Pima-Papago

ETHNONYMS: O'odham, Upper Pirnas; including, at different times, peoples called Papabota, Sobaipuri, Soba, Gileno, Piato, Areneno, Pima, Papago, Sand Papago, Akimel O'odham (river people), and Tohono O'odham (desert people)

Orientation

Identification and Location. Aboriginally, the Pima-Papagos/Upper Pirnas occupied about forty thousand square miles of the Sonoran Desert of the present states of Sonora, Mexico, and Arizona, United States. This territory lies Between 30° and 33° N and 112° and 115° W. Today's Pima-Papago are the remnant and consolidation of that territory's earlier occupants whom the Spaniards called the "Upper Pirnas." During the nineteenth century, at the time of the U.S. entry into the region, a portion of the Upper Pirnas was called the "Gila River Pimas" and most others were called "Papagos." Although many historians and anthropologists have treated the two as separate peoples, we bring them Together because so much that is true of the one people is true of the other. Furthermore, in writing of the varieties of Pima-Papagos, we will frequently make use of a three-part division by settlement pattern, which pertains to the two peoples as follows: One Village (sedentary)—Pirnas; Two Villagers (seasonal oscillation between lowland field and highland well villages)—most Papagos; and No Villagers (completely migratory campers opposed to villagers)—a few Papagos. There were perhaps five thousand One Villagers, seven thousand Two Villagers, and five hundred No Villagers (the so-called Sand Papagos).

Linguistic Affiliation. These people spoke closely related dialects of Pima-Papago, a Uto-Aztecan language. In the late nineteenth century, the One Villagers spoke one dialect, the Two Villagers about five, and the No Villagers one.

History and Cultural Relations

Archeological evidence is inconclusive on the origins of the Upper Pima/Pima-Papago. It is not clear if they are the descendants of the Hohokam or of some other pre-European culture such as the Mogollon. In early post-European times, they bordered various Apache tribes to the east; the Opata, Lower Pima, and Seri to the south; the Cocopa, Quechan (or Yuma), and Maricopa to the west; and the Yavapai to the north. In the premodern period, relations with the Apache, Quechan, and Yavapai were warlike, those with the Cocopa and Maricopa were peaceful, and those with other peoples were ruled by the Pax Hispanica.

The periods of post-European history are scant European contact (c. 1550-1700), premodern (1700-1900), and modern (1900-the present). Contact began soon after Columbus, but Spanish mission and secular (military, ranching, mining) settlement did not enter Upper Pima territory until nearly 1700. Throughout the premodern period those settlements, whether Spanish, Mexican, or European-American, remained sparse and remote from centers of White culture. For their part, the Upper Pima/Pima-Papago tended to accept European-Americanization whenever it was offered. In premodern times they fought for Spain, Mexico, and the United States against Apaches and Yavapais. When the United States entered and brought peace to the region, from 1850 to 1880, ushering in the modern period, the economic pace quickened on both sides of the new U.S.-Mexican border that divided Pima-Papago territory. These post-1850 developments did not cost the Pima-Papago much additional territory. Except for a town-studded railroad swath that also passed through their territory, separating the Gila River Pirnas from the Papagos, the new non-Indian settlements were on land that had earlier been ceded to Spain, Mexico, Yavapais, or Apaches. The unceded Pima-Papago territory (except for the most arid western extremity of it, the home of the Sand Papagos) was incorporated into Indian reservations between 1875 and 1925. From the largest in territory to the smallest, the reservations are Sells, Gila River, San Xavier, Salt River, Ak Chin, and Gila Bend.

Settlements

The One, Two, and No Village settlement patterns existed through the scant contact and premodern periods. Villages were a collection of household buildings (a household had separate sleeping, cooking, and storage structures), plus a central meeting house and an associated central dance ground. Prior to the 1850s, the most substantial village buildings had earth roofs and circular brush walls; mud was not, or not commonly, a building material. The No Villagers had ephemeral versions of the same building types. In particular, they had no earth-roofed buildings. On the other hand, part way through the premodern period, beginning around 1850, the One and Two Villagers added rectangular mud-walled houses to their older mudless form, and they added mudwalled Christian churches, with associated mud-walled feast houses and European-style dance grounds, to their inventory of village public buildings. These new substantial buildings were native or folk copies of Spanish prototypes. During the modern period the Gila River and Salt River reservations of traditionally One Villager People were largely divided into separate household farm allotments producing a dispersed, road-gridded settlement pattern. The largest reservation in the Two Villager tradition, the Sells Reservation, was not so divided. Its villages remained nucleated with wide open spaces between them.

