The Short, Swift Time of Gods on Earth: The Hohokam Chronicles

THE SHORT,

SWIFT TIME

OF GODS

ON EARTH

Title page photograph: Juan Smith

University of California Press

Berkeley and Los Angeles, California

University of California Press

London, England

Copyright © 1994 by

The Regents of the University of California

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

The short, swift time of gods on earth: the Hohokam chronicles / Donald Bahr … [et al.].

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 0-520-08467-5 — ISBN 0-520-08468-3 (pbk.)

1. Hohokam culture. 2. Pima Indians—Legends. 3. Tohono

O’Odham Indians—Legends. I. Bahr, Donald M. II. Title: Hohokam chronicles.

E99.H68S56 1994

398.2'089974—dc20

93-41131

CIP

Printed in the United States of America

123456789

The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1984 @

CONTENTS

CONTENTS

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

INTRODUCTION

PART 0 PRELUDE, THE FONT TEXT

PART 1 GENESIS

PART 2 THE FLOOD

PART 3 NEW CREATION AND CORN

PART 4 THE WHORE

PART 5 ORIGIN OF WINE AND IRRIGATION

PART 6 MORNING GREEN CHIEF AND THE WITCH

PART 7 FEATHER BRAIDED CHIEF AND THE GAMBLER

PART 8 SIUUHU’S DEATH AND RESURRECTION

PART 9 THE CONQUEST UNTIL BUZZARD

PART 10 THE CONQUEST UNTIL SIWAÑ WA’AKI

PART 11 AFTER THE CONQUEST

CONCLUSION MYTHOLOGIES

APPENDIX: CORRELATION OF CONQUESTS IN THIN LEATHER AND SMITH-ALLISON

NOTES

REFERENCES

INDEX

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Bahr wishes to thank the following for their diverse help in making this book: N. Allen, H. Allison, A. Bahr, J. Bierhorst, T. Bostwick, W Bright, D. Brumble, L. Cameron, E. Diaz, L. Evers, E. Feldman, W Fenton, B. Fontana, S. Holwitz, T. Hutchinson, M. Jordan, J. Jorgensen, V Joseph, D. Kozak, A. Krupat, J. Lewis, S. Lewis, J. Manwarren, D. Morris, S. Pablo, M. Schweitzer, S. Vaughn, L. Webb, and J. Wilder.

INTRODUCTION

The text given in this book is a full, traditional Pima Indian creation narrative composed of thirty-six distinct stories that begin with the creation of the universe and end with the establishment of present-day villages. Versions of most of these stories have been published before, sometimes in isolation and sometimes as parts of larger texts. This text, in addition to having an interesting version of nearly every known Pima story, is the most complete natively articulated set of such stories to be written to date. They were selected, narrated, intermittently commented on, and translated by two Pimas, Juan Smith and William Allison, over several nights in spring 1935 at Snaketown, a village on the Gila River Indian Reservation in Arizona. Smith spoke in Pima, and Allison provided an English translation with comments. The white archaeologist Julian Hayden took down the English with care to preserve Allison’s diction and phrasing.

Snaketown was the site of an ongoing archaeological excavation. The text was given because Hayden was interested in what the Pimas knew about the culture that he and his colleagues were investigating, a culture whose archaeological name, the Hohokam, was borrowed from Pima mythology. The word means Finished-ones in Pima, but it was not clear to archaeologists or to white students of modern Pima culture exactly how this old culture had ended and what its relation was to the Pimas who had lived on former Hohokam territory since they were discovered and named Pima by the Spaniards around 1550. It was hoped that the Smith-Allison text, taken down at a village built on a Hohokam site, would be of assistance.

In fact, the text was of no more help than others that were already known. It states maddeningly that the Pimas were both the same as and different from the Hohokam:

they were the same because they spoke the same language (there are many songs in the text that are considered to retain Hohokam language verbatim), and they were different because the text says that they conquered and finished the other people. The conclusion to draw from this, if both ideas are accepted, is that the Hohokam conquest was internal and fraternal, if not fratricidal, something like a civil war.

