previous sub-section
Notes
next sub-section

Part 3— New Creation and Corn

1. The Dolores texts can be read as positing no connection between the people of the first creation and conquering emergents. The problem is that these texts are from a variety of narrators, and we cannot tell what any of these narrators' entire mythology would have been like. Moreover, not only is the Dolores collection a composite but Saxton and Saxton add additional narrators to those recorded by Dolores. Saxton and Saxton's book, therefore, is an organized anthology of Papago mythology. It is not, like the texts of Thin Leather and Smith, the comprehensive, organized, well-considered telling of one person. It is analogous to an American history composed of chapters taken from the works of different historians.

While not ideal, such anthologizing is not necessarily evil. The truth is, we do not know whether it is so or not, because the study of whole, single-narrator mythologies is a new field. Really, Thin Leather's is the only such work published from the Pima-Papago (happily, in three versions). Smith-Allison is the second. I should say that these are the only long works. The Pima narrator Anna Moore Shaw wrote a relatively short English-language book of Pima mythology. She meant it for the instruction of children on the virtues of the old life, and so it tends to avoid tales of conflict. To complete this survey, the native-language typescript of another Papago mythology exists. It was spoken by the narrator Frank Lopez for Bernard Fontana in the 1960s. This work has not yet been given a written English translation. Finally, Harold Bell Wright, a best-selling writer of inspirational fiction in the 1920s, edited and published a Papago mythology that, like Saxton and Saxton/Dolores, seems to have come from several narrators. break [BACK]

2. Songs about the circularity of the earth are in Russell (1908: 272) and Saxton and Saxton (1973: 3); but these songs are attributed to Earth Doctor at the time of the earth's creation. They do not refer to spinning or circular movement ( sikol him ), as in the Smith songs, but to the circular form of the newly made earth ( sikolim na:to , 'circularly made'). I imagine that Smith sang sikol him , not sikol na:to , and he took his phrasing as an expression, or even a product, of Siuuhu's dizzy change of heart regarding the second creation. In short, according to Smith, the world spins because Siuuhu changed his mind. [BACK]

3. Seems to be a hitherto unrecorded word for the collectivity of "Yuman" (by anthropological classification) language speakers. Note, however, that the Font text uses the term "Oba" to refer to a tribe or nation of Yuman-speakers. And "O'obab" is the Pima-Papago word now generally used to name the Maricopa tribe, the members of which share reservations with the Pimas. Conceivably, Smith actually said one of those two words; conceivably, Font's Oba, today's O'obab, and Smith's Obniu are the selfsame word and people. [BACK]

4. This is the only Pima-Papago song I know of on the origin, as opposed to the recovery, of a farm crop. It is also the only song I know of on cotton, and it is the only instance of a singing seed. See note 6, below, on crop songs in general. [BACK]

5. An allusion to a 1930s cartoon or magazine adinline image [BACK]

6. Some comments are in order on how such songs are reported elsewhere in the literature on Pima-Papago. In fact, a rich and consistent record is available, and it is time for someone to study it (no one has done so, so far).

Consistent with Smith's remarks, although he did not put the matter so firmly, there seem to be two categories of "farming" or "crop" songs. One category, let us call it Type A, goes with his story 5, "Corn Returns," not with the songs of his story 4, "Corn and Tobacco Leave." There are songs with that Corn and Tobacco story, as we have seen, but they do not have the distinctive linguistically unanalyzable "signature phrases" of the two categories of farming songs. The "Corn Returns" story is reported from throughout the Pima-Papago area. Thus, Underhill makes reference to it in Papago Indian Religion (1946: 80; she tries to distinguish it, misleadingly I think, from a "myth of the corn woman" that she discusses on 78); and Saxton and Saxton give an excellent bilingual version from Dolores in their Legends and Lore (1973: 27-44).

