AS LATE AS the 1950’s no thorough collection or study has been made of Yaqui folklore. At this time only about a score of Yaqui stories were to be found in published form. The 61 Yaqui folk and fairy tales and 90 pen and ink drawings in this comprehensive volume go quite a way to correcting this. HEREIN you will find stories like Yomumuli And The Little Surem People, The Ku Bird, The Wise Deer, Tasi'o Sewa, Yuku, When Badger Named The Sun, Mochomo, The Walking Stone, The Stick That Sang, Cho'oko Baso plus many more. YAQUI FOLK literature also expresses the tribe's sense of the sacred and material value of their territory, and the antiquity and distinctiveness of their customs. As such, you will also find stories of War Between The Yaquis And The Pimas and The Wars Against The Mexicans. For most of the 19th C. the Mexican government baited the Yaquis, captured and sold them off as indentured workers then confiscated their land and moved settlers in. But the Yaquis fought back. There is also the story of the Peace At Pitahaya which was signed in 1909. STORY TELLING among the Yaquis is quite informal. There is no socially determined time or place for relating the myths or tales except in the case of pascola stories, which are told at fiestas. Nor are there special persons who are supposed to tell the myths or tales. Yaquis say that stories are most often told, by men or women, in the evenings when a group happens to be gathered in the ramada or in the house by the fire. They also tell stories when working in the fields. However, some of the older Yaquis indicate that story-telling used to be more formalised in the time of their parents or in their own youth. The more the pity as there is no better way of keeping a culture alive than through story telling. WE INVITE YOU to curl up in front of your hearth with the fire crackling and spitting. Then open this this unique sliver of Yaqui culture not seen in print for many a year; and immerse yourself in the tales and fables of the ancient American South West. ---------------------------- KEYWORDS-TAGS: fairy tales, folklore, myths, legends, children’s stories, children’s stories, bygone era, fairydom, fairy land, classic stories, children’s bedtime stories, fables, cultural, setting, Arizona, Mexico, South Western USA, storytelling, narrators, yomumuli, little surem people, ku bird, wise deer, tasi'o sewa, yuku, badger, named the sun, mochomo, wax monkey, false beggar, stick that sang, two bears, walking stone, sun, moon, five friends, takochai, man, buzzard, snake people, omteme, juan sin miedo, boy, became king, kaiman, big bird, wars against the Mexicans, war between the yaquis and the pimas, peace at pitahaya, malinero'okai, first, deer hunter, death, kutam tawi, flood, prophets, san pedro, cristo, Saint Peter, Jesus Christ, jesucristo, pedro de ordimales, san pedro and the devil, father frog, two little lambs, maisoka, hima'awikia, cricket, lion, grasshopper and cricket, turtle, coyote, rabbit, heron and fox, cat, monkey, rabbit's house, coyote, friendly dogs, black horse, duck hunter, tesak pascola, watermelons, calabazas, funeral, suawaka, topol the clever, remain animals, coyote woman, first fiesta, bobok, five mended brothers, 5, first fire, spirit fox, 2, yaqui doctor, twins, snake of the hill of nohme, tukawiru, cho'oko baso
"The reminiscences of a Yaqui Indian born in 1896 in northwestern Mexico whose story begins during the Yaqui revolutionary period, continues through the last uprising in 1926, and ends with [his] recollections of his life on a Texas farm from 1952 to 1969. The introduction by Professor Kelley adds scholarly analysis to the poignant autobiographical narrative."?Booklist. "A powerful chronicle. . . . It deserves an important place in the annals of American Indian oral history and literature."?Bernard L. Fontana, New Mexico Historical Review. "A valuable document . . . about the effects of the Diaz Indian policy in Sonora on the human beings who were its object. [It] tells the story of the social limbo created by the shattering of families and corruption of personal relations under the relentless pressures of the Yaqui deportation program."?Edward H. Spicer, Arizona and the West. "The nightmare world of witchcraft and dream-dependence is one of the major fascinations of this strange and moving book. . . . [Its understatement] acquires a kind of fascinating power, as does the laconic stoicism of the Yaqui himself."?Southern California Quarterly. Jane Holden Kelley, a professor of archaeology at the University of Cal-gary, is the author of Yaqui Women: Contemporary Life Histories (1978), also a Bison Book. Her father, William Curry Holden, a trained historian and anthropologist, met the Yaqui narrator of this chronicle, Rosalio Moisäs, in 1934. They remained close friends until Moisäs's death in 1969.