ORAL HISTORY

Unable to affirm or deny the text from the evidence of the excavations and uncertain of what to expect of a text spoken five hundred years after the events in question (it was estimated that the last Hohokam period ended in the 1400s), Hayden filed it away, awaiting the guidance of a specialist in distinguishing between history and myth. I would like to pass that cup to another, and I will do so by presenting and then applying another’s ideas. The most stimulating thinker known to me on these matters is Jan Vansina, author of Oral Tradition as History (1985). He takes a strict, straightforward position on the history in oral texts: that which is historical is that which has been preserved intact from an original eyewitness account. Thus, the Smith-Allison text is historical if after five hundred years it preserves the content of a report (Vansina 1985: 29-32) uttered soon after the event.

His position is empiricist as it appeals to an original sensory observation, and it is literalist in supposing that words refer straightforwardly to things. He argues, and I agree, that tribal narrators use these standards, which amount to a kind of perfectionism. But neither the narrators nor we can be sure if the standards are met, especially relative to a text that is as long and that reaches as far back as this one and most especially when we know that contradictory versions of these events exist. Thus, the standards imply a perfectionism that is unverifiable in reality, and therefore they imply that most or all oral traditions fall short of their goals. I agree.

I think that this is the position of the Pimas. To continue with Vansina, the typical total system of a tribal people’s narratives is divided into three temporal zones, or tiers, from the most recent to the most ancient: personal accounts, group accounts, and accounts of origin (23). The personal accounts differ from those of the group because they trace to known reporters. The materials of the second sort have diffused generally through the group (a group of villages, a geographic section of a tribe); and while they are considered to be historical in the empirical, literal sense, the wide dissemination of these narratives robs them of an indubitable original observational source. Years are not necessarily counted in either zone, but genealogies and natural events may time them objectively. Both zones’ stories may run concurrently, and taken together the two zones commonly go back no farther than seventy-five to one hundred fifty years when they are correlated with European calendars and records.

Then, according to Vansina, comes a floating gap that, as he describes it, does not float as a space between discernible points of past time but is floated toward, as one travels back through the relatively confidently held zones of personal and group history. Simply, the past dwindles. One finds either a hiatus or just a few names, given with some hesitation (23). Beyond the gap, which is crossed instantaneously, one finds a final zone rich in tales about how the world was created and how the tribe’s constituent social groups came into existence. These are what Vansina calls tales of origin and many others call myth.¹

He avoids the word myth for such tales because it implies deliberate invention, intentional fiction, and the making up of new pieces of the past. He believes that myths are rarely created in tribal society. All such peoples at all times have a body of ancient origin accounts that they accept as unverifiable, imperfect, but possibly true. The people are loath to stray from them. Improbable as they are and detached from the present, these stories have a kind of inertia. Thus, people are the most reluctant to change their least verifiable stories. For all that we know, their origin stories may stay constant for centuries. Now, from the archaeological perspective, the Hohokam would have had such stories, because archaeologists believe that the Hohokam civilization lasted a thousand years. However, to the Fimas, at least to Smith and Allison, the Hohokam came to an end as a people with no ancient memories: they were a young tribe at the time of their destruction. I agree with the archaeologists that the Hohokam must have had their own origin accounts, but as is explained in the next chapter, I do not think we can know them.

I neither relish nor object to using the word myth in reference to these good faith, fallible, histories. Now, there are four additional points to be made relative to Vansina’s ideas and the Smith-Allison account. First, the conquest comes at the end of the long, multitale text, which is appropriate as this event gives the origin of the present Pima and Papago, or Tohono O‘odham,² territorial groups. Immediately after the conquest the groups fanned out to their present locations. Thus, the conquest falls near Vansina’s floating gap. He would place it on the origins side, and I agree. Neither Smith-Allison nor any other known narrator is clear on exactly what became of all of the Hohokam. If they were mostly exterminated, how was this done, and where are the signs? If they were mostly absorbed, which of today’s groups accepted them? As I understand Vansina ‘s idea of the second zone, matters as important as these would surely be told if people had confident knowledge of them. Therefore, I conclude that the conquest, while vividly told, is not confidently known in the sense of lending itself to probing questioning.