These Type A songs, uniformly in Pima-Papago country, have a distinctive, ending "signature" or "call" phrase, " hi lu, ya a na ." The phrase has no obvious meaning in the Pima-Papago language. Different writers write it differently (Hayden wrote Smith's ren- soft

dition as Hai lo Hya'an ). The above is simply my version, which I believe, however, to be phonetically correct for more singers than the ones I have personally heard.

Finally, the Type A songs, at least many of them, seem to be the thoughts or statements of the principal characters of "Corn Returns," or Corn Woman (better called Corn Man) myth, a story in which the key male character is Corn and the key female character is a human (not corn) woman. Most commonly, perhaps, the "I's" of the song texts refer to, or are taken to be the words of, Corn Man.

Type A songs are published by G. Herzog (1936: 335), 2 songs; F. Russell (1908: 333-334), 8 songs; D. Saxton and L. Saxton (1973: 29-30, 43-44), 4 songs; R. Underhill (1946: 78-81), 18 songs.

Type B songs seem to have no myth associated with them. They tend to be about rain, thundering, and crops—nature and water poetry. They are sometimes called Rain Songs (e.g., by Russell and Herzog) and can be taken as part of a crop-related rain ceremonialism that is distinct from the more famous and salient "wine drinks" or "cactus wine" ceremony (the subject of Smith's story 7). The wine ceremony songs do not have the distinctive signature phrase, and the wine ceremony is distinct from the ceremonies in which Type B songs are used.

Type B songs are sung to the accompaniment of a stick scraped over another, notched stick, with the latter pressed onto a basket resonator, thus "scraping stick songs" (Smith called them "basket rubbing," the same idea). It is not known whether Type A songs were sometimes or normally acompanied in the same manner, or whether, on the contrary, they were normally accompanied by shaking a gourd rattle, the more common, or "unmarked" form of Pima-Papago song accompaniment. (Gourd rattles are used for wine ceremony songs, for example.)

Type B songs have a distinct call or signature both at the beginning and at the end, and this signature, also not interpretable into Pima-Papago, is different from that of the Type A songs. At the beginning, it is something like he eyanayo (as Herzog wrote it), and the end has heceya hahena (again, as Herzog wrote it). I have heard them sung, respectively, as [soiya * soiya soiya] hi ya nai hu (the bracketed part, a separate initial line, was in the two songs I heard) and hi ci ya ya'i na .

Type B songs are published by G. Herzog (1936: 336), 8 songs; F. Russell (1908: 331-332), 9 songs; and R. Underhill (1946: 72-76), 24 songs.

This makes a total for the two types of 73 songs. Herzog, Russell, and Saxton and Saxton give them in Pima-Papago as well as in English translation, and the Pima-Papago originals for the Underhill songs must exist in her notebooks. There are probably additional crop songs in print or in archives, although it seems that continue

Densmore's Papago Music (1929) lacks them. In 1991, perhaps a thousand such songs were in Pima-Papago singers' minds and memories, but probably no one who was not closely associated with the traditional agriculture knows such songs, and now all those farmers are old and retired. The songs as oral literature will probably die with the last old farmers. (I must note that the Type A and Type B songs, with their distinct signatures, are different from the cotton song given earlier in this myth. That song lacks a vocable signature and is about the origin of cotton raising.)

Herzog, in 1936, traced connections between the Pima-Papago song signatures and those of various Pueblo Indian corn or farming songs, but he only opened the door for such considerations; and I would add that comparisons of poetry, ceremony, and myth should also be made southward, starting with the Yaquis, especially with Yaqui deer songs (Evers and Molina 1987). It is not idle to compare deer songs with crop or corn songs because the Pima-Papago Type B songs, as "scraping stick songs," were used for deer hunting and obtaining ocean salt as well as for farming; and the "Beneath the East" of Pima-Papago Type A songs should be compared with the "Wilderness World" of Yaqui deer songs. [BACK]

7. A stick dice game whose goal is to move a marker called soiga * ('pet', 'slave', or 'horse'—but kawiyu from Spanish caballo is the normal word for horse) around a large rectangle marked with lines incised on the ground. The game is not unlike a U.S. Monopoly-type board game, except it is played outdoors on a rectangular playing surface, 8 feet by 12 (Russell 1908: 175-176).