In some respects, however, all reservations, large or small, allotted or not, and whatever their prior settlement pattern, have now become like dispersed small American towns. The downtown is the reservation or tribal headquarters and the distinct villages, or grid of allotments, are the neighborhoods. Like a small town, the reservation is a bounded, self-governing, self-serving social entity of a few thousand people. Unlike a typical U.S. town, however, there is very little commercial (buying and selling) activity. As in previous eras, the gift, not the sale, is the dominant Indian-to-Indian mode of exchange. Therefore, there is nothing in a reservation resembling a business district. Nowadays people buy most of their necessities, but they do so in White towns off the reservation, and they sell little among themselves.

Economy

Subsistence and Commercial Activities. Prior to the modern period, the No Villagers subsisted on a few highly specialized plants as well as some game animals. The Two Villagers had slightly more abundant wild plant food, better hunting opportunities, and cultivatable fields in which they grew tepary beans, maize, and squash. The One Villagers had access to fertile river flood plains which provided them with surplus crops. The Spanish brought horses, cattle, wheat, and much else to Pima-Papago awareness, but it was only with the Pax Americana that the Indians could safely cultivate those plants. Two and No Villagers then labored for the geographically better endowed One Villagers, as well as for incoming European-Americans. Since the 1960s, welfare payments and reservation service-sector jobs (working for "the town"—see above) have supplemented the older migratory day-work practice; the traditional food-getting economy is nearly extinct. In aboriginal times, only the dog was domesticated. Cattle, horses, chickens, and so on were introduced early by Europeans and remain important today.

Industrial Arts. Aboriginal crafts included pottery, basketry, and cotton weaving. Pima-Papago arts were utilitarian. Pottery was used for hauling water and cooking. Baskets were used for food storage and preparation. Iron and steel were early adopted for cutting and digging, but stone was retained into the twentieth century for pounding and grinding food-stuffs. By the 1960s, nearly all pottery and baskets were produced for sale to White-Indian traders, not for home use.

Trade. There was aboriginal trade in raw materials among the One, Two, and No Villagers, and among them and other Indian groups. No and Two Villagers exchanged their labor for the grains of the One Villagers. During the last half of the nineteenth century, the One Villagers along the Gila River enjoyed a prosperous trade with White settlers and migrants (such as journeyers to California). As White settlers diverted the river water for their own crops, the One Villagers' farming boom ceased.

Division of Labor. In all periods, men did most of the hunting, farming, and building, and women gathered wild foods and fetched water, made baskets and pottery, cooked, and cared for the young children. Native ritual and curing practices were assigned primarily to men, but women dominated the premodern folk Christian liturgies. Both sexes worked as migrant cash laborers, and both work in the Contemporary tribal service economies.

Land Tenure. Land was abundant and fields and houses were easy to make (fifty person hours for an earth-covered house, five hours for a No Villager house). There was a tendency toward patrilineal inheritance of fields and house sites and to patrilocal postmarital residence, but few people felt constrained by those tendencies. Men could reside matrilocally and people could relocate with cousins.

Kinship

Kin Groups and Descent. There were pan-Pima-Papago patrimoieties whose totems were the Coyote and Buzzard. There were five pan-Pima-Papago patrilineal sibs, three Buzzard, and two Coyote. Neither moiety nor sib membership had much effect on marriage, material property, or religious or political office. Sib membership did determine one form of intimate behavior: the word a child used to address his or her father. People without a Pima-Papago father lacked a socially proper way to say "my daddy." In effect this was a pan-Pima-Papago endogamy enforcer. The important economic grouping was the bilateral kindred. A person's kindred extended outside the local community. A prohibition against marrying close relatives (up to second cousins) encouraged this tendency and resulted in households with far-reaching bilateral ties.

