1. The native author N. Scott Momaday used essentially the same tripartite past in writing his books The Way to Rainy Mountain and The Names , especially the former. His terms for the three periods are "the mythical, the historical, and the immediate." His method was to form "triplet chapters," each chapter being composed of a short story from each time period, the three stories being unified by an overall concern or motif. H. David Brumble (1988) put this method into the perspective of Indian autobiography in general. For Brumble, the pre-Momaday native oral autobiographical tradition was confined to the immediate past (Vansina's period of personal accounts). This tradition classically consisted of recitations of fame-giving or fame-worthy events. Momaday's innovations on that tradition were, first, to expand the range and moods of remembered personal experience to conform to the range and moods of European autobiography and, second, to tribalize his personal accounts by juxtaposing them with pieces of group history and ancient myth. The result was a new form of autobiography, modern in its sense of self but invoking the full oral cultural time scale.

Smith and Allison do not do this. They stay in the realm of ancient time narrative. They certainly were more conservative and less formally schooled than Momaday, who was a good generation younger than them, and I would also say that they wanted to make a church scripture (see below), while Momaday wanted to make a more secular and modern kind of literature.

2. A people with the same culture, language, and myth tradition as the Pimas. The Pimas live along the Gila and Salt rivers in desert central Arizona. The Papagos live in the riverless desert to the south of them. I will refer to the two peoples jointly as the Pima-Papago.

3. I will make constant reference to Thin Leather's mythology. It was taken down independently three times, first by Frank Russell (published in condensed form in 1908), then by J. W. Lloyd (published in a more oral, more Indian English in 1911), and finally by J. W. Fewkes (excerpts published in 1912). The Lloyd version, which is quite close to Smith-Allison in content, completeness, continue

and style, was privately published and is now quite rare. The other two versions are also out of print. I will frequently supplement a Smith-Allison story with a Thin Leather version from one of these sources.

4. The latter transmissions are imperfect, I think, more due to problems of haste and in the reliability of translation than to problems of untranslatability. Granted, there are also problems of omission of materials that the narrator thought could make the tribe look silly or crude. One Papago summed these up as "the miracles and the dirty stuff." Finally, there are problems of misunderstanding and misapprehension on the part of the white collector. In general, these are not great because the collectors depended on and took few liberties with native translators, that is, people like Allison. The translators are the unsung heroes of myth collection. In the best texts, for example, the Smith-Allison text and Thin Leather's version published by the Lloyd Group, the native-language narrator was willing to speak and was not hurried, the translator had a keen sense of both languages, and the collector let the text write itself, off the translator's lips.

5. Note that such accounts can occur in any of Vansina's three temporal zones. There can be personal accounts of revelations and divine transports. I suppose that in Vansina's scheme these are disqualified as history because they lack independent sensory verification. We should also note that such eruptions of the divine into the present have the potential to change the sense of the ancient past. This occurs when the eruption is taken as informative about the past. Alfred Kroeber (1925: 754) felt that the Mojave Indians and other "Yuman" tribes near to the Pima-Papago believed that they received such information, hence they could update their mythologies. I know that the Pima-Papago say that they travel in dreams with the gods of their myths, but no one has told me that these travels actually changed their understanding of the past. Of course, it is likely that no Mojave told that to Kroeber, either. He probably surmised it.

6. I thank Todd Bostwick for pointing out in a letter of May 1993 that the Hohokam area contained several dozen settlements in which earth "platform mounds" were surrounded by "compound walls." Only a few of these—less than a dozen—had massive, multistory clay or adobe houses, that is, "great houses" in the strict sense.

7. Their names from bottom to top are Vahki, Estrella, Sweet-water, Snaketown, Gila Butte, Santa Cruz, Sacaton, Soho, and Civano. The first one and last two are from Pima-Papago mythology: Wa'aki, 'Great-house', S-e'ehe, 'Elder Brother', and Sivañ, 'Chief [of a great-house]'. The other names are of Pima villages, generally with Hohokam sites nearby, or of local geographic features. break

Note that the period names, Pioneer, Colonial, Sedentary, and Classic, amount to a sketch history of the Hohokam, and it is a history that echoes that of Anglo-America. Of course, those terms have passionate meanings for America, and we do not know whether or how they registered in the minds of the Hohokam. On the basis of Smith-Allison, I suggest the following periods: Genesis, Flood (actually not a period but a hiatus), the Origin of Farming and Marriage, and the Killing of God.

