Journal of the Southwest

Why do some stories continue to be told mouth to mouth, generation to generation, for centuries, without ever losing their power or precision? It is a question that is particularly potent for peoples who have been oppressed, enslaved, or brought to the brink of extinction by genocide. We suspect that such stories may do far more than to simply remind them how their ancestors survived difficult times. Could it be that they offer object lessons for current generations on how to remain resistant and resilient in the face of the challenges and threats that continue to confront them?

What if these oral histories remind them of the moral convictions that their ancestors had? What if they also provide sensory touchstones—the smell of danger in the air, or the unnerving sound of military forces coming toward them in the still of the night—which may allow contemporaries to stay alert to emerging dangers like those their predecessors endured?

Could it be that such stories work metaphorically like antibodies to prevent or protect a cultural community from succumbing to similar dangers today?

Let us attempt to tentatively answer such questions by "fleshing out" the context of one such parable or "legend" with multiple versions. It is the story of "Coyote Iguana" and "Lola Casanova," whose origins date back to the 1840s and 1850s, that continues to be told today. As ethnohistorian Thomas Sheridan bluntly noted:

The [Mexican versions or] legends, which changed through time, capture the fascination and repugnance with which "white," Victorian Sonora viewed the Seri in particular, and Indians in general.… [They] resonated with the lurid power when a Mexican woman of "good society" had sexual relations with one of the "barbarous Indians."

(Sheridan 1999: 481) [End Page 453]

It is not surprising that the oral accounts of the Seri (or Comcaac) regarding this incident have an entirely different meaning and moral force. By more fully understanding why the content of these stories has mattered so much to the descendants of those involved in these historical events, we might be able to fathom why it has had staying power in building a steady sense of resistance within the Indigenous Comcaac communities along the desert coast of the Sea of Cortés.

These are the seafaring, hunting, fishing, and wild foraging communities who were once called "the nomadic Seri tribe." They were considered by some to be too primitive "to farm or to build permanent abodes," and erroneously deemed "wild cannibals" by racist outsiders over three centuries of sporadic contact (Bahre 1980: 197).

In fact, the Comcaac have been considered by anthropologists to be an endangered people because barely 200 of them survived the 19th century (McGee 1898). Ironically they are now celebrated by human rights activists as an enduring people (Spicer 1976, 1981) with 1,200 to 1,500 individuals found in their two villages by 2010. Most of them still regularly speak in their native tongue, Cmiique Iitom, even though some linguists consider it to be a threatened language (Marlett 2006). Perhaps the following accounts will give us insights into why they have endured—and why their stories in their own language retain meaning—when so many other hunter-gatherer societies in the Americas have perished.

By the early 19th century, many of the Indigenous communities of the Sonoran Desert felt as though they had been caught between a rock and a hard place.

During the Mexican War of Independence from Spain (1810–1821), the Indigenous communities then known as Yaqui, Mayo, Seri, and Pima refused to fight for either side. But with Mexican independence, a law was passed in 1825 which forced upon them a mandate to pay taxes and do military services on behalf of the new Mexican government. At the same time, the colonial repartimiento system of forcing Indigenous populations to offer "tribute labor" for public or private work projects was still in effect. That allowed Sonoran officials as well as Spanish hacendado settlers both to confiscate Indigenous lands and to employ those whom they had displaced to accomplish their colonial objectives (Bahre 1980: 78).

These...