“JUANA MARIA,” SERI ELDERWOMAN]
Señor Encinas himself, with Don Andrés Noriega and several other
attachés, vouch for the catching of a horse by a Seri hunter in still
more expeditious fashion: one of the horses belonging to the rancho
was exceptionally fat, and hence exceptionally tempting to the Seri
band (and at the same time worthless to the vaqueros); the chief
begged for it persistently until, wearied by his importunities, the
ranchero offered the horse to the band on condition that a single one
of them should catch it within a fixed distance (about 200 yards) from
the gateway of the corral—and the offer was promptly accepted. With
the view of making the test of fleetness fair, a vaquero was called
in to frighten the horse and start him running around the interior
of the corral, while a boy stood by to drop the bars at the proper
moment, the Indian standing ready outside the gateway; when the animal
had gained its best speed the bars were dropped and it bolted for
the open plains—but before the 200-yard limit was reached the hunter
had overtaken it, leaped on its withers, caught it by the jaw in one
hand and the foretop in the other, and thereby thrown it in such
manner as to break its neck. Knowing of these and other instances,
L. K. Thompson, of Hermosillo, undertook arrangements for publicly
exhibiting Seri runners as deer catchers at different expositions
during the nineties; but his arrangements failed, chiefly because of
the anticipated (and probably underestimated) difficulty of taming the
Seri sufficiently for the purpose.
About 1893, Señor Encinas and several attendants left Costa Rica one
morning for Hermosillo, leaving at the rancho, among others, a Seri
matron with a sick child nearly a year old; in the evening (as they
learned later) the child was worse, and the matron took the trail about
dusk, in the hope of finding a cure in the white man’s touch or other
medicine—and at dawn next morning she was at Molino del Encinas, 17
leagues (nearly 45 miles) away, with her helpless child and a peace
offering in the form of a hare, which she had run down and caught in
the course of the journey. And the matrons, with children astride their
hips and water-filled ollas balanced on their heads, and all their
goods and chattels piled on their backs, habitually traverse Desierto
Encinas from the sea to Costa Rica (some 30 miles), or from Costa Rica
to the sea, in a night.
Examples of Seri fleetness and endurance might be multiplied
indefinitely, and many of still more striking character might be
adduced; but these instances, all attested by several witnesses,
all corroborated by independent facts, and all consistent with the
observations of the 1894 expedition, seem fairly to represent one
aspect of the pedestrian habit of the tribe.
* * * * *
A trait of the Seri hardly less conspicuous than their pedestrian
habit is habitual use of hands and teeth in lieu of the implements
characteristic of even the lowly culture found among most primitive
tribes. Perhaps the most nearly universal implement is the knife—at
first of shell, tooth, bone, or wood, later of stone, and last of
metal—and hardly a primitive tribe known from direct observation
or from relics has been found independent of this most serviceable
implement; yet the Seri may be described with reasonable accuracy as
a knifeless folk. Awls and marlinspikes of bone and wood, shell cups,
and protolithic mullers or hammers are found in numbers in their hands,
on their rancheria sites, and in their ancient shell accumulations,
while rudely chipped stone arrowpoints are sparsely scattered over
their range; yet not a single knife of stone or other wrought substance
has been found in their territory or in their possession, save for an
occasional metal knife obtained by theft or barter. And the habit of
dispensing with this primary implement is attested both by everyday
customs and by the traditions and chronicles concerning the tribe.
Thus, various observers (notably Hardy) have recorded the features
and uses of balsas, harpoons, ollas, etc., yet no records of cutting
implements have been found; similarly the chronicles contain records of
barter between the Seri and the Sonorenses through which the savages
acquired aguardiente, manta, garments, sugar, grain, etc., yet no record
is known of the leading articles of exchange to practically all other
tribes of the continent, viz., cutlery; and in like manner the local
traditions recount the constant desire of the Seri for liquor and
tobacco, saccharine and other food substances, clothing or material for
making it, tin cups, lard-cans, and other metallic utensils, as well
as nails for harpoons and hoop-iron for arrowpoints, in addition to
firearms and ammunition; yet the recounters are significantly silent on
the subject of knives.
