Demonstrates the method of the deer song

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 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.

Describes the history and culture of the Native peoples of the regions on either side of the border with Mexico

An anthology of writings by contemporary Native American authors on the theme of home places, including stories from oral traditions, autobiographical writings, songs, and poems.

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.

An exploration of rhythm and the richness of musical time from the perspective of performers, composers, analysts, and listeners.

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.

The Columbia Guide to American Indian Literatures of the United States Since 1945 is the first major volume of its kind to focus on Native literatures in a postcolonial context. Written by a team of noted Native and non-Native scholars, these essays consider the complex social and political influences that have shaped American Indian literatures in the second half of the twentieth century, with particular emphasis on core themes of identity, sovereignty, and land. In his essay comprising part I of the volume, Eric Cheyfitz argues persuasively for the necessary conjunction of Indian literatures and federal Indian law from Apess to Alexie. Part II is a comprehensive survey of five genres of literature: fiction (Arnold Krupat and Michael Elliott), poetry (Kimberly Blaeser), drama (Shari Huhndorf), nonfiction (David Murray), and autobiography (Kendall Johnson), and discusses the work of Vine Deloria Jr., N. Scott Momaday, Joy Harjo, Simon Ortiz, Louise Erdrich, Leslie Marmon Silko, Gerald Vizenor, Jimmy Santiago Baca, and Sherman Alexie, among many others. Drawing on historical and theoretical frameworks, the contributors examine how American Indian writers and critics have responded to major developments in American Indian life and how recent trends in Native writing build upon and integrate traditional modes of storytelling. Sure to be considered a groundbreaking contribution to the field, The Columbia Guide to American Indian Literatures of the United States Since 1945 offers both a rich critique of history and a wealth of new information and insight.

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 Andrés Pérez 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.