1. I think this is typical of North American and perhaps of all tribal, or simply of all human, mythologies. These are stories that treat of creations and origins in long-ago times. They are sacred and tell of miracles. As a rule, or at least as a strong tendency, these stories lack normal human procreation. One may say that they lack it precisely because a good deal of their sacred and miraculous creation is, as Freud would say, sublimated ("made sublime") sexual procreation. Such creation is instead of sexual procreation. It is achieved by retaining one member of the normal procreating pair, man or woman, and by keeping that person away from normal coitus with the opposite sex. This person normally manipulates or comes into contact with a sublimated form of the opposite sex (molds feminine earth, eats masculine worm, etc.). Finally and perhaps a sensitive issue to feminism, generally only man-gods, not woman-gods, create humans external to their bodies (e.g., the continue

god sits and molds mud). Perhaps this is not strictly true, and insofar as it is true it may not be abhorrent to feminists. I am not aware that this topic has been surveyed and judged relative to North American myth or tribal myth in general. [BACK]

2. I consider this to be like procreation. It represents a woman-enacted counterpart to the molding of people from scratch by Siuuhu, etc. It is a woman's "creation" of a character outside her body. As such, it contradicts or qualifies the rule on external creation as stated in the previous note. [BACK]

3. This may be quibbling, but parrots are not people. The old woman does not equal the creator man-gods. [BACK]

4. Another instance of this is a green hawk that is formed from the smoke from the baking witch. I take it that this hawk is solar, and yet its color is explicitly green (Saxton and Saxton 1973: 295-304). [BACK]

6. Uam Nu:wi, 'Yellow Buzzard'.

The Thin Leather version of this story has the two families, the mother's and the "father's," living respectively at Casa Grande Ruin and a place about 20 miles to the southeast, near a mountain called Ta:tkam in Pima-Papago, which is the large mountain just to the east of Eloy, Ariz. Thin Leather and Smith-Allison agree that the father's side is associated with the sun ("Sun Meeter" in Thin Leather, "Yellow Buzzard" in Smith-Allison). Thin Leather explicitly associates the mother's side with water ("Morning Green Chief," turquoises, etc.); and Smith-Allison do so implicitly, if I am correct that the direction west connotes wetness.

Smith's identifying the mother as a Mojave and his attaching the "father's" family to Yellow Buzzard aligns his version of this story to a myth called the Flute Lure. This myth is known by Pima-Papago, and it appears in several collections (e.g., Densmore 1929: 54-77), but they generally consider it to be a Maricopa or Mojave narrative. It is similar to the "ho'ok" myth in that it treats the career of a person born of a human woman. In the ho'ok story, this person is fathered miraculously by a kickball, while in the Flute Lure story, the person (actually twin boys) is fathered miraculously from underground and through water by a gopher.

Smith's mythology lacks a version of the Flute Lure story, except that he uses the Flute Lure geography, so to speak, to open his version of the ho'ok. [BACK]

7. Russell's Thin Leather gives five songs that are said to have been sung on this occasion (278-279). Saxton and Saxton's two continue

versions of the story lack songs; and, so far as I know, the "Ho'ok killing" songs in Russell are the only ones that have been recorded so far. Those five contain many passages that Russell and his helpers could not understand. I cannot understand them either. [BACK]

8. Muhadag. Most versions of this story put the location of the dance near the present Papago village of Poso Verde, Sonora, Mexico; and Smith himself stated earlier in the story that the girl grew up (and presumably met her end) in Papago country. This does not preclude that Siuuhu might have been summoned from his residence at a mountain in Pima country, near today's Phoenix, but it would have made it a long trip. (Some Papago versions of the story, I believe, place his residence at this time near Baboquivari Mountain in Papago country.) [BACK]

9. The most prominent mountain on today's Papago or Tohono O'odham reservation. [BACK]

10. Papago or Tohono O'odham village just south of the U.S./Mexico border, 30 miles south of Baboquivari mountain. [BACK]

11. I speculate that Fewkes put this term in quotations because the other settlement in question may not have been referred to as a "great-house" (wa'aki). In the most restrictive sense, it seems that the term was reserved for Casa Grande Ruin and for various distant, cosmic places such as the "Shining Great-house" named in the ceremonial speech by Corn in the Thin Leather version of the Corn and Tobacco myth. Thus, places such as the settlement in this myth are great-houses by extension or by courtesy. [BACK]

12. Fewkes had Thin Leather staying with him at Casa Grande Ruin, hence the detail in this narrative. [BACK]

13. The first two syllables add up to tas * , 'sun'. The remaining three syllables cannot possibly yield the rest of that line, but they are probably the first line of the song. Fewkes should have written down all the syllables, start to finish, then one might use his English sketch to piece the song back together. [BACK]