The most conspicuous characteristic of the Seri tribe as a whole is
isolation. The geographic position and physical features of their
habitat favor, and indeed measurably compel, isolation: their little
principality is protected on one side by stormy seas and on the other
by still more forbidding deserts; their home is too hard and poor to
tempt conquest, and their possessions too meager to invite spoliation;
hence, under customary conditions, they never see neighbors save
in chance encounters on their frontier or in their own predatory
forays—and in either case the encounters are commonly inimical. The
natural isolation of the habitat is reflected in modes of life and
habits of thought; and during the ages the physical isolation has come
to be reflected in a bitter and implacable hereditary enmity toward
aliens—an enmity apparently forming the strongest motive in their life
and thought, and indeed grown into a persistent instinct. Thus the
Seri stand alone in every respect; they are isolated in habitat and
still more intensely isolated in habits of thought and life from all
contemporaries; they far out-Ishmael the Ishmael of old on Araby’s
deserts.
The isolation of the Seri in thought and feeling is well illustrated
by the relations with their nearest neighbors (activitally as well
as geographically), the Papago Indians. The Papago are much esteemed
in Sonora as fearless fighters, always ready to join or even to lead
a forlorn hope; yet when the expedition of 1895 was projected it was
found no easy matter to induce the picked Papago guards quartered at
Costa Rica to enter Seriland. They were ready, indeed mildly eager,
for fray, provided it were on the frontier; but they held back in
dread from actual invasion of the territory of the hereditary enemy.
Like representatives of the faith-dominated culture-grades generally,
they spoke weightily of inherent rights descended from the ancient
time, even back unto the creation; they repeatedly declared the right
of the Seri to protect their territory because it was _theirs_; yet
their converse but served to show the depth and persistence of their
abhorrence of the Seri and of everything pertaining to them. And when
gales arose to delay the work, when the frail craft of the party was
storm-buffeted and lost for days, when they were seized with the
strange sickness of the sea, when the salt and sugar mysteriously
disappeared (having been secretly sacrificed to diminish suffering
from thirst), when all of the earth-powers and air-powers seemed to be
arrayed against the expedition, they stoically held it to be but just
punishment for a sacrilegious infraction of the ancient law—and their
steady adherence to duty, despite tradition and physical difficulty
and constant danger, revealed a real heroism. The strain was no slight
one; it may have been felt more by the stay-at-homes than by the men
in action; certainly a sister of one of the party (Anton Castillo) and
spouse of a supporter at the supply station broke under the strain,
and died of her terrors—and the return of the party was, to the Papago
women and oldsters at least, as the rising of the dead. The dread
inspired by the personal presence of the alien is stronger still; when
the Seri rancheria at Costa Rica was visited in 1894 it was found
needful to keep the Papago interpreter and others of the tribe at a
distance, since the mere sight of the inimical tribesmen threw even the
women and children into watchful irritation, like that of range-bred
horses at scent of bear or timber-wolf, or that of oft-harried cats and
swine at sight of passing dog—they instinctively huddled into circles
facing outward, and ceased to think connectedly under the stress of
nervous tension. The irritation was so far mutual that it was days
before the usually placid interpreter, José Lewis, recovered his normal
spirits; while the 1895 interpreter, Hugh Morris, was actually rendered
ill by the mere entrance into Seriland at Pozo Escalante. And the
antipathy between Seri and Yaqui is nearly as great as that between the
common-boundary neighbors.
The instinctive antagonism, or race antipathy, between the Seri and
the widely distinct Caucasian is less trenchant and intense than the
local antipathy; yet even between Seri and Caucasian there would
seem to be hardly a germ of sympathy. In the days of his prime, the
Tiburon islanders flocked around Don Pascual, first as a provider of
easy provender and later as a superpotent shaman whose wrath bore
destruction; yet their allegiance was never more than that of the cowed
and beaten brute to a hated trainer, and his coming never brought a
smile to their stolid features—indeed, his passage among their jacales
was met with the same stolid yet sinister indifference accorded the
solitary visitor to a menagerie of caged carnivores. And no sooner did
his vision become impaired than their fear-born veneration evaporated,
and their native antipathy reappeared in original virulence. The 1894
party was fortunate in successfully treating a sick wife of sub-chief
Mashém, and subsequently spent days in the rancheria, distributing
gifts to old and young in a manner unprecedented in their experience
and making liberal exchanges for such small possessions as they wished
to spare; yet, with a single possible exception, they succeeded
in bringing no more human expression to any Seri face or eye than
curiosity, avidity for food, studied indifference, and shrouded or
snarling disgust. Among themselves they were fairly cheerful, and the
families were unobtrusively affectionate; yet the cheerfulness was
always chilled and often banished by the approach of an alien. The
Sonorenses generally hold the Seri in indescribably deep dread as
uncanny and savage monsters lying beyond the human pale; while the
reciprocal feeling on the part of the Seri toward Caucasians, and still
more toward Indian aliens, seems akin to that of the average man toward
the rattlesnake, which he flees or slays without pause for thought—it
seems nothing less than intuitive and involuntary loathing. The Seri
antipathy is at once deepened into an obsession and crystallized
into a cult; the highest virtue in their calendar is the shedding of
alien blood; and their normal impulse on meeting an alien is to kill
unless deterred by fear, to flee if the way is clear, and to fawn
treacherously for better opportunity if neither natural course lies
open.