Kinship Terminology. Pima-Papago parental generation kin terms were of the lineal type, which uses a distinct term for each relative. For one's own generation two distinct terms were used, which is characteristic of the Eskimo and Iroquois types, but the logic of the Pima-Papago deployment conforms to neither type. The Pima-Papago logic pertains to the relative age either of a sister (by English reckoning) or female cousin to oneself or of a female cousin's parent relative to one's own parent. One term means "younger sister, or child of my parent's younger brother or sister," and the other term means "older sister, or child of my parent's older brother or sister." It is a relative age-sensitive version of the Hawaiian type of same-generation terminology.

Marriage and Family

Marriage. Marriage was permitted with nonrelatives and relatives more remote than second cousins, with marriages arranged by the bride's parents soon after puberty. The levirate and sororate were practiced and polygyny permitted. The husband's first marriage was at sixteen or seventeen years of age. Patrilocal residence was the norm until a couple had several children, when they then built their own house. The primary cause of divorce was a bad temper; next came infidelity. Couples could take their dispute to the Keeper of the Smoke at the central village meeting house (see below). After divorce, men and women tended to remarry quickly.

Domestic Unit. The aboriginal standard was the extended family. Among contemporary Pima-Papago the nuclear Family is the norm, yet extended family members usually live nearby.

Inheritance. In aboriginal times individual property, Including the deceased's house, was destroyed or buried with the dead. Since land is indestructible and was held not Individually but through layers of collective rights, tracts of land, including fields, were neither destroyed after death nor simply transferred to single inheritors. Earth-bound productive resources were constantly but slowly redealt and reshuffled. This is less true today as U.S. probate procedures and Inheritance law are used in each reservation's tribal court. Besides land (primarily on the allotted reservations where land is now leased to outsiders), horses (formerly destroyed), cattle (Primarily on unallotted reservations), and bank savings are now probated.

Socialization. Child rearing discouraged boisterous or affrontive expressions of hostility or anger. As they matured, children were trained to be modest and retiring. Young people were continually taught a moral code of industry, fortitude, and swiftness of foot.

Sociopolitical Organization

Social Organization. In early times, class distinctions were absent. Status came with heading a large family. The various language dialect groups comprised politically autonomous local or regional bands. There was some intermixing of these bands at ceremonies, and by the mid-nineteenth century there was a pan-Pima-Papago native-centered mythology with public commemorations at two known pan-Pima-Papago ceremonial centers. The ceremony was called the wi:gita (see below).

Political Organization. Aboriginally the Pima-Papago had no centralized regulation of production, exchange, war, or diplomacy. Each village was autonomous but joined with other villages of the regional band for war and ceremonies. Villages had headmen (Keepers of the Smoke) who were at the center of local public life. The headmen ideally were generous, soft-spoken, and humorous. Synonyms for the headman were the "Wise Speaker," "Fire Maker," "Keeper of the Basket," "One Above," "One Ahead," and "One Made Big." Other offices were War Leader, Hunt Leader, Irrigation Ditch Leader, and Song Leader. Shamans, as seers, were none of the above. The above offices pertained to talking and to gaining consensus through talk, not to seeing in the dark (the shaman's specialty). Shamans were thought to have personalities different from politicians. Village council matters Concerned agriculture, hunting, war, and dates for ceremonies and games to be held with other villages. The headmen did not pronounce a decision unless there was consensus.

All the reservations adopted U.S.-modeled constitutions in the 1930s (some were grouped under single tribal jurisdictions, however). These constitutions connected villages to districts and then to tribes by establishing elected offices or councilmen (now men and women) at district and tribal levels. The constitutions produced office-rich, high-participation governments, since the tribes had populations equivalent to small U.S. towns. Most matters for council consideration arise from outside (White) initiative; the Councils primarily carry White (Bureau of Indian Affairs, private corporate) proposals to grass-root respondents.

Social Control and Conflict. Traditional society operated with a minimum of overt control. Conflicts were glossed over in an attempt to maintain order. Peaceableness was a virtue. For minor offenses, the fear of gossip was a control, as was the fear of witchcraft or sorcery. (One never knew who might be a shaman, at least a bad shaman.) Major offenders might be banished by council decision and bad shamans might be executed, allegedly after village council discussion. Mystical punishments for the violation of taboos were also believed in, and many native sicknesses (see below) were said to result from such violations. Conflict with non-Pima-Papagos was minimized. Warfare was rationalized as defensive. Pima-Papagos fought as mercenaries for Spain, Mexico, and the United States in defense of the latter's frontiers. They sold captive Apaches and Yavapais to Spaniards and Mexicans, and they continued to hold their warrior initiation ceremonies, as "mock battles," long after the Pax Americana.