8. Here is Hayden's opinion on the history of the Hohokam, as stated in a letter to me of January 23, 1993.

To be simplistic, I imagine that the region was [very anciently] occupied by O'otam-Piman speakers who were hunters and gatherers. They had been part of a migration of such speakers at the end of the Altithermal period, 5000 [years] B.P. or so. Others of this migration went on to the vicinity of the Valley of Mexico where they learned canal irrigation and many other distinct traits [represented in the Colonial Hohokam period]. Around the time of Christ or before, some of these southern folk must have come back up to the Gila River, with which they must have been well acquainted, probably through Pima-speaking travelers in both directions. These returnees settled down very quickly at Snaketown, without any known developmental stages.

These were the Hohokam, surrounded by the O'otam, whom they quickly influenced and taught the new ways that they had learned in the south. In time these Hohokam were joined by others with power, who became the big house builders and the constructors of the immense canal systems. These were the ones against whom the O'otam, the Emergents, arose, and whom the O'otam drove out as detailed in The Hohokam Chronicles, as you term the tales. Not many of us accept the concept of "Salado" per se, although influence from the Puebloans of the north is clear toward the last [of Hohokam history], and there was certainly trade between Hohokam and Pueblos. But I think it is safe to confine the history of Hohokam development to the southern influence and the immigrants from Mexico who were joining their congeners on the Gila.

9. Smith-Allison tend to deny this, but many other Pima-Papago mythologies claim it. See the introductory remarks to part 3.

10. It would be ideal if the text had been written in Pima, but Hayden was not trained in linguistics. More important, even if he or Allison were willing and able to tackle Pima prose (much more demanding than the writing of single key words), I doubt that continue

they could have obtained Smith's entire mythology through the painstaking, pain-giving method of face-to-face written dictation. In general, dictation is not used for texts as long and booklike as this one. (The Iroquois text mentioned below is an exception.) The method is best used for short texts and small series. Had Hayden or Allison attempted it, the result would probably not have been as long and lively as the text that was taken in English. And if I may say so on the basis of 30 years experience with Pima-Papago, Allison's translation is faithful but free.

In general, long native-language mythological texts such as Smith's have only been written by natives. The best-known examples are old, e.g., the Codex Chimalpopoca and the Popul Vuh from the early postconquest Aztecs and Quiche Mayas (see Bierhorst 1992 and Tedlock 1985 for recent editions of those works); a Tsimshian Raven cycle written by Henry Tate and published by Franz Boas (1916); and the Iroquois cosmology dictated in Onondaga and written and published by the Tuscarora J. N. B. Hewett (1928).

One would think that the era of tape recorders would be a boon to native mythological literature, and this is true. There have been some excellent tape recorder-based myth books in the early and middle 1970s, e.g., by Dennis Tedlock from the Zuni (published in 1972) and Gary Gossen and Robert Laughlin from Tzotzil Mayas (1974 and 1977). Of those, only Laughlin gives the native-language originals, but the original tapes are available. The pace of such publication quickened in the 1980s, especially for languages spoken in Alaska, Canada, and Mexico and due to the efforts, respectively, of the Alaska Native Language Center (University of Alaska, Fairbanks), the Mercury Series of the Canadian Ethnology Service, and the Summer Institute of Linguistics (especially for Mexico). Those publication programs are closely tied to particular native communities. In the United States, the Navajo Community College Press, for one, has done similar work. The programs are deliberately bilingual, being tied to school curricula.

To my knowledge those programs have not published many works like the Smith-Allison text, that is, texts formed by one author and covering the entire span of ancient, pre-European history. It is an open question how many such texts still exist in native communities. In the concluding section of this book, I speculate that the age of such mythologies may be past, but, of course, I would like to be proved wrong.

11. He is remembered as that today, rather than as Allison Smith.

12. I will sketch Bierhorst's reckoning because it is the most recent. In his study of Mexico and Central America, he distinguishes between pre-Columbian motifs and tales . A motif is a dominant episode or image, something that a whole story seems to continue

revolve upon, such as "Why the Earth Eats the Dead," "The Emergence of Ancestors," "The Man of Crops," "The Loss of the Ancients," and "The Seeds of Humanity." Those are in fact all of the major pre-Columbian motifs identified by Bierhorst in his book on the mythology of Mexico and Central America. Three of them (the second, third, and fourth) appear as stories—but with different titles—in the Smith-Allison text.