Second, I am content to say without reviewing the evidence here that the two zones of the Pima and Papago recent past reach back only about one hundred years. In other words, that past stops four hundred years short of the time when, according to the archaeologists, the conquest would have occurred. Thus, the gap is an ocean from our perspective, and the ocean includes the entire long period in which Europe worked its early effects on this people. Because of their remoteness from the centers of Spanish and Mexican power, the period of early effects, that is, the period in which Europe failed to reduce the Pima-Papago to its rule, lasted from the late seventeenth to the midnineteenth century. (The Pima-Papago had an exceptionally long period of weak European influence.)

Third and related to the first point, the stories of the conquest and all the myths that lead up to it are about individual heroes. Although Vansina does not stress this point, I note that such stories are not what most historians and prehistorians seek. Those scholars accept individuals, but they want generalizations. Thus, archaeologists are not satisfied with one Hohokam pot, they want a representative sample. Furthermore, and again something that Vansina does not stress, I suspect that the group accounts zone of oral traditions contains more generalizations than the zone of origins. The far side of Vansina’s gap has unique individuals and unprecedented events. The near side has regularized, much more typified and quantified life. This is why I have said that the conquest account falls on the far rather than the near side of the gap. If the account were on the near side, those generalizing questions on the fate of the Hohokam would have been addressed. For their part, the individual characters on the far side are brilliantly, if not fully, drawn, sometimes down to the words they spoke. As is explained later, these words are given in song, that being the form that in Pima opinion is the most resistant to errors in reproduction. It is as if the heroes rose into song when they wanted their words to endure. Now, what Vansina desires of history is observations of events, situations, and tendencies. I take it that the last two pertain to generalization, and I conclude that the zone of myth gives primarily the first, in a highly individualizing and exquisitely limited selectivity: libretti.

A final comment on the floating gap. Because we believe that the Hohokam lived very long ago, we are surprised that the Smith-Allison text ends with their conquest. Actually, the text has a brief section on the immediate after- math of the conquest, and then it hastens to the present. I believe this is a phenomenon of the gap. A Pima could do as Smith-Allison and start with the beginning, then proceed up to the gap, and then make a final dash to the present. Or one could start from the present and work back to the gap. The two accounts would have almost no events in common. Presumably, the second narrator would say on reaching the end of zone two that sometime before that, he or she does not know how long, there was the Hohokam conquest. Neither narrator would be disturbed, because neither is aware of anything that happened in four hundred unnarrated years.

That remarkable unawareness serves as the background for the remainder of this introduction. Immediately below I consider in somewhat greater detail how well archaeology and the Pimas agree on the Hohokam era. Following that is a discussion of the particulars of the telling and recording of the text in 1935 and a discussion of overt and possible covert Christian influence on the text and the possibility that a text such as this one could stand as the scriptural base of a Bible-acknowledging native Pima church. Finally there are discussions of the text as literature in the Vansinian sense of remembered narrative and of technical matters of editing.

THE TWO HOHOKAMS

Archaeology and the Pimas agree that at the end of their era the Hohokam enclosed some parts of their settlements with clay walls and that some of the walled areas contained multistory clay buildings. The first Spanish explorers found these structures in ruins. They called them great houses (casas grandes), a term that archaeologists retain. Since the nineteenth century and perhaps since the conquest, the Pimas have called these buildings wa:paki, an etymologically untransparent word that I translate as great-house.

The Smith-Allison text on the Hohokam conquest is a story of battles at successive great-houses. Since the narrated battle places correspond to archaeologically known great-houses (I will use the hyphenated spelling for both the archaeologists’ and the Pimas’ usages), one may think that the narrative is an accurate memory.