Concordantly with their primary characteristic, the Seri have avoided
ethnic and demotic union beyond the narrow limits of their own kindred;
and even of these they seem to have cast out parts, annihilating the
Guayma and Upanguayma, displacing and nearly destroying the Tepoka,
and outlawing individuals and (apparently) small groups. The earlier
chronicles indicate that the Jesuit missionaries, and after them the
Franciscan friars and the secular officials, sought to scatter the
tribe by both cajolery and coercion, and endeavored to divide families
by restraint of women and children and by banishment of wives; there
are loose traditions, too, of the capture and enslavement of Indian
and Caucasian women in Seriland; yet the great fact remains that not a
single mixed-blood Seri is known to exist, and that no more than two of
the blood (Kolusio and perhaps one other) now live voluntarily beyond
the territorial and consanguineal confines of the tribe. The romantic
story of a white slave and ancestress of a Seri clan, sometimes
diffused through pernicious reportorial activity, is without shadow of
proof or probability; the tradition of the captivity of a Papago belle
was corroborated, albeit indefinitely, by Mashém’s naive admission
that an alien women was once kept as a slave to a childless death due
to her inaptitude for long wanderings; and there is not a single known
fact indicating even so much as miscibility of the Seri blood with
that of other varieties of the genus _Homo_. Naturally the presumption
of miscibility holds in the absence of direct evidence; yet the
presumption is at least partially countervailed by conspicuous biotic
characters, such as color, stature, etc., so distinctive as almost to
seem specific: the Seri are distinctively dark-skinned, their extreme
color-range (so far as known) being less than their nearest approach
to any neighboring tribe; they are nearly as distinctive in stature,
the difference between their tallest and shortest normal adults being
apparently less than that between their shortest and the tallest of the
neighboring Papago—though they are not so far from the more variable
and often tall Yaqui; and they appear to be no less distinctive in such
physiologic processes as those connected with their extraordinary food
habits. Still more distinctive are the demotic characters connected
with their habits of life and modes of thought; and when the sum of
biotic and demotic characters is taken, the Seri are found to be set
apart from all neighboring Sonoran tribes by differences much more
striking than the individual range among themselves.[237]
[237] It seems probable that the Seri were nearer to tribes of southern
Baja California than to those of Sonora at the time of the earliest
explorations, yet that the distinction was sufficiently strong to
warrant the extension of the proposition to these tribes also.
It is especially noteworthy that the Seri have held aloof from that
communality of the deserts which has brought so many tribes into
union with each other and with their animal and vegetal neighbors
through common strife against the common enemies of sun and sand—the
communality expressed in the distribution of vital colonies over
arid plains, in the toleration and domestication of animals, in
the development of agriculture, and eventually in the shaping of a
comprehensive solidarity, with the intelligence of the highest organism
as the controlling factor.[238] Dwelling on a singularly prolific
shore, the Seri never learned the hard lesson of desert solidarity, but
looked on the land merely as a place of lodgment or concealment, or as
a source of luxuries such as cactus tunas, mesquite beans, and tasty
game; they never formed the first idea of planting or cultivating,
and their only notion of harvesting and storing against time of need
was the intolerably filthy one of nature’s simplest teaching; they
apparently never grasped the concept of cooperation with animals, and
came to tolerate the parasitical coyote only in that its persistence
was greater than their own, and in so far as it was stealthy enough to
hide its travail and the suckling of its young against their ravening
maws; and they apparently never rose to real recognition of their own
kind in alien forms, but set their hands against agricultural and
zoocultural humans as peculiarly potent and hence especially obnoxious
animals. Naturally their racial intolerance was seed of battle and
blood-feud; and they would doubtless have melted away under the general
antagonism but for the natural barriers and unlimited food of their
restricted domain.
[238] The Beginning of Agriculture, American Anthropologist, vol. VIII,
1895, p. 350. The Beginning of Zooculture, ibid., vol. X, 1897, p. 215.
At present, as for the later and best-known decades of their history,
the Seri are absolutely without extratribal affiliations, or even
sympathy. When the chronicles of three centuries are scanned in the
light of recent knowledge, it seems practically certain that they have
been equally isolated since the dawn of Caucasian history in Mexico;
and both recent data and the chronicles combine with the principles of
demotic development to indicate that the Seri have stood alone from the
beginning of their tribal career, and have never foregathered with the
neighboring tribes of distinct blood, distinct arts and industries,
distinct organization, distinct language, and distinct thought and
feeling.
The present isolation of the Seri throws light on their early
history and reveals the extent of the misapprehension of the pioneer
missionaries, who half deluded themselves and wholly deluded distant
readers into the notion that the Seri were really proselyted and
actually collected in the mission-adjuncts of military posts
established to protect settlers against forays of the tribe; for, as
illumined by later and fuller knowledge of the tribal characteristics,
the chronicles are seen to indicate merely that a few captives,
malingerers, cripples, spies, and tribal outcasts were harbored at
the missions until death and occasional escapes brought the colonies
to a natural end, with no real assimilation of blood or culture on
either side. So, too, the persistent tribal antipathy reveals the
error of confounding the independent or even inimically related
outbreaks of the Seri and of the Pima or Apache with the concerted
action of confederated tribes. Doubtless the ever-watchful spies from
Tiburon habitually gave notice of the disturbance due to outbreaks of
contemporary tribes, just as they do today when the local soldiery
are withdrawn for duty on the Yaqui frontier; naturally the civil and
military authorities were thereby led to provide for protection against
the Seri and Piato, against the Seri and Pima, or against the Seri and
Apache at each period of disturbance, just as they provided against
the Seri between periods; and it would appear that this association in
thought and speech led to the unconscious magnification, in the minds
of the chroniclers, of a supposed alliance.
In brief, the tribal relations of the Seri seem always to have been
antipathetic, especially toward the aboriginal tribes of alien blood,
in somewhat less measure toward Caucasians, and in least—yet still
considerable—degree toward their own collinguals and (presumptive)
consanguineals.