The terminology of this game, which includes "hip," "burning," "fire," and "house" as well as the above-mentioned "pet/slave/horse" (all given in Russell), seems clearly related to the terminology of the Mesoamerican ball game (discussed extensively by Scarborough and Wilcox [1991]). Therefore gins may have some relation to the ball courts of the prehistoric Hohokam. The relation need not be of gins as a reduced, mock, or simulated version of former live-player Hohokam ball games. For one thing, the Aztecs had both a version of the dice game, called patolli , and a live-player ball game. Moreover, Pima-Papago women played a large playing field stickball game, called toka ; and the men had kickball races. There are many games, probably all related.

Mythical associations will be crucial to establishing the relations. Concerning the present stories, I can only say that gins is the means by which female (mostly) Tobacco and male Corn parted company. Tobacco is associated with rain calling or rain magic, and corn is associated with unnatural abundance on the condition of nonmarriage. [BACK]

8. Hai ya ha'ai ya , a standard lamenting phrase in songs. This is not one of the crop song signatures. Those signatures and this continue

one practically exhaust the "vocable phrases" (standardized special "words" that lack meaning within ordinary spoken Pima-Papago). [BACK]

9. Superstition Mountain is at the east end of Pima country, and Santa Cruz is at the west. Corn's home was somewhere beyond Superstition Mountain. (Ta:tkam, of the next note, is actually 40 miles south of Superstition Mountain.) The version of this story published by Saxton and Saxton (1973: 27-43) puts Corn's home at "Below the East" ( Si'alig Weco ), the location of the Pima-Papago land of the dead, or their paradise. The same place figures into the end of this story by Smith. [BACK]

10. Bahr had thought that this could be Ta:tkam, the large mountain east of Eloy, Ariz., because Thin Leather gives that mountain as the home of a Corn Man, the subject of Type A crop songs (Russell 1908: 333-334; see n. 6, above, for crop song types and myths). Ta:tkam does not mean "hole," however. It seems to mean "feeler." The word " vag " does mean "hole"; and "Vagkam" would mean "Hole-place." Hayden confirmed this in a letter of Feb. 1993.

Vatcum—a butte east of Florence [Ariz.] with a hole on each opposing side, giving the appearance of passing all the way through. In 1930 George Boundy, custodian of Tumacacori [National Monument, Ariz.], took my father, Dr. Van Bergen and Art Woodward to it, claiming that the apparent passage forced a draft through the mountain which made for the efficient cremation of bodies, hence the Hohokam use of it as a crematory and the "smoked" walls and roof of the "tube." Not so, the holes are not connected and didn't go through.

11. In a letter of Feb. 1993, Hayden stated that this means "White Thin." If so, I would spell the Pima phrase S-toa Komalk. Hayden understood the phrase to be the name of a long east-west mountain range near Blackwater, Ariz. I think this range is normally called Ko:magi, 'Grey'. Thus, I think the last element is really the word for "grey," not the word for "thin" (or "flat"—another translation of "Komalk"). [BACK]

12. Except for the letter "d," which could be a typing error, this phrase is close to Hayden's rendition of the Type A crop song signature phrase as discussed in note 6, above. [BACK]

13. Note that this episode says that the proper use of tobacco is in groups whose members know and state their kinship with each other. To know those relations, people must know their parenthood. In Pima-Papago and I suppose in all societies, the institution of marriage serves to make parenthood clear. Thus, this episode on the proper use of tobacco underlines what I take to be continue

the theme of this part, that with the new food crops came the regularization of marriage. Tobacco's father insists on it. No doubt he knew that he was Tobacco's father, but he insisted that all people know such things. They cannot smoke without testifying to that knowledge. [BACK]


previous sub-section
Notes
next sub-section