There is reason to doubt this, and doubt is all that I recommend. When we come to the conquest portion of the Smith-Allison text, we will review all the known versions of this war. We will see that there are only two accounts of a long, drawn-out march through archaeological places, that of Smith-Allison and that of another Pima, Thin Leather, whose mythology was well recorded shortly after the turn of the twentieth century.³ There are, however, several accounts that present a specific earthly conflict with cosmic overtones, rather than a grand territorial sweep. These other versions seem no less plausible as origin stories than the grand territorial ones. The cosmic overtones are present in both sorts of texts. One can equally believe that the grand territorial, archaeologically interesting texts are latter-day enlargements in a spirit of militarism or that the others are forgetful.

The balance tips toward the latter-day enlargement theory when a pair of older Pima texts is considered, one from 1694 and the other from 1775. Here there is a single greathouse, as if there were just one, and there is no conquest whatever. These texts are discussed in a prelude to the Smith-Allison text.

Briefly, to understand the differences between the older and both sorts of the more recent mythologies, one must leave aside the archaeologically detectable great-houses and take up the chiefly persons who the Pimas say lived in them; and one must ask why and by whom those chiefs were or were not attacked. The key is the absence in the older texts of the idea, present in all the later texts, that the Hohokam were conquered because they had killed the god who made them. The god returned to life, journeyed to the underworld, and summoned the Pima-Papago, or a portion of them, to avenge his death.

Those matters will be explored as we proceed story by story through the Smith-Allison mythology, annotating it and supplementing it with other stories from the Pima- Papago. The exploration will not preclude the possibility of an actual past place-by-place conquest of Pima-Papago by Pima-Papago. But the exploration will diminish our text’s standing as reliable history while letting it shine as theology and as passionate, historically conscious literature, in other words, as myth. As for my own opinion on what could have happened in Hohokam history, I repeat that all the stories or myths on this subject should be taken as good faith histories, that is, as stories that were offered by their tellers as true. Each myth might, could, and should be true as far as its teller was concerned; and thus I assume that no story was ever intentionally falsified, neither in tellings to Indians nor in transmission to a white recorder.⁴

Now, without going into detail, I say that all the stories on the Hohokam cannot be true. They are a collection of alternative and more or less contradictory good faith histories. Finally, I note that the stories have events that I find difficult to believe, such as the god’s resurrection and the ascent of the Pima-Papago from the underworld. Of course, my own Christian white people have stories that are equally difficult to believe. All accounts of mystical or supernatural things are of that nature.⁵

I do not suppose that the mystical parts of the stories will ever be proved. All our efforts at proof will concern nonmystical matters such as whether some or all of the Hohokam could have spoken a fifteenth-century form of Pima-Papago, whether all the Hohokam great-houses were destroyed or abandoned within a short period, and whether the Hohokam were more numerous, politically more centralized, and socially more stratified (with inherited differences in wealth) than the Pima-Papago of 1600 or 1900.

Simply, I cannot answer most of these questions, but I think that progress can be made toward that goal. Let me now propose a bit of an answer. As will be seen below, archaeologists believe that the great-houses only existed during the final period of a long, thousand-year, Hohokam history. Pima-Papago mythologies differ from accepted archaeological thought in that they do not grant a long temporal existence to the Hohokam. But mythology and archaeology might come together on one point, that the great-house time was troubled by warfare, specifically, that the walls around residential compounds and the large mud buildings such as Casa Grande (see below) were built for defense. I believe that archaeologists would agree that these structures would serve for defense, but it would be a further step for them to argue that the structures would not have been built except for defense. Relevant considerations would be whether the pre-great-house Hohokam had the ability to make such constructions but did not do so because the defense motive was lacking and whether some nondefense motive (storage, residential, religious) would justify the late architecture. I am not sure that these questions can be answered decisively, and I admit that they leave out the question of defense against whom (other great-house communities? mountain-based raiders?), but I offer them as thoughts on the nonmystical conciliation of Pima-Papago mythology and archaeology. Needless to say, they are offered because I believe the mythologies could have a base, if not their sole basis, in nonmystical local fifteenth-century fact.

