65–66; organization of, 81; in origin myth, 45, 47; and martyrs for Native religion, 10, 11–12; at Santa Rosa, 61–65. See also Wine dance ceremony; Wine Drinks ceremony

170 / Index Smith, Juan, 157n4 song, O’odham, 6, 121, 151n2. See also singing songs, social dancing, 110, 114 Sonora, 19 South Corner of Time (Evers, ed.), 55 speak (cei), 80, 110; and speech of mockingbird, 111, 113, 115 speech acts, 80, 110–14 Spicer, Edward: Cycles of Conquest, 20 Spicer, Rosamond: The Desert People, 20 Spider Shaman, 95 Story of Nahvauchoo (Navicu), 82–89 suicide, 23, 26, 29–30 Swallow song series, 121 syllables, O’odham, 15–16 talk (niok), 80, 110, 151n2; and oratory, 6–7; and speech of mockingbird, 111 Tarantula (mythical character), 39 Taw-kah. See Tokka tell (a:ag), 80, 110, 112, 113; and O’odham oral history, 111; and speech of mythical characters, 114 textuality, 117–22 Thin Leather, 155n4; and consistency of tellings, 24; and construction of new stories, 26; and dissemination of his text, 14; and Down Nested Medicine-man, 114; Mockingbird speech of, 82, 95–107, 160n19; Navicu story of, 71, 81–89; and old age in Mockingbird speech, 125, 126; and parody of Papago, 71–72, 118–19; and Russell’s translation methods, 17; and speech sounds of mockingbird, 111, 112–13, 114, 115; and story of Corn and Tobacco, 23–26; and story of Morning Green, 34–35 Thomas, Juan, 11 Thrasher (mythical character), 43, 113, 114 Tis-win, 26, 152n6, 153n6. See also Cactus wine

Tobacco (mythical character), 24, 25, 33. See also Corn and Tobacco tobacco: and concept of kinship, 25; mythical origins of, 24, 26; and rainmaking, 95, 107, 127 Toehahvs (Coyote), 26 Tohono O’odham, 1, 2, 9, 10, 13, 16, 22, 26, 156n2. See also Papago Tohono O’odham Nation, 35, 96 Tokka game, 23, 26, 27 Tokka playing girl (mythical character), 27–30, 38 tone, narrative, 154n8. See also parody Transcription: method of in this book, 96 translation: method of in this book, 14–17, 72, 77, 96, 129. See also punctuation Turtle (mythical character), 83, 86 Twisted Neck Mountain, 83, 84, 87 Underhill, Ruth, 72; and Admonitory speech, 59; and calendar stick recitations, 11; and Moreno’s Mockingbird speech, 79; Papago Indian Religion, 20; and Seating speech, 72; and Sit-and Drink song translations, 65; and transcription, 95, 96; on Wi:gita ceremony, 82; and Wine Drink ceremonies, 66 Vanyiko, Thomas: Earth Medicine-man story of, 89–91, 125; Ho’ok A:gida of, 90–91; Mockingbird story of, 71, 72, 91–95; and oratory in prose narration, 82; and speech sounds of mockingbird, 111, 112; transcription of oral literature of, 89 Wants to Get Married (Pima story), 23–26 Wi:gita ceremony, 82, 84, 86, 87 wind and cloud, 17–18, 22, 23, 54, 72, 76; attracted by drunkenness, 77, 79, 81. See also Rain Wind-man (mythical character), 34–35

Index Windy Talk, 5–6 wine, mythological origins of, 21–22, 24, 31–32, 35–53, 44, 54 Wine dance ceremony, 17. See also Sitand Drink ceremony; Wine Drinks ceremony Wine Drinks ceremony: abolition of, 11, 53, 152–53n6; and community pride, 4–5, 52–53; origin stories of, 157n4; origin stories of compared, 52–53, 54; and participants as gods, 62–63; and rainmaking, 9, 52; revival of by O’odham communities, 10; as sacrament, 8; suppressed, 4, 9–10, 66 winemaking: description of process, 57–59, 157n4; in private houses, 58,

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59, 65; and rainmaking ceremonies, 58, 60; in Seating speech, 73 Winged Spider (mythical character), 91 Winnebago, 123–26 Witch Tellings, 5, 6, 7. See also Ho’ok A:gida Wood, Edward, 86, 88 Wright, Harold Bell, 95; and Lopez’s story, 52–53; and The Giant Cactus story, 26; and Long Ago Told, 155–56n8 Yellow Spider (mythical character), 88 Yes Is Better Than No (Baylor), 20 Zepeda, Ofelia, 14, 153n7

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Bahr

INDIGENOUS STUDIES The mediation of mockingbirds and the enduring significance of indigenous ceremonial speeches are deftly revealed in this brilliant analysis of ritual orations created and delivered by the O’odham people (also known as the Pima-Papago). Making their homes along rivers and washes across the arid expanses and mountains of the desert of southern Arizona and northern Sonora, the O’odham people traditionally lived in small villages with scattered brush-walled round houses. Public ceremonies involved many villages and centered around small brush-walled “rainhouses.”

Why? Drawing upon a rich reservoir of O’odham oral traditions and ceremonial performances, a meticulous deciphering of particular texts, and an insightful assessment of the impact of Christianity upon the O’odham people, Donald Bahr offers a brilliant analysis of why some indigenous stories cease to be relevant and told. The clues lie in the very different trajectories of the Pima and Papago communities in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, trajectories resulting in part with how Christianity fared in the respective communities. Donald Bahr is Professor Emeritus of Anthropology at Arizona State University at Tempe. He has published several books, including O’odham Creation and Related Events: As Told to Ruth Benedict in 1927; Piman Shamanism and Staying Sickness; Short Swift Time of Gods on Earth: The Hohokam Chronicles; and Ants and Orioles: Showing the Art of Pima Poetry.

Mockingbirds How Mockingbirds Are

One hundred years ago, two very different versions of a speech delivered during rain ceremonies were heard at these rainhouses. The Pimas (Akimel O’odham) told of nearly silent and stately events—the calming of a heaving earth, the building of a house on the stilled land, the breathing out of smoke, and the coming of gentle rain. In marked contrast, the Papagos (Tohono O’odham) told of how raucous, drunken people caused clouds to rise and explode with quenching rain. Both stories featured mockingbirds and both involved the coming of rain. Today, the gentler, Pima version is extinct while the wilder Papago story endures.

How

Are

O’odham Ritual Orations

A volume in the SUNY series in North American Native Peoples, Past and Present Raymond Demallie and Douglas Parks, editors

State University of New York Press www.sunypress.edu

Donald Bahr