The Seri Indians. (1898 N 17 / 1895-1896 (pages 1-344*))McGee, W J
History
The Seri Indians. (1898 N 17 / 1895-1896 (pages 1-344*))
McGee, W J
Seri Indians; Seri language; Yuman languages
[130] Doubtless the structures approached the conventional Seri
pattern, illustrated in the accompanying plate vi, from photographs
taken on Tiburon in 1895.
[131] Arricivita, op. cit., pp. 426-429, 520-524.
[Illustration: PL. VI
RECENTLY OCCUPIED RANCHERIA, TIBURON ISLAND]
[Illustration: TYPICAL HOUSE INTERIOR, TIBURON ISLAND]
Traditions of this Franciscan mission still linger about Hermosillo
and at Rancho San Francisco de Costa Rica, and they, like Arricivita’s
account, indicate that the churchly jacal was planted either hard by
Pozo Escalante or at a traditional Ojito Carrizal (Aguaje Parilla, not
found in the surveys of 1895), supposed to lie a few miles farther
northwestward. All the probabilities point to Pozo Escalante as the
site, despite the fact that no cane now grows there; the topographic
description applies exactly, while the state of the padre’s remains,
when exhumed six months later, attests the dry and saline soil in
this vicinity. None of these conditions exist about Aguaje Parilla at
the southeastern base of Sierra Seri. The present absence of living
carrizal at Pozo Escalante is of little significance, since the
extinction of the plant might easily have been wrought either by the
stock of later expeditions or by the rise of the salt-water horizon
accompanying the local subsidence of the land; certainly dried roots
and much-weathered fragments of cane still remain about the margin of
the playa extending southward from the well.
The episode culminating in the assassination of Fray Crisóstomo was
characteristic: beset at all points and rankling under the invasion
of their range, the Seri sought anew to delude the governor with fair
words, using their own reprobates and apostates at Pitic and elsewhere
to point their asseverations; and remembering the facility with which
the earlier ecclesiastics were duped into unwitting allies, they made
the kindly and long-suffering friars the immediate object of their
petitions. But some of the tribe galled under the lengthy and still
lengthening blood-feud too deeply to tolerate the alien presence; and
one of these, either alone or supported by the alleged accomplices or
others, tried a typical ruse, suggested less by need than inherited
habit; for the friar was helpless in their hands, and might have been
slain in his jacal as easily as in the open. Typically, too, the
assassination initiated or deepened factional dissension and further
bloodshed.
The Franciscan records are of even less ethnologic use than those
of the Jesuits. Beyond his incidental expressions concerning Seri
character and custom in connection with the founding and abandonment
of Carrizal, it need only be noted that Arricivita makes hardly
a reference to the Tepoka, but habitually combines the “Seris y
Piatos”—the latter perhaps representing the “confederate Pima” of
“Rudo Ensayo”, or the Soba occupying the lower reaches of Rio San
Ignacio about that time.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
Reviews
Reviews
No reviews yet
Be the first to share your thoughts on this work.
Elsewhere in the archive
Join the Discussion
Join the discussion
Sign in to leave a comment or review.
Sign InorCreate an account