Such are my proposals relative to the Hohokam problem. Let us now briefly review the history of Hohokam archaeology, up to, including, and after the Snaketown excavations. This review is in no sense a methodological or technical summary of that archaeology, which has now been augmented by thousands of dedicated workers. I simply wish to give the uninitiated reader a sketch of the field.

Snaketown was the third systematic excavation into the Hohokam. The first was in 1886-1888 under the leadership of Frank H. Cushing, famed for his study of Zuni religion. The second, in 1906-07 and 1907-08, was led by J. W Fewkes, a veteran of Hopi studies. The first excavation produced extensive materials but no clear ideas on the origin, duration, and fate of the Hohokam. Archaeology’s great dating technique, the stratigraphic removal of materials, was not employed. The second expedition did not use that technique either, and after twenty years of progress since Cushing in Southwest archaeological survey, in studying Spanish documents, and in collecting Pima mythologies, Fewkes found himself in agreement with the Pimas in their maddening, not necessarily true, picture of the end of the Hohokam. He believed that the Hohokam stopped making large, mud-walled great-houses and mud house compounds, that they abandoned the dozen-odd⁶ great-house settlements in which they had lived, and that they emigrated north and south, to Mexico and northern Arizona. Some also stayed where they were. Those who stayed became the Pima-Papago (Fewkes 1912: 152, 153-54).

Both the Cushing and Fewkes excavations concentrated on great-houses, Cushing at a location called Los Muertos (The Dead) in today’s Tempe, Arizona, and Fewkes at Casa Grande (Great House) near today’s town of Coolidge. These were indeed impressive ruins, with walls as thick as seven feet surrounding their constituent subunits or compounds and with some individual buildings as large as forty by sixty feet at the base and as tall as three stories (25 ft.).

By the time of the Snaketown excavations and evermore after those diggings, the great-houses were understood as the final flourishes of a long-standing and much more modest mode of Hohokam village life. This mode started around A.D. 1 and went through four periods (Pioneer, Colonial, Sedentary, and Classic), each with from one to four distinct subphases.⁷ The modest life was housed in freestanding, single-room, brush-walled, dirt-roofed buildings, which were much like (not identical with) those of the historic Pimas. Lacking were the football field-sized, house-aggregating compounds, and lacking too were the multistory prominences with which the terminal Hohokam graced some but not all of their compounds. Present, however, almost from the start, were open, oval-shaped, mound-surrounded, flat-floored ball courts and long irrigation canals. Those public features were also present in the great-house period. Thus, Snaketown, which generally lacked Classic period remains, had ball courts and canals but lacked great-houses (Haury 1976: 351-357).

The Snaketown excavators concluded that the final period great-house constructors left suddenly, which was also Fewkes’s opinion. But the Snaketown archaeologists also believed that the great-house people, or practice, had entered and commenced suddenly. They traced the practice to a core area to the north and east of the Hohokam, called the Salado. Possibly, then, the great-houses were Salado colonies. (No Pima-Papago mythology has said this.) Finally, the Snaketown excavators, like Fewkes, felt the Pimas were probably descended from the Hohokam, specifically, from the majority of the Hohokam who had lived in freestanding houses.