Religion and Expressive Culture

Religious Beliefs. Little is known of Pima-Papago beliefs prior to the nineteenth century, which saw, as noted above, a remarkable pan-Pima-Papago pagan religious synthesis. This synthesis was certainly achieved in the knowledge of Christianity and may have been at least partly a response to it. The myth synthesis featured a murdered man-god analogous to Jesus, and the corresponding public ceremony (the wi:gita) was analogous to, and echoed, neighboring Christian tribes' (such as Yaqui) Easter ceremonies. Meanwhile, and probably before this pagan synthesis, God, the devil, the saints, heaven, and hell were all acknowledged. Folk Christianity preceded mission-led Christianity in the northern Upper Pima/Pima-Papago area.

The nineteenth-century pagan prose mythology has as its principal characters two man-gods (a Creator and a Culture Hero), one of whom was murdered by public consent like Jesus; Coyote and Buzzard (moiety totems); a female monster; a race of exterminated humans; and the ancestral Pima-Papagos as the exterminators (this mythology is currently under tribal revision in the direction of pacifism among ancient Indians). The Christian pantheon has long been recognized. Shaman seers and gifted nonshamans dream songs from all the above, Christian and pagan, and from many other things and spirits as well. The songs constitute a Literature supplementary to, and actually greater than, the prose mythology. Finally, well into the twentieth century and continuing in parts today, there were native traditional (pagan) public ceremonies for rain, farming, hunting, war, and other activities; and there was an elaborate, generally private (performed at home) development of ritual cures for sicknesses caused by taboo violations.

Religious Practitioners. Shamans divined for both public ceremonies and private cures. Shamans do not divine for Christian rituals nor for traditional or constitutional governmental deliberations. There were and are non-shaman singers and chanters-orators for all pagan and church religious observances. Certain ceremonies required nonspeaking, sometimes dancing, sometimes costumed, functionaries as well.

Medicine. "Staying sickness," a class of illness considered to be unique to the Pima-Papago, is an important Contemporary religious expression. The sicknesses come from breaking taboos associated with many animals, some plants, unbaptized saints' images, Christian devils, and the wi:gita Ceremony. Over a lifetime an individual becomes the host of many such maladies. When a sickness builds to an intolerable level, a shaman is called to make a diagnosis. The shaman then performs a "seeing," with singing, sucking, and blowing, and announces the cause—the violated "way" of the "dangerous object" (from the above list of types). The shaman either sings (and blows) the required liturgy or advises another Ritual curer who can do so. This cure originates in and belongs to the offended "way." Upon hearing or feeling the cure, this "way" lifts its power from the sick person.

Death and Afterlife. The death of others is feared by the living. The spirit of the dead is to proceed to a land of the dead "below the east." The dead live in a community like that of the living yet free from hardships. Burial was formerly at a distance from the village in a rock-covered enclosure or a cave that faced east. A person's possessions were buried with the deceased, placed on top of the mound or destroyed at home. Funeral practices now have a Christian form, with consecrated cemeteries. A one-year death anniversary is observed for the deceased. In addition, on All Souls' Day a feast is prepared by families who vacate their homes to allow the spirits of the dead to visit the household in peace.

Bibliography

Bahr, Donald M. (1988). "Pima-Papago Christianity." Journal of the Southwest 30:133-147.

Bahr, Donald M., J. Gregorio, D. Lopez, and A. Alvarez (1974). Piman Shamanism and Staying Sickness. Tucson: University of Arizona Press.

Ortiz, Alfonso, ed. (1983). Handbook of North American Indians. Vol. 10, Southwest, 125-229. Washington D.C.: Smithsonian Institution.

Russell, Frank (1980). The Pima Indians. Tucson: University of Arizona Press.

Underhill, Ruth (1939). Social Organization of the Papago Indians. New York: Columbia University Press.

Underhill, Ruth (1946). Papago Indian Religion. New York: Columbia University Press.

DONALD M. BAHR and DAVID L. KOZAK