Perhaps you know them for their deer dances or for their rich Easter ceremonies, or perhaps only from the writings of anthropologists or of Carlos Castaneda. But now you can come to know the Yaqui Indians in a whole new way. Anita Endrezze, born in California of a Yaqui father and a European mother, has written a multilayered work that interweaves personal, mythical, and historical views of the Yaqui people. Throwing Fire at the Sun, Water at the Moon is a blend of ancient myths, poetry, journal extracts, short stories, and essays that tell her people's story from the early 1500s to the present, and her family's story over the past five generations. Reproductions of Endrezze's paintings add an additional dimension to her story and illuminate it with striking visual imagery. Endrezze has combed history and legend to gather stories of her immediate family and her mythical ancient family, the two converging in the spirit of storytelling. She tells Aztec and Yaqui creation stories, tales of witches and seductresses, with recurring motifs from both Yaqui and Chicano culture. She shows how Christianity has deeply infused Yaqui beliefs, sharing poems about the Flood and stories of a Yaqui Jesus. She re-creates the coming of the Spaniards through the works of such historical personages as AndrŽs PŽrez de Ribas. And finally she tells of those individuals who carry the Yaqui spirit into the present day. People like the Esperanza sisters, her grandmothers, and others balance characters like Coyote Woman and the Virgin of Guadalupe to show that Yaqui women are especially important as carriers of their culture. Greater than the sum of its parts, Endrezze's work is a new kind of family history that features a startling use of language to invoke a people and their past--a time capsule with a female soul. Written to enable her to understand more about her ancestors and to pass this understanding on to her own children, Throwing Fire at the Sun, Water at the Moon helps us gain insight not only into Yaqui culture but into ourselves as well.
In this illuminating book, anthropologist Kirstin Erickson explains how members of the Yaqui tribe, an indigenous group in northern Mexico, construct, negotiate, and continually reimagine their ethnic identity. She examines two interconnected dimensions of the Yaqui ethnic imagination: the simultaneous processes of place making and identification, and the inseparability of ethnicity from female-identified spaces, roles, and practices. Yaquis live in a portion of their ancestral homeland in Sonora, about 250 miles south of the Arizona border. A long history of displacement and ethnic struggle continues to shape the Yaqui sense of self, as Erickson discovered during the sixteen months that she lived in Potam, one of the eight historic Yaqui pueblos. She found that themes of identity frequently arise in the stories that Yaquis tell and that geography and location—space and place—figure prominently in their narratives. Revisiting Edward Spicer’s groundbreaking anthropological study of the Yaquis of Potam pueblo undertaken more than sixty years ago, Erickson pays particular attention to the “cultural work” performed by Yaqui women today. She shows that by reaffirming their gendered identities and creating and occupying female-gendered spaces such as kitchens, household altars, and domestic ceremonial spaces, women constitute Yaqui ethnicity in ways that are as significant as actions taken by males in tribal leadership and public ceremony. This absorbing study contributes new empirical knowledge about a Native American community as it adds to the growing anthropology of space/place and gender. By inviting readers into the homes and patios where Yaqui women discuss their lives, it offers a highly personalized account of how they construct—and reconstruct—their identity.
Winner of the American Folklore Society’s Chicago Folklore Prize Yaqui regard song as a kind of lingua franca of the intelligent universe. It is through song that experience with other living things is made intelligible and accessible to the human community. Deer songs often take the form of dialogues in which the deer and others in the wilderness world speak with one another or with the deer singers themselves. It is in this way, according to one deer singer, that “the wilderness world listens to itself even today.” In this book authentic ceremonial songs, transcribed in both Yaqui and English, are the center of a fascinating discussion of the Deer Song tradition in Yaqui culture. Yaqui Deer Songs/Maso Bwikam thus enables non-Yaquis to hear these dialogues with the wilderness world for the first time.
The Papago Indians of the American Southwest say butterflies were created to gladden the hearts of children and chase away thoughts of aging and death. How the Butterflies Came to Be is one of twenty-four Native American tales included in Native American Animal Stories. The stories, coming from Mohawk, Hopi, Yaqui, Haida and other cultures, demonstrate the power of animals in Native American traditions.Parents, teachers and children will delight in lovingly told stories about "our relations, the animals." The stories come to life through magical illustrations by Mohawk artists John Kahionhes Fadden and David Fadden."The stories in this book present some of the basic perspectives that Native North American parents, aunts and uncles use to teach the young. They are phrased in terms that modern youngsters can understand and appreciate ... They enable us to understand that while birds and animals appear to be similar in thought processes to humans, that is simply the way we represent them in our stories. But other creatures do have thought processes, emotions, personal relationships...We must carefully ccord these other creatures the respect that they deserve and the right to live
In this innovative, performative approach to the expressive culture of the Yaqui (Yoeme) peoples of the Sonora and Arizona borderlands, David Delgado Shorter provides an altogether fresh understanding of Yoeme worldviews. Based on extensive field study, Shorter's interpretation of the community's ceremonies and oral traditions as forms of "historical inscription" reveals new meanings of their legends of the Talking Tree, their narrative of myth-and-history known as the Testamento, their fabled deer dances, funerary rites, and church processions.