Conformably, the 60 Seri gathered near Costa Rica in 1894 made it
their business to pick up or beg all sorts of industrial products and
materials, yet apparently did not possess so many as a dozen knives in
the entire band; and while protolithic implements, ollas, shell cups,
paint-stones, etc., were seen in constant use, none of the men, women,
or children were observed to use knives for cutting meat or for any
other customary purpose. Among the supplies laid on top of the jacal
shown in plate X, to keep them out of the way of the dogs, was a hind
leg of a horse, from femur to hoof (some three days dead and still
ripening); most of the larger muscles were already gnawed away, leaving
loose ends of fiber and strings of tendon clinging to the bone, the
condition being such that the remaining flesh might easily have been
cut and scraped away by means of a knife; yet whenever a warrior or
woman or youth hungered he or she took down the heavy joint, squatted
or sat on the ground with back to one side of the doorway, held the
mass at the height of the mouth, and gnawed, sucked, and swallowed,
frequently tearing the tissue by twisting and backward jerks of the
head, and not only masticating, but swallowing the free ends of tendons
still attached to the bone. This process was varied only by seizing
with the hands and tearing off a strip of flesh or skin already
loosened by the teeth; and it was continued until the bones were
practically clean, when they were wrenched apart by the stronger men
in order that the cartilaginous cushions and epiphyses might be gnawed
away. The only approach to cooking or carving was a parboiling of the
foot, after the leg was wrenched off at the hock, until the hoof was
sufficiently softened to be knocked off with the protolithic hupf[253]
shown in plate XLIII, when half a dozen matrons and well-grown
maidens gathered about to gnaw the gelatinous tissue (already
softened by incipient decay as well as by the parboiling) investing
the coffin-bone. The entire procedure in this as in many other cases
proclaimed the absence of knife-sense. The Caucasian huntsman does
not have to think of his knife when game is to be bled or skinned or
dissected; his habit-trained hand knows where to find the implement,
how to seize it, and in most cases how to wield it advantageously;
but the Seri hand possesses no such cunning, and uses the knife only
clumsily and at second thought, if at all. The Seri huntsman, on the
other hand, does not have to think of nails and teeth, for they are
trained and coordinated by hereditary habit to spontaneously act
in unison and with the utmost possible or needful vigor; while the
Caucasian at least has completely lost the claw-and-teeth instinct of
offense and defense.
[253] Defined postea, p. 188.
Conformably with their striking independence of knives, the Seri are
conspicuously unskilful in all mechanical operations involving the
use of tools. Their most elaborate manufacture is the balsa, made
from reeds broken at the butts and with the leaves and tops removed
by the hands or by fire, bound together with hand-made cords; next in
elaborateness come the bow and arrow, normally made without cutting
tools; then follows their fictile ware, which is made wholly by hand,
without aid of the simple molds and paddles and other devices used by
neighboring tribes; while their primitive fabrics were apparently of
hand-extracted fibers, twisted and woven wholly by hand, with the aid
of wood or bone in sewing and possibly in weaving. Practically the
Seri possess but a single tool, and this is applied to a peculiarly
wide variety of purposes—it is the originally natural cobble used
for crushing bones and severing tendons, for grinding seeds and
rubbing face-paint, for bruising woody tissue to aid in breaking
okatilla poles for house-frames or mesquite roots for harpoons (both,
afterward finished by firing), and on occasion for weapons; and
this many-functioned tool is initially but a wave-worn pebble, is
artificially shaped only by the wear of use, and is incontinently
discarded when sharp edges are produced by use or fortuitous fracture.
The hupf is supplemented chiefly by the simple perforator of mandible
or bone or fire-hardened wood; and these two primitive implements,
together with molluscan shells in natural condition, apparently serve
as the primary tools for all the mechanical operations of the tribe.