Tales are more specific and constraining than motifs. They are standard plots, made up of several or many incidents that recur from variant to variant (1990: 8). Of a total of 15 different pre-Columbian Mexican and Central American tale types that Bierhorst recognizes, only one appears as a story in the Smith-Allison text, namely, "The Flood Myth."

Those proportions are not unimpressive. One could say there are more than enough shared motifs to qualify our text as a Mexican or Central American mythology, although not enough shared tale types. These latter are quite specific, and they tend to come in alternative sets, e.g., five alternative myths about the sun. No people would have a perfect score on them, but nonetheless it appears true that Smith-Allison have too few of them, e.g., none of the sun myths as recognized by Bierhorst.

Turning briefly to the North American side, Bierhorst gives three basic myths for the Southwest portion of the pre-Columbian continent: "The Emergence" [from the underworld—a motif in the Mexico-Central America calculation], "[Boy] Heroes and Their Grandmothers," and "The Dying [Man-] God." The Smith-Allison text has the first and last but lacks the second, more than enough to establish their text's continuity with pre-Columbian North American peoples, not just in the Southwest but beyond. Bierhorst does not give a continentwide inventory, and I will not venture one.

The Pimas are about equally distant (1,200 mi.) from Mexico City and Chicago, so we should expect their stories to show relations both to the south and to the north.

13. The god Siuuhu is an exception in Smith-Allison. He has human morality constantly on his mind. His moral interest is more pronounced in Smith-Allison than in any other Pima-Papago mythology known to me, which is to say that their mythology comes closer than any other to violating this aspect of the First Commandment.

14. One may say that simply to credit gods with a formative role is to worship them, but I take worship to mean something more specific, namely, to accept a lasting covenant with gods, to seek personal and collective salvation through them, and to hope for joy in eventual eternal union with them. Such worship is urged and required in the Bible and the Book of Mormon, compatibly so in the eyes of the Mormons. It is not required in Smith-Allison or continue

any other Pima-Papago mythology, nor is it expressed in any traditional, non-Christian Pima-Papago ceremony known to me. It is expressed relative to God in Pima-Papago "established" and folk Christianity (see below for that distinction).

15. The recent African-centered world histories surely do Africanize Europe, and they do so similarly to the Mormons' Israelization of America. The African-centrists and Mormons do not dispute the race of the current Europeans and Indians, respectively, but they detect influence from their own kind of people on the land and customs of ancient Europe and America.

16. Other sources that I consulted on the Book of Mormon are Hugh Nibley's Since Cumorah (1967) and essays by Adele McCullum, Steven Sondrup, Bruce Jorgensen, Richard Rust, and George Tate in Literature of Belief (1981), edited by Neal Lambert. These works show that the scholarship on the Book of Mormon is confident and sophisticated. I hope I have done it justice.

17. For simplicity and due to my lack of knowledge, I limit this discussion to tribes, mythologies, governments, and churches within the United States.

18. The most churchlike native formation known to me, because it has a full mythology, is a complex that developed among Iroquois peoples at the turn of the nineteenth century and that still exists today. The political aspect of this complex is the League or Confederacy of the Iroquois, a governmental structure that took shape well before 1800 and in fact before the first European contact. The ritual, liturgical, sacramental aspect is the Longhouse religion, which took its present form around 1800 under the impetus of the Seneca prophet Handsome Lake. The mythological aspect has three layers of texts: a creation story analogous to Smith-Allison, an account of the origin of the political league, and an account of prophetic impetus for the reform of the Longhouse religion. As I understand it, no Iroquois sovereignty within or outside the league has formally established this complex as the Iroquois religion, and yet its various components comprise a virtual, full church in the sense used in this essay. I thank John Bierhorst and William Fenton for personal discussions on aspects of this religion. I also consulted the writings of Elizabeth Tooker (1978 a 1978 b ), Anthony Wallace (1978), and Edmund Wilson (1960) in writing this note.

19. There is no use to lament that the songs were not written in Pima and translated literally. That would have been a very specialized activity. Perhaps many of them are still out there, and in any case, thousands of more or less similar ones, not necessarily used for creation myth-telling, are still there. break