The principal archaeological interpreters of Snaketown were Harold Gladwin and Emil Haury. There has been considerable work on the Hohokam since 1935, including an important return excavation of Snaketown by Haury in 1964-65 (published 1976); and many other archaeologists, including Hayden, who wrote the Smith-Allison mythoiogy , have contributed findings and interpretations on the origin, duration, and end, or historic persistence, of the Ho- hokam. My impression is that the sequence of periods and phases established by Gladwin and Haury is still considered valid and that their idea of a long in situ development and a short great-house intrusion is still taken as most probable.⁸

THE TEXT

We turn now to the text—let us call it mythology—that was recorded from Smith and Allison at Snaketown. Fully three-fourths of it deals with the Hohokam, either as stories of what happened to them before the conquest or stories of their extensive and merciless defeat. This is why I call the work as a whole The Hohokam Chronicles. The narrative is in the third person, of course, but the common thread of character between these portions is the figure of Siuuhu (better but less attractively spelled S-e'ehe and meaning ‘Elder-brother’), the above-mentioned murdered and revived god. Before these chronicles begin, there is a section on the creation of the earth and the first humans, who were not the Hohokam but perhaps were the ancestors of the Pima-Papago.⁹ This era was ended by a flood that the ancestral Pima-Papago escaped by entering the underworld. The Hohokam were created after the floodwater subsided. Appended to the last section of the Hohokam chronicles is a very brief section on Apache wars. Europeans are barely mentioned. Their origin is given along with that of the Africans in a story set in Hohokam times; but characteristic of most Native American mythologies, I think, there is no narrative of white-Indian relations. It is as if the story stopped on the eve of the European coming, a moment that was very long ago, about 450 years in the case of the Pimas. Years are not counted in the mythology, and so we have no idea how long its events would take in years. My impression is that the time would be amazingly short, perhaps just a few generations or even only a few years, since a youthful or middle-aged Siuuhu is present throughout the chronicles and in much of the section leading up to them. When Siuuhu drops out, the post-Hohokam , Apache-dominated, and, in effect, postEuropean past begins. Only then does the text give the impression of a fleeting but long passage of years.

Hayden sensibly let Allison supply the register, diction, and cadence of the translation. These things he did not change, and the translation is both readable and authentic.¹⁰ A Presbyterian deacon, Allison was a language conscious and no doubt also socially conscious man. I imagine that he thought of his English as plain. In any case, I think so, because of his preference for simple expressions and what I will call an oral, singsong cadence. Concerning this latter, note the difference between the well-known cadence that Longfellow used for his Indianist poem, The Song of Hiawatha, and what seems to be the basic cadence of Allison’s translation. Longfellow made his lines eight syllables long, with accents on the first, third, fifth, and seventh syllables (THAT was HOW he MADE his POem). The basic unit is the paired syllable, with the accent on the first of the pair. Allison did not recite his translation in lines, but he did, I think, opt for a paired syllable beat the opposite of Longfellow’s, with the accent on the second syllable of the pair (and SO he MADE it SOUND like THIS). These are both singsong Englishes and, both are oral in that sense, but if I am correct, they are technically oppositely so. Neither is the better. I must add that Allison’s cadence is not rigorously and exclusively as I have just sketched it. His speech is prose, not verse. Furthermore, not only might Hayden have moved it slightly in that direction in recording it (although he certainly did not do so deliberately) but I moved it so in instances while smoothing or shortening Hayden’s rendition. Thus, the version given here is not authentic Allison, that is, not as authentic as a text made from a tape of his own voice. This could not be done in 1935. For an example of fine work of this nature, see Anthony Mattina and M. DeSautel’s The Golden Woman (1985), a red English translation of a long Colville Indian story.

Here in a letter to me of September 1991 is Hayden’s recollection of the making of the creation narrative text.

You ask for the background of my recording of the Pima Creation Myth. I'll do the best I can, based on my recollections, and am checking with Emil Haury for some further details or correction of mine, as he may recall. Herewith my present remembrance:

As part of a planned extensive study of the Hoho- kam remains of Southern Arizona, Gila Pueblo, a privately endowed research institution of Globe, Arizona, had commenced study and excavation of a very large prehistoric Hohokam site on the north terrace of the Gila River roughly south of Chandler, Arizona. There were a number of large rubbish mounds at the site, evidences of canals, and ball courts—and many rattlesnakes. In fact, the site, and the Pima village near it, was known as Snaketown. So, in the fall of 1934, a tent camp was set up at the