The dearth of tools and the absence not only of knives but of
knife-sense among the Seri illumine those traditions of Seri fighting
made tangible by the teeth-torn arm of Jesus Omada; for they explain
the alleged recourse of the Seri warriors to nature’s weapons, used in
the centripetal fashion characteristic of nascent intelligence.
* * * * *
The Seri are distinguished by another trait hardly less striking than
the pedestrian habit, and even more conspicuous than the tooth-and-nail
habit with the correlative absence of tool-sense; the trait is not
tangible enough for ready definition or description in terms (of course
because so unusual as not to have bred words for its expression),
but is akin to—or, more properly, an exceeding intensification
of—race-pride in all its protean manifestations; it may be called
_race-sense_. Like other primitive folk, the Seri are self-centered
(or egocentric) in individual thought, i. e., they habitually think
of the extraneous phenomena of their little universe with reference
to self, as in the labyrinth of consanguineal relationship extending
and ramifying from the speaker; furthermore, they typify primitive
culture in their collective thinking, which is tribe-centered (or
ethnocentric), i. e., they view extraneous things, especially those of
animate nature, with reference to the tribe, like all those lowly folk
who denote themselves by the most dignified terms in their vocabulary
and designate aliens by opprobrious epithets; but the Seri outpass
most, if not all, other tribes in dignifying themselves and derogating
contemporary aliens. Concordantly with this habitual sentiment,
they glory in their strength and swiftness, and are inordinately
proud of their fine figures and excessively vain of their luxuriant
locks—indeed, they seem to exalt their own bodies and their own kind
well toward, if not beyond, the verge of inchoate deification. The
obverse of the same sentiment appears in the hereditary hate and horror
of aliens attested by their history, by their persistent blood-thirst,
and by the rigorous marriage regulations adapted to the maintenance
of tribal purity; for just as their highest virtue is the shedding of
alien blood, so is their blackest crime the transmission of their own
blood into alien channels. The potency of the sentiment is established
by the unparalleled isolation of the tribe after centuries of contact
with Caucasians, by their irreducible love of native soil, by their
implacable animosity toward invaders, and by their rigorously
maintained purity of blood; it is manifested in their commonplace
conduct by a singular combination of hauteur and servility, forbidding
association with aliens on terms of equality. The entire group at
Costa Rica in 1894 were on good behavior, partly, no doubt, for
profit, partly because they were at peace bought by bloodshed; yet
they kept an impassable gulf between themselves and the Caucasians,
and a still wider chasm against the Papago and Yaqui. They came to
the tanque, usually in groups, rarely alone, always alert; especially
when alone or in twos or threes, they moved slowly and stealthily in
their peculiar collected and up-stepping gait, often stopping, always
glancing furtively with roving eyes, and bearing a curious air of
self-repression—as of the camp-prowling coyote who seems to hold down
his instinctively bristling mane by voluntary effort. And the visitor
to their rancheria sent a wave of influence before as his approach was
noted; laughter ceased, languor disappeared, and a forced, yet sullen,
amiability took their place, though the children and females edged
away; if he appeared unexpectedly or came too close, the children and
younger adults simply flitted like young partridges, while the elders
stiffened rigidly, with bristling brows and everting lips and purpling
eyes, perhaps accompanied by harsh gutturization—indeed the curiously
canine snarl and growl, often evoked by the stranger unintentionally,
betrayed the bitterness of Seri antipathy toward even the most
tolerable aliens. Every human is panoplied in a personality, perhaps
intangible but none the less real, which repels undue approach and
fixes limits to familiarity on the part of strangers, friends, kinsmen,
and mates, according to their respective degrees of mutually elective
affinity; but the Seri are so close to each other and so far from
all others that they are collectively panoplied against extra-tribal
personalities even as are antipathetic animals against each other—and
the Seri can no more control the involuntary snarl and growl at the
approach of the alien than can the hunting-dog at sight or smell of the
timber-wolf.
[Illustration